The Many Complications With Impeachment

Articles of impeachment will be voted on as soon as tomorrow.



Today on Sekulow, we discussed the news that the House of Representatives is planning to impeach President Trump on Wednesday. The primary focus of the article of impeachment is the allegation that President Trump incited an insurrection.



That one count resolution has now been induced in the U.S. House of Representatives. They are saying that the President’s actions incited an insurrection that took place at the Capitol. There’s all kinds of legal debates as to whether that speech itself is protected speech under the 1st Amendment. Alan Dershowitz, a noted 1st Amendment lawyer, said it is constitutionally protected speech. I think you have to put that aside right now, as to what is culpable and what is not culpable, and look at the reality of what is happening.

I think you could argue that speech is protected speech, but that’s not really relevant to this conversation. What’s relevant to this conversation is where things stand. The article of impeachment has been introduced and it looks like the vote will happen tomorrow.



ACLJ Director of Government Affairs Thann Bennett gave an overview of what to expect to tomorrow:

"It’s scheduled to be on the floor of the House tomorrow after they vote on, basically a move to try to push the Vice President to invoke the 25th Amendment tonight. Tomorrow they are going to move to impeachment. The latest that I am hearing is that you would probably expect some procedural votes, a vote on the rule around 10:30am in the morning. Then you would have debate throughout the afternoon and a vote sometime late afternoon, or early evening. There were 160 Democrat co-sponsors when it was introduced, yesterday. The reports now from the lead sponsor Congressman David Cicilline is that is up to 220 or more. So essentially what you have on the Democrat side of the aisle is every member, or very very close to it, by the time this is called up tomorrow, will be a co-sponsor of that resolution."

I also asked Thann to give his best guess of what the partisan breakdown would be. Thann responded:

"There are going to be 220 or more Democrats. There’s 222 Democrats who are sworn into the House right now. There’s still some moving parts on that . . . . I suspect fully by the time it’s called up, every single Democrat member will be on it. At this point there are no Republicans co-sponsoring. It has yet to be seen how many [Republicans] will vote for it. I’ve been asking around today and the most common number I am hearing is between twenty and twenty-five."

If that’s the case then this is not a partisan impeachment like we saw last year. We’ll keep you updated as this situation develops. We’ll know tomorrow where it’s going.



The full broadcast is complete with much more discussion and analysis by our team about what tomorrow is going to look like in the U.S. House of Representatives and other related topics.