WASHINGTON (AP) — On Capitol Hill, House Republicans were all-in Wednesday on House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s announcement of an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. Down Pennsylvania Avenue, the president was holding forth at the White House on the importance of bipartisanship in fighting cancer — and ignoring shouted questions about impeachment.

It was a clear sign of Biden’s broader reelection pitch: the idea that if he simply does his job and governs, Americans will see the results and reward him with four more years. Never mind all that pesky impeachment talk across town.

“Look, I’ve got a job to do,” the president said later, away from the cameras, to a roomful of supporters at a reelection fundraiser in Virginia in his most extensive comments yet about the inquiry. “I get up every day — not a joke — not focusing on impeachment. I’ve got a job to do. I’ve got to deal with the issues that affect the American people every single solitary day.”

The we’re-all-better-than-this attitude is central to the White House strategy for countering impeachment proceedings being launched ahead of the 2024 election by Republicans who are trying to link Biden to the business dealings of his son, Hunter. This as the GOP tries to shift attention away from Donald Trump’s own legal troubles.

The White House has been preparing for a potential impeachment essentially since Republicans won control of the House in the November elections. It has roughly two dozen staff members in the counsel’s office detailed to the matter. The new chief counsel, Ed Siskel, is a former Obama administration attorney who helped craft the response to the congressional investigations into the 2012 Benghazi attack that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador.

The White House impeachment playbook so far has been: Dismiss. Compartmentalize. Scold.

That is, shrug off the charges as baseless, stay focused on policy, leave the impeachment question to the lawyers and chide those who give too much credence to it all.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had dismissed the inquiry as a “political stunt” and deflected questions about the details to the White House counsel’s office. House Republicans? “We think they should work with us on legitimate issues — things that actually matter to the American people,” she said.

Still, the impeachment inquiry is a tricky matter for Biden because the thing is so personal, focused on his relationship with his 53-year-old son, a source of pain and pride whose questionable choices have landed the president here.

The White House has said that Joe Biden was not involved in his son’s business affairs. And so far, despite months of investigations, Republicans have unearthed no significant evidence of wrongdoing by the elder Biden, who spoke often to his son and as vice president did stop by a business dinner with his son’s associates. Hunter Biden is not a public figure.

Hunter Biden’s attorneys were on message, too.

“Rather than waste time and taxpayer dollars on this political sideshow, Mr. McCarthy should lead the Congress to do real work of governing,” Abbe Lowell said in a statement. “Americans deserve better.”

Before now, most of the questions from reporters fielded by the president on the topic were about a criminal investigation into Hunter’s business dealings running parallel to the House investigations. His responses were brief and upbeat: He’s done nothing wrong; we support him.

While the overall White House strategy is not expected to change, this week’s announcement of a formal inquiry shifts the dynamics somewhat. It will be harder to just shrug off questions. And the Biden reelection campaign is starting to blast out fundraising emails and texts denouncing the probe.

Even the donation pitches reflect the broader strategy. An email from Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday made this plea to potential donors: “It’s clear: They’re going to throw everything they have at Joe, because they know they can’t run against our record. If you’re waiting for a moment to show your support for him, trust me when I say: This is it.”

Threats of impeachment used to be rare so there’s not much basis for comparison. While Trump was twice impeached, neither was about personal conduct. The inquiry into Biden is more akin to the late 1990s impeachment of President Bill Clinton led by the Republican House speaker at the time, Newt Gingrich of Georgia. In that endeavor, the White House stonewalled, making then-special counsel Lanny Davis the public face of its response. By his account, it worked.

“Take a look at how things went for Speaker Gingrich and the GOP House members after the midterm congressional elections in November 1998,” Davis emailed Wednesday. “They lost five seats to the Democrats, defying U.S. history.”

He predicted McCarthy would suffer the same fate, praising the White House response so far.

“The Biden White House has begun to speak forcefully to rebut the misinformation and false innuendo that is the only basis Speaker McCarthy and House leaders can express as the basis of a House inquiry.”

Andrew Johnson was the other president impeached. Trump is the only president to face it twice — acquitted both times — and he is the first to face criminal charges in four separate indictments, including for trying to overturn the 2020 election he lost to Biden.

Rep. Ted Lieu, a top Democrat, said Wednesday there are no similarities between the Democratic impeachments of Trump and the Republicans’ pursuit of Biden.

“We had mountains of evidence,” he said. “That’s why articles of impeachment … were passed, and that’s why we had a bipartisan vote of U.S. senators to convict Donald Trump.” Lieu added that while the Democratic majority didn’t ultimately have enough support to remove Trump from office, they were able to get a handful of members from the other side to join them.

McCarthy said that House investigations so far “paint a picture of a culture of corruption” around the Biden family as Republicans probe the business dealings of Hunter Biden from before the Democratic president took office.

“These are allegations of abuse of power, obstruction and corruption, and they warrant further investigation by the House of Representatives,” McCarthy said at the Capitol.

Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., says he doesn’t want the inquiry to last into election season. “I hope not. I hope we can get it through as quickly as possible. I’m an impatient person. We wouldn’t have to do impeachment inquiry if this administration would cooperate with us.”

As impeachment talk swirled elsewhere, Biden and first lady Jill Biden gathered with top administration officials on Wednesday afternoon to talk about battling cancer, one of the president’s top goals. Their elder son, Beau, died of brain cancer.

After the Bidens finished speaking, reporters erupted with questions about the impeachment inquiry. Four boom mics dangled above the table, ready to catch any response from the president.

He didn’t respond.

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Bill Mehlem recalls a time when his politics generally aligned with conservatives, enthusiastically backing Republicans such as John McCain during his 2008 presidential campaign.

But the stay-at-home dad has grown dismayed with the tempestuous GOP molded by former President Donald Trump, who is now seeking a return to the White House. And the threat of a Republican-led impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden’s family finances and the churning U.S. House probes of his son, Hunter Biden, have left Mehlem indignant, angry and remembering why he’s a political independent. “It’s all about revenge politics to keep Trump’s base” engaged for the 2024 elections, Mehlem said. “It’s all about nothing.”

That sentiment reflects the gamble House Republicans are making as they consider moving forward with an impeachment inquiry against Biden. The talk delights some Republicans who are eager for retribution following several indictments of Trump in recent months, including two federal cases that charge him with hoarding classified documents and working to overturn the 2020 election.

But for many of those outside of the die-hard GOP base, the impeachment chatter is a turn off. It’s especially risky for the party in California, where five House Republicans occupy Democratic-leaning districts that Biden won in 2020. Those districts alone could help Democrats retake the House majority next year.

In one crucial battleground — sprawling through suburbs and high desert north of Los Angeles — GOP Rep. Mike Garcia will need to overcome a nearly 13-point Democratic registration advantage to claim a fourth term and remain the sole Republican House member anchored in heavily Democratic Los Angeles County. In suburban Santa Clarita, at the heart of Garcia’s district, Mehlem said he saw no chance he would support Garcia — in part because the congressman joined House Republicans who attempted to reject electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania after the 2020 presidential election.

But in a Congress often stalemated by partisan division, he has his doubts about Democrats, too. Despite its reputation as a Democratic stronghold, a string of California House districts has proved volatile in recent elections, highlighting their importance to both parties as they seek the majority. Democrats seized seven seats from Republicans in 2018, then Republicans reclaimed four from Democrats in 2020. In the 2022 elections, California Republicans gained one seat, from 11 to 12, while Democrats dropped to 40 seats from 42, after California lost a House seat in reapportionment after the 2020 census. Overall, the state dropped to 52 districts from 53.

With the chamber divided 222-212, with one vacancy, only a handful of seats separate the two parties. Also in play: a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act that is expected to lead to new, Democratic-leaning districts in Alabama and possibly elsewhere.

In Santa Clarita, Democrat Bonnie Untaran said the House should be debating skyrocketing rents and home prices and lowering the cost of living, not focusing on the Bidens. “It’s starting to get unrelatable to our daily life,” she said. Untaran said she will consider voting for the Republican Garcia — a former Navy combat pilot and the son of a Mexican immigrant father — providing he talks about local issues.

The importance of pocketbook issues was echoed by former Republican congressman Doug Ose, who said GOP candidates need to stick to what families talk about at kitchen tables. When Republicans carried state swing districts in 2022, “they were not talking about the Hunter Biden investigation or a Joe Biden impeachment.

They were talking about bread-and-butter issues, and that’s where I think the voters are,” said Ose, who represented a Sacramento-area district. “Why would you go talk about something else?” he asked. Indeed, Republican candidates have had success in state swing districts in recent years by making elections a referendum on California itself under progressive Democratic rule, pointing to pervasive homelessness in major cities, vexing crime rates and wallet-sapping taxes.

In the middle of a California summer, with voters distracted by barbecues and baseball games, it’s unclear how many people are following the day-to-day scrum on Capitol Hill, although Congress is now in recess for the month. Independent voter Hamilton Grier, a father of two, said he intentionally avoids political news so he won’t be distracted from his marketing job. He had “no idea” what the Hunter Biden investigations were about.

Grier worries about inflation, and the world to come for his kids, a 1-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old boy. He expects to shift his attention to politics when the elections get closer. “I’m scared for them,” he said. “I don’t know what the future will be like.” In recent posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, Garcia writes about rising gas prices, inflation, a porous border with Mexico and climbing mortgage rates — without mentioning Hunter Biden.

Veteran Democratic consultant Bill Carrick said GOP House candidates already are facing two challenges in heavily Democratic California: Trump, if he becomes the nominee, is widely unpopular in the state outside his conservative base, and suburban woman are likely to see an elevated turnout, driven by concern over abortion rights after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling. With the focus on the Bidens, McCarthy “has strategically taken the position that he is going to stoke up the base in a lot of the rural, red-state areas,” Carrick said.

But California isn’t Texas or Utah, where conservative politics tend to dominate. “The current McCarthy strategy doesn’t really account for that,” Carrick said, adding that House control will likely turn on swing districts in states like California and New York. But there is also a risk for Democrats, depending on what the investigations turn up. And voters say Republicans like Garcia can help themselves by focusing on things that matter back home. Democrat Laura Stotler, a retired government employee, said she plans to vote for Garcia, based on his attention to district issues.

She doesn’t always agree with his votes, but she credits him with showing up at events she has attended, and his office responded when she made an inquiry about pending legislation honoring women telephone operators who served during World War I. As for Washington news, she avoids it. She said she doesn’t need the stress. “I can’t keep track of who is getting indicted for what,” she said. “I’m just so tired of it.”

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, who rose to national prominence as the lead prosecutor in President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, said Thursday he is running for the Senate seat held by long-serving Democrat Dianne Feinstein.

The 2024 race is quickly emerging as a marquee Senate contest, even though the 89-year-old Feinstein, the oldest member of Congress, has yet to announce if she will seek another term, though her retirement is widely expected. Schiff is jumping in two weeks after Rep. Katie Porter became the first candidate to declare her campaign for the safe Democratic seat.

Schiff, a former federal prosecutor, made clear he intends to anchor his candidacy to his role as Trump’s chief antagonist in Congress. In his campaign kickoff video, he said the “biggest job of his life” was serving as impeachment manager, and he promised to continue to be a “fighter” for democracy.

“If our democracy isn’t delivering for Americans, they’ll look for alternatives, like a dangerous demagogue who promises that he alone can fix it,” Schiff said of Trump, who has announced his 2024 campaign for the presidency.

Feinstein, a former San Francisco mayor who joined the Senate in 1992, told reporters in Washington this week that she will make a decision about 2024 in the “next couple of months.”

The jockeying for the seat has created a politically awkward dynamic for Feinstein, who has broken gender barriers throughout her decadeslong career in local and national politics. In recent years, questions have arisen about her cognitive health and memory, though she has defended her effectiveness in representing a state that is home to nearly 40 million people.

Schiff, 62, said in an interview Thursday that he had spoken to Feinstein a day earlier to inform her about his plans.

“I want to make sure that everything I did was respectful of her and that I did so with her knowledge and her blessing,” Schiff told The Associated Press.

Asked if he was aware of the senator’s plans, Schiff said, “I don’t want to presume to speak for Sen. Feinstein, and I think she’s earned the right to announce her decision when she’s ready to make that announcement.”

Schiff was first elected to Congress in 2000 and represents parts of Hollywood. He has been a frequent target of conservatives — Trump in particular — since the then-GOP-led House Intelligence Committee he served on started investigating Trump’s ties to Russia in the 2016 election. Schiff appeared frequently on television to question Trump’s actions.

That criticism intensified when Democrats took the House majority in early 2019 and he became the committee chair, and it reached a full-on roar with his role in the impeachment investigation of Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. Trump was impeached in December 2019 on charges he abused the power of the presidency to investigate rival Joe Biden and obstructed Congress’ investigation.

In an impassioned plea to the Senate in early 2020, Schiff urged Trump’s removal from office and framed the choice in moral terms. “If right doesn’t matter, we’re lost,” he said at the time.

“You know you can’t trust this president do what’s right for this country,” Schiff said. “You can trust he will do what’s right for Donald Trump. He’ll do it now. He’s done it before. He’ll do it for the next several months, he’ll do it in the election if he’s allowed to. This is why if you find him guilty you must find that he should be removed. Because right matters.”

The Republican-led Senate acquitted Trump of both charges. In 2021, he became the first president in U.S. history to be impeached twice, this time for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol after he lost the 2020 election. He was again acquitted by the Senate.

Republicans are still angry about Schiff’s starring role at the impeachment trial, with new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy accusing him of using his leadership position to “lie to the American public again and again.” McCarthy, R-Calif., said this week that he intended to block Schiff from continuing his service on the House Intelligence Committee.

With the centrist Feinstein in the twilight of her career, the race in the heavily Democratic state already is shaping up as a showcase for an ambitious, younger generation on the party’s left wing.

Both Schiff and Porter are nationally recognized — Schiff through his leading impeachment role and Porter, a favorite of the party’s progressive wing, through her tough questioning of CEOs and other witnesses at congressional hearings. Each is also a formidable small-dollar fundraiser.

Neither has run statewide before, and each would face the challenge of becoming better known beyond their Southern California districts. Democrats are expected to dominate the contest — a Republican hasn’t won a statewide race in California since 2006, and the past two Senate elections had only Democrats on the November ballot.

The field is expected to grow, with other possible contenders including Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee, a former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Asked how he would stand out in what is expected to be a crowded field, Schiff said he would emphasize his central role of national struggles over democracy and the economy.

“I think that record of leadership, that record of staunch defense of our democracy, and the way that I’ve championed an economy that works for everyone, I think are a powerful record to run on,” he said.

In his announcement video, Schiff mixed shots of his family and highlights from his courtroom work with video from the impeachment proceedings and clips of Trump and other Republicans.

He warns that the threat of extremism is not over.

“Today’s Republican Party is gutting the middle class, threatening our democracy” Schiff says. “They aren’t going to stop. We have to stop them.”

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In the still shaken and heavily guarded U.S. Capitol, thousands of National Guard troops still wander the halls. Glass windows remain broken. Doors swing without handles.

And in the grand marble hallways, which amplified the shouts of insurrectionists just over a month ago, there is an uncomfortable silence. The end of Donald Trump’s impeachment trial is only the beginning of Congress’ reckoning with the Jan. 6 attack, a violent ransacking of the Capitol that resulted in five deaths.

While the Senate has spoken on Trump’s role in the violence, acquitting him of insurrection after a wrenching five days of impeachment testimony, lawmakers who fled the violent mob are still demanding answers. How, they ask, could security could have failed so catastrophically? And how can they ensure it doesn’t happen again? “This is not a moment where we pivot and move on,” Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy said Saturday, just after the acquittal vote in the impeachment trial. “You cannot view today as the last page of the book. What we were talking about today was the accountability for the leader of the mob.

But we still have to protect against future mobs, we still have to go after members of the mob.” The coming weeks — and likely the coming months and years — will force lawmakers to work through the many unanswered questions about the attack. It’s a complex task that will test whether lawmakers can set aside partisanship, which flared anew during the impeachment process, and turn the harrowing violence that threatened their lives into a restorative moment for their institution.

Since Saturday’s vote, Democratic leaders have said they will take steps to form an independent investigative commission modeled after one that studied security failures before the 9/11 attacks. Two Senate committees have summoned top security officials to testify, the beginning of a comprehensive look at what went wrong.

Separately, retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré is leading an ongoing review of the Capitol’s security process, commissioned by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And several other panels are looking into different aspects of the insurrection, including intelligence lapses and whether it was coordinated. “Security is the order of the day,” Pelosi said in a letter to her House colleagues on Monday. “The security of our country, the security of our Capitol which is the temple of our democracy, and the security of our members.” Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, one of seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump, said Sunday that there should be a “complete investigation” into what happened. “What was known, who knew it and when they knew, all that, because that builds the basis so this never happens again,” he said.

Legislation to set up the commission could be introduced in the House as soon as this week, according to a person familiar with the process and granted anonymity to discuss the planning. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is expected to support the commission, and a spokesman said Tuesday that he “looks forward to it being approved by both chambers with overwhelming bipartisan support.” At the White House, press secretary Jen Psaki said President Joe Biden supports it as well. Biden “backs efforts to shed additional light on the facts to ensure something like that never happens again,” she said. In her letter to Democratic colleagues, Pelosi said the House will also put forth supplemental spending to boost security at the Capitol.

The first congressional hearings will come next week, with two Senate panels calling in the former chief of Capitol Police and the former heads of security for the House and Senate, all three of whom resigned immediately after the attack. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the Senate Rules Committee announced Tuesday that they had invited former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, former Senate Sergeant at Arms Michael Stenger and former House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving to the hearing, along with Robert Contee, the chief of the District of Columbia’s Metropolitan Police Department.

The hearing will begin a broad examination of the security failures that led to the breach. In addition to the Feb. 23 hearing, the two committees are pressing for information from almost two dozen agencies and departments about the response. The security breakdown on Jan. 6, as the House and Senate met for a joint session to count electoral votes, was severe. The Capitol Police had planned for a free speech demonstration, not a violent insurrection by Trump supporters to overturn the election. With the diminished security presence, the rioters not only breached the Capitol but entered the Senate chamber minutes after senators had fled. The rioters also tried to break through the doors of the House chamber with lawmakers still inside.

Outside, they engaged in hand-to-hand combat with an outnumbered, ill-prepared Capitol Police force, which was eventually assisted by D.C. police. The acting chief of the Capitol Police, Yogananda Pittman, has acknowledged the department knew before Jan. 6 that extremists and white supremacists could be in the crowd outside the Capitol. But she and other leaders are still pointing fingers about who was responsible for not bolstering security.

The hearings and investigations — which will be conducted in both the House and Senate by several committees — are expected to help inform decisions about the wide perimeter around the building that has been in place since Jan. 6. The show of force has also angered D.C. residents who have to navigate blocked-off roads, and it has frustrated some lawmakers in both parties who believe the building should be open to the public. Outside of Congress, federal law enforcement has arrested more than 200 people who broke into the Capitol, and others have suggested that Trump himself could be criminally liable for his efforts to persuade officials to change election results and encourage his supporters to overturn his defeat.

In a blistering speech that came immediately after his vote to acquit Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pinned responsibility for the riots on Trump and said he didn’t “yet” get away with anything. “We have a criminal justice system in this country, we have civil litigation,” McConnell said. Still, inside the building, people are still dealing with the aftermath. Maine Sen. Angus King, an Independent who voted to convict the former president, said he’s most worried about presidents who come after Trump, and what lessons they will take from the Senate’s decision to acquit. “I do feel sad,” he said.

“This gave us an opportunity for closure which we missed.” Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski reflected on the sights and sounds she heard on Jan. 6 as she walked out of the chamber after the vote. Like Cassidy, she was one of the seven Republicans who voted to convict. “It hits me,” Murkowski said in an interview with Politico, remembering the trash that scattered the same floors she was walking on as she spoke. “I hear the sound of the of the Capitol Police officer who was retching in the bathroom because he had just gotten sprayed with pepper spray and was trying to wash it out. … We’re all witnesses to this. And you have to bear witness to it, I guess.” ___ Associated Press writers Josh Boak and Michael Balsamo contributed to this report.

MARY CLARE JALONICK • AP News

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump was impeached by the U.S. House for a historic second time Wednesday, charged with “incitement of insurrection” over the deadly mob siege of the Capitol in a swift and stunning collapse of his final days in office.

With the Capitol secured by armed National Guard troops inside and out, the House voted 232-197 to impeach Trump. The proceedings moved at lightning speed, with lawmakers voting just one week after violent pro-Trump loyalists stormed the U.S. Capitol, egged on by the president’s calls for them to “fight like hell” against the election results.

Ten Republicans fled Trump, joining Democrats who said he needed to be held accountable and warned ominously of a “clear and present danger” if Congress should leave him unchecked before Democrat Joe Biden’s inauguration Jan. 20.

Trump is the only U.S. president to be twice impeached. It was the most bipartisan presidential impeachment in modern times, more so than against Bill Clinton in 1998.

The Capitol insurrection stunned and angered lawmakers, who were sent scrambling for safety as the mob descended, and it revealed the fragility of the nation’s history of peaceful transfers of power. The riot also forced a reckoning among some Republicans, who have stood by Trump throughout his presidency and largely allowed him to spread false attacks against the integrity of the 2020 election.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi invoked Abraham Lincoln and the Bible, imploring lawmakers to uphold their oath to defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign “and domestic.”

She said of Trump: “He must go, he is a clear and present danger to the nation that we all love.”

Holed up at the White House, watching the proceedings on TV, Trump later released a video statement in which he made no mention at all of the impeachment but appealed to his supporters to refrain from any further violence or disruption of Biden’s inauguration.

“Like all of you, I was shocked and deeply saddened by the calamity at the Capitol last week,” he said, his first condemnation of the attack. He appealed for unity “to move forward” and said, “Mob violence goes against everything I believe in and everything our movement stands for. … No true supporter of mine could ever disrespect law enforcement.”

Trump was first impeached by the House in 2019 over his dealings with Ukraine, but the Senate voted in 2020 acquit. He is the first president to be impeached twice. None has been convicted by the Senate, but Republicans said Wednesday that could change in the rapidly shifting political environment as officeholders, donors, big business and others peel away from the defeated president.

Biden said in a statement after the vote that it was his hope the Senate leadership “will find a way to deal with their Constitutional responsibilities on impeachment while also working on the other urgent business of this nation.”

The soonest Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell would start an impeachment trial is next Tuesday, the day before Trump is already set to leave the White House, McConnell’s office said. The legislation is also intended to prevent Trump from ever running again.

McConnell believes Trump committed impeachable offenses and considers the Democrats’ impeachment drive an opportunity to reduce the divisive, chaotic president’s hold on the GOP, a Republican strategist told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

McConnell told major donors over the weekend that he was through with Trump, said the strategist, who demanded anonymity to describe McConnell’s conversations.

In a note to colleagues Wednesday, McConnell said he had “not made a final decision on how I will vote.”

Unlike his first time, Trump faces this impeachment as a weakened leader, having lost his own reelection as well as the Senate Republican majority.

Even Trump ally Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, shifted his position and said Wednesday the president bears responsibility for the horrifying day at the Capitol.

In making a case for the “high crimes and misdemeanors” demanded in the Constitution, the four-page impeachment resolution approved Wednesday relies on Trump’s own incendiary rhetoric and the falsehoods he spread about Biden’s election victory, including at a rally near the White House on the day of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

A Capitol Police officer died from injuries suffered in the riot, and police shot and killed a woman during the siege. Three other people died in what authorities said were medical emergencies. The riot delayed the tally of Electoral College votes that was the last step in finalizing Biden’s victory.

Ten Republican lawmakers, including third-ranking House GOP leader Liz Cheney of Wyoming, voted to impeach Trump, cleaving the Republican leadership, and the party itself.

Cheney, whose father is the former Republican vice president, said of Trump’s actions summoning the mob that “there has never been a greater betrayal by a President” of his office.

Trump was said to be livid with perceived disloyalty from McConnell and Cheney.

With the team around Trump hollowed out and his Twitter account silenced by the social media company, the president was deeply frustrated that he could not hit back, according to White House officials and Republicans close to the West Wing who weren’t authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.

From the White House, Trump leaned on Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to push Republican senators to resist, while chief of staff Mark Meadows called some of his former colleagues on Capitol Hill.

The president’s sturdy popularity with the GOP lawmakers’ constituents still had some sway, and most House Republicans voted not to impeach.

Security was exceptionally tight at the Capitol, with tall fences around the complex. Metal-detector screenings were required for lawmakers entering the House chamber, where a week earlier lawmakers huddled inside as police, guns drawn, barricaded the door from rioters.

“We are debating this historic measure at a crime scene,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass.

During the debate, some Republicans repeated the falsehoods spread by Trump about the election and argued that the president has been treated unfairly by Democrats from the day he took office.

Other Republicans argued the impeachment was a rushed sham and complained about a double standard applied to his supporters but not to the liberal left. Some simply appealed for the nation to move on.

Rep. Tom McClintock of California said, “Every movement has a lunatic fringe.”

Yet Democratic Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo. and others recounted the harrowing day as rioters pounded on the chamber door trying to break in. Some called it a “coup” attempt.

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., contended that Trump was “capable of starting a civil war.”

Conviction and removal of Trump would require a two-thirds vote in the Senate, which will be evenly divided. Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania joined Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska over the weekend in calling for Trump to “go away as soon as possible.”

Fending off concerns that an impeachment trial would bog down his first days in office, Biden is encouraging senators to divide their time between taking taking up his priorities of confirming his nominees and approving COVID-19 relief while also conducting the trial.

The impeachment bill draws from Trump’s own false statements about his election defeat to Biden. Judges across the country, including some nominated by Trump, have repeatedly dismissed cases challenging the election results, and former Attorney General William Barr, a Trump ally, has said there was no sign of widespread fraud.

The House had first tried to persuade Vice President Mike Pence and the Cabinet to invoke their authority under the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. Pence declined to do so, but the House passed the resolution anyway.

The impeachment bill also details Trump’s pressure on state officials in Georgia to “find” him more votes.

While some have questioned impeaching the president so close to the end of his term, there is precedent. In 1876, during the Ulysses Grant administration, War Secretary William Belknap was impeached by the House the day he resigned, and the Senate convened a trial months later. He was acquitted.

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It’s easy to forget what the Senate impeachment trial is supposed to be about.

It’s not a fight over whether the Senate will call a couple of witnesses that the House couldn’t, or didn’t bother to, obtain on its own.

The underlying question is whether the United States Senate will impose the most severe sanction it has ever inflicted on any chief executive, voting to remove a president for the first time in the history of the country and doing it about 10 months from his reelection bid.

This is a truly radical step that, if it ever came about, would do more damage to the legitimacy of our political system than President Donald Trump’s underlying offense.

If Trump were actually convicted, the 2020 election would proceed under a cloud of illegitimacy. Tens of millions of Trump voters wouldn’t accept the result. They’d see it as an inside job to deny the incumbent president a chance to run for reelection, without a single voter having a direct say. The GOP would be brought to its knees by internal bloodletting, a prospect that Democrats surely would welcome, especially given that it would deliver them the presidency. Republicans would be out for revenge, and instead of a halcyon return to normalcy, our politics would be even more poisonous than before.

Democrats argue that Trump can’t stay in office because he’s such a threat to the integrity of our elections. But the portrayal of Trump’s Ukraine scheme as “election interference,” as the Democrats always say, is tendentious and inapt. If the Ukrainians had complied with the Trump team’s pressure to announce an investigation of the energy company Burisma, it wouldn’t have changed one vote in 2020, even if former Vice President Joe Biden eventually is the Democratic nominee.

The fact is that impeachment, as my colleague Ramesh Ponnuru points out, is a weak check on the presidency. It requires a supermajority of the country to remove a president and one of the political parties being willing to nullify the choice of its own voters for president and an election he won. Both the Trump and Clinton impeachments show that this is a hateful prospect for the president’s party.

The best case for what the Democrats are doing now is that Republicans impeached Clinton in the 1990s with little or no hope for conviction in the Senate, and turnabout is fair play. But it’s time to conclude that this is a failed model of impeachment. It depends on a process that diverts the time and energy of the nation’s political institutions as if the survival of a presidency is at stake, even when everyone knows it isn’t.

Congress can hold hearings on a president’s conduct, subpoena witnesses and documents and fight the executive with full force if they aren’t produced, hold officials in contempt, withhold funding, deny the executive traditional forms of interbranch comity and, if it wants to put down a long-lasting marker, censure the president.

But it needn’t drag the country through a melodrama based on the fiction that any president who hasn’t crashed to, say, a 25% approval rating is going to be removed by his own party — in other words, exactly what Adam Schiff and his managers are doing now.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.

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Nancy Pelosi said she undertook impeachment “prayerfully,” and apparently what she was praying was that she could get it over with as soon as possible.

The House is preparing to send a flagrantly incomplete factual record to the Senate as the basis of an effort to remove a sitting president for the first time in our history.

Pelosi has affected a posture of heavy-heartedness since the outset of the process, saying that “there’s no joy in this” and urging a somber spirit as Democrats pursue the facts wherever they may take them — so long as that’s not too far into an election year.

In substantive terms, the Democrats had a good set of public hearings before Adam Schiff’s intelligence committee in recent weeks — with one gaping hole. They didn’t have anyone with first-hand knowledge of Trump’s directives on Ukraine or his state of mind. The closest was EU ambassador Gordon Sondland, who, still, could only “presume” a quid pro quo over the defense aid.

There are people who probably don’t have to presume, and Sondland named some of them: Trump’s personal counsel Rudy Giuliani, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. They all were closer to this than Sondland, yet Democrats are happy to make the guy from the outer bounds of the inner circle their “star witness” and forgo the inner circle. To get the more central witnesses requires litigation since they all have at least colorable claims of privilege. The Democrats don’t want to wait for the courts.

The minimum requirement of a historic impeachment case, only the fourth in our history, would seem to be a complete account of the facts. Schiff used to say as much: “We have to flesh out all of the facts for the American people. The seriousness of the matter and the danger to our country demands nothing less.” Now, the seriousness and the danger are demanding that Democrats rush things along so the president can be impeached by the end of the year.

(The Check-the-Box)

No matter how often Democrats say, “Let’s honor the Constitution,” their actions say, “Let’s check the box.”

Democrats have had the difficulty from the beginning of trying to build an edifice of impeachment and removal atop the narrow foundation of the Ukraine episode, and now they aren’t even going to finish the edifice, content with what they could complete in a two-month investigation largely reliant on the testimony of people who weren’t around for the main events (former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch) or were out of the loop (former Trump Russia adviser Fiona Hill).

With every day that passes it becomes a little more absurd to say Trump should be impeached and removed when the public can make its own verdict in the election. Besides, Democrats know that impeachment is going nowhere in the Senate, so why bother locking down the case to make it worthy of the gravity of the process?

They might as well go with what they have, a partisan impeachment pursued on a political timetable. During Bill Clinton’s impeachment, it was his defenders who were saying, “Let’s move on.” Now, it’s Trump’s pursuers, who prayerfully and sorrowfully want to get impeachment over with.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.

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