House Democrats are planing to introduce an article of impeachment possibly as early as Monday alleging that President Donald Trump should be removed from office days after a violent ‘pro-Trump’ mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in a deadly riot.
The California Democrat, who helped draft the charges, said the articles had drawn 180 co-sponsors as of Saturday afternoon. A spokeswoman for Lieu said no Republicans have yet signed on.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the top congressional Democrat, has threatened to impeach Trump for a historic second time unless he resigned “immediately.”
Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the No. 4 Democrat, said that if Vice President Mike Pence would not invoke the 25th Amendment to forcibly remove President Trump of his duties, House Democrats were prepared to act on impeachment by sometime next week. But in a noon phone call, there’s warned that Democrats needed to pause to consider the implications. Nancy Pelosi told her colleagues she planned to speak to Joseph Biden about the matter sometime later on Friday.
Biden said that even though Trump exceeded his worst expectations, he is now aiming on “getting into office,” not on impeaching Trump.
“If we were six months out, we should be doing everything we can to get him out of office,” but not two weeks before a new administration takes over, he stated to reporters in Delaware.
The odds that Trump will actually be removed before Jan. 20, when Joe Biden is sworn in, remain long.
Twitter permanently cut off Trump’s personal account and access to his nearly 90 million followers late on Friday.
Trump has said he will not be at Biden’s inauguration, but Pence will attend, a senior administration official stated on Saturday.
Sources: NBC News, Politico, and Washington Post; Photo: politicususa.com
