House Dem pledges vote to impeach Trump next week

Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) said Thursday that he will force a House floor vote to impeach President Trump next week.

The actual House vote will likely only be a procedural vote, but it will still serve as the first referendum in Congress to impeach Trump. It comes when Trump has spent less than 11 months in office.

“Next week, there will be a vote to impeach,” Green announced in a House floor speech.

“I refuse to stand idly by as a billionaire bigot does irreparable harm to my country. A billionaire bigot who tolerates the KKK, but won’t tolerate Islam. A billionaire bigot who tolerates anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia and homophobia,” he said.

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Green plans to force a vote on a “privileged” resolution that lays out his case for impeaching Trump. Under House rules, privileged resolutions must receive floor action within two legislative days.

The impeachment effort is sure to fail given opposition from the House GOP majority, as well as most Democrats, who think it’s premature to push impeachment at this point.

It’s unclear how Republicans would move to dismiss Green’s resolution, but the formal vote may specifically move to table it, send it to committee or move directly on its contents.

Green is among a handful of Democrats who have been agitating for Trump’s impeachment for months.

He unveiled his articles of impeachment in October, which state that Trump is “fueling an alt-right hate machine” that’s “causing immediate injury to American society.”

The articles of impeachment cite as examples Trump’s equivocating response to the violence stemming from a white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Va., over the summer and attacks on NFL players kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality.

Green declined to force a vote at the time he originally introduced the articles, citing a desire to let the public and fellow lawmakers review them. But he later pledged to force a vote on impeachment by Christmas.

Green’s plans to force a vote on impeachment comes after Trump retweeted anti-Muslim videos from a fringe British nationalist group on Wednesday. Trump’s retweets drew backlash from British leaders, including Prime Minister Theresa May.

A handful of other Democrats have also unveiled articles of impeachment, but haven’t gone as far as promising to force their colleagues vote on them.

Six House Democrats introduced articles of impeachment earlier this month, with Reps. Steve Cohen (Tenn.), Luis Gutiérrez (Ill.), Marcia Fudge (Ohio), John Yarmuth (Ky.), Adriano Espaillat (N.Y.) and Green as its sponsors. 

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) also filed an article of impeachment in July arguing that Trump obstructed justice by firing James Comey as FBI director amid the agency’s investigation of whether the president’s 2016 campaign colluded with the Russian government.