Liz Cheney is the daughter of the former vice-president
Credit: AP
Mr McConnell believes the president has committed impeachable offences and that an impeached Mr Trump will be easier to sideline in the party, according to the paper. CNN reported similar shortly afterwards.
The report has not been denied by Mr McConnell’s office. Mr McConnell is yet to speak up against impeachment — a marked difference from his stance during Mr Trump’s first impeachment.
His reported position not just underscores the vast rift between the two most powerful men in the Republican Party but also indicates the political peril Mr Trump now faces.
If Mr McConnell supports impeachment then it remains possible that the minimum 17 Republican senators needed to convict Mr Trump in a Senate trial could be found.
Even if that trial happens after Mr Trump has left office at the January 20 inauguration he could still be barred from ever seeking the presidency again — a possible boon for moderate Republicans seeking to reclaim their party.
Impeachment is the process by which Congress can remove a sitting president if that person is deemed to have committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanours”, to quote the US Constitution.
Mr Trump has already been impeached once, in December 2019. But the Democrats launched a push to make him the only president ever impeached twice due to the storming of the US Capitol by pro-Trump extremists, leaving five dead.
On Wednesday, the House is set to vote on a single article of impeachment which accuses Mr Trump of “inciting violence against the government of the United States”.
The vote is all but guaranteed to pass given the overwhelming support among Democrats, who control the House. But on Tuesday night a flurry of Republicans said they too would vote to impeach.
John Katko, the Republican congressmen for New York, was the first to go public.
“To allow the president of the United States to incite this attack without consequence is a direct threat to the future of our democracy,” Mr Katko said in a statement.
“For that reason, I cannot sit by without taking action. I will vote to impeach this president.” Then came Ms Cheney. She is part of the Republican Party’s leadership team in the House, making her rebellion all the more striking.
“The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” Ms Cheney said in an excoriating statement about Mr Trump, a president from her own political party.
“Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the president. The president could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not.”
Ms Cheney has long clashed with Mr Trump, being one of the few Republicans in Congress from the party’s traditionalist wing to consistently break with the president.
Indeed in his speech on Wednesday morning to his tens of thousands of supporters Mr Trump singled out Ms Cheney as someone he wanted primaried, which means to challenge their party nomination when they seek re-election.
Ms Cheney’s public support for impeachment could convince other Republicans to join. The Republican leadership in the House is reportedly not whipping its members to vote against the move to impeach Mr Trump.
Adam Kinzinger, the congressmen from Illinois, became the third Republican House member to publicly pledge to vote for impeachment just a few minutes after Ms Cheney.
“There is no doubt in my mind that the president of the United States broke his oath of office and incited this insurrection. He used his position in the Executive to attack the Legislative,” he said.
Not a single Republican House member voted for Mr Trump’s first impeachment, which was passed in December 2019. He was acquitted by the Senate in a trial in February 2020.
The timing of any Senate trial — the second stage in the impeachment process — remains unclear.
It is unlikely to happen before the inauguration of Joe Biden as the next president on January 20, at which point Mr Trump will leave office.
However the trial can still happen after Mr Trump is out of the White House, with a ban on holding public office a possibility if he is convicted.
Read more: Impeachment timeline – what could happen next?
Свежие комментарии