Trump impeachment: House impeaches president in historic vote along party lines
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Eric Garcia
Washington Bureau Chief
The House has voted to impeach Donald Trump, making him the third president in American history to receive such a censure.
After roughly eight hours of debate, the House of Representatives gathered to vote and ultimately charged him with abusing the power of his office by attempting to extort a political favour from Ukraine. The House then voted on a second article of impeachment, approving formal charges that Mr Trump had obstructed Congress during the subsequent congressional investigation into his conduct.
The Senate will now take up the approved impeachment articles in the new year.
Defiant as ever, Mr Trump walked onstage at a rally in Michigan just as the House began voting — and was bragging about his Space Force and mocking stock market jitters as the first article of impeachement was approved. Before it became official, as the vote crept towards approving the first article of impeachment, Mr Trump was interrupted by a protester, who he suggested was treated too well by security forces — and that they should have been tougher on her.
Before the vote and rally, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius described a letter sent by Mr Trump to House speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday as “the most unpresidential presidential document ever written” on MSNBC’s Morning Joe after rallies backing the impeachment process were held in cities across the country on Tuesday evening.
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Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-North Carolina, is the latest House Republican to claim that Democrats want to overturn the 2016 election by impeaching Donald Trump. But impeachment would make Mike Pence president, not replace Donald Trump with Hillary Clinton.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, a former constitutional law professor, says Democrats "must act now to protect our constitutional democracy".
Freshman Democrat Donna Shalala served as Secretary of Health and Human Services from 1993-2001 under President Bill Clinton.
As the House was beginning debate on the articles of impeachment, Rep. Shalala told The Independent that one difference between the impeachment of President Clinton and the case against President Trump is that when Clinton was impeached, Democrats didn't complain about process.
“We didn’t argue process, we argued whether it was an impeachable offense, and many Democrats admitted he did something wrong. Here we can’t get any Republican to admit it," she said.
Rep. Shalala added that President Clinton -- unlike President Trump -- admitted what he did and acknowledged that his behavior was wrong.
Here's our write-up on the dueling messages coming from the White House today:
Here's a clip of Nancy Pelosi's opening remarks to the ongoing debate over impeachment:
If you missed this opening statement from Doug Collins, take a look for the Republican lead:
Some ribbing from the husband of Kellyanne Conway, a top White House adviser.
Over here just trying to imagine a US government without two bitterly divided political parties...
Take a gander at this video of Mike Pence sticking up for his good buddy Donald Trump:
Bernie Sanders has announced an all-Spanish rally in California coming up, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is set to be the keynote speaker at that event.
That's what she is (re)tweeting about today:
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