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Judiciary Committee Restarts Marathon Debate, Before Voting on Impeachment

VOA News

   The U.S. House Judiciary Committee reconvenes Friday morning to vote on
   articles of impeachment against U.S. President Donald Trump. The
   committee recessed late Thursday after 14 hours of debate.

   The Democratic-controlled committee rebuffed Republican attempts
   Thursday to weaken or throw out the allegations and instead will vote
   on sending them to the full House of Representatives for a vote, likely
   to be held next week.
   Democratic lawmakers, after hours of at-times rancorous partisan claims
   and counterclaims with Republicans, rejected the Republican effort to
   eliminate the impeachment allegation that Trump abused the presidency
   by pushing Ukraine to investigate one of his chief 2020 Democratic
   election rivals, former Vice President Joe Biden.
   WATCH LIVE: Vote on Articles of Impeachment

   The committee is also expected to approve a second article of
   impeachment, that Trump obstructed Congress by refusing to turn over
   hundreds of documents to impeachment investigators and blocked key
   Trump administration officials from testifying. The unified Democratic
   majority has the votes to block Republican efforts aimed at slowing the
   push to impeach Trump.
   Flawed case?
   Republicans contended that the case against Trump is flawed, that the
   committee was rushing to judgment without hearing more witnesses. They
   noted that Trump in September released the $391 million in military aid
   to Ukraine that Trump had temporarily blocked without Ukrainian
   President Volodymyr Zelenskiy launching the politically tinged Biden
   investigation that the U.S. leader wanted.
   Trump asked Zelenskiy in a late July phone call to "do us a favor" by
   opening the investigation of Biden, his son Hunter Biden's work for a
   Ukrainian natural gas company and a debunked theory that Ukraine worked
   to undermine Trump's 2016 election campaign.
   Republican Congressman Jim Jordan, a staunch Trump ally, contended that
   the "us" in Trump's request was a reference to the United States, not
   to a Trump request to benefit himself politically.
   But Democratic Congressman David Cicilline, supporting Trump's
   impeachment, said that Trump in his call with Zelenskiy "never once
   uttered the word corruption" to investigate corruption generally in
   Ukraine. "It was about a smear on Vice President Biden," Cicilline
   argued.
   If the full House, as expected, votes to impeach Trump, he would become
   only the third American leader to be impeached in the country's
   243-year history, setting the stage for a trial in the
   Republican-majority Senate in January, where his conviction and removal
   from office remains unlikely.

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