House votes to send Trump impeachment articles to Senate for trial

FAN Editor

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, December 10, 2019.

Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images

The House of Representatives voted Wednesday to pass a resolution sending articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump to the Senate for a trial on whether to convict him and remove him from office.

The resolution passed the House nearly along party lines in a 228-193 vote. No Republicans voted for the resolution.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is scheduled to sign a copy of the resolution later Wednesday during an engrossment ceremony with the newly announced team of Democratic House impeachment managers.

The two articles of impeachment — for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — will then be marched over to the Senate, where they will be officially transmitted to Secretary of the Senate Julie Adams.

The House started voting on the resolution shortly after Trump signed a phase one trade deal with China. 

House Democrats voted Dec. 18 to impeach Trump on articles of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, both related to his efforts to have Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announce probes involving former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, as well as a debunked conspiracy theory about the 2016 election.

Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate is expected to begin Tuesday, according to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Earlier Wednesday, Pelosi unveiled the seven House Democrats who will serve as impeachment managers in the impeachment trial in the Senate.

House managers will essentially act as prosecutors in the Senate trial, laying out the evidence that House investigators have collected and making their arguments for voting Trump out of office, while Trump’s team of lawyers defends him.

The 100 senators, in turn, will act as jurors as they consider how they will vote on the two articles of impeachment against Trump that the House passed last month. It is highly unlikely that two-thirds of the GOP-majority Senate will vote to convict a Republican president and remove him from office. No Senate Republicans have said they will vote to convict.

Trump is just the third U.S. president ever to be impeached.

The vote to pass the resolution came after Pelosi withheld the articles for weeks in a gambit to get assurances about how Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s chamber will conduct the trial.

But McConnell, R-Ky., made no concessions to the Democrats, and rejected their requests to approve witnesses before the trial was set to start. 

“This was a sham impeachment from the beginning and never anything more than Democrats trying to interfere in an election that is now less than ten months away,” Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement.

This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.

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