In March, days before special counsel Robert Mueller concluded his months-long investigation into the ties between Trump campaign associates and Russia, Nancy Pelosi was asked whether she believed the president should be removed from office.
“I’m not for impeachment,” the House speaker told the Washington Post Magazine in an interview published on 11 March.
“Unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country,” Pelosi continued. “And he’s just not worth it.”
For months Pelosi resisted calls for impeachment from members of her caucus and activists in her party. But then, in late September, Congress was informed of a whistleblower complaint detailing Donald Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate former vice-president Joe Biden, the leading Democratic presidential candidate in 2020. In a matter of days, she dropped her objections and launched a formal impeachment inquiry.
Pelosi’s evolution from holdout to leader in the process has pushed a president to the brink of impeachment for only the third time in US history.
With the House poised to vote this week, impeaching the 45th president of the United States for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress is a legacy-defining moment for a speaker whose career has already had many.
“In the dark days of the revolution, Thomas Paine said, ‘The times have found us,’” Pelosi said. “We think the times have found us now.”
The outcome is all-but assured. The Democratic-controlled House is expected to easily pass both articles of impeachment. But the margin could matter.
While public support for impeachment has climbed since September, polling indicates that support for it remains below 50%. Democrats who break from the party could help bolster Republicans’ claim that opposition to impeachment is bipartisan. They could also harm some of the so-called “frontline” Democrats who are risking their political future by supporting Trump’s removal from office.
Article 1 of the United States constitution gives the House of Representatives the sole power to initiate impeachment and the Senate the sole power to try impeachments of the president. A president can be impeached if they are judged to have committed "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" – although the US Constitution does not specify what “high crimes and misdemeanors” are.
The formal process starts with the House of Representatives passing articles of impeachment, the equivalent of congressional charges. A simple majority of members need to vote in favour of impeachment for it to pass to the next stage. Democrats currently control the House.
The chief justice of the US Supreme Court then presides over proceedings in the Senate. The president is tried, with senators acting as the jury. For the president to be found guilty two-thirds of senators must vote to convict. Republicans currently control the Senate.
Two presidents have previously been impeached, Bill Clinton in 1998, and Andrew Johnson in 1868, though neither was removed from office as a result. Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 before there was a formal vote to impeach him.
Martin Belam
“This is a vote that people will have to come to their own conclusion on,” Pelosi told reporters. “The facts are irrefutable.”
She said her leadership team will not “whip” the vote, meaning members will not be pressured to stand with the party. She declined to say how many Democrats might vote against the articles of impeachment.
Privately Democrats estimate that they could lose between two to half a dozen. By contrast, Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, has predicted his party will remain united in opposition to articles of impeachment.
Not a single House Republican voted for a resolution outlining the next stage of the impeachment proceedings. Two Democrats broke from their party, a rhetorical gift to Republicans who touted “bipartisan opposition” to the investigation.
“It’s a very sad thing for our country but it seems to be very good for me politically,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Friday, moments after the House judiciary committee approved the articles of impeachment on a party-line vote.
Pelosi has insisted that she never wanted to impeach the president. She was in Congress during the impeachment of Bill Clinton, when the then House speaker, Newt Gingrich, resigned after wrongly predicting that the effort would help Republicans during the 1998 congressional midterm elections. During Pelosi’s first tenure as speaker, she resisted calls from her party to impeach George W Bush over the Iraq war. She managed a similar approach with Trump throughout the Mueller investigation.
She warned that Trump was “goading” Democrats into a divisive impeachment investigation. As talk of impeachment intensified, she insisted that she would rather see Trump “in prison” than impeached. But Trump, she said, left Congress “no choice”.
“The facts of the Ukraine situation,” she said, explaining her transformation on impeachment. “It just changed everything.”
Despite her initial reluctance to impeach, which angered some corners of her caucus, she has largely earned their praise for her “expeditious” and “deliberate” handling of the proceedings.
Pelosi has maintained tight control over the impeachment process. She decided with her lieutenants to keep the articles of impeachment narrowly focused on Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, rather than to charge him with a third article of impeachment for obstruction of justice based on the evidence uncovered during the course of the Mueller investigation. The effect, Trump said recently, is an “impeachment-lite”. But Democratic leaders believe it will help protect the party’s most vulnerable members, who only came out in support of an impeachment inquiry after Trump’s dealings with Ukraine were revealed.
In recent weeks, she has displayed rare flashes of frustration when pressed on the motives behind her leap on impeachment. “Don’t mess with me,” she told a reporter who asked if she hated the president.
“He is the one who is dividing the country on this,” she said, referring to Trump. “We are honoring the constitution of the United States.”
Last week, less than an hour after she formally accused Trump of “high crimes and misdemeanors”, Pelosi announced that congressional negotiators had reached a trade agreement with the administration, a top campaign promise for the president.
“We certainly wouldn’t miss any opportunities because of the present occupant in the White House,” Pelosi said at the Politico’s Women Rule Summit last week. Matter-of-factly, she added: “It’s just not worth it, in my view.”
