House speaker said inquiry revealed a failure by president to uphold the law and his actions are a ‘violation of the public trust’

Quoting from the Declaration of Independence and the founding fathers about the danger of a president one day betraying the country’s trust to foreign powers, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, announced on Thursday that she was directing the judiciary committee to draft articles of impeachment against Donald Trump.

“The president leaves us no choice but to act,” Pelosi said. “Sadly, but with confidence and humility, with allegiance to our founders and a heart full of love for America, today I am asking our chairman to proceed with articles of impeachment.”

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In a brief statement delivered from the House speaker’s balcony and invoking the history of the United States as a land free of kings, Pelosi said that the impeachment investigation must move forward after revealing a failure by Trump to uphold the law and defend the constitution.

“If we allow a president to be above the law, we do so surely at the peril of our Republic,” she said. “In America, nobody is above the law.”

About an hour later, Trump tweeted in reply. “The Do Nothing, Radical Left Democrats have just announced that they are going to seek to Impeach me over NOTHING,” he wrote in part. “This will mean that the beyond important and seldom used act of Impeachment will be used routinely to attack future Presidents. That is not what our Founders had in mind. The good thing is that the Republicans have NEVER been more united. We will win!”

Pelosi said that Trump had engaged in misconduct on a historic scale.

“The facts are uncontested,” Pelosi said. “The president abused his power for his own personal political benefit at the expense of our national security by withholding military aid and a crucial Oval Office meeting in exchange for the announcement of an investigation into his political rival.

“The president’s actions are a profound violation of the public trust. The president’s actions have seriously violated the constitution, especially when he says and acts upon the belief that ‘article 2 says I can do whatever I want’. No.”

If it has not already begun, the judiciary committee would now draft articles of impeachment for approval as early as next week. A vote on whether to impeach Trump could follow on the floor of the House before a 20 December holiday break.

Trump could become the second president in the last 150 years and only the third of 44 US presidents to be impeached.

In her somber delivery and methodical quotation of the founding fathers James Madison, George Mason and Benjamin Franklin, Pelosi hewed to a Democratic strategy of framing the impeachment inquiry as a joyless task made imperative by the historic dimensions of Trump’s abuse of power.

Republicans have sought to defend Trump by attacking the process by which Democrats have pursued impeachment and criticizing the swift pace of the inquiry, but they so far have not managed a defense of Trump on the merits more substantive than the president’s repeated assertion that his conduct has been “perfect”.

In recent days Pelosi, the most senior Democrat in Congress, had been surveying her caucus, especially moderate members from swing districts, on their views on impeachment. Support for impeachment nationally jumped sharply after Democrats announced their inquiry in September and then settled to 48-44% support on average, according to FiveThirtyEight.

On Thursday, Pelosi, who has the unilateral power to move the impeachment process forward and to dictate its terms, indicated that Democrats in Congress had replied to her query with vocal support for impeachment.

“In the course of today’s events it becomes necessary for us to address, among other grievances, the president’s failure to faithfully uphold the law,” she said.

Pelosi spoke after the first day of public impeachment hearings in the judiciary committee, which took up the process after more than a month of work in chairman Adam Schiff’s intelligence committee.

Schiff referred the investigation to the judiciary committee on Tuesday with a 300-page report laying out the committee’s finding that Trump had “abused the power of his office for personal and political gain, at the expense of [US] national security”.

The judiciary committee chairman, Jerry Nadler, said on Wednesday that “never before has a president engaged in a course of conduct that included all the acts that most concerned the framers”.

Republicans on the judiciary committee accused Democrats of rushing the process to impeach Trump before voting begins in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary race in February.

Pelosi said Congress had no choice but to act because Trump was still trying to subvert the 2020 election.

“Our democracy is what is at stake,” she said. “The president leaves us no choice but to act, because he is trying to corrupt once again the election for his own benefit.”

Pelosi did not indicate what might be the precise nature of the potential articles of impeachment. Democrats have signalled three possible offenses: abuse of power, obstruction of Congress and obstruction of justice.

If Trump were to be impeached in the House, the proceedings would move to the senate for a trial to be presided over by US supreme court’s chief justice, John Roberts. About 20 Republican senators would have to defect to convict Trump and remove him from office.