Battle lines......

Trump on the brink of impeachment

But battle lines between Democrats and Republicans will remain unmoved.

By KYLE CHENEY and ANDREW DESIDERIO

The House is set to vote on Wednesday to impeach Donald Trump for abusing his power and obstructing congressional investigations, labeling the president a threat to national security and recommending his removal from office.

With the votes, which are expected to fall largely along party lines, Trump will become just the third president to be impeached — after Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. He likely will also become the first to campaign for reelection after facing the House’s ultimate punishment.

It’s the culmination of Democrats’ yearlong string of Trump-focused investigations overseen by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a skilled political tactician who remained reluctant to embrace impeachment until September, when allegations were unearthed about Trump’s conduct toward Ukraine.

Even with the president heading to the Senate for a trial and likely acquittal, House Democrats have vowed to continue their impeachment probes — particularly those focused on former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and potential obstruction of justice by the president.

Leading up to Wednesday’s vote, nearly every moderate and swing-district Democrat declared his or her support for the impeachment articles — an indication that Democratic leaders were successful in holding their caucus together amid fears that several members would peel off. Republicans, meanwhile, are poised to vote uniformly against impeachment after weeks of a feverish whip operation by GOP leaders who “kept a close pulse on the entire conference,” according to a Republican source.

The debate on the House floor is set to last at least six hours, and the final votes are expected to take place between 6:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Trump will be taking the stage at a rally in Michigan around the same time.

“Can you believe that I will be impeached today by the Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats, AND I DID NOTHING WRONG! A terrible Thing,” Trump wrote on Twitter early Wednesday morning, echoing a blistering letter he sent Tuesday to Pelosi haranguing the impeachment process.

Democratic leaders cited Trump’s lack of remorse — and, indeed, his alleged ongoing pursuit of an scheme to undermine the integrity of the 2020 presidential election — as evidence that he poses a continuing and unprecedented threat to U.S. national security while in office. That charge far exceeds the gravity of any previous presidential impeachment.

The two articles of impeachment against Trump stem from his efforts to enlist Ukraine to announce investigations targeting former Vice President Joe Biden and other Democrats on discredited allegations. Trump made the request in a July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a summary of which the White House released in September, fueling the House's impeachment investigation and prompting allegations that Trump was soliciting foreign help for his reelection.

“This was tragically made necessary by the president's misconduct, by the abuse of his office,” said House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who led the impeachment inquiry.

“I think there may very well be members who have regrets after this day when they're asked in the future why they did nothing to stand up to this unethical president who is betraying our national security,” he added.

Democrats also accuse Trump of dispatching his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to pressure Ukrainian officials to launch the probes. They said Trump sought to further pressure Zelensky by ordering a freeze on $391 million in military aid meant for Ukraine and by refusing a White House visit for Zelensky intended to broadcast U.S. support for an ally at war with Russia.

In directing the alleged scheme, Democrats said, Trump “betrayed” the country and violated his oath of office — a claim that forms the basis of the first article of impeachment: abuse of power. In a separate report issued earlier this week, the House Judiciary Committee went further, writing that Trump committed criminal bribery and wire fraud as part of a monthslong scheme to solicit foreign interference in a U.S. election. Republicans have pointed out that neither charge appears in the text of the impeachment articles.

When Democrats began investigating the matter, Trump directed senior officials to defy subpoenas and refuse to appear for testimony or to provide documents. The second impeachment article — obstruction of Congress — describes these actions as an unprecedented assault on the House’s impeachment power and an attempt to skirt accountability.

The two articles of impeachment were the product of weeks of agonizing debate inside the Democratic Caucus about which “high crimes and misdemeanors” to bring to the floor. A swath of the Democratic Caucus had hoped to include obstruction of justice as a third charge, based primarily on Mueller’s findings, but Pelosi and other House leaders viewed the Ukraine scandal as a simpler and more compelling narrative to explain to Americans.

Lawmakers first learned of the Ukraine allegations when the White House intervened to block a whistleblower complaint from reaching the House Intelligence Committee in early September. Soon after, the committee launched an aggressive and fast-paced investigation that included depositions from 17 State Department, Pentagon and White House officials as well as a series of public hearings that unearthed a mountain of evidence supporting the allegations against Trump.

While many Democrats have been eager to impeach Trump since his inauguration, the majority of House Democrats took their cues from Pelosi, who routinely and swiftly suppressed the energy for impeachment — spurred mostly by progressive activists — during the first months of the House Democratic majority.

The expectation for a party-line vote underscores the deepening dysfunction that has gripped Washington in the Trump era — in addition to the unflinching loyalty that the president demands, and almost invariably receives, from congressional Republicans. Trump capitalized on his iron grip on the Republican Party’s base to demand that lawmakers describe his conduct as not just acceptable but “perfect.”

Democrats, meanwhile, once contended that impeachment must be solidly bipartisan or else it would not be worth pursuing. In the face of a united Republican Party, though, Democrats have argued that their reversal on this pledge is a reflection of a GOP that refuses to bend despite overwhelming evidence of Trump’s misconduct. Republicans routinely accused Democrats of backing off this stance to satisfy their base’s most zealous impeachment supporters.

Republicans have contended that Democrats’ pursuit of impeachment lowers the standard envisioned by the framers of the Constitution for deploying Congress’ weightiest weapon against a sitting president. They have harangued Democrats over what they say is an unfair process that did not provide Trump ample opportunities to defend himself. The president on Tuesday sent Pelosi a six-page letter recounting his complaints about the impeachment process, claiming “more due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials.”

Trump’s GOP allies also argued that the evidence Democrats presented was thin and less convincing than it was in previous impeachment inquiries.

After the vote, the Senate will become the epicenter of the impeachment process, with a trial expected early next year to decide the fate of the Trump presidency — just the second time in U.S. history an elected president has been put on trial. Chief Justice John Roberts is slated to preside over the proceedings.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has telegraphed his close partnership with Trump’s White House legal team, vowing that the trial will be conducted to their liking. That pledge drew sharp attacks from Democrats, who pleaded for McConnell to adopt a more impartial posture.