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As the House prepared to move forward on Wednesday with a vote to formally charge President Trump with inciting violence against the government of the United States, a small but growing number of Republicans said they support the effort.
The vote is set to come exactly one week after the United States Capitol was breached by an angry mob of Trump loyalists.
In 2019, not a single Republican voted in favor of impeachment. House Republican leaders have said they would not formally lobby members of the party against voting to impeach the president this time, and these are the Republicans who have said that they intend to vote for impeachment.
Representative John Katko
Representative John Katko of New York was the first Republican to publicly announce that he would back the impeachment proceedings. A former federal prosecutor, Mr. Katko said he looked at the facts of the siege, which began as lawmakers were working to certify the presidential election results.
“It cannot be ignored that President Trump encouraged this insurrection — both on social media ahead of Jan. 6, and in his speech that day,” Mr. Katko said in a statement. “By deliberately promoting baseless theories suggesting the election was somehow stolen, the president created a combustible environment of misinformation, disenfranchisement, and division. When this manifested in violent acts on Jan. 6, he refused to promptly and forcefully call it off, putting countless lives in danger.”
Not holding the president accountable for his actions would be “a direct threat to the future of our democracy,” he said.
Representative Liz Cheney
Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, said on Tuesday evening that she would vote to impeach, citing the president’s role in an insurrection that caused “death and destruction in the most sacred space in our Republic.”
“The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” she said in a statement. “Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the president. The president could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”
Representative Adam Kinzinger
Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a frequent critic of Mr. Trump, joined his Republican colleagues on Tuesday evening, saying the nation was in uncharted waters. He said that Mr. Trump “encouraged an angry mob to storm the United States Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes.”
“There is no doubt in my mind that the president of the United States broke his oath of office and incited this insurrection,” he said in a statement, adding that if the president’s actions “are not worthy of impeachment, then what is an impeachable offense?”
Representative Fred Upton
Representative Fred Upton of Michigan issued a statement saying that he would vote to impeach after President Trump “expressed no regrets” for what had happened at the Capitol.
“I would have preferred a bipartisan, formal censure rather than a drawn-out impeachment process,” Mr. Upton said. “I fear this will now interfere with important legislative business and a new Biden administration. But it is time to say: Enough is Enough.”
Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.
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