The Trump Impeachment Vote: Live Updates

The House on Tuesday night formally called on Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and strip President Trump of his powers. But Mr. Pence rejected that idea before debate on the vote even began, all but guaranteeing that the House would move forward with impeachment on Wednesday.

The House will convene to debate articles of impeachment that accuse the president of “inciting an insurrection” that led to his loyalists storming the Capitol a week ago. The vote after the debate is expected to pass, with a small but significant number of Republicans joining Democrats to impeach Mr. Trump for the second time, which would make him the first president to be impeached twice.

At least five Republicans have said that they would vote to impeach the president after he incited the mob that ransacked the Capitol last week. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, has embraced the effort, according to people who have spoken to him.

The most blistering condemnation came from Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, who said there had “never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States.” Her announcement is likely to give cover to two dozen or so other House Republicans looking to break ranks and join the effort to remove Mr. Trump from office.

Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the top Republican in the House, has said he is personally opposed to impeachment but will not formally lobby members of the party against the effort, making an implicit break with Mr. Trump. Not a single House Republican voted in favor of impeachment during the 2019 proceedings.

Taken together, the stances of two top congressional Republicans — neither of whom has said publicly that Mr. Trump should resign or be impeached — reflected the politically challenging and fast-moving nature of the crisis that the party faces after the president incited a violent mob that ransacked the seat of American government and killed a Capitol Police officer.

Yet as Republican lawmakers tried to balance the affection their core voters have for Mr. Trump with the now undeniable political and constitutional threat he poses, Republican congressional leaders who have loyally backed the president for four years were still stepping delicately. Their refusal to demand his resignation and quiet plotting about how to address his conduct highlighted the gnawing uncertainty that they and many other Republicans have about whether they would pay more of a political price for abandoning him or for continuing to enable him.

Making their task more difficult, Mr. Trump has shown no trace of contrition, telling reporters on Tuesday that his remarks to supporters had been “totally appropriate,” and that it was the specter of his impeachment that was “causing tremendous anger.”

Once a majority of House lawmakers vote to impeach the president, they will then determine if and when to send the charges to the Senate, making the timing of the trial less certain.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, called on Mr. McConnell, his Republican counterpart, to use emergency powers to call the Senate back for a trial as soon as the articles were adopted. If that does not happen, a trial would begin no sooner than Jan. 19, when the Senate is scheduled to return. The next day, alongside Mr. Biden’s inauguration, Democrats will take operational control of the Senate.

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House Calls on Pence to Remove Trump From Power

The House of Representatives voted, 223 to 205, on Tuesday night to call on Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to strip President Trump of his powers for inciting a mob to attack the Capitol.

“I think every member in this body should be able to agree that this president is not meeting the most minimal duties of office. He is not meeting the oath that he swore to uphold and defend the Constitution. We are simply asking Vice President Pence to exercise his powers under the 25th Amendment of the Constitution, Section 4, to convene the cabinet and to mobilize the cabinet to state and articulate what is obvious to the American people: This president is not meeting the duties of office and is clearly not capable of it.” “The 25th Amendment specifically addresses the incapacity of the president to discharge the duties of his office. It was never intended as a political weapon when Congress doesn’t like the way he discharges those duties. Now, I’ve read that speech. He never suggested rampaging the Capitol and disrupting the Congress.” “The facts are very clear. The president called for this seditious attack. Wednesday morning, he participated in a rally to encourage the rioters to march on the Capitol and fight. The president’s actions demonstrate his absolute inability to discharge the most basic and fundamental powers and duties of his office. Therefore, the president must be removed from office immediately.” “The adoption of this political resolution would be divisive rather than unifying. The vice president has said he has no intention of taking action under the amendment, so this process is pure political theater on the part of the majority.” “On this vote, the yeas are 223; the nays are 205. The resolution is adopted. Without objection, the motion to reconsider is laid on the table.”

The House voted Tuesday night to formally call on Vice President Mike Pence to use the 25th Amendment to strip President Trump of his powers after he incited a mob that attacked the Capitol, as lawmakers warned they would impeach the president on Wednesday if Mr. Pence did not comply.

Lawmakers, escorted by armed guards into a heavily fortified Capitol, adopted the nonbinding measure just before midnight largely along party lines. The final vote was 223 to 205 to implore Mr. Pence to declare Mr. Trump “incapable of executing the duties of his office and to immediately exercise powers as acting president.”

“We’re trying to tell him that the time of a 25th Amendment emergency has arrived,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and the author of the resolution, said before the vote. “It has come to our doorstep. It has invaded our chamber.”

Only one Republican, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, voted in favor of the resolution.

The House proceeded after Mr. Pence sent a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday. “I do not believe that such a course of action is in the best interest of our nation or consistent with our Constitution,” he wrote. “I will not now yield to efforts in the House of Representatives to play political games at a time so serious in the life of our nation.”

Almost all Republicans lined up in opposition. They did little to defend Mr. Trump’s behavior but argued that Congress had no role telling the vice president what to do.

“The vice president has given you your answer, before you asked the question,” said Representative Dan Bishop, Republican of North Carolina. “Your ultimatum does violence to a core feature of the architecture of the Constitution.”

Democrats planned to reconvene on Wednesday to vote on a single article of impeachment charging Mr. Trump with “inciting violence against the government of the United States.” The rioters last week ransacked the seat of American government and killed a Capitol Police officer.

Every single Democrat was expected to vote to impeach, and Republicans were bracing for as many as two dozen of their members to follow suit.

Breaking with Mr. Trump, Republicans were not formally pressuring lawmakers to oppose either vote. Their leaders were treading carefully, navigating an extremely complex and fast-moving political environment that threatened the cohesion of the party and that could inflict lasting damage on the country.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, had told associates that he was fine with the House moving forward with impeachment and that Mr. Trump had committed impeachable offenses, according to people familiar with his thinking.

Mr. Trump met with Mr. Pence on Monday for the first time since their falling out last week over the president’s effort to overturn the election and the mob assault, which had put the vice president in danger. The two spoke for an hour or more in the Oval Office in what amounted to a tense peace summit meeting with the remainder of the Trump presidency at stake.

The impeachment drive came as President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. signaled more clearly that he would not stand in the way of the impeachment proceeding, telling reporters in Newark, Del., that his primary focus was trying to minimize the effect that an all-consuming trial in the Senate might have on his first days in office.

He said he had consulted with lawmakers about the possibility that they could “bifurcate” the proceedings in the Senate, so that half of each day would be spent on the trial and half on the confirmation of his cabinet and other nominees.

As the House prepared to move forward on Wednesday with a vote to formally charge President Trump with inciting violence against the government of the United States, a small but growing number of Republicans said they supported the effort.

The vote is set to come exactly one week after the Capitol was breached by an angry mob of Trump loyalists.

In 2019, not a single Republican voted in favor of impeachment. House Republican leaders have said they would not formally lobby members of the party against voting to impeach the president this time, and some members said they intended to support the effort.

Representative John Katko of New York was the first Republican to publicly announce that he would back the impeachment proceedings. Not holding the president accountable for his actions would be “a direct threat to the future of our democracy,” he said.

Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, said on Tuesday evening that she would vote to impeach, citing the president’s role in an insurrection that caused “death and destruction in the most sacred space in our Republic.”

Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a frequent critic of Mr. Trump, joined his Republican colleagues on Tuesday evening, saying the nation was in uncharted waters. He said that Mr. Trump “encouraged an angry mob to storm the United States Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes.”

Representative Fred Upton of Michigan issued a statement saying that he would vote to impeach after Mr. Trump “expressed no regrets” for what had happened at the Capitol.

Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler of Illinois issued a statement saying, “The president’s offenses, in my reading of the Constitution, were impeachable based on the indisputable evidence we already have.”

Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday named nine Democrats as managers of the impeachment trial of President Trump on charges of inciting a violent mob of his supporters to storm the Capitol, where rioters ransacked the seat of American government and killed a Capitol Police officer.

The nine managers, all lawyers, have expertise in constitutional law, civil rights and law enforcement. They will serve as the new faces of the impeachment drive after Americans last year grew accustomed to seeing Representatives Adam Schiff, Democrat of California and the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, and Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, as the leaders of Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial.

The managers come from across the country and represent different ideological wings of the party. Of the nine, seven are people of color, L.G.B.T.Q. or women.

With Democrats controlling the House, Mr. Trump is likely to become the first American president to be impeached twice.

“It is their constitutional and patriotic duty to present the case for the president’s impeachment and removal,” Ms. Pelosi said of the impeachment managers. “They will do so guided by their great love of country, determination to protect our democracy and loyalty to our oath to the Constitution.”

Ms. Pelosi named Representative Jamie Raskin, a constitutional lawyer from Maryland who drafted the impeachment article, as the lead manager of Mr. Trump’s trial. Mr. Raskin, who lost his 25-year-old son to suicide on New Year’s Eve and then survived the mob attack, is a professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law.

“I’m honored to be on a team with extremely distinguished lawyers and representatives,” Mr. Raskin said. “We have a tremendous responsibility on our shoulders right now.”

The other impeachment managers are: Representatives Diana DeGette of Colorado, a lawyer with a civil rights background; David Cicilline of Rhode Island, a former public defender; Joaquin Castro of Texas, a lawyer; Eric Swalwell of California, a former prosecutor; Ted Lieu of California, a former Air Force officer and prosecutor; Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands, a former prosecutor; Joe Neguse of Colorado, a lawyer; and Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania, also a lawyer.

Most Democrats are expected to support the impeachment of Mr. Trump after he spent weeks spreading baseless falsehoods about widespread election fraud and then held a large rally where he encouraged a mob to march on the Capitol as he sought to pressure lawmakers to overturn the results of a democratic election. Four Republicans have announced that they, too, will vote to impeach the president.

Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, said on Tuesday that she would vote to impeach Mr. Trump, adding that there had “never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States” than Mr. Trump’s incitement of the mob.

“Good for her for honoring her oath of office,” Ms. Pelosi said of Ms. Cheney, before adding that she wished “more Republicans would honor their oaths of office.”

YouTube said on Tuesday that it had suspended President Trump’s channel over concern about “ongoing potential for violence,” in the latest move by one of the large tech companies to limit the president online.

In a tweet on YouTube’s official account, the Google-owned video site said it had suspended Mr. Trump’s account after one of his recent videos violated its policy banning content that spreads misinformation about widespread election fraud. YouTube said Mr. Trump would not be able to upload new content for at least seven days to his channel, which had about 2.8 million subscribers. YouTube also said it was indefinitely disabling comments on the video in question.

It was not immediately clear which video resulted in the suspension of the president’s account.

Many tech companies have moved to curtail Mr. Trump online since he urged on a violent mob of his supporters, who stormed the Capitol last week. In the aftermath, Facebook suspended the president from its core social network as well as on Instagram, at least until the end of his term. Twitter followed suit by permanently barring Mr. Trump’s account on its service, depriving him of his favorite social media platform, where he had 88 million followers. Other sites such as Snapchat, Reddit and Twitch also curtailed Mr. Trump.

President Trump has demanded since summer that the Census Bureau produce a state-by-state tally of immigrants who are in the country illegally, numbers long sought by Republicans who want to base political maps on population figures that do not include undocumented immigrants. On Tuesday, a federal inspector general questioned an order to deliver the estimates before Mr. Trump leaves office, after whistle-blowers warned that the rush would imperil their accuracy.

The Commerce Department inspector general, Peggy E. Gustafson, said in a letter that two White House political appointees were the “driving forces” behind the order, which required census experts to deliver counts of unauthorized immigrants by Friday, five days before Inauguration Day.

Her letter states that the Census Bureau director appointed by Mr. Trump, Steven Dillingham, had designated the estimates a top priority for the bureau’s data experts, even though completion of the 2020 census itself has fallen months behind schedule because of the coronavirus pandemic. The letter said Mr. Dillingham had discussed offering cash bonuses for producing the estimates quickly.

Mr. Dillingham backed off his order this week, according to bureau employees who refused to be named for fear of retaliation. Some of them said career employees planned to refuse to deliver substandard estimates, which would have led to an unprecedented standoff between the agency’s political leaders and its traditionally nonpartisan staff.

“It was just ‘Give us what you’ve got,’” one bureau employee said, adding that the estimates “were just not ready for prime time.”

The Census Bureau has been stewing in controversy, largely over the question of counting unauthorized immigrants, virtually since Mr. Trump took office. A battle over the Trump administration’s order to ask census respondents whether they were American citizens went to the Supreme Court before the justices barred the question in 2019, saying officials’ justification for the question was “contrived.”

The administration offered a new rationale in July, saying it wanted a count of unauthorized noncitizens so states could deduct them from overall 2020 census results, which count everyone living in the country regardless of citizenship. Doing so would produce a more rural, Republican-leaning population base when political maps are redrawn later this year based on new census figures.

Republican legislators in some states, including Texas and Missouri, are pressing for citizen-only population counts for redistricting. All states currently draw maps using total population counts, or something very close to them, and the legality of relying on citizen-only population totals is unclear.

The first television advertisements of the 2022 campaign cycle are on the air in Wisconsin.

The Democratic Party of Wisconsin on Wednesday morning began a week’s worth of ads pounding Senator Ron Johnson for his role in fomenting doubts about President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the presidential election and tying the senator to last week’s riots at the Capitol.

With gruesome images of a Capitol Police officer being crushed by Trump supporters, the ad’s narrator cites an editorial published last week in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that called Mr. Johnson “a leading member of the Senate’s Sedition Caucus” and demanded his resignation.

The state party is spending more than $100,000 to put the Johnson ad on the air in five Wisconsin TV markets and Washington, D.C., beginning Wednesday morning, and plans to keep it on television through Mr. Biden’s inauguration next week, according to Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic chairman.

Mr. Johnson has not confirmed that he will seek a third term in 2022. He initially said he would retire after two terms, but in the final days before the Nov. 3 election told The Times that “things have changed.”

“Ron Johnson shouldn’t wait 21 months to lose an election, he should resign now,” Mr. Wikler said. “Wisconsinites should never forget the image of marauding violent mob smashing its way into the United States Capitol to overturn the results of the election. That moment will be a stain on Ron Johnson’s career for the rest of his life.”

At least three Wisconsin Democrats are actively planning to run against Mr. Johnson in a 2022 primary. Thomas Nelson, the Outagamie County executive, launched his campaign in October; Sarah Godlewski, the state treasurer, and Alex Lasry, the Milwaukee Bucks executive who led the team that won the bid for the Democratic National Convention, are also putting together campaign infrastructures but have not yet announced their bids.

Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes has said he is considering running for the Senate but is more likely to seek a second term on the ticket with Gov. Tony Evers.

National Guard troops who are flooding into Washington to secure the Capitol for Inauguration Day will be armed, the Army secretary, Ryan McCarthy, has decided, Defense Department officials said Tuesday.

The armed troops will be responsible for security around the Capitol building complex, the officials said.

As up to 15,000 troops continued to arrive in Washington from all over the country, Defense Department officials had been weighing whether to deploy them with arms. Mr. McCarthy has decided that at the very least those around the Capitol building will carry weapons, said the officials, who confirmed the decision on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. McCarthy’s decision came after a meeting with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California. Ms. Pelosi, according to congressional staff members, demanded that the Pentagon take a more muscular posture after a mob, egged on by President Trump last week, breached the Capitol.

Pentagon officials say they are deeply worried about protests that are planned for the inauguration of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. next week. About 16 groups — some of them saying they will be armed and most of them made up of hard-line supporters of Mr. Trump — have registered to stage protests in Washington, officials said.

Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington sent a letter to Mr. Trump on Sunday asking for an emergency declaration to obtain additional funding for inauguration security.

“In light of the attack on the Capitol and intelligence suggesting further violence is likely during the inaugural period, my administration has re-evaluated our preparedness posture for the inauguration, including requesting the extension of D.C. National Guard support through Jan. 24, 2021,” Ms. Bowser wrote.

Defense Department officials said that the White House had signed off on the decision to arm some of the National Guard troops coming to Washington to provide security. Pentagon officials have underscored that the National Guard — not active-duty military troops — will be assigned to those duties.

As the Senate majority leader on Sept. 11, 2001, Tom Daschle was among those hurriedly evacuated in the chaos of an expected attack on the Capitol, only to return later that evening for a bipartisan show of unity and resolve on the marble steps many had used to flee just hours earlier.

“We all joined together after 9/11 and professed ourselves to be Americans, not just Republicans and Democrats, as we sang ‘God Bless America’ on those same Capitol steps and returned to business the next morning,” Mr. Daschle, the former Democratic senator from South Dakota, recalled this week.

But like many Democrats, Mr. Daschle is not in a unifying mood in the wake of the assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob last week, and Jan. 6 is not proving to be a Sept. 11 moment.

This time, the menace to Congress was not from 19 shadowy hijackers from overseas but from within — fellow Americans and colleagues taking their usual places in the House and Senate chambers to try to overturn President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory and stoke President Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, which inspired the violent rioting that chased lawmakers from the House and the Senate.

“On 9/11 we were united as Americans against a common enemy, a foreign enemy, foreign terrorists,” said Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who was on Capitol Hill for both shattering events. “On Jan. 6, America was divided against itself.”

Outraged at the conduct of Republicans who perpetuated Mr. Trump’s bogus allegations of widespread voting fraud, Democrats are determined to impeach the president a second time, to try to expel and censure members who sought to overturn the presidential election even after the mob assault on the Capitol, and to ostracize Republicans who do not acknowledge and apologize for their role.

The 2001 terrorist attacks on Washington and New York — and the recognition that a horrific assault on the Capitol was prevented only by courageous passengers who brought down Flight 93 in Pennsylvania — led to an extraordinary period of congressional comity and cooperation.

Both parties immediately pulled together in a show of strength despite lingering Democratic resentment over the Supreme Court decision that had given the presidency to George W. Bush just months earlier. Democrats and Republicans set aside their very real differences — including concern among some Democrats that the new administration had failed to heed warnings about the attack — to present an impenetrable front to the country and the world.

“This Congress is united — Democrats, independents, Republicans,” Representative Richard Gephardt of Missouri, the Democratic leader, declared during somber but angry proceedings on Sept. 12, 2001, as Congress passed a resolution condemning the attacks and promising national unity in the face of such threats. “There is no light or air between us. We stand shoulder to shoulder.”

Today, there is outright hostility among members of Congress, emotions that will be hard to contain even as Mr. Biden plans an inauguration with the theme of “America United” — an admirable goal, but one that seems difficult if not impossible to attain at the moment.