Republicans Are Still Trying To Keep Trump In Power Even After He Incited A Deadly Insurrection
West Virginia Rep. Alex Mooney prevented Democrats from passing a bill asking Vice President Pence to remove Trump from office on behalf of his Republican colleagues.
Reporting From Washington, DC
Last updated on January 11, 2021
Nurphoto / Getty Images
A flag flies at half staff at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, Jan. 10. THANKS TO SPEAKER PELOSI
WASHINGTON — House Republicans blocked a resolution calling on Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and declare President Donald Trump incapable of governing after the president incited a violent insurrection last week that resulted in five deaths, including one Capitol Police officer.
Democrats brought the resolution to the floor Monday, and Republican Rep. Alex Mooney of West Virginia objected to the measure, arguing a resolution “of this magnitude” required a full debate, forcing a full House vote expected Tuesday.
“The US House must never adopt a resolution that demands the removal of a duly elected president, without any hearings, debate, or recorded votes,” said Mooney, a conservative House member who has pushed for the decertification of the election results.
The resolution follows an ultimatum House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued to Pence Sunday night, calling for Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment or the House would proceed with bringing articles of impeachment to the floor.
“If we do not receive Unanimous Consent, this legislation is planned to be brought up on the Floor the following day,” Pelosi said in the statement. “We are calling on the Vice President to respond within 24 hours. Next, we will proceed with bringing impeachment legislation to the Floor.”
Pelosi’s statement Sunday also laid out a timeline for the coming days. With Congress not in session and most members in their home districts, the plan is to first bring the 25th Amendment resolution drafted by Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat of Maryland, and then bring articles of impeachment to the floor as soon as Wednesday.
Raskin's resolution, which Republicans objected to Monday, reads, “[O]n Wednesday, January 6, 2021, the day fixed by the Constitution for the counting of electoral votes, Congress experienced a massive violent invasion of the United States Capitol and its complex by a dangerous insurrectionary mob which smashed windows and used violent physical force and weapons to overpower and outmaneuver the United States Capitol Police and facilitated the illegal entry into the Capitol of hundreds, if not thousands, of unauthorized persons."
It continues, “[T]hese insurrectionary protests were widely advertised and broadly encouraged by President Donald J. Trump, who repeatedly urged his millions of followers on Twitter and other social media outlets to come to Washington on January 6 to 'Stop the Steal' of the 2020 Presidential election and promised his activist followers that the protest on the Electoral College counting day would be ‘wild.’”
House Democrats have already drafted and circulated an article of impeachment against Trump for inciting insurrection. The measure was introduced in the House Monday morning by Raskin, as well as Reps. David Cicilline, Ted Lieu, and Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler.
“President Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of Government. He threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power, and imperiled a coequal branch of Government. He thereby betrayed his trust as President, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States,” the article reads.
In an interview with CNN Monday morning, Cicilline said he is confident there will be majority support for the impeachment and expects a vote Wednesday in the House. The article of impeachment would next go to the Senate for a trial.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who introduced the 25th Amendment resolution for Democrats on Monday, said that whether the Senate would ultimately vote to remove Trump from office "is not the issue. The issue is, we have a president who, most of us believe participated in encouraging an insurrection and attack on this building and on democracy and trying to subvert the counting of the presidential ballot."
"Now we are trying to act in an expeditious fashion on making sure that this president, as soon as possible, [is] remove[d] from the ability to repeat the seditious activity took last Wednesday and the encouragement of people to attack the government, an equal branch of government, and to prevent us from doing our constitutional responsibility," he added.
Trump has just nine days left in office and would be the first president in history to be impeached twice. The House impeached Trump in December 2019, on two counts, abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, after a phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in which he solicited interference into the 2020 election.
This time, Trump faces just one charge: “incitement of insurrection.”
Addy Baird is a political reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Washington, DC.
Ruby Cramer is a politics reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.
WASHINGTON — House Republicans blocked a resolution calling on Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and declare President Donald Trump incapable of governing after the president incited a violent insurrection last week that resulted in five deaths, including one Capitol Police officer.
Democrats brought the resolution to the floor Monday, and Republican Rep. Alex Mooney of West Virginia objected to the measure, arguing a resolution “of this magnitude” required a full debate, forcing a full House vote expected Tuesday.
“The US House must never adopt a resolution that demands the removal of a duly elected president, without any hearings, debate, or recorded votes,” said Mooney, a conservative House member who has pushed for the decertification of the election results.
The resolution follows an ultimatum House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued to Pence Sunday night, calling for Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment or the House would proceed with bringing articles of impeachment to the floor.
“If we do not receive Unanimous Consent, this legislation is planned to be brought up on the Floor the following day,” Pelosi said in the statement. “We are calling on the Vice President to respond within 24 hours. Next, we will proceed with bringing impeachment legislation to the Floor.”
Pelosi’s statement Sunday also laid out a timeline for the coming days. With Congress not in session and most members in their home districts, the plan is to first bring the 25th Amendment resolution drafted by Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat of Maryland, and then bring articles of impeachment to the floor as soon as Wednesday.
Raskin's resolution, which Republicans objected to Monday, reads, “[O]n Wednesday, January 6, 2021, the day fixed by the Constitution for the counting of electoral votes, Congress experienced a massive violent invasion of the United States Capitol and its complex by a dangerous insurrectionary mob which smashed windows and used violent physical force and weapons to overpower and outmaneuver the United States Capitol Police and facilitated the illegal entry into the Capitol of hundreds, if not thousands, of unauthorized persons."
It continues, “[T]hese insurrectionary protests were widely advertised and broadly encouraged by President Donald J. Trump, who repeatedly urged his millions of followers on Twitter and other social media outlets to come to Washington on January 6 to 'Stop the Steal' of the 2020 Presidential election and promised his activist followers that the protest on the Electoral College counting day would be ‘wild.’”
House Democrats have already drafted and circulated an article of impeachment against Trump for inciting insurrection. The measure was introduced in the House Monday morning by Raskin, as well as Reps. David Cicilline, Ted Lieu, and Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler.
“President Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of Government. He threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power, and imperiled a coequal branch of Government. He thereby betrayed his trust as President, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States,” the article reads.
In an interview with CNN Monday morning, Cicilline said he is confident there will be majority support for the impeachment and expects a vote Wednesday in the House. The article of impeachment would next go to the Senate for a trial.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who introduced the 25th Amendment resolution for Democrats on Monday, said that whether the Senate would ultimately vote to remove Trump from office "is not the issue. The issue is, we have a president who, most of us believe participated in encouraging an insurrection and attack on this building and on democracy and trying to subvert the counting of the presidential ballot."
"Now we are trying to act in an expeditious fashion on making sure that this president, as soon as possible, [is] remove[d] from the ability to repeat the seditious activity took last Wednesday and the encouragement of people to attack the government, an equal branch of government, and to prevent us from doing our constitutional responsibility," he added.
Trump has just nine days left in office and would be the first president in history to be impeached twice. The House impeached Trump in December 2019, on two counts, abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, after a phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in which he solicited interference into the 2020 election.
This time, Trump faces just one charge: “incitement of insurrection.”
Addy Baird is a political reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Washington, DC.
Ruby Cramer is a politics reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.
Republicans Are Calling For “Unity” After They Voted To Try To Overturn The Election Following The Deadly Capitol Attack
One hundred forty-seven Republicans in Congress voted to try to keep President Donald Trump in power based on what many knew were lies about the election.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was one of the 147 congressional Republicans who voted to try to overturn President-elect Joe Biden's win after rioters stormed the Capitol.
WASHINGTON — Republicans in Congress are demanding “unity” after 147 of them voted to try to overturn the election, propping up the very lies that led a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters to violently attack the US Capitol on Wednesday.
The calls for unity came not in the immediate aftermath of the storming of the Capitol, or after the group — a majority of House Republicans plus eight of their Senate colleagues — spent seven more hours forcing votes to try to undo President-elect Joe Biden’s win and citing claims of election fraud that have been repeatedly rejected by the courts and for which there is no evidence. The calls came as Democrats began to consider imposing consequences.
Impeaching the President with just 12 days left will only divide our country more. I've reached out to President-elect Biden today & plan to speak to him about how we must work together to lower the temperature & unite the country to solve America’s challenges. My full statement
"There is more that unites us than divides us, and that’s where we must focus. Let’s set politics aside, focus on the American people and sound policy to fix our nation, and preserve its bounty for future generations." My full statement on this week: https://t.co/IYhUqMjX0T
The 147 Republicans voted separately to undermine the will of voters in Arizona and Pennsylvania; the vast majority of them voted for both. Many of them knew that the election fraud claims upon which they based those votes were not true, that they were invented by and for a president whose ego would not allow him to acknowledge his own loss until a full day after a violent mass breached the Capitol on his behalf and as news was breaking that a Capitol Police officer had died.
Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, who led the Senate attempts to object to Biden’s win, didn’t say they believed the election was fraudulent in defending those decisions Wednesday night. Instead, they argued a lot of Trump’s supporters believed it was and that they for some reason had some responsibility to act on their behalf while continuing to amplify conspiracies, “leaving the ouroboros undermining our democracy to keep chomping away,” as the Washington Post's Mike DeBonis put it. Hawley spoke solely about his concerns about Pennsylvania’s election, raising questions about the state’s mail-in voting law passed more than a year ago that had already been rejected by multiple courts, and which Hawley himself said were “quite apart from allegations of any fraud.”
Cruz has since said the nation must now “must come together and put this anger and division behind us.” Hawley — who was photographed raising a fist in support of the mob before they broke into the Capitol — has been mostly silent but did complain about the loss of his book contract while comparing Simon & Schuster to the “mob” that stormed the Capitol.
The attack at the Capitol was a despicable act of terrorism and a shocking assault on our democratic system. We must come together and put this anger and division behind us. We must, and I am confident we will, have a peaceful and orderly transition of power. My full statement:
In the aftermath of Wednesday’s violence — in which not only was Officer Brian D. Sicknick killed, but one Trump supporter was shot and killed by police, and three others died due to medical emergencies — the 147 Republicans who voted to try to keep Trump in power have largely praised law enforcement and, rightly, mourned Sicknick, something Trump himself has not publicly done. And they’ve decried Democratic plans to start a second impeachment of the president as anti-unity; a handful of the Republicans who voted to uphold Biden’s win are telling him the same thing.
Susan and I were saddened to learn of the passing of U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who died protecting our Capitol. Our prayers are with his family and our law enforcement officers. We must heal our nation’s divide; there is more that unites us than divides us.
President Trump showed extremely poor leadership on Wednesday, but there is no good Constitutional argument for impeachment. Speaker Pelosi knows the Senate will not try this case before the President leaves office. Impeachment will only worsen divisions, rather than uniting us.
Impeachment is not a path toward a unified solution. My full statement ⬇️
They’ve also focused heavily on “cancel culture” because the man who will be president of the United States for just another 11 days was booted from Twitter and other social media platforms for inciting violence. This, despite the fact that you cannot cancel the commander in chief, who continues to have the largest platform in the country — the Oval Office, the White House briefing room, the MAGA rally stage, and literally dozens of TV cameras following him — at his disposal whenever he wants to speak.
What happened on Wednesday at the U.S. Capitol is as wrong as wrong can be. But canceling conservative speech will not promote “unity and healing.” It will only divide us further.
To these 147 Republicans, Democrats considering impeaching Trump is what is causing the division. Not their reality-defying support for a president who wouldn’t call in reinforcements as members of Congress, reporters, and staff huddled behind chairs and desks fearing for their lives; who was reportedly pleased by the chaos, as rioters pushed past police officers and shouted “Hang Mike Pence!”; who took hours and endless pleading from staff to tell his people to stop — and even then, telling them, “We love you. You’re very special.” What we need now, after those Republicans took the time to try to give Trump and those domestic terrorists what they wanted, is unity.
