January 13, 2021

The House Has Impeached Donald Trump—Again

Trump is the first president in US history to be impeached twice.

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The House of Representatives just voted to impeach Donald Trump on one charge of “incitement of insurrection,” making him the first president in history to be impeached twice.

Following Trump’s incitement of the violent mob that stormed the US Capitol last week—leaving five people, including a police officer, dead—House Democrats drew up an impeachment resolution and brought it to a vote just days before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration. The article of impeachment passed 232–197, with 10 Republicans siding with Democrats.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will not reconvene the Senate before January 19, a spokesperson said Wednesday, meaning that Trump’s impeachment trial will extend into Biden’s first term. The New York Times has reported that McConnell privately approves of impeachment, but McConnell reportedly said in a letter Wednesday that he hasn’t yet decided whether he will vote to convict the president.

It’s unclear how likely it is that the Senate will muster the two-thirds majority needed to convict Trump, but the effort could have broader bipartisan support than Trump’s first impeachment, when only one GOP senator, Mitt Romney (Utah), voted to convict. This time around, Sens. Pat Toomey (R-Penn.) and Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), in addition to Romney, have expressed a willingness to consider voting to convict.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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