Democrats set to take historic step of impeaching Trump

House Democrats are poised to take the historic step of impeaching President Trump on Wednesday, marking what will be the most partisan vote to remove a sitting president since the country's founding.

The highly divisive vote — packed into the very last week of the legislative year — is sure to exacerbate tensions in Washington and around the country heading into a crucial election year, when echoes of impeachment could play an outsize role up and down the ballot.

The Democrats’ decision to bring impeachment to the floor caps months of House investigations into Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, and will kick the impeachment process over to the Senate, where GOP leaders are expected to stage a trial early next year that's likely to end in Trump's acquittal.

Democratic leaders, after rejecting impeachment for much of the year, reversed course in September, following allegations from a government whistleblower that Trump had leveraged U.S. military aid and a White House meeting to press Ukrainian officials to investigate his political rivals.

The House probe led to the drafting of two impeachment articles charging Trump with abusing power and obstructing Congress. Wednesday’s votes on those measures — while energizing the party’s liberal base — pose a political risk for a number of centrist Democrats, particularly the 30 lawmakers representing districts carried by Trump in 2016.

Even so, those same vulnerable Democrats have overwhelmingly dismissed the political threat and emerged, one by one, in recent days to announce their support for both articles, all but ensuring easy passage when they hit the floor.

“It became clear to me that he did, in fact, withhold critical military aid from a security partner in order to investigate — or attempt to have a foreign power investigate — an opponent of his in our democratic election process,” freshman Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.), a Navy veteran from a Trump-won district, said Tuesday, just after announcing her support for the articles.