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Democrats’ Rules Approved for Impeachment Inquiry: Live Updates
The Trump Impeachment Inquiry: What Happened Today
(about 4 hours later)
The vote was on a resolution that sets rules for the public phase of an impeachment inquiry that has so far been conducted exclusively behind closed doors. The final tally was 232-196, largely along party lines.
The House voted 232-196 to endorse the Democratic-led impeachment inquiry into President Trump. The resolution sets out rules for the investigation, which will soon go public with hearings and the publication of documents.
It authorized the House Intelligence Committee — the panel that has been leading the investigation and conducting private depositions — to convene public hearings and produce a report that will guide the Judiciary Committee as it considers whether to draft articles of impeachment against President Trump.
Only two Democrats broke with their party to vote against the measure, a sign of how unified the caucus is on impeachment — and how much confidence it has in the evidence of Mr. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. “This is not any cause for any glee or comfort,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said. “What is at stake in all of this is nothing less than our democracy.”
The measure also gives the president rights in the Judiciary Committee, allowing his lawyers to participate in hearings and giving Republicans the chance to request subpoenas for witnesses and documents. But the White House says it does not provide “basic due process rights,” and Republicans complain that their ability to issue subpoenas is limited. They will need the consent of Democrats, or a vote of a majority of members. That has been standard in previous modern impeachments. The majority has the final say over how the proceedings unfold.
Republicans, who for weeks had called for a vote, unanimously opposed the resolution, accusing it of attempting to undo the 2016 election. “Democrats are trying to impeach the president because they are scared they cannot defeat him at the ballot box,” Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, said. “Why do you not trust the people?”
Immediately after the vote, President Trump again attacked the inquiry on Twitter.
In closed-door testimony today, a National Security Council aide corroborated a key fact when he confirmed that Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, said that a package of military assistance for Ukraine would not be released until the country committed to investigating the Bidens.
In a statement, the White House press secretary also attacked the inquiry and the Democratic leader, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, calling it “unhinged obsession” of her party.
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“The president has done nothing wrong, and the Democrats know it,” the press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, said.
The witness, Timothy Morrison, the former top Russia expert for the National Security Council, testified Thursday that a top diplomat who was close to President Trump told him that a package of military assistance for Ukraine would not be released until the country committed to investigating Mr. Trump’s political rivals, corroborating a key episode at the center of the impeachment inquiry.
I asked Julie Davis, our congressional editor, about the history this resolution made — and what it says about the next phase of the investigation.
Mr. Morrison’s testimony backed up details provided last week by Ambassador William B. Taylor Jr., the top American diplomat in Ukraine, during his private testimony.
Julie, in the most basic sense, why was the vote meaningful?
In his opening remarks, which were reviewed by The New York Times, Mr. Morrison resisted drawing conclusions about Mr. Trump’s involvement, and in subsequent testimony he made clear he did not view the actions of the president or others involved as illegal or improper. Instead, he characterized their behavior as bad foreign policy of the sort that could potentially squander a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” afforded by the election of Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
It was only the third time in modern history the House has had a roll-call vote on an impeachment inquiry. But this was different than the previous two since it wasn’t to authorize the inquiry. It was to set rules for an ongoing one.
Mr. Morrison appeared under subpoena despite a White House directive not to, according to an official involved in the inquiry. He is the second current white House official to testify before the inquiry this week, following Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman.
How did we get to today?
It wasn’t that long ago that Democrats were questioning the politics and utility of a vote like this, given the large probability that Senate Republicans will acquit Mr. Trump if the House impeaches him. And Republicans recognized that was the case, and felt quite confident that the political will behind something like this was not there. But that’s not the case today, if you look at the polls, which show majorities of Americans favoring the inquiry.
Mr. Morrison resigned his post at the National Security Council on Thursday ahead of the testimony, though he had been weighing leaving for some time, according to another official familiar with the matter.
What did today’s vote tell us about where Republicans stand?
The 232 House Democrats that voted for the impeachment resolution Thursday morning weren’t surprised by the two members of their party that broke ranks.
They’re still in a place politically where they’re completely unwilling to break with Mr. Trump. It doesn’t seem at the moment like there’s any substantive development that could shake that. But today’s resolution made it clear that public hearings will be much different than the private interviews that have been happening for weeks.
Both Representatives Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey and Collin C. Peterson of Minnesota represent conservative-leaning districts and had publicly aired their concerns that impeachment would be divisive and fruitless.
What’s something that we’re not paying enough attention to in what will be the public part of the inquiry?
Mr. Van Drew predicted a successful impeachment in the House will undoubtedly yield a failed trial in the Senate.
Those of us covering this have been obsessed with public hearings and what a spectacle they’ll be. But one thing we’ve glossed over in today’s resolution is that transcripts of these private depositions will become public. When you get that volume of black and white evidence for the whole public to see, that hasn’t been spun, it’s going to be really compelling.
“We’ll have the same president and presidential candidate who will be able to say he is exonerated,” he said. “So I don’t know how much we really gain from that.”
We looked into the archives to see how The Times covered similar votes in the last two presidential impeachments. Here was how we described the House approving a resolution in the Nixon impeachment investigation, in 1974:
Mr. Peterson called the process “hopelessly partisan.”
“The House thus formally ratified the impeachment inquiry begun by the committee last October and empowered the panel to subpoena anyone, including the President, with evidence pertinent to the investigation,” The Times wrote. “ … The vote followed an hour of debate in which no one rose to defend Mr. Nixon, but Democrats and Republicans quarreled over the best method to guarantee that the inquiry, would not become partisan.”
“Without support from Senate Republicans, going down this path is a mistake,” he said in a statement.
And here was how The Times described the House approving a resolution in the Clinton impeachment investigation, in 1998:
In a rare gesture, Speaker Nancy Pelosi presided over the House chamber as the text of the procedures and the resolution outlining the public stage of the inquiry was read into the Congressional Record.
“After a civil if sometimes harshly phrased debate that lasted more than three hours, the House of Representatives voted largely along party lines this afternoon to begin a full-scale, open-ended inquiry,” The Times wrote. “ … the founding fathers, the Constitution and the long shadow of precedent were cited by both sides as the debate unfolded.”
Standing next to a poster of the American flag, Ms. Pelosi repeatedly evoked the tenets of the Constitution as she framed the vote as an act of transparency as lawmakers investigate whether Mr. Trump abused his office in pressuring Ukraine to investigate a political rival.
Right after the House voted today, I asked my colleague Carl Hulse, who covered the Clinton impeachment, what his first thought was about this vote compared to the one he covered in 1998. Here’s what he told me:
“That is really what this vote is about,” Ms. Pelosi said. “It is about the truth.”
“The vote today underscored the deep and new kind of polarization in Washington. Back then, 31 Democrats broke with the president, and Bill Clinton was happy about that! He thought it’d be more. Now, no one broke. That’s how much things have changed. If 31 people broke with Mr. Trump, we’d be proclaiming him dead. It would feel like a political apocalypse. Today, it was a rock solid party line.”
After she concluded her remarks, the dozens of Democrats already gathered in the chamber broke into applause.
Polarization has consequences, and straight party-line votes can undermine public confidence in the proceedings, Carl wrote today. “It shows the bases are controlling both parties,” Representative Peter King, a New York Republican, told him.
Republican lawmakers continued to argue that under the procedures and the resolution outlined by House Democrats, Mr. Trump would not have the opportunity to sufficiently defend himself against the allegations.
Two conservative Democrats became the party’s only defectors in the House’s impeachment vote. They warned that the process was “hopelessly partisan.”
At a news conference early Thursday morning, Ms. Pelosi dismissed questions about Republican concerns, saying that “these rules are fairer than anything that have gone before in terms of an impeachment proceeding.”— Emily Cochrane
Politico reports that Mr. Trump is using his considerable fund-raising muscle to reward Republicans who support him in the impeachment inquiry, emailing supporters with a call for money that would be distributed between friendly senators who face tough re-election fights in 2020.
Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the Republican whip, emerged from the House floor triumphant that not a single member of his party broke ranks to support the House Democrats’ resolution.
My colleague Catie Edmondson tweeted this picture of a box sent to a Democratic congresswoman from a swing district, with the message, “Get Packing!” It was apparently sent by the campaign committee for House Republicans, but its appearance was suspicious enough that Capitol Police came to investigate.
“There were a lot of questions today about whether or not Republicans would stick together on this vote and do the right thing for the country,” Mr. Scalise said. “I can tell you that our conference stood strong.”
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In a victory lap in the speaker’s lobby, Mr. Scalise noted that two Democrats opposed the resolution.
“Nancy Pelosi, at the beginning of this Congress, said if there’s going to be impeachment it has to be bipartisan,” he said. “In fact the only bipartisan vote today was against impeachment.”— Catie Edmondson
Republicans are already making hay of the fact that their side was the only one to stay united in today’s House vote. Two Democrats broke ranks to vote against a resolution endorsing an impeachment inquiry into President Trump.
But 21 years ago, a much larger defection on a similar vote was viewed differently. Back in 1998, the Republican-led House voted 258 to 176 to initiate an impeachment inquiry into President Bill Clinton.
As an article in The New York Times noted at the time: “The quarreling on the House floor was plainly partisan. So was the subsequent vote of 258 to 176, as only 31 of the 206 House Democrats joined the Republican majority and signed on to the resolution for an open-ended impeachment inquiry.”
The story described White House officials as “heartened that not enough Democrats defected to make the vote appear bipartisan.”
A CNN article on the vote at the time also described Democrats as “pleased only 15 percent of their caucus broke ranks.”
Several Democrats seeking the party’s nomination for president in 2020 uniformly praised the House vote to endorse an impeachment inquiry and urged Congress to continue with the process.
Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey tweeted that he was “proud of House Democrats” for approving the resolution; former Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas called it a “good step” but “only the beginning.” And Senator Kamala Harris of California issued what she called a well-timed “reminder” that “no one is above the law, including the president of the United States.”
“This president took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution,” said Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind. “So did every member of Congress. This president violated that oath, betraying our country and leaving our representatives with no choice but to uphold their own. Congress must move forward with impeachment.”
In a statement, Tom Steyer, the billionaire and former hedge fund manager who has supported impeachment for more than two years, called Thursday’s vote a “significant step forward.”
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said in a statement Thursday that Mr. Trump had “weaponized the institutions of our government for political purposes, subverting our national security for his own political gain.” Mr. Biden has a personal connection to the events that helped trigger the impeachment inquiry: Mr. Trump asked the government of Ukraine to investigate the Biden family.
“Today, the House did its constitutional duty to proceed with a solemn investigation of unprecedented wrongdoing,” Mr. Biden said. “Members of Congress take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution when they are sworn in, not an oath to their party or to the president. Congress must do its duty to ensure that Donald Trump’s assault on the Constitution does not seep beyond his presidency, with a lasting and devastating impact on our democracy.”— Matt Stevens and Katie Glueck
Mr. Trump repeatedly pressured President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to investigate people and issues of political concern to Mr. Trump, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Here’s a timeline of events since January.
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.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced in September that the House would open a formal impeachment proceeding in response to the whistle-blower’s complaint. Here’s how the impeachment process works and here’s why political influence in foreign policy matters.
House committees have issued subpoenas to the White House, the Defense Department, the budget office and other agencies for documents related to the impeachment investigation. Here’s the evidence that has been collected so far.
Read about the Democrats’ rules to govern impeachment proceedings.
