As the U.S. House of Representatives was voting on the two articles of impeachment it brought against President Donald Trump, the Commander-in-Chief was conducting a rally in Battle Creek Michigan. While on stage, Trump eventually addressed the elephant in the room, saying that it “doesn’t really feel like we’re being impeached.”
“I’m the first person to ever get impeached and there’s no crime. Like, I feel guilty,” Trump said from the stage.
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Shortly afterward, he added “with Richard Nixon, I just see it as a very dark era, very dark… I don’t know about you, but I’m having a good time. It’s crazy.”
The House voted to approve both articles, with opposing sides largely falling along the party lines. Article I passed with 230-197, while Article II passed 229-198. After the votes, which capped off several hours of debates from both sides, the House adjourned until Thursday morning.
Despite social media being set aflame with the news, Trump kept repeating that he was unphased by the ordeal. Now that the House has voted to impeach the president, there will be a trial held in The Senate. It will take 67 votes to remove a sitting president, and given the GOP majority, that seems unlikely at this time.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi first announced that they’d start impeachment proceedings against Trump back in September. The focus was a 2017 phone call between him and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, where Trump allegedly threatened to withhold $400 million worth of military aid unless he received dirt on Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, who serves on the board of a Ukranian energy company.
The issue was raised by an anonymous whistleblower within the intelligence committee, and several weeks of hearings — both public and private — took place, where witnesses began giving their accounts of the incident in question. The two Articles of Impeachment were approved for a final vote this past Friday, which was held this evening, in spite of some unhappy Wheel of Fortune fans.
Despite Trump’s comments to the contrary, the vote in the House tonight means he is only the third president in U.S. history to be impeached. Preceding him are Bill Clinton in 1998, and Andrew Johnson in 1868. While both former presidents were impeached, neither were voted out of office by a Senate majority. Richard Nixon, meanwhile, resigned from office in 1974 before he could be impeached by The House.
