WASHINGTON _ Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee wanted their first impeachment hearing Wednesday to carry the weight of history, replete with references to the nation's Founding Fathers and a panel of august constitutional scholars to analyze President Donald Trump's actions.
Republicans did their best to turn it into a partisan brawl instead.
In the opening hour of the hearing, Democrats and witnesses struggled to speak without interruption as Republicans called for adjourning the proceedings, holding a hearing of their own, and otherwise objected to a process they derided as a "sham" and "a simple railroad job."
Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., said Trump's opponents on the committee were motivated by "a deep-seated hatred of a man who came to the White House and did what he said he was going to do."
The raucous start was expected as the impeachment process enters a new phase that poses clear dangers to Trump's legacy, if not his presidency.
Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee issued a report on Tuesday that the Judiciary Committee was expected to rely on to draft articles of impeachment. If approved by the full House, the Republican-led Senate would then hold a trial, and at that point, Trump appears all but certain to win acquittal.
The report found "overwhelming" evidence of Trump's misconduct in pushing Ukraine's president to announce investigations that would benefit Trump's reelection bid and then for trying to obstruct the impeachment inquiry.
"Never before in the history of the republic have we been forced to consider the conduct of a president who appears to have solicited personal political favors from a foreign government," Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat and the committee chairman, said in his opening statement.
He sought to ward off criticism that the Democrats were racing to impeach the president before the presidential primaries began in February.
"If we do not act to hold him in check now," Nadler said, "President Trump will almost certainly try again to solicit interference in the election for his personal political gain."
The first three legal scholars to testify, all of them called by Democrats, wholeheartedly agreed with that argument and delivered scorching assessments of Trump's conduct.
Harvard's Noah Feldman said the Founding Fathers had put impeachment into the Constitution explicitly to guard against foreign interference in elections. Trump had violated that provision by asking Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination.
"President Trump has committed impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors by corruptly using the office of the presidency," Feldman said.
Pamela Karlan, a Stanford University law professor, said Trump had tried to "strong-arm a foreign leader into smearing one of the president's opponents in our ongoing election season. That's not politics as usual."
She added, "It is a cardinal reason why the Constitution contains an impeachment power."
Michael Gerhardt, a University of North Carolina law professor who has written a widely respected textbook on impeachment, said the House had no choice but to impeach Trump because of his obstruction of congressional investigations.
"If Congress fails to impeach here," he said, "then the impeachment process has lost all meaning and, along with that, our Constitution's carefully crafted safeguards against the establishment of a king on American soil."
The sole witness called by Republicans, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, disagreed. He said Democrats had not made an adequate case for impeaching Trump and that moving forward would be a historic mistake.
"What we leave in the wake of this scandal will shape our democracy for generations to come," he said. "I am concerned with lowering impeachment standards to fit a paucity of evidence and an abundance of anger."
Once Turley finished, Republicans interrupted the proceedings again by asking to subpoena the still-unidentified whistleblower who set the scandal in motion by filing a complaint about Trump's July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy where he asked for investigations of Biden and Democrats.
.png?w=600)
