Impeachment Maths – emptywheel
Let me explain what happened with yesterday’s impeachment vote to explain some basic maths, as they call it here in Ireland.
Tom Massie filed some articles of impeachment. He chose when to file them, and chose to file them to overlap with Veterans Day, which Pete Hegseth exploited in fighting back and which also meant at least one person, Nancy Pelosi, had a pre-scheduled Veterans Day event on the other side of the country.
Mike Johnson, who remains Speaker until January, was obligated to call a vote within two business days. Over the course of yesterday, there were signs (notably, Don Bacon’s flip-flopping comments about whether he’d support impeachment or not) that the GOP developed a strategy on it.
Sometime in the afternoon, Mike Johnson set the vote for 5:30, which happened to be right in the middle of a publicly scheduled event a number of the Dems were going to be at and (I believe) after Nancy Pelosi had already left for that publicly scheduled event at which she would be honored.
The vote was on a motion to table the impeachment vote — basically, to refer it to committee to make it go away forever. Moving to table the impeachment provided a way for Republicans to vote for something, without weighing in on the substance of impeachment — basically a way to vote for party loyalty without going on the record in support of the Iran War.
The vote was a bit curious in that the numbers rose together, such that Republicans always had about ten more votes in favor of tabling impeachment than Democrats — perhaps a sign that some people were waiting to vote until their vote was needed.
In the end, the vote was gaveled at 6:02 when some number of people returning to the Hill from the prescheduled event had not yet returned. That is how Mike Johnson runs his House: by keeping votes open until he has the votes he wants. It’s what you get to do when you are Speaker.
The vote to table impeachment ended up passing with 210 GOP votes, plus Kevin Kiley (the independent), voting to support, and 203 Democrats opposing it, plus Tom Massie, the sole GOP vote. 7 Republicans did not vote, and 11 Democrats (including Haley Stevens, who caucused with Republicans the day before) did not vote.
18 minutes after the impeachment vote, there was another vote decided on a party line vote — this time with Massie voting with the GOP. It’s a useful vote because it tells you how many Republicans were available for the impeachment vote who did not vote. It passed with 215 votes (the 210 Republicans who voted to table impeachment, plus Kiley, plus Massie, and three other Republicans). There were 209 no votes, five more than voted against tabling impeachment, so six more Democrats.
What that shows is even if the six people who wanted to vote for impeachment had gotten back (which would have resulted in 210 votes), the GOP still had plenty of people available to make sure impeachment was tabled. If all six had made it back, Johnson would have just kept the vote open long enough to defeat the vote. Even if Nancy Pelosi had canceled her event at the last minute, the GOP still would have had a three vote margin. Even if Haley Stevens had pretended she was still a Democrat, the GOP still would have had a two vote margin. (One of the other Dems missing, Luis Correa, is having surgery today.)
What all that tells you is, one, Trump’s people pulled out the stops to make sure impeachment failed. And, two, conservative Democrats like Tom Suozzi were at least supportive of impeachment, in theory.
This was always going to be a test vote, to see what would happen for Democrats. It told us the GOP doesn’t plan on course correcting and Democrats will take necessary steps once they do get to decide when votes take place.
