House speaker Nancy Pelosi told a meeting of congressional Democrats on Tuesday morning that she would call a vote on Wednesday to refer articles of impeachment approved by the House last month to the Senate, according to multiple reports.
The move means that the opening stages of a Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump could be under way later this week. A two-thirds majority of senators would be required to remove Trump from office, which was not seen as likely.
Judiciary committee chair Jerry Nadler told reporters after the meeting that Republicans in the Senate must now conduct a “fair” trial.
“The question is, do the Republicans all want to vote to insult the American people?” Nadler said, “to insult the intelligence of anybody watching, and to say ‘We’re going to have a cover up and not a fair trial’?”
Pelosi had delayed relaying the articles of impeachment to the Senate, calling on majority leader Mitch McConnell to clarify the rules of the trial before she designated prosecutors in the case.
Under Senate rules, articles of impeachment against a president are prosecuted at trial by designees known as House managers. Pelosi stopped short of naming managers on Tuesday.
Hakeem Jeffries, the chairman of the Democratic caucus, said Pelosi would release the names of the managers at some point before the vote tomorrow. He called the pressure campaign on Ukraine at the heart of the impeachment a “geopolitical shakedown scheme.”
The president has the option of appearing in his own defense but was expected to send a legal team headed by White House counsel Pat Cipollone.
“We need to see the arena in which we are sending our managers,” Pelosi had said in a news conference on Thursday, explaining the delay. “Is that too much to ask?”
But under growing pressure from fellow Democrats to move the impeachment process ahead, Pelosi took the decision to refer the articles without McConnell’s supplying a substantive description of the rules in question.
Trump was impeached on two articles, for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, on 18 December. He denies any wrongdoing.
