House of Representatives vote to impeach the president on abuse of power and obstruction of Congress
THE United States House of Representatives on Wednesday, December 18 voted along party lines on two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, making him the third sitting U.S. president in history to be impeached.
The final vote among the Democratic-controlled House was 229 to 198; four Democrats dissented with the majority and did not vote for impeachment, including Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii who abstained from the tally by voting “present” on both articles.
“Today, as speaker of the House, I solemnly and sadly open the debate on the impeachment of the president of the United States,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in her opening remarks to the debate on the articles on the House floor. “If we do not act now, we would be derelict in our duty. It is tragic that the president’s reckless actions make impeachment necessary.”
In one of the most talked-about scandals of the Trump administration, the impeachment of the president involved an alleged abuse of power and soliciting foreign intervention in the 2020 election as well as investigations into conspiracy theories involving the Democratic National Committee (DNC) server.
Following the House’s impeachment (which does not guarantee removal from office), the Senate will hold a historic trial that will have the final say on whether to acquit or convict and remove Trump from office.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kent.) asserted that there was “no chance” that the Republican-majority Senate would convict Trump, escalating the growingly partisan nature of the affair.
But the impeachment, and the grounds on which Trump’s impeachment lie, shouldn’t be viewed as a partisan effort but as an act of accountability, according to Filipino American Anthony C. Ocampo, associate professor of sociology at Cal Poly Pomona.
“Even if Trump isn’t removed from office, I’m thrilled that he’s being held accountable, for once,” Ocampo said in an email to the Asian Journal. “He went behind the American people’s back and sought help from a foreign government in order to get damaging information about a political opponent. That’s wrong. The president is supposed to have the interest of the American people in mind. Instead, he was compromising the interest of the American people for personal gain.”
As the tally was finalized, Americans everywhere began reacting to the historic impeachment vote resulted in Trump becoming the third U.S. president to be impeached. (Both the 17th U.S. President Andrew Johnson the 42nd U.S President Bill Clinton were impeached by the House but avoided conviction from the Senate.)
The enormous response to the impeachment vote on social media was largely divided by extreme reactions: those celebrating the impeachment and those outraged by the Democrats. But there are few who question the veracity of the impeachment inquiry.
“I feel that the impeachment process was rushed and there wasn’t really enough time or evidence to get an accurate picture of what Trump is being accused of,” Brian Relada, a Filipino American political science student at Liberty University, told the Asian Journal in a phone interview.
Relada, who said he is not a Trump supporter, noted the context surrounding the impeachment — the Mueller report which found no collusion of the 2016 election by the Trump campaign, the accusations of sexual misconduct by the president, the widely criticized nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and the controversial immigration policy proposals “to name a few” — and felt “worried” that the House Democrats were acting “for party, not country.”
“If you look at the history of impeachment in American politics, you can see that it’s not a partisan effort — it’s an attempt to remove an elected official who has been charged with misconduct. You can make arguments that there are tones of partisanship, but it’s not supposed to be. In this case, [the timing of the impeachment] is suspicious to me since we have the 2020 election looming ahead, and Democrats have been trying to get him out of office on other matters,” Relada said.
“In regards to the Ukraine affair, I do think that there are significant things to mine there and there could be more damning evidence of abuse of power, but I just don’t think there was enough to vote on it now,” Relada said.
“As a patriot, I want to have trust in our elected officials, that they aren’t making moves to further their agendas, but the current political and social climate of our country makes it hard to believe in nonpartisanship,” he lamented.
The vote brings to a head several weeks of testimonies and hearings following Pelosi’s official announcement of the impeachment inquiry on Sept. 24, 2019.
Initially, Pelosi resisted the pressure to call for an impeachment inquiry from leftists, but in May 2019, she began validating the accusations of “obstruction of justice” and refusal to acknowledge congressional subpoenas following various scandals that continue to plague the Trump administration.
It wasn’t until a whistleblower complaint in August 2019 that alleged abuse of power by Trump that kickstarted the impeachment.
The whistleblower alleged that Trump used the Office of the President to catalyze intervention in the 2020 election by urging the newly-elected Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to open investigations on Democratic candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden (the latter of whom was on the board of a Ukranian natural gas company called Burisma) and a debunked conspiracy theory that alleged that Russia hacked into the DNC server.
In the transcripts of the now-infamous Trump-Zelensky phone call that occurred on July 25, Trump suggested that if Zelensky doesn’t comply with these investigation requests that he will withhold military aid to Ukraine, which many described as a quid pro quo.
The Trump administration and Republican lawmakers have blasted the Democrats for moving forward with the impeachment process, and following Wednesday’s decision, Trump once again pushed back on the Democrats.
“SICK ATROCIOUS LIES BY THE RADICAL LEFT, DO NOTHING DEMOCRATS. THIS IS AN ASSAULT ON AMERICA, AND AN ASSAULT ON THE REPUBLICAN PARTY!!!!” the president tweeted in response to the House vote.
Minutes after the vote was tallied, the Trump 2020 reelection effort also declared the impeachment a “sham” and accused the Democrats of acting for their own interests as opposed to those of the American people. (An aggregated poll from FiveThirtyEight found that 47.6% of Americans support Trump’s impeachment while 46.1% do not.)
“The contrast between President Trump and the Democrats couldn’t be more clear,” Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Pascale said in a statement. “While the President rallied with tens of thousands of citizens in Michigan and celebrated the greatness and success of America, Democrats in D.C. completed their cold, calculated, and concocted 3-year impeachment sham and voted against 63 million Americans. And the only part of the vote that was bipartisan was in opposition. The President is just getting stronger while support for the Democrats’ political theater has faded. Undeterred, President Trump keeps racking up victories for the American people, who will respond by resoundingly re-electing him next November.”
As the House impeachment vote transitions into a Senate impeachment trial scheduled for early next year, what hangs in the balance is how this issue will play into the next presidential election. Ocampo acknowledged the significant effect the 2018 midterm election — which flipped the House from Republican-controlled to Democrat-controlled — had on Trump’s impeachment.
“Whether he is removed from office or not, by way of conviction or the 2020 election, I think the impeachment vote is a reminder of how important midterm elections are,” Ocampo noted. “Had the Democrats [hadn’t] galvanized a resistance movement, they would not have earned back the House of Representatives. Had they not earned back the House, impeachment would not have even been a conversation point, let alone a reality. I hope Americans interested in restoring the dignity of this country will see this as evidence that mobilizing matters.”
