Dec. 13 (UPI) — The House judiciary committee voted along party lines Friday to approve two articles of impeachment, charging President Donald Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
In an expected outcome, the Democratic-held committee voted 23-17 to approve each of the two counts. The vote shifts the impeachment articles to the full House for a vote next week.
The charges were contained in a nine-page resolution charging Trump with two offenses stemming from Trump’s pressing the Ukraine government to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, a former board member at Ukrainian gas company Burisma.
The first says the president leveraged a White House meeting for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to pressure Kiev into launching the investigations.
The second says Trump stonewalled Congress by ordering witnesses in his administration to defy subpoenas for documents and testimony as a part of the inquiry.
The White House condemned the vote Friday as “shameful.”
“This desperate charade of an impeachment inquiry in the House judiciary committee has reached its shameful end,” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement. “The president looks forward to receiving in the Senate the fair treatment and due process which continues to be disgracefully denied to him by the House.”
The judiciary committee reconvened Friday morning after a marathon 14-hour session Thursday, which ended with Democrats postponing the vote. Committee chairman Jerold Nadler called a halt to the proceedings over the objections of minority Republicans after 11 p.m.
The move to adjourn brought outcries from Republicans, with ranking minority member Rep. Doug Collins saying he was not consulted and calling the committee session “a kangaroo court.”
“The chairman’s integrity is gone,” he told reporters after the recess, saying Nadler’s committee is “more concerned with being on TV in the morning than it was in finishing its job tonight and letting the members go home.”
Democrats contended the recess was justified, saying it was important the actual impeachment vote be done “in the light of day” after so many hours of debate and voting down Republican efforts to dismiss the charges.
“We weren’t sure if [Republicans] had more amendments, they wouldn’t tell us that,” said Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-Pa. “And what the chairman’s spirit was: We want to make sure we do this in the light of day. We don’t want to vote on such an important article, or articles, that matter to the American people [and] to this president, in the late of night.”
The committee voted Thursday against four Republican amendments, all on 23-17 party-line votes, including efforts to strike each of the two articles of impeachment, for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
