Halloween Impeachment Procedures-Vice News Update
October 31, 2019
Vice News newsletter message: It’s finally here.
The House passed Democrats’ impeachment rules Thursday morning, an unnecessary vote but one marking a new, more-public phase in the impeachment investigation.
The vote went almost completely along party lines. All but two Democrats supported the measure, and all the Republicans opposed it.
The vote was at once historic and ludicrous — a grave moment of government crisis and a political act that wasn’t technically required by the Constitution. It was also marked by Congress’ usual partisan bickering.
House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) slammed the vote as “Soviet-style” on the House floor, while House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) accused Democrats of “running an unprecedented, unfair, and undemocratic” process. Republicans broke into hollers of unfairness and yelled futilely about “order” as the vote was closed.
The White House wasn’t far behind.
“With today’s vote, Speaker Pelosi and the Democrats have done nothing more than enshrine unacceptable violations of due process into House rules,” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement.
That’s not true.
The House makes its own rules, the vote isn’t constitutionally required, and Democrats went back and forth on whether to do it at all — but Nancy Pelosi eventually decided to bring the vote to the floor to knock down Republicans’ talking point of closed-door meetings.
But that hasn’t stopped Trump backers from claiming that Democrats poisoned the well with the initial interviews.