Courtesy of The White House
President Trump speaking about the Capitol riots last week
The House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to impeach President Trump—one week after a mob of his supporters violently stormed and occupied the U.S. Capitol and one week before President-elect Joe Biden is set to be sworn into office.
Lawmakers charged Trump with “incitement of insurrection” against the U.S. government by sowing false claims about election fraud and encouraging his supporters to try to stop the U.S. Senate and the House from certifying Biden’s victory. After leaving a speech that Trump gave to supporters in front of the White House last Wednesday, the rioters made their way to the Capitol, broke through police barricades, and swarmed the building, ransacking the seat of American government. One Capitol Police officer was killed and dozens of other officers were injured. Lawmakers who were in their chambers and in the process of certifying the election results were forced to evacuate and take shelter.
“We are debating this historic measure at an actual crime scene, and we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the president of the United States,” Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, said as he opened the impeachment debate on Wednesday. “This was not a protest. This was a well-organized insurrection against our country that was organized by Donald Trump.”
President Trump has denied doing anything wrong. He told reporters on Tuesday that his actions ahead of the riot at the Capitol were “totally appropriate.”
Trump is the first president in American history to be impeached twice. The House also impeached him in December 2019, accusing him of pressuring a foreign government to help him win the 2020 presidential election. But no House Republicans supported it, Trump was acquitted by the Senate in a mostly party-line vote, and he remained in office.
On Wednesday, the House voted 232-197 in favor of impeaching the president for insurrection, arguing that he must be held accountable for “inciting violence against the government of the United States,” as the impeachment article states. All 222 Democrats in the House voted for impeachment. This time, 10 Republicans crossed party lines and voted to impeach Trump.
"The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not,” Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the third ranking member of her party in the House, said ahead of the impeachment vote. "There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”
While lawmakers from both parties denounced the violence that occurred at the Capitol, 197 Republicans—93 percent of their party’s members in the House—voted against impeachment. (Four Republicans did not vote.) Many said voting to impeach the president would do no good because it would further divide the nation.
“I can think of nothing that would cause further division more than the path the majority has taken,” Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, said during the impeachment debate. “Rather than looking ahead to a new administration, the majority is settling scores with the old one.”
The Constitution permits Congress to remove presidents before their term is up if they’re found to have committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Impeachment is the first step in that process.