If Vice President Mike Pence does not move to invoke the 25th Amendment against President Donald Trump after the riot at the Capitol, House Democrats will move forward with articles of impeachment to be filed as early as the middle of next week, Rep. Katherine Clark, the assistant Speaker of the House, said Friday.
"Donald Trump needs to be removed from office, and we are going to proceed with every tool that we have to make sure that that happens to protect our democracy," the Massachusetts Democrat said Friday on CNN's "New Day." "If the reports are correct and Mike Pence is not going to uphold his oath of office and remove the president and help protect our democracy, then we will move forward with impeachment to do just that."
She acknowledged there is limited time, with the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden on Jan. 20, but said that "every day that Donald Trump is president of the United States is a day of grave danger."
"We can use procedural tools to get articles of impeachment to the floor for a House vote quickly," said Clark."We have already had chairman Jerry Nadler, chair of the Judiciary Committee, say that he will use those tools to bring the articles as fast as possible ... we can act very quickly when we want to."
Clark also spoke out against Republicans who voted Wednesday, after the rioting, to challenge the Electoral College's vote for Biden.
"They are going to have to answer to history," she said. "They are going to have to answer to how they took that oath of office, just on Sunday, and turned around and voted for this president after the actions that occurred on the capitol on Wednesday."
Clark, though, said her focus is not on reprimanding those lawmakers, but on securing the country.
"It's not only Americans who need security," she said. "It is the world looking at us and saying, this is the democracy that we look to for guidance. We are the symbol of freedom around the world. And if we do not hold this president accountable, if we do not remove him from office, we cannot underestimate the damage we will do to the American experience and experiment of democracy."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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