The House will vote on an impeachment managers resolution Wednesday, setting the stage for the Senate impeachment trial against President Trump in the coming days.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) announced the timeline for the vote at a Democratic caucus meeting Tuesday morning, where she also declined to say just yet who she is selecting for the House managers team, according to lawmakers leaving the meeting.
Some Democratic members said the caucus had a general idea who would be appointed to make the House’s impeachment case to the Senate. Other Democrats said those who will be on the team may not even know so yet.
“The team will be prepared,” House Committee Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) told reporters. Having led the second half of the House’s impeachment process last year, Nadler is expected to be named to the team. But on Tuesday he declined to say whether he was expecting to be chosen.
There was little other information coming out of Tuesday’s meeting about Pelosi’s House manger plans. It’s unclear exactly how many she will choose — during the Clinton impeachment, the managers team was made up of 13 House managers — or how far ahead of the resolution vote she will announce their names.
Once the managers resolution is put on the floor, the vote will happen very quickly, after only 10 minutes of debate. The House will then seek notice from the Senate on when the Senate would like to receive the impeachment articles, a process that involves the managers physically carrying the articles to the Senate chamber and reading them aloud on the Senate floor.
Senate GOP leaders on Monday evening said that once they received the articles, they expected to spend the remainder of the week dealing with the house keeping measures setting up the initial procedures for conducting the Senate trial. It appears that opening arguments will not begin until early next week, after the Martin Luther King Day holiday on Monday.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has not yet unveiled the package of impeachment trial rules expected to shape the initial phases of the proceedings.
