US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said the House would move ahead with the process to impeach President Donald Trump for encouraging a mob that stormed the Capitol if he did not resign “immediately”.
The Speaker and the Democrats believed that he should be removed from office immediately as an aftermath of the incident of Capitol Hill violence on Wednesday. Trump, who lost the Presidential elections 2020, would be succeeded by Joe Biden on January 20 as mandated by the Constitution.
“It is the hope of members that the President will immediately resign. But if he does not, I have instructed the Rules Committee to be prepared to move forward with Congressman Jamie Raskin’s 25th Amendment legislation and a motion for impeachment,” Pelosi said in a statement on Friday.
“Accordingly, the House will preserve every option – including the 25th Amendment, a motion to impeach or a privileged resolution for impeachment,” she said after the House Democratic Caucus had an hours-long discussion on the issue.
Congressman Kaiali’i Kahele while fully supporting the removal of Trump from the office said, “We cannot have a sitting president in office who incites violence among the people, or who tries to upend the American people’s democratic process and right to a just election. His remarks in front of an agitated mob of his supporters that roused civil indignancy at the grounds of the US Capitol are unforgivable, either by invoking the 25th Amendment or bringing forth articles of impeachment against him. Every day Trump remains in the White House is another day America is unsafe.”
Kahele is a co-sponsor of two resolutions of impeachment authored by fellow US members of Congress. The one sponsored by Representatives David Cicilline, Ted Lieu, and Jamie Raskin offers a single article of impeachment of abuse of power that covers both inciting violence against the US as well as Trump’s urging of Georgia’s Secretary of State to find votes; and the other by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar which contains two articles of impeachment – Trump’s abuse of power and unlawful attempts to overturn the November 2020 presidential election; and his abuse of power to incite violence and orchestrate a coup against the country.
Congressman Gregory Meeks, Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, led Democratic members of the Committee in calling for the impeachment of Trump for instigating the attack on the Capitol.
