WASHINGTON — The decision to impeach President Donald Trump, which has loomed over the 116th Congress since it was sworn in last January, will be made Wednesday.
The outcome of the historic vote has been expected for weeks: The Democrat-controlled House will impeach the 45th president on a largely party-line vote, forcing a trial in the Senate, where a Republican majority is expected to acquit the president.
Utah’s lone Democrat in Congress said this week he will vote to impeach. Yet Ben McAdams’ momentous decision hasn’t always been clear, or predictable. Since before he took office, McAdams has consistently said that impeachment should be a bipartisan endeavor since it is designed to be Congress’ ultimate check on presidential power.
But within days of his swearing-in, it appeared that neither side of the aisle was interested in working together on much of anything, let alone whether the president should be impeached. And McAdams’ penchant for finding consensus solutions left him increasingly isolated as it became clear he would need to decide whether to vote to impeach Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
“This is not a decision I came to lightly, and it is not one I take any joy in, but I feel it is the only way to uphold the oath I took when I arrived to Congress,” he said in an email to campaign supporters and volunteers Tuesday explaining why he will vote to impeach.
The green Y next to his name on the voting results that will be projected on the wall above the press gallery of the House chamber will stand in contrast to the red N’s next to the names of Utah’s three Republican House members. But he’ll be in the majority of a House that is expected to impeach Trump.
The House vote will be just the third time Congress will have impeached a sitting U.S. president. President Andrew Johnson was impeached in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. Both were acquitted by the Senate, which has never removed a president from office. President Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 before the House could vote on articles of impeachment.
Impeachment eve
The partisan fighting continued Tuesday on the eve of the impeachment vote, with Trump saying more due process was afforded in the “Salem Witch Trials,” in a six-page letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“You are the ones bringing pain and suffering to our Republic for your own selfish, personal political and partisan gain,” Trump wrote, accusing Democrats of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
And House members took jabs at each other during a House Rules Committee hearing, where members argued into the evening the parameters of Wednesday’s floor debate.
Chairman Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said “every day we let President Trump act like the law doesn’t apply to him, we move a little closer” to rule by dictators, according to the Associated Press.
Ranking Republican Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma said Americans divided over impeachment should be reason enough not to proceed with the rare action. “When half of Americans are telling you what you are doing is wrong, you should listen,” he said.
Trump faces two articles of impeachment brought by Democrats. One charges him with abuse of power by pressuring Ukraine to investigate Democrats, including potential 2020 presidential rival Joe Biden. The other says he obstructed Congress by ordering his administration to defy subpoenas and requests for documents by the House investigators.
The president “betrayed the nation by abusing his high office to enlist a foreign power in corrupting democratic elections,” says the 658-page report from the House Judiciary Committee accompanying the charges. Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine as leverage for an announcement of the investigations he sought, the report states, and that “demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office.”
Where Reps. Rob Bishop, Chris Stewart and John Curtis stood on impeachment has never been in question, as they have consistently blasted the process as unfair and unjustified.
In the Senate, Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee, who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 but is now co-chairman of Trump’s reelection campaign in Utah, has been meeting with White House counsel putting together the president’s anticipated defense. But he has declined comment on the House impeachment hearings.
Less certain is Sen. Mitt Romney, a prominent Republican critic of Trump. He has declined to talk about the charges against the president, citing his role as a “juror” in a potential Senate trial.
Agonizing decision
While McAdams reserved judgment until this week, many of his more liberal colleagues in the House have clamored for impeachment since Trump took office.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi resisted, once saying Trump was “just not worth it,” considering political fallout over the divisive nature of the process. Her stance provided political cover for the more moderate members of her caucus, like McAdams, who were key to Democrats wresting control of the House from Republicans in last year’s midterm elections.
But that changed in September, when she announced an official impeachment inquiry centered on a whistleblower complaint over a phone conversation between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in which Trump asked his counterpart for “a favor” — the investigations that became key to the abuse of power charges.
McAdams dodged questions about whether he supported the inquiry, until an awkward town hall meeting in early October where he said Trump’s refusal to cooperate with House investigators tipped the scales and the freshman Democrat became among the last to publicly support the impeachment inquiry.
His concern about uttering the term “impeachment” became instantly clear, when a voter in the scrum of journalists crowded around him and shouted that meant he supports impeachment.
But McAdams didn’t. Even after he voted in support of the inquiry going public with televised hearings that would lead to drafting of articles of impeachment, he worked with other moderates to successfully convince their leaders to keep the charges limited to the Ukraine affair, but were unsuccessful in urging the party to censure, rather than impeach, Trump.
“I hoped to find bipartisan common ground to censure the president instead of putting the country through a divisive and lengthy Senate impeachment trial with a predetermined outcome of dismissal,” he said in a statement on his decision. “Bipartisan action better protects our country from future election meddling and presidential wrongdoing than a party line impeachment followed by a partisan trial outcome in the Senate.”
But that wasn’t an option any more. He told reporters gathered in the Murray City Hall chambers that his duty wasn’t to his party but to “the Constitution and our country” and that he couldn’t condone the actions of “this president and future presidents, Republican or Democrat, to do the same.”
Future fallout
McAdams hasn’t masked his irritation that his impeachment vote will be overturned by the Senate in what he predicts will be a partisan show trial. He said voters will make the ultimate decision next year on whether Trump stays in office.
An election was the process McAdams and other moderate Democrats who represent pro-Trump districts had preferred. Even before impeachment became a reality, they were already targeted by conservative PACs and the Republican Party eager to take back those 31 seats that delivered the House to Democrats a year ago.
Now those fundraising organizations are leveraging the impeachment vote a month ago with television and digital ads in those vulnerable pro-Trump districts, like Utah’s 4th Congressional District that McAdams won by just 700 votes.
“As President Trump continues to fight for the people of Utah, focusing on quality healthcare reforms and growing our economy, it’s a shame that McAdams is taking his orders from Nancy Pelosi and wasting taxpayer time and resources,” said White House deputy press secretary Steven Groves, in a statement Tuesday.
McAdams has said his main defense against an aggressive campaign to make him a one-term congressman will be emphasizing most of his time has been spent working on issues he said voters sent him to Washington to address, such as accessible health care and reigning in government spending.
On Tuesday, he sent out a statement saying that he “led the fight” that killed congressional pay raises last spring supported by Democratic leadership. The raises would have been in a $1.4 trillion spending plan that he also voted against Tuesday, but which passed and will prevent a government shutdown before the holidays.
Correction: An earlier version stated Rep. Ben McAdams sent an email to his staff about his vote to impeach the president. The email was addressed to “Staff,” but was sent to campaign supporters and volunteers. It also stated McAdams helped kill a congressional pay raise that was in a $1.4 trillion spending plan that passed the House Tuesday. The pay raises were killed last spring.