The US House of Representatives was poised on Wednesday officially to charge Donald Trump with inciting an insurrection against the US government in the wake of the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January by a pro-Trump mob, an extraordinary and historic measure that would make him the only American president ever to be impeached twice.
The unprecedented effort gained momentum overnight as senior Republican leaders in the House joined Democrats in calling for his removal from office for his role in inflaming a horde of loyalists who led the deadly assault on the US Capitol while members of Congress in both the House and Senate were in session to certify Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in November’s presidential election.
A remorseless Trump called his inflammatory language at a rally immediately prior to the mob marching on the US Congress and breaking in last week “totally appropriate”.
He said impeachment was nothing more than a “continuation of the greatest witch hunt in the history of politics”.
On Tuesday, Mike Pence formally rejected calls to strip Trump of power in an unprecedented invoking of the 25th amendment to the US constitution that allows for the removal of a sitting president if deemed unfit to perform his job.
Pence’s signal came just hours before the House passed a resolution calling on him to do so.
In lengthy documents outlining the case for impeachment, House Democrats argued that Trump’s lack of remorse was further proof that he remained a threat while in office.
“The president’s remaining term is limited – but a president capable of fomenting a violent insurrection in the Capitol is capable of greater dangers still,” they wrote. “He must be removed from office as swiftly as the constitution allows.”
Fear turned to fury in the days since the riot, as lawmakers learned more about the security failures that brought death and destruction to the People’s House.
“The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack,” said Liz Cheney, the No 3 House Republican, in a scathing statement on Tuesday evening announcing her support for impeachment. “Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the president.”
No House Republicans voted in support when Trump was impeached in 2019 over his attempts to persuade the leader of Ukraine to investigate the family of Joe Biden, then his election rival, now his incoming replacement in the White House.
Cheney was joined by several other House Republicans, including Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who asked if the president’s actions were “not worthy of impeachment, then what is an impeachable offense?”
Their support marks a dramatic shift from the proceedings last year, when Republicans fought back against Trump’s impeachment and he was acquitted in his Senate trial in early 2020 with only one GOP Senator, Mitt Romney, joining Democrats in voting for his conviction.
The swift and historic second impeachment vote comes just one week after the riot in Washington DC – the first occupation of the US Capitol since British troops burned the building during the war of 1812 – and one week before Trump is due to leave office.
The formal charge, or article of impeachment, was drafted even as lawmakers were ducking under chairs and praying for safety during the attack.
It charges Trump with “inciting violence against the government of the United States’’ by encouraging his supporters to march on the Capitol and obstruct lawmakers from formalizing Joe Biden’s electoral victory, in an attempt to overturn the result and give Trump a second term in office.
“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” he told the raucous crowd at last Wednesday morning’s gathering near the White House.
Rallying behind what they believed was a battle cry from an American president who refused to accept his election defeat, thousands of loyalists stormed the Capitol in a violent rampage that threatened the lives of lawmakers, Congressional staff, journalists and his own vice-president, who was there to fulfill his constitutional duty to count and certify the electoral college votes.
“In all this, President Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of government,” the article states. “He threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power, and imperiled a coequal branch of government. He thereby betrayed his trust as president, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.”
Once the House votes to impeach the president, an outcome that is all but assured as the Democrats hold the majority in the House, the Senate, which is currently dominated by the Republicans, would then hold a trial. Two-thirds of the 100-member body are required to convict a president, meaning 17 Republicans would have to join all Democrats to render Trump guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors”.
Two Senate Republicans have already called on Trump to resign, and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell reportedly believes the president committed impeachable offenses.
A Senate trial is likely to unfold, at least in part, until after Trump has left office.
Though Trump would not be removed from office, the trial would not be entirely symbolic. A convicted president can be barred from ever again holding public office, a punishment that only requires a simple majority.