Here’s what you need to know:
- Democrats defeated Republican efforts to derail the articles as the House met to debate them.
- Here’s a rough rundown of the schedule.
- Trump comes out swinging as Democrats lock up enough votes to impeach him for high crimes and misdemeanors.
- For Democrats, the only question is how many of their own balk at impeaching Mr. Trump.
- While the House debates, the Senate looks ahead to a trial with the rules still unsettled.
- A vote to impeach the president is just one part of the process. Here’s how it works and where it would go next.
- Catch up on some important background on how we got here.
Democrats defeated Republican efforts to derail the articles as the House met to debate them.
The House of Representatives turned back the first two of what may be a string of Republican efforts to block impeachment of President Trump in early tests of partisan solidarity on Wednesday, rejecting back-to-back motions on strictly party-line votes.
The House voted 226 to 188 to block a motion to adjourn without considering the articles of impeachment and then voted 226 to 191 to put aside a Republican resolution condemning the inquiry as an illegitimate and unfair violation of House rules.
The second resolution, introduced by Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, outlined a litany of complaints about the way the inquiry was run by Representatives Adam B. Schiff of California and Jerrold Nadler of New York, the Democratic chairmen of the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees.
Their “abuses of power,” as Mr. McCarthy’s resolution put it, echoing one of the charges against Mr. Trump, “willfully trampled on the rights of the minority” and “brought dishonor and discredit upon the House of Representatives.” Democrats moved to table the resolution, and the vote unfolded along party lines.
“It’s going to be a lot of walking up these stairs today, I think,” Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat, said as he climbed the steps from his Capitol office to vote on the first of the procedural votes called by Republicans.
The House will spend much of the rest of the morning debating the rules for the debate itself before taking up the two articles of impeachment themselves around midday. Democrats assert that Mr. Trump committed high crimes and misdemeanors by pressuring Ukraine to tarnish Democratic rivals to aid his re-election campaign while Republicans argue that the majority was engaged in a partisan witch hunt against a president they fear they could not beat at the polls. The House plans to vote by the end of the day.
In a letter on Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi invited all Democratic members to be present on the floor on Wednesday as the chamber convened to debate the articles at what she called a “very prayerful moment in our nation’s history.”
Here’s a rough rundown of the schedule.
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In the morning, the House is expected to debate the rules that the House Rules Committee hashed out on Tuesday with a vote expected around noon. This will be the first procedural vote by the full chamber to lay the groundwork for formally impeaching Mr. Trump. The rules call for six hours of debate, equally divided between Republicans and Democrats, on the articles.
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Republicans opened the day with the first of what may be a series of parliamentary moves to register their opposition and slow the process, which could lead to multiple procedural votes that don’t amount to much like the one to adjourn. The votes everyone is waiting for — on the two articles of impeachment — are expected in the evening. House leaders anticipate two separate votes on the two articles to begin at 7:15 p.m. and wrap up about 20 minutes later.
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The House may also vote to empower Ms. Pelosi to name impeachment managers, whose identities are likely to become public in the coming days. The managers are House members who act much like prosecutors in the impeachment trial that is to follow in the Senate, presenting the findings of the House inquiry to their colleagues across the Capitol. Senators decide whether to acquit the president or to convict and remove him from office, which requires a two-thirds vote, or 67 senators if all are present.
Trump comes out swinging as Democrats lock up enough votes to impeach him for high crimes and misdemeanors.
House Democrats head into the debate with the 216 votes they need (with four vacant seats) to pass the articles of impeachment already in their pocket, according to a survey of members by The New York Times.
The president on Wednesday called on his Twitter followers to “say a prayer” ahead of the House vote.
Mr. Trump set the tone on Tuesday with an aggrieved and hectoring six-page letter to Ms. Pelosi accusing her of “declaring open war on American Democracy” with “an illegal, partisan attempted coup” that he called a “perversion of justice and abuse of power.” He complained he was being railroaded: “More due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials.”
Even as the House has enough Democratic members to pass the impeachment articles, Democrats and Republican will most likely engage in hours of passionate and even angry debate before the roll is called.
Republicans will almost surely pick up many of his points on the floor on Wednesday, while Democrats make their case that Mr. Trump put his own political interests ahead of those of the country by withholding American security aid from Ukraine even as he pressed the country’s new president to announce investigations into former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other Democrats.
If the House, as expected, approves both of the articles, Mr. Trump will find himself in the company of Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, who were the other presidents impeached. President Richard M. Nixon resigned after the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment but before the full House could vote. Both Mr. Johnson and Mr. Clinton went on to be acquitted in a Senate trial, and by all accounts, it looks as if Mr. Trump will follow that pattern as well.
For Democrats, the only question is how many of their own balk at impeaching Mr. Trump.
With the final outcome seemingly preordained, perhaps the only suspense about the vote on Wednesday will be how many Democrats break with the party and oppose impeachment.
Two House Democrats who registered their opposition to the inquiry by voting against its ground rules in October, Representatives Collin C. Peterson of Minnesota and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, plan to vote against the articles as well — and Mr. Van Drew is expected to leave the party altogether to become a Republican.
Another 14 Democrats have said they were undecided or have not responded to The Times survey, but only one of them, Representative Ron Kind of Wisconsin, represents a district won by Mr. Trump. The rest of the so-called front-line Democrats representing Republican areas announced their support for impeachment in recent days, suggesting that the party was rallying behind the effort.
No Republican has announced support for impeachment, and while 30 have not said how they would vote, few expect any to break with the president.
While the House debates, the Senate looks ahead to a trial with the rules still unsettled.
Assuming the House proceeds with impeachment as anticipated, the fate of Mr. Trump’s presidency will soon be in the hands of the Senate, whose leaders are already quarreling over how to put on a fair trial in an era of deep divisions.
Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Chuck Schumer of New York, the Republican and Democratic leaders, hardly waited for the House vote to debate how to proceed. On Tuesday, Mr. McConnell rejected Mr. Schumer’s proposal to call four witnesses who did not testify in the House inquiry, arguing that it was not the Senate’s job to complete a rushed and inadequate investigation by the House.
But even as Mr. McConnell and other Republicans assailed House Democrats for not hearing from key witnesses, they generally did not fault the White House for blocking those witnesses from testifying in the first place. Instead, they said the blame lay with Democrats for not going to court to challenge the White House refusal to cooperate, an approach that Democrats rejected because they concluded the judicial process would take too long.
Mr. McConnell was navigating a tricky position of balancing Mr. Trump’s desire for vindication through a trial and the positions of vulnerable Republican senators who are concerned that an abbreviated trial or one that seems tilted to Mr. Trump would make it look like they did not take the charges seriously.
The various sides will continue to try to formulate a plan for the trial on Wednesday even as the House formally decides whether one will be needed.
A vote to impeach the president is just one part of the process. Here’s how it works and where it would go next.
transcript
How Does the Impeachment Process Work?
Explosive testimony. News media frenzies. A trial in the Senate. Here is how impeachment works — and how it has played out in the past.
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“Impeachment by its nature, it’s a political process.” “What people think is going to happen can turn out to be very different from what happens.” “Because it has to do with elected officials holding another elected official to account for their conduct.” When the framers of the Constitution created a process to remove a president from office, they were well … kind of vague. So to understand how it’s going to play out, the past is really our best guide. “I think we’re just all in for a really crazy ride.” Collectively, these New York Times reporters have covered U.S. politics for over 150 years. “I’m also a drummer in a band, so …” They’ve reported on past impeachment inquiries. “Yea, I’m lost in Senate wonderland.” And they say that the three we’ve had so far have been full of twists and turns. “The president of the United States is not guilty as charged.” In short, expect the unexpected. First, the process. Impeachment is technically only the initial stage. “Common misconceptions about impeachment are that impeachment by itself means removal from office. It doesn’t. The impeachment part of the process is only the indictment that sets up a trial.” The Constitution describes offenses that are grounds for removing the president from office as bribery, treason and — “They say high crimes and misdemeanors, which, really, is in the eye of the beholder.” “The framers didn’t give us a guidebook to it. They simply said, that the House had the responsibility for impeachment and the Senate had the responsibility for the trial.” One of the things missing from the Constitution? How an impeachment inquiry should start. And that has generally been a source of drama. Basically, anything goes. “In fact, in the Andrew Johnson case they voted to impeach him without even having drafted the articles of impeachment.” For Richard Nixon, his case started with several investigations that led to public hearings. That part of the process went on for two years, and yielded revelation after revelation, connecting Nixon to a politically-motivated burglary at D.N.C. headquarters — “… located in the Watergate office building.” — and its subsequent cover-up. “Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president?” “I was aware of listening devices. Yes, sir.” “This was a shocker. Everybody in the White House recognized how damaging this could be.” As the House drafted articles of impeachment, Nixon lost the support of his party. “O.K., I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.” “I was asked to write the farewell piece that ran the morning after Nixon resigned. And this is what I wrote: The central question is how a man who won so much could have lost so much.” So for Nixon, it more or less ended after the investigations. But for Bill Clinton, that phase was just the beginning. “This is the information.” An independent counsel’s investigation into his business dealings unexpectedly turned into a very public inquiry about his personal life. “The idea that a president of the United States was having an affair with a White House intern and then a federal prosecutor was looking at that, it was just extraordinary.” That investigation led to public hearings in the House Judiciary Committee. “When the Starr Report was being delivered to Congress it was a little bit like the O.J. chase, only a political one. There were two black cars. They were being filmed live on CNN. They were heading towards the Capitol. We were watching it and a little bit agog.” Public opinion is key. And the media plays a huge part in the process. This was definitely true for Clinton. “You know it was just a crazy time. We worked in the Senate press gallery.” “All your colleagues are kind of piled on top of each other.” “We had crummy computers, the fax machine would always break. The printer would always break.” After committee hearings, the House brought formal impeachment charges. “It was very tense. I thought that the Saturday of the impeachment vote in the House was one of the most tense days I’d experienced in Washington.” And it turned out, also, full of surprises. “The day of impeachment arrived, everyone’s making very impassioned speeches about whether Bill Clinton should or should not be impeached and Livingston rises to give an argument for the House Republicans. He started to talk about how Clinton could resign.” “You, sir, may resign your post.” “And all of a sudden people start booing and saying, ‘Resign, resign’!” “So I must set the example.” “He announced he was resigning because he had had extramarital affairs and challenged President Clinton to do the only honorable thing, in his view —” “I hope President Clinton will follow.” “— to resign as well, so there was all this drama unfolding even in the midst of impeachment.” Then it went to the Senate for trial. The Constitution gets a little more specific about this part. “The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is supposed to preside over that trial.” “Rehnquist, he showed up in this robe he had made for himself, which had gold stripes on the sleeves because he liked Gilbert and Sullivan.” “The Senate is the actual jury.” “You will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws. So help you, God.” “This is a copy of the rules of the Senate for handling impeachment. They’re actually very specific.” “Meet six days a week.” “Convene at noon. The senators have to sit at their desks and remain quiet in their role as jurors. And not talk, which trust me, is going to be a problem for some of the senators who are used to talking all the time.” It’s just like a courtroom trial. There are prosecutors who present the case against the president. “That was perjury.” Only, they’re members of the House, and they’re called managers. Then the senators, or the jurors, vote. And things are still, unpredictable. “The options are guilty or not guilty. But there was one senator —” “Arlen Specter, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania.” “Under Scottish law, there are three possible verdicts: guilty, not guilty and not proved.” “— which is not a thing.” “And everybody just looks, you know, how do you even record that vote?” In the end, there were not enough votes to oust Clinton. “What’s amazing about this whole thing to me wasn’t so much the constitutional process. It was that it felt to me like the beginning of really intense partisanship, the weaponization of partisanship.” And here’s the thing: An impeachment charge has never gotten the two-thirds majority it needs in the Senate to actually oust a president from office. “So you could end up having a situation where the president is impeached, acquitted and runs for re-election and wins re-election.” And that would be a first. “This is my ticket to the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. I don’t think you’ll find these on StubHub.”
Catch up on some important background on how we got here.
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Mr. Trump and his advisers repeatedly pressured President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine for investigations that could benefit Mr. Trump politically, including one of Mr. Biden. Here’s a timeline of events since January.
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A C.I.A. officer who was once detailed to the White House filed a whistle-blower complaint on Mr. Trump’s interactions with Mr. Zelensky. Read the complaint.
transcript
Who Are the Main Characters in the Whistle-Blower’s Complaint?
President Trump’s personal lawyer. The prosecutor general of Ukraine. Joe Biden’s son. These are just some of the names mentioned in the whistle-blower’s complaint. What were their roles? We break it down.
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Congressman: “Sir, let me repeat my question: Did you ever speak to the president about this complaint?” Congress is investigating allegations that President Trump pushed a foreign government to dig up dirt on his Democratic rivals. “It’s just a Democrat witch hunt. Here we go again.” At the heart of an impeachment inquiry is a nine-page whistle-blower complaint that names over two dozen people. Not counting the president himself, these are the people that appear the most: First, Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani. According to documents and interviews, Giuliani has been involved in shadowy diplomacy on behalf of the president’s interests. He encouraged Ukrainian officials to investigate the Biden family’s activities in the country, plus other avenues that could benefit Trump like whether the Ukrainians intentionally helped the Democrats during the 2016 election. It was an agenda he also pushed on TV. “So you did ask Ukraine to look into Joe Biden.” “Of course I did!” A person Giuliani worked with, Yuriy Lutsenko, Ukraine’s former prosecutor general. He pushed for investigations that would also benefit Giuliani and Trump. Lutsenko also discussed conspiracy theories about the Bidens in the U.S. media. But he later walked back his allegations, saying there was no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens. This is where Hunter Biden comes in, the former vice president’s son. He served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company run by this guy, who’s had some issues with the law. While Biden was in office, he along with others, called for the dismissal of Lutsenko’s predecessor, a prosecutor named Viktor Shokin, whose office was overseeing investigations into the company that Hunter Biden was involved with. Shokin was later voted out by the Ukrainian government. Lutsenko replaced him, but was widely criticized for corruption himself. When a new president took office in May, Volodymyr Zelensky, Zelensky said that he’d replace Lutsenko. Giuliani and Trump? Not happy. They viewed Lutsenko as their ally. During a July 25 call between Trump and the new Ukrainian president, Trump defended him, saying, “I heard you had a prosecutor who is very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair.” In that phone call, Trump also allegedly asked his counterpart to continue the investigation into Joe Biden, who is his main rival in the 2020 election. Zelensky has publicly denied feeling pressured by Trump. “In other words, no pressure.” And then finally, Attorney General William Barr, who also came up in the July 25 call. In the reconstructed transcript, Trump repeatedly suggested that Zelensky’s administration could work with Barr and Giuliani to investigate the Bidens and other matters of political interest to Trump. Since the whistle-blower complaint was made public, Democrats have criticized Barr for dismissing allegations that Trump had violated campaign finance laws during his call with Zelensky and not passing along the complaint to Congress. House Democrats have now subpoenaed several people mentioned in the complaint, as an impeachment inquiry into the president’s conduct continues.
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Ms. Pelosi announced in September that the House would open a formal impeachment proceeding and this month directed Democrats to draft articles of impeachment. Here’s how the impeachment process works, and here’s why political influence in foreign policy matters.
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House committees have issued subpoenas to the White House, the Defense Department, the White House budget office and other agencies for documents related to the impeachment investigation. Here’s the evidence that was collected.
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Read about the Democrats’ rules to govern impeachment proceedings.
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