WASHINGTON (AP) – President Donald Trump is about to be indicted for the second time in an unprecedented vote in the House on Wednesday, a week after encouraging a crowd of loyalists to “fight like hell” against fair election results before they stormed the United States Capitol in a deadly siege.
While Trump’s first ouster in 2019 did not generate Republican votes in the House, a small but significant number of leaders and lawmakers are breaking with the party to join Democrats, saying Trump violated his oath to protect and defending American democracy.
The shocking collapse of Trump’s last days, against the alarming warnings of more violence from his followers, leaves the nation in an awkward and unknown moment before Democrat Joe Biden is inaugurated on January 20th.
“If inviting a crowd to the insurrection against your own government is not a debatable fact, what is?” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., editor of the dismissal article.
Trump, who would become the only U.S. president to be indicted twice, faces a single charge of “inciting insurrection.”
The four-page dismissal resolution it is based on Trump’s own incendiary rhetoric and the falsehoods he spread about Biden’s election victory, even in a White House rally on the day of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, to build his case for high crimes and misdemeanors as required by the Constitution.
Trump was not responsible for the riot, suggesting it was the push to oust him more than his actions around the bloody riot that divided the country.
“To continue on this path, I think it is causing enormous danger to our country and is causing enormous anger,” Trump said Tuesday, his first statements to reporters since last week’s violence.
A Capitol police officer died from his injuries during the riot, and police shot dead a woman during the siege. Three more people died in what authorities said were medical emergencies. Lawmakers had to fight to protect and hide while the mutineers took control of the Capitol and delayed for hours the last step to end Biden’s victory.
The outgoing president offered no condolences for the dead or wounded, he just said, “I don’t want violence.”
At least five Republican lawmakers, including the third GOP leader in the House, Liz Cheney of Wyoming, were not influenced by the president’s logic. Republicans announced they would vote to prosecute Trump, splitting Republican leadership and the party itself.
“The president of the United States convened this crowd, gathered the crowd and ignited the flame of this attack,” Cheney said in a statement. “There has never been a greater betrayal by a U.S. president of his office and his oath in the Constitution.”
Unlike a year ago, Trump faces dismissal as a weak leader as he had lost his own re-election and the Republican majority in the Senate.
Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is said to be angry with Trump and it is unclear how an indictment trial would unfold. In the House, California Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, one of Trump’s top allies, struggled to suggest lighter censorship, but that option collapsed.
To date, Republican representatives John Katko of New York, a former federal prosecutor; Adam Kinzinger, of Illinois, an Air Force veteran; Fred Upton of Michigan; and Jaime Herrera Beutler, of Washington state, announced that they would also join Cheney to vote on charges.
The House first tried to push Vice President Mike Pence and the Cabinet to intervene, passing a resolution Tuesday night calling for them to invoke the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to remove Trump from office. The resolution urged Pence to “declare what is obvious to a horrified nation: that the president cannot successfully fulfill the functions and powers of his office.”
Pence made it clear he would not, and said in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that it was “time to unite our country as we prepare to invest President-elect Joe Biden.”
The debate over the resolution was intense after lawmakers returned the Capitol for the first time since the siege.
Representative Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas, argued that Trump should leave because, as he said in Spanish, he is “crazy”: crazy.
In opposition, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio said the “cancel culture” was only trying to cancel the president. He said Democrats have been trying to reverse the 2016 election since Trump took office and end his term in the same way.
While Republican House leaders allow full-fledged lawmakers to vote their conscience on the ouster, it is unclear whether there would be a two-thirds vote in the divided Senate to condemn and oust Trump. Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania joined Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska over the weekend to demand that Trump “leave as soon as possible.”
With just over a week to go before Trump’s term, the FBI warned of possible armed protests by Trump’s loyalists before Biden took office. Capitol police urged lawmakers to be on alert.
With new security, lawmakers had to go through metal detectors to enter the House of Commons, not far from where Capitoline police, with guns drawn, had barricaded the door against riot police. Some Republican lawmakers complained about the projection.
Biden has said it is important to make sure that the “people who took part in the sedition and threatened their lives, damaging public property, caused great damage, so that they would be held accountable.”
Defending the concern that an indictment trial would worsen his first days in office, the president-elect encourages senators to divide their time between assuming their priorities of confirming their candidates and approving the replacement of COVID-19 while also leads the trial.
The indictment bill is drawn from Trump’s false statements about his electoral defeat against Biden. Judges across the country, including some named by Trump, have repeatedly dismissed cases challenging election results, and former Attorney General William Barr, Trump’s ally, has said there is no evidence of widespread fraud.
Like the resolution to invoke the 25th Amendment, the indictment bill also details Trump’s pressure on state officials in Georgia to “find him” with more votes and his White House rally for “Fight like hell” heading to the Capitol.
While some have questioned the removal of the president so near the end of his term, there are precedents. In 1876, during the administration of Ulysses Grant, the Secretary of War, William Belknap, was charged by the House the day he resigned and the Senate summoned a trial months later. He was acquitted.
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Associated Press writers Alan Fram and Zeke Miller contributed to this report.
This story has been corrected to show that Trump’s first ouster was in 2019, not last year.