Voters see slightly more partisanship among Republicans than Democrats in Congress when it comes to President Trump’s ongoing impeachment, according to a Hill-HarrisX poll released on Friday.
Fifty-eight percent of voters said that GOP lawmakers have “behaved in a partisan manner” in considering the impeachment allegations against Trump, compared to 54 percent of those who thought Democratic lawmakers were being unfair.
Another 42 percent of those surveyed thought congressional Republicans fairly considered the allegations against Trump, while 46 percent of voters said the same of Democrats.
The survey comes as Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) prepares to send the articles of impeachment against Trump over to the Senate next week.
“I have asked Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler [D-N.Y.] to be prepared to bring to the Floor next week a resolution to appoint managers and transmit articles of impeachment to the Senate,” Pelosi wrote in a letter to Democrats on Friday.
The move broke a weeks-long standoff between Democratic and Republican leaders over the conditions of Trump’s impending impeachment trial.
The Democratic-led House voted to impeach Trump on two counts last month. The first article alleged that Trump abused his power while pressuring Ukraine to open investigations into his political rivals, while the other claimed that Trump had obstructed their investigations into those dealings.
Shortly after that historic vote, Pelosi announced that she would withhold the articles until she was sure Trump would receive a fair trial, a condition she said included the ability for senators to call in witnesses.
But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) did not change his position on the terms of Trump’s impeachment, saying that any decisions on witnesses should come after the Senate trial begins. He maintained that this was the same standard for former President Clinton’s impeachment trial in 1999.
HarrisX researchers surveyed 1,001 registered voters across the country between Jan. 3 and 4. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
—Tess Bonn
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