Own Correspondent|President Trump is likely to enter the history books as the third president in U.S. history to have been impeached by the House.
The votes on impeachment bring to an end the House’s months-long inquiry into whether Trump improperly pressured Ukraine to conduct investigations that would benefit him politically.
First, what has been happening on Wednesday?
The House spent the day and night debating the two impeachment articles on the House floor. The first article is for abuse of power, and the second is for obstructing the congressional inquiry.
Once debate is over, they will vote separately on the two articles of impeachment. If just one passes with a majority vote, Trump will be impeached.
HOWEVER, That won’t mean Trump is removed from office. The Senate determines whether that will happen.
A president who has been impeached by the House can still serve as president. It’s up to the Senate to hold a trial to decide whether to remove him from office. The two other presidents impeached by the House, Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson, were both acquitted by the Senate.
The Constitution only says that the Senate has to hold a trial, with the senators sitting as jurors, House lawmakers serving as prosecutors known as managers and the chief justice of the United States presiding over it. They must take a public vote, and two-thirds of senators present must agree on whether to convict the president and thus remove him from office.
Why Is Trump Being Impeached?
Congress and the Defense Department approved nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine in early 2019. Out of public view, diplomats were urging Trump to meet with Ukraine’s newly elected president in the Oval Office — a meeting the Ukrainians viewed as an important signal to Russia.
But that meeting was pushed off, and the military aid was ordered stopped by the White House.
In late July, Trump spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, asking him to “do us a favor though” that included investigating his political opponents and the Biden family.
In August, a whistleblower filed a complaint about that call, alleging Trump had dangled a meeting with Zelensky in exchange for launching investigations into Joe Biden and his son Hunter and into a conspiracy theory about a Democratic National Committee server.
The Washington Post’s Editorial Board wrote that it had been “reliably told” that Trump was pressuring Zelensky to investigate the Bidens.
The existence of the whistleblower complaint is reported by The Post and other outlets.
The White House releases a transcript of the call with Zelensky, and the whistleblower complaint becomes public. And Speaker Nancy Pelosi announces the House will conduct an impeachment inquiry into Trump to see whether his actions on Ukraine render him unfit for office.
The investigation gets underway. It happens behind closed doors at first. Then to the dramatic public testimony by White House aides, many of whom said Trump held up an Oval Office meeting with Ukraine’s president to get those investigations, and many of them say they believed Trump withheld the military aid for the same reason.
Trump also blocked his top aides from complying with congressional subpoenas to testify in the investigation.
The vote to impeach
The House Intelligence Committee released a report on the findings of the investigation, and based on that, the Judiciary Committee wrote up the two articles of impeachment the House will vote on.
Source: Washington Post