Home Units Impeachment Vote to Cost Trump With Incitement

“It’s something we’re thinking a lot about right now,” Representative Peter Meijer, a newly minted Republican from Michigan, told a Fox partner in his home state. “I think what we saw on Wednesday made the president unfit for office.”

Mr. Trump gave his party little direction or reason to gather around him. He was housed in the White House and banned from Twitter. He offered no defense against himself or the armed attackers who overtook the Capitol and put the lives of the congressional leaders, their staff and his own vice president at risk.

Chad F. Wolf, the acting secretary for homeland security, resigned as the youngest cabinet official after the Capitol Rebellion and resigned only nine days before he was supposed to coordinate security at the inauguration.

If Mr Trump were to be indicted by the House of Representatives, which now seems almost certain, he would be tried in the Senate, requiring all of the Senators to be in the Chamber while the case is being examined. Democrats had briefly considered postponing impeachment proceedings until the spring to buy Mr Biden more time without the cloud of such a process hanging at the start of his presidency, but by late Monday most felt they could quick action does not justify impeachment and then justify delay.

However, the timing of a trial remained unclear as the Senate was not currently in session. New York Senator Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat, was considering using emergency measures to roll back the chamber before Jan. 20, a senior Democratic adviser said. However, this would require the approval of his Republican counterpart, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

House leaders said the timing and outcome of a Senate trial was secondary to their urgency to indict Mr. Trump with crimes against the country.

“Whether the impeachment can happen through the United States Senate is not the problem,” Maryland majority leader Steny H. Hoyer told reporters. “The problem is we have a president who most of us believe promoted an insurrection and attack on this building, democracy, and tried to undermine the presidential count.”