On Wednesday, the House of Representatives is expected to vote on the impeachment of President Donald Trump. Two articles of impeachment charge Trump with abuse of Presidential power and with obstruction of Congress. The vote follows the House Judiciary Committee hearings, which Susan Glasser described as “a fact checker’s nightmare of half-truths and Trumpian talking points.” No important amendments were passed and no minds were changed as the Committee approved the articles on a strictly party-line vote. “There was a lot of shouting,” Glasser observed. “The deliberations, in other words, were anything but deliberative; they were also mostly beside the point, given the foregone conclusion.”
The conventional wisdom is that the articles of impeachment, which require only a simple majority to pass, will be approved in the House, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than thirty seats. Early next year, a trial will be held in the Senate, where Republicans hold a slim majority. Amy Davidson Sorkin recently wrote that the quickness of the impeachment timeline “almost certainly means that impeachment is hurtling toward an acquittal for the President in the Republican-controlled Senate by February, with nine months left before the election.” Last week, Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, told Davidson Sorkin that he doesn’t feel that congressional Democrats have “broken through the ideological sound barrier.” But, on Monday, Fox News released a poll taken during the second week of December showing that fifty-four per cent of Americans approve of Trump’s impeachment and forty-one per cent disapprove. The President promptly tweeted, “They got it all wrong. Get a new pollster!” You can watch the vote on the live stream above.