impeachment

WASHINGTON — In a day of bitter partisan skirmishing, President Trump’s allies and his Democratic antagonists took to the nation’s talk shows Sunday to present stridently opposing views of the impeachment inquiry that hit Washington last week like a tornado, sweeping nearly all other priorities aside.

The sharply dueling narratives showed that the impeachment battle will be one of bitter political messaging as much as impartial sifting of evidence. Initial polls showed a majority of Americans approve of the inquiry — but no national consensus on how to assess the president’s actions.

While the president spent the day golfing, his allies angrily attacked the legitimacy of the House inquiry, excoriated the whistleblower whose complaint sparked the crisis, and repeated debunked allegations against former Vice President Joe Biden and his son.

Trump later upped the ante on Twitter, leveling an incendiary charge against Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee that is spearheading the impeachment process. Schiff, the president wrote, should be “questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason.”

Democrats pushed back, saying that if the whistleblower’s complaint is borne out, Trump’s misconduct was egregious enough to merit ouster from office.

“This is classic abuse of power. This is as serious as it gets,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Democratic caucus, said on “Fox News Sunday.”

At issue is whether Trump abused his authority for personal gain, and put national security at risk, by withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in promised military aid to Ukraine while urging its president to do him a “favor” by digging up dirt on his potential Democratic rival in the 2020 election.

Schiff said lawmakers had reached an agreement with the whistleblower who filed an anonymous complaint about Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and subsequent White House efforts to “lock down” evidence, to testify behind closed doors.

Schiff did not give a date, but said he expects it as soon as the individual’s lawyers are granted an appropriate security clearing to attend the hearing. “We’ll get the unfiltered testimony of that whistleblower,” Schiff said on ABC News’ “This Week.”

“We are taking all the precautions we can to protect the whistleblower’s identity,” Schiff added. “With President Trump’s threats, you can imagine the security concerns here.”

Mark Zaid, one of the lawyers representing the whistleblower, tweeted, “We continue to work w/both parties in House & Senate & we understand all agree protecting whistleblower’s identity is paramount.” He added that no date or time had been set for the testimony.

Schiff, asked if Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer and a central figure in the impeachment storm, would also be called to testify, said it was too soon to say.

“I don’t want to commit myself to that at this point,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “We certainly need to do a lot of work to find out what Giuliani has been doing in Ukraine.”

Giuliani, a private citizen who claims the State Department approved his back-channel dealings with Ukrainian officials on Trump’s behalf, said during a testy exchange on ABC’s “This Week” that he “wouldn’t cooperate” with Schiff.

He derided Schiff, who has served nearly two decades in the House, as an “illegitimate chairman” who “wants to hang the president.”

Stephen Miller, a senior White House aide who has mounted scorched-earth campaigns for Trump’s controversial immigration crackdown, branded the whistleblower’s complaint a “little Nancy Drew novel” that “drips with condemnation, condescension and contempt for the president.”

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Miller called the whistleblower “a saboteur trying to undermine a democratically elected government,” and endorsed Trump’s menacing characterization of the whistleblower — made in a closed-door meeting in New York last week — as “close to a spy.”

The acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, told Schiff’s committee last week that the whistleblower, who is reportedly a CIA analyst who was assigned to the White House, had acted “in good faith” and had followed the law.

Republicans have generally stood behind Trump, but in an administration beset by near-constant turnover and turmoil, some former White House officials began to venture criticism.

Trump’s former homeland security advisor, Tom Bossert, told ABC’s “This Week” that “it is a bad day and a bad week for the president and for this country if he is asking for political dirt on an opponent.”

But Trump’s staunchest congressional supporters — including Sen. Lindsey Graham, (R-S.C.), who once called Biden “as good a man as God ever created” — sought to counter allegations against Trump by insisting it was the Democratic presidential candidate whose actions needed investigating.

Giuliani and other Trump supporters have repeatedly claimed that in 2016, Biden, then vice president, acted improperly to help his son, Hunter, by pushing for the firing of Ukraine’s prosecutor general, the country’s senior law enforcement official.

The prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was ousted at the request of not only the Obama administration but also the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, who were seeking to stem corruption in Ukraine and believed Shokin was obstructing that work.

Shokin had once looked into the oligarch who owned Burisma, the energy company that had given a lucrative job to Hunter Biden, but the younger Biden was not the target or accused of any wrongdoing. In any case, the probe was already dormant when Shokin was pushed out.

Graham said on “Face the Nation” Sunday that “I love Joe Biden” but added, “somebody ought to look at whether or not Joe Biden had the prosecutor fired, and in a proper way.” Graham also said the whistleblower’s complaint “smells to high heaven.”

Sen. Christopher S. Murphy (D-Conn.), who recently traveled to Ukraine, said attacks on the former vice president were groundless, noting that no evidence of any criminal conduct has emerged in either Ukraine or the U.S.

“All these insinuations around Joe Biden — there is zero evidence for the claims the president is making,” Murphy said, describing them as a deliberate attempt to distract attention from Trump’s own comments in his July phone call to Zelensky.

“The whistleblower complaint is absolutely credible, but frankly you don’t need it because you have a transcript of a conversation in which the president of the United States tried to convince a foreign leader to interfere in the 2020 election,” he said.

“And you have Rudy Giuliani on TV every morning and every night, openly admitting that as an agent of the president’s campaign, he has been coordinating with the State Department in order to try to perpetuate the president’s political agenda,” Murphy added. “This is not allowable in a democracy.”

NEW YORK — It would seem the most straightforward of notions: A thing takes place, and it goes into the history books or is added to museum exhibits. But whether something even gets remembered and how — particularly when it comes to the history of a country and its leader — can become complex, especially when the leader is Donald Trump.

The latest example of that came Friday, when the Smithsonian Institution said it had removed a reference to Trump’s 2019 and 2021 impeachments from a panel in an exhibition about the American presidency. Trump has pressed institutions and agencies under federal oversight, often through the pressure of funding, to focus on the country’s achievements and progress and away from things he terms “divisive.”

The Smithsonian on Saturday denied getting pressure from the Trump administration to remove the reference, which had been installed as part of a temporary addition in 2021. The exhibit “will be updated in the coming weeks to reflect all impeachment proceedings in our nation’s history,” the museum said in a statement.

In a statement that did not directly address the impeachment references, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said: “We are fully supportive of updating displays to highlight American greatness.”

But is history intended to highlight or to document — to report what happened, or to serve a desired narrative? The answer, as with most things about the past, can be complicated.

American stories

The Smithsonian’s move comes as the Trump administration has asserted its dominion over many American institutions, such as removing the name of a gay rights activist from a Navy ship, pushing for Republican supporters in Congress to defund the Corp. for Public Broadcasting — prompting its elimination — and getting rid of the leadership at the Kennedy Center.

“Based on what we have been seeing, this is part of a broader effort by the president to influence and shape how history is depicted at museums, national parks and schools,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. “Not only is he pushing a specific narrative of the United States but, in this case, trying to influence how Americans learn about his own role in history.”

It’s not a new struggle, in the world generally and the political world particularly. There is power in being able to shape how things are remembered, if they are remembered at all — who was there, who took part, who was responsible, what happened to lead up to that point in history. And the human beings who run things have often extended their authority to the stories told about them.

In China, for example, references to the June 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square are forbidden and meticulously regulated by the ruling Communist Party government. In Soviet-era Russia, officials who ran afoul of leaders such as Josef Stalin disappeared not only from the government itself but from photographs and history books where they once appeared.

Jason Stanley, an expert on authoritarianism, said controlling what and how people learn of their past has long been used as a vital tool to maintain power. Stanley has made his views about the Trump administration clear; he recently left Yale University to join the University of Toronto, citing concerns over the U.S. political situation.

“If they don’t control the historical narrative,” he said, “then they can’t create the kind of fake history that props up their politics.”

Framing history

In the United States, presidents and their families have used their power to shape history and calibrate their own images. Jackie Kennedy insisted on cuts in William Manchester’s book on her husband’s 1963 assassination, “The Death of a President.” Ronald Reagan and his wife got a cable TV channel to release a carefully calibrated documentary about him. Those around Franklin D. Roosevelt, including journalists of the era, took pains to mask the effects of paralysis on his body and his mobility.

Trump, though, has asserted far greater control — a sitting president encouraging an atmosphere where institutions can feel compelled to choose between him and the facts, whether he calls for it directly or not.

“We are constantly trying to position ourselves in history as citizens — as citizens of the country, citizens of the world,” said Robin Wagner-Pacifici, professor emerita of sociology at the New School for Social Research. “So part of these exhibits and monuments are also about situating us in time. And without it, it’s very hard for us to situate ourselves in history because it seems like we just kind of burst forth from the Earth.”

Timothy Naftali, director of the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda from 2007 to 2011, presided over its overhaul to offer a more objective presentation of Watergate — one not beholden to the president’s loyalists. In an interview Friday, he said he was “concerned and disappointed” about the Smithsonian decision. Naftali, now a senior researcher at Columbia University, said that museum directors “should have red lines” and that he considered one of them to be the removal of the Trump impeachment panel.

While it might seem inconsequential for someone in power to care about a museum’s offerings, Wagner-Pacifici says Trump’s outlook on history and his role in it — earlier this year, he said the Smithsonian had “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” — shows how important those matters are to people in authority.

“You might say about that person, whoever that person is, their power is so immense and their legitimacy is so stable and so sort of monumental that why would they bother with things like this … why would they bother to waste their energy and effort on that?” Wagner-Pacifici said. Her conclusion: “The legitimacy of those in power has to be reconstituted constantly. They can never rest on their laurels.”

Hajela and Italie write for the Associated Press.

Smithsonian Institution says it will update exhibit to reflect all impeachments of US presidents following backlash.

The parent organisation of a top-visited history museum in the United States has denied that political pressure played a role in the removal of a display about the impeachments of US President Donald Trump.

The Smithsonian Institution, which runs the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, said on Saturday that it removed the “temporary” placard for failing to meet the museum’s standards in “appearance, location, timeline, and overall presentation”.

“It was not consistent with other sections in the exhibit and moreover blocked the view of the objects inside its case. For these reasons, we removed the placard,” the institution said in a statement.

“We were not asked by any Administration or other government officials to remove content from the exhibit.”

The Smithsonian Institution, which runs 21 museums and the National Zoo, said the impeachment section of the museum would be updated in the coming weeks to “reflect all impeachment proceedings in our nation’s history”.

The statement comes after The Washington Post on Thursday reported that the museum removed an explicit reference to Trump’s impeachments last month, resulting in its exhibit about impeachment incorrectly stating that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal”.

The Post, citing an unnamed person familiar with the exhibit plans, said the display was taken down following a “content review that the Smithsonian agreed to undertake following pressure from the White House to remove an art museum director”.

The museum’s removal of the display drew swift backlash, with critics of Trump casting the development as the latest capitulation to the whims of an authoritarian president.

“You can run, but you cannot hide from the judgment of history,” Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Friday.

“So, here’s my message to the president: no matter what exhibits you try to distort, the American people will never forget that you were impeached – not once, but twice.”

Trump has, with lightning speed, moved to exert greater control over political, cultural and media institutions as part of his transformative “Make America Great Again” agenda.

In March, the US president signed an executive order to remove “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution’s properties and deny funding for exhibits that “degrade shared American values” or “divide Americans based on race”.

During his first term, Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives twice, in 2019 and 2021, but he was acquitted by the Senate on both occasions.

He was the third US president to be impeached, after Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and the only US president to be impeached twice.

Former President Richard Nixon faced near-certain impeachment before his resignation in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

NEW YORK — The Smithsonian Institution has removed from an exhibit a reference to President Trump’s two impeachments, a decision that comes as the White House exerts pressure to offer a more positive — and selective — view of American history. A spokesperson said the exhibit eventually “will include all impeachments.”

A label referring to impeachment had been added in 2021 to the National Museum for American History’s exhibit on the American presidency, in a section called “Limits of Presidential Power.” Smithsonian spokesperson Phillip Zimmerman said Friday that the section, which includes materials on the impeachment of President Clinton and the Watergate scandal that helped lead to President Nixon’s resignation, needed to be overhauled. He said the decision came after the museum was “reviewing our legacy content recently.”

“Because the other topics in this section had not been updated since 2008, the decision was made to restore the Impeachment case back to its 2008 appearance,” Zimmerman said in an email.

He said that in September 2021, the museum installed a temporary label on content concerning Trump’s impeachments. “It was intended to be a short-term measure to address current events at the time,” he said. But the label remained in place.

“A large permanent gallery like the American Presidency that opened in 2000 requires a significant amount of time and funding to update and renew,” he said. “A future and updated exhibit will include all impeachments.”

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said the Smithsonian has “highlighted divisive DEI exhibits which are out of touch with mainstream America” for too long.

“We are fully supportive of updating displays to highlight American greatness,” he said in a statement that did not address the missing reference to Trump’s impeachments.

Trump’s impeachments were more recent

Trump is the only president to have been impeached twice — in 2019, for pushing Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden, who would defeat Trump in the 2020 election; and in 2021 for “incitement of insurrection,” a reference to the Jan. 6, 2021, siege of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters attempting to halt congressional certification of Biden’s victory.

The Democratic majority in the House voted each time for impeachment. The Republican-led Senate each time acquitted Trump. Soon after Trump’s first impeachment, the history museum issued a statement saying that curators “will determine which objects best represent these historic events for inclusion in the national collection.”

Since returning to office in January, Trump has cut funding, forced out officials and otherwise demanded changes across a range of Washington cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the Kennedy Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The current administration has targeted interpretations of history

In March, Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” in which he alleged that the Smithsonian was beholden to “a divisive, race-centered ideology.” He has placed Vice President JD Vance in charge of an effort to ensure no funding goes to “exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.”

Congressional Democrats issued a statement in April calling Trump’s order a “flagrant attempt to erase Black history.”

Last week, artist Amy Sherald canceled a planned exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery after officials raised concerns over her painting “Trans Forming Liberty, 2024,” in which she depicts a nonbinary transgender person posing as the Statue of Liberty. Sherald is best known for her painting of then-First Lady Michelle Obama, which was commissioned by the Portrait Gallery.

Founded in the 19th century, the Smithsonian oversees a network of cultural centers that includes the portrait gallery, the history museum, the National Zoo and the Smithsonian Gardens. News of the Trump impeachment label being removed was first reported by the Washington Post.

Italie writes for the Associated Press.

July 26 (UPI) — An impeachment proceeding against Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte can’t proceed due to a constitutional limit on the annual number of impeachments, the Philippine Supreme Court ruled.

The Philippine Constitution bans multiple impeachment proceedings in a given year, so Duterte could not be impeached until February, the nation’s Supreme Court announced on Friday, the BBC reported.

The ruling does not prevent Duterte’s impeachment, but it delays it until an impeachment proceeding would not violate the Philippine Constitution.

“It is not our duty to favor any political result,” the court said in its ruling. “Ours is to ensure that politics are framed within the rule of just law.”

The court said it is prepared to address the claims against Duterte “at the proper time and before the appropriate forum.”

Lawmakers in the Philippine Parliament’s lower house in February voted to impeach Duterte for allegedly misusing taxpayer dollars and threatening to kill President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

It was the fourth impeachment case received by the lower chamber from December to February, one of which was transferred to the Senate.

Duterte is the daughter of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and formerly was a close political ally of Marcos. She is considered to be a viable candidate for the nation’s presidency during the 2028 election cycle after she and Marcos had a political fallout.

Duterte and Marcos in 2022 formed what they called the “Uniteam,” which temporarily united two of the nation’s most powerful political families. After the pair secured wins in the May 2022 elections, the Uniteam began to fray.

Duterte’s father called Marcos a “drug addict,” and Duterte in November said she ensured the president would be killed if she were killed first.

The elder Duterte afterward was extradited to the Hague to be tried for alleged crimes against humanity due the deaths of thousands arising from his administration’s war on drugs.

Rodrigo Duterte was president for six years from June 2016 to June 2022.

Sara Duterte says the accusations against her are politically motivated, although many supporting her impeachment note that 12 of the nation’s 15 Supreme Court justices were appointed by her father.

WASHINGTON  — When Nancy Pelosi first held the speaker’s gavel in 2007, liberals in her caucus wanted to impeach President Bush over the Iraq war. Pelosi resisted.

More than a decade later, the San Francisco Democrat returned to the speaker’s rostrum with a new Democratic majority, hearing similar calls to impeach a Republican president.

This time, too, she resisted for months. But President Trump, she insists, left her no choice.

Trump’s offenses, she said in an interview Tuesday in the speaker’s office, justified impeachment in a way Bush’s had not.

“What could be worse than that? Misrepresenting to the public what the basis of the war was,” Pelosi said. But, she continued, Trump’s efforts to enlist a foreign government, Ukraine, in domestic U.S. politics, asking the Ukrainian president to investigate Trump’s Democratic rivals, “is so overwhelming that for us to not do this would be a dereliction of our own duties.”

The process Pelosi set in motion when she said the House would begin the impeachment is now on the eve of completion. Lawmakers are scheduled to open debate Wednesday on an impeachment resolution that is all but certain to pass on a near-party-line vote.

With that vote, impeachment will stand as a key part of her legacy, her colleagues agree — along with becoming the country’s first female speaker of the House and shepherding the Affordable Care Act into law.

Republicans, who have defended the president, say the impeachment effort will put the Democratic majority at risk.

The impeachment vote “will be a stain on Nancy Pelosi’s legacy as speaker,” said Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), denouncing what he called “a personal vendetta against the president.”

Pelosi’s allies paint a very different picture.

“All this is coming out now because, as Nancy says, ‘the times have found us,’” said former California Sen. Barbara Boxer, a friend of Pelosi’s. “The times have found her.”

In the eyes of Democrats, Boxer added, the speaker has become “the chief antagonist or the chief opponent to the man who has taken a wrecking ball to America.”

That position wasn’t ordained a year ago.

When Pelosi’s party regained the majority after the 2018 election, a small but vocal faction of Democrats were calling for her to step aside. Her initial months back in the speaker’s office were marked by tension between progressives and moderates among the sometimes unruly House Democrats.

Members on the party’s left “were rambunctious; they assumed the caucus would get in their way. So they spoke out,” said former Rep. George Miller, a longtime ally of Pelosi’s.

Paradoxically, however, impeachment, which many saw as a divisive issue, has caused Pelosi’s party to coalesce around her. Critics who just a year ago said she should step aside have put their trust in her political instincts, saying the House would have been rolled by Trump under a less powerful speaker.

And to the surprise of some Democrats, who considered her out of touch with a younger generation in the party, Pelosi has become a pop culture symbol of Democratic resistance by standing up to the president on live television or even just by walking out of the White House in a fashionable coat.

“In her whole career, she has always prided herself on being measured. But the times she has stepped out of that measured status have been blockbusters,” said Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Hillsborough), a Pelosi ally. “I think she has found a newer voice — to be used sparingly but effectively.”

Pelosi has insisted all along that Democrats are not impeaching Trump because of politics. Disagreements over separation of children from their families at the border, gun control or climate change need to be resolved at the ballot box, she said.

“Impeachment, politics — [they] have nothing to do with each other,” she repeated in the interview.

But politics is an inevitable part of impeachment. If Democrats hold the House majority in November and defeat Trump for reelection, Pelosi’s management of the process will garner political credit. If they fail, she will take much of the blame. In the year ahead, preserving the House’s Democratic majority will be her top political responsibility.

She insists the prospect doesn’t worry her.

“We’re on a good path with all of that. If impeachment never existed, we would still have to be protecting our incumbents,” she said.

One measure of Pelosi’s effectiveness: She has clearly gotten under Trump’s skin. The president once avoided personal attacks on Pelosi, but in recent weeks has dropped that deference, repeatedly referring to her as “crazy,” and recently insulting her teeth.

On Tuesday, in a vitriolic six-page letter, he accused her of lying about her faith.

“You are offending Americans of faith by continually saying ‘I pray for the President,’ when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in a negative sense,” Trump wrote.

“You are making a mockery of impeachment, and you are scarcely concealing your hatred of me, of the Republican Party, and tens of millions of patriotic Americans,” he wrote.

Pelosi said she has prayed for whoever the president is and has felt it important to say that publicly.

“I don’t hate anybody. And if I were to ever resort to such an emotion, I wouldn’t waste it on him,” she said in the interview. “It is not something that’s in my upbringing or my character.”

Pelosi’s allies say she attends Roman Catholic Mass regularly, including on foreign trips with other lawmakers. Last weekend she went with Republicans and Democrats to Mass at St. Alphonse Church in Luxembourg.

“I prayed for [Trump] that God — that his heart will receive God’s grace to help everyone in our country, not just the privileged few, which seems to be the course that he is on,” Pelosi said.

The decision to open an impeachment inquiry came after a hectic weekend in late September filled with church services — a memorial for Pelosi’s longtime friend, journalist Cokie Roberts, and the funeral for Emily Clyburn, the wife of House Whip James E. Clyburn of South Carolina. As Pelosi flew from Washington to South Carolina and then to New York, she drafted the speech she would give announcing the decision — at one point losing her notes on a plane.

The announcement on Sept. 24 came before television cameras in a hallway off the speaker’s office — a space typically reserved for high-level announcements. From there, she sent the investigation to six House committees, primarily the House Intelligence Committee that she once helped lead, now headed by her close ally, Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank).

Schiff said Pelosi was “deeply engaged” in the investigation but “never attempted to micromanage.”

“What she has done is consult with the chairs of the various committees, and try to arrive at consensus,” he said.

Pelosi succeeded in bridging disputes among Democrats over how broad the articles of impeachment should be — and how quickly to move. Democrats close to her describe a process of constant communication with members, whether on the phone or in person on the House floor. That has allowed her to act as a barometer, measuring the pressure on the lawmakers.

“I know people think she goes up there and cracks the whip,” said John Lawrence, who was Pelosi’s chief of staff from 2005 to 2013. “That’s just not the case.”

She “derives her strength from the fact people believe — regardless whether the final decision reflects personal preference — they were able to make their case and had opportunity to be consulted.”

Pelosi, however, has also developed a level of support among Democratic voters that she did not have a year ago, when even many Democrats conceded that she was an electoral liability in some congressional districts. By wagging her finger at the president during a meeting in the Oval Office and merely exiting the White House in a stylish orange coat, she has become the subject of memes and political logos.

Those moments were spontaneous, she says.

“All of them [are] a part of something vis-a-vis him,” she said. “It was really more about him than about me.”

She didn’t wear the burnt-orange coat with a collar — one that she bought for the inauguration of Barack Obama — to make a point, she said.

“No, it was clean, it was warm,” she said. “Being from California, I don’t have many real winter coats.”

Pelosi has said she considered retirement when it appeared Hillary Clinton would defeat Trump in 2016. When Trump won, she stayed on to protect the Affordable Care Act, the piece of legislation Pelosi counts as her top legislative accomplishment.

She refused to speculate on whether she would once again think of stepping down if a Democrat wins in 2020.

“I have no intention of weakening the position I’m in now by making myself a lame duck for what comes next,” she said. “When that comes, we’ll see.”

But when the day comes, there’s little chance she’d remain in Washington as many former politicians do, she says.

“Every single day that I leave,” she said of her San Francisco district, “it’s enticing to stay in California.”

WASHINGTON — A Democratic lawmaker is launching a renegade effort to impeach President Trump, pushing past party leaders on Wednesday with an attempt to force a procedural vote in the U.S. House that is expected to fail.

Rep. Shri Thanedar of Michigan announced his intention to charge ahead, saying that as an immigrant to America he wants to do all he can to protect its Constitution and institutions from Trump’s lawlessness. His resolution contains seven articles of impeachment against the Republican president.

“Donald J. Trump has been committing crimes since day one — bribery, corruption, taking power from Congress, creating an unlawful office in DOGE, violating 1st Amendment rights, ignoring due process,” the congressman said earlier from the House floor.

It would be the historic third time Trump has faced impeachment efforts after being twice impeached during his first term as president — first in 2019 on charges related to withholding military aid to Ukraine as it confronted Russia and later on a charge of inciting insurrection over the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters. Trump was acquitted both times by the Senate.

Thanedar is not the only Democrat who has signaled impeachment efforts against Trump. But his decision to go it almost alone, without backing from party leadership, comes as he faces his own political challenges at home, with several primary opponents looking to unseat him in his Detroit-area congressional district.

Timing is also key. His resolution claiming Trump committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” comes as Trump is traveling in the Middle East in his first major trip abroad of his second term, violating a norm in American politics of not criticizing the president once he leaves the U.S.

But Thanedar said he was pressing ahead in part because of Trump’s trip abroad and the potential conflicts of interest as the president appears to be mixing his personal business dealings with his presidential duties and is considering accepting a lavish gift of an airplane from the Qatari government.

“My constituents want me to act,” Thanedar told the Associated Press late Tuesday.

“It’s time for us to stand up and speak. We can’t worry about, ‘Is this the right time?’ We can’t worry about, ‘Are we going to win this battle?’ It’s more about doing the right thing,” he said. “I took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. So did Mr. Trump. He has violated his oath, and he’s doing unconstitutional activities. It’s time for someone to stand up and say that, and if that’s just me, then so be it.”

Thanedar is using a procedural tool to force a vote Wednesday on whether to proceed to the issue or shelve the matter.

One top Trump ally, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, criticized Thanedar and dismissed the impeachment effort.

“It’s DOA,” she posted on social media.

Impeachment of a president or other U.S. officials, once rare, has become an increasingly common in Congress.

Republicans in the House opened an impeachment inquiry into then-President Biden, a Democrat, but stopped short of action. The Republicans in Congress did, however, impeach Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The Senate dismissed two articles of impeachment against Mayorkas, ending his trial.

Thanedar, who’s from India, has said he came to the United States without many resources. He said he loves the U.S. and wants to defend its Constitution and institutions.

When he took over the Detroit congressional district, it was the first time in decades the city was left without a Black lawmaker in Congress.

Mascaro, Brown and Askarinam write for the Associated Press.