House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday announced the House of Representatives would be moving forward with a formal impeachment inquiry of Donald Trump.
The actions of the president, she said, are a “betrayal of [the president’s] oath of office, a betrayal of our national security, and a betrayal of the integrity of our elections.”
The move comes as a number of Texans in the House — all Democrats, unsurprisingly — expressed support on Tuesday for at least beginning impeachment proceedings.
For months, the Speaker had argued that support for impeachment was not strong enough among the public and that the president would likely be acquitted in the Republican-controlled Senate. For now, the latter remains true.
But recent allegations that Trump attempted to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden from a foreign leader have caused the dominoes to fall. Reports indicate Trump allegedly withheld military aid from Ukraine in order to try to extort the Ukraine’s president into investigating Biden’s family.
It’s not yet clear what Democratic officials see as the political upside to commencing impeachment. Morally and constitutionally, however, the case is clear for more than half of the Democrats in the House.
The president’s actions in the Biden matter “represent a gross abuse of power and an abuse of the trust,” Rep. Lizzie Fletcher of Houston said in a statement.
Trump said he’s releasing the full, “unredacted” version of the transcript of his phone call with the Ukrainian President. He then went bonkers on Twitter.
Photo: Zach Gibson/Getty Images
