COLUMN: 228-193 — The Night the Capitol Fell With Almost No Republicans

Maxime Marquette

2026-06-26 22:14:12

The Ukraine Affair at the Heart of the Indictment

To understand this vote, we must look back at the events that made it possible. In the summer of 2019, President Trump withheld crucial military aid to Ukraine—a democracy at war with Russian aggression—while asking his counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, to publicly announce an investigation into Democratic political rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter. The aid—some $391 million approved by Congress—was being exploited for personal and electoral gain. This was the first article of impeachment: abuse of power.

The second article—obstruction of Congress—stemmed from the White House’s systematic refusal to cooperate with the congressional investigation: documents withheld, witnesses barred from testifying, and executive orders invoked to block any transparency. It was within this context that the seven impeachment managers appointed by Pelosi—including their leader, California Representative Adam Schiff, chairman of the Intelligence Committee—would have to build their case before the Republican-controlled Senate.

The Significance of Aid to Ukraine in This Vote

There is a cruel irony in this story. Trump had withheld military aid from Kyiv to serve his political interests. That was why he was on trial. And it was this same Ukraine, four years later, that would once again take center stage in the American debate, amid a full-scale war launched by Russia in 2022. The thread linking the 2019 Ukraine affair to the 2022 Russian invasion is direct. Trump weakened Kyiv’s defenses for the sake of a political phone call. Putin took note.

On January 15, 2020, while the House was voting, Trump signed a preliminary trade agreement with China—Phase One of the U.S.-China trade war. He welcomed Republican lawmakers to the White House, expressly asking them to leave early to vote against the articles of impeachment. “I’d rather you vote than stay here listening to me,” he said, according to reports at the time. The absurdity of the scene was almost comical, had the situation not been so serious.

Ukraine was in the background of all this—I often come back to that. Zelensky was a newly elected president, barely settled into office, whom Trump was calling on to betray his own democratic integrity. He refused to give in. And years later, he is the one standing up to Putin. There is something profoundly right about this trajectory.

Nancy Pelosi: The Lawmaker Who Crossed the Threshold

Weeks of Standoff with McConnell

The January 15 vote brought an end to four weeks of political standoff between two dominant figures in Washington. On one side was Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House and former representative from San Francisco, who called herself the “master legislator.” On the other, Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, whom his opponents nicknamed “the Grim Reaper” for his ability to bury bills. Pelosi had delayed sending the articles of impeachment for a month, hoping to extract from McConnell a guarantee of a fair trial with witnesses and documents. McConnell had not budged an inch.

When Pelosi finally broke the deadlock by announcing on the morning of January 15 that she would transmit the articles, she knew exactly what she was doing. She knew the Senate would acquit Trump—the math was inescapable: 67 votes were needed for conviction, and there were only 47 Democrats in the Senate. But she had one phrase in mind, a phrase she would repeat like a mantra: “He will be impeached forever. That cannot be erased.”

The Pen-Signing Ceremony and the Solemn Procession

After the vote, the signing ceremony was a moment of rare solemnity. Pelosi, surrounded by her seven impeachment managers, signed the articles with several ceremonial pens—each intended to be distributed as a memento, according to parliamentary tradition—under the gaze of a portrait of George Washington. She declared, “Today, we will make history. In making this history, we are moving the American people forward.”

Then the procession began. The managers walked slowly and silently through Statuary Hall—the room that honors the great figures of each of the fifty states—then beneath the immense dome of the Rotunda, passing the Ohio Clock, the imposing mahogany piece of furniture that marks the entrance to the Senate. House Clerk Cheryl Johnson carried the articles in two blue folders. Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving walked beside her. Each click of heels on the marble triggered a new flurry of photographs. It was 5:34 p.m. when the articles were officially delivered to the Senate.

That procession across the Capitol’s marble floor—slow, solemn, silent—has always struck me as one of the most beautiful and painful moments in American democracy. The beauty of protocol set against the ugliness of what had made it necessary. The two coexisted in that hallway.

The Republican camp: a wall of silence and partisan solidarity

No dissent within the GOP—an alarming sign

The total absence of Republican voices in favor of sending the case to the Senate is undoubtedly the most significant development of the day. By way of comparison, during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998, some Democrats voted with the Republicans. Nixon’s impeachment, which was dropped before a vote could take place, still saw Republicans join Democrats in demanding accountability. In 2020, under Trump, party discipline had reached a level that even the most cynical analysts had not anticipated.

Not a single Republican. Of the roughly 192 Republicans present, not a single one deemed that withholding military aid to Ukraine—aid that had been voted on by Congress and was therefore within the legislature’s constitutional authority—merited serious scrutiny. Defending the party took precedence over defending the Constitution. It was this logic that would proliferate, harden, and become entrenched in the years that followed, leading to far more serious episodes, including the assault on January 6, 2021.

McCarthy and the Rhetoric of Trivialization

House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy summed up his side’s position with a phrase as memorable as it was intellectually lazy: “The fastest, thinnest, and weakest impeachment in American history.” He described the day as a “sad saga” and a “national nightmare.” This is the kind of rhetoric designed to mobilize a base that’s already on board, not to offer a reasoned rebuttal of the facts.

This same McCarthy who, on January 6, 2021, would call Trump to ask him to stop the assault on the Capitol, before reconciling with him a few weeks later. His words from January 15, 2020, sound in retrospect like an admission: he knew that the substantive arguments did not hold up to scrutiny. So he focused on the form—the speed, the partisan zeal—to sidestep the substance. This technique has become the standard modus operandi of an entire faction of the Republican Party.

McCarthy has always fascinated me with his ability to say one thing and its opposite in the same breath. “A national nightmare,” he said on January 15, 2020. And a few years later, he was back holding Trump’s hand at Mar-a-Lago. There is a form of servility there that goes beyond politics—it’s almost a character study.

McConnell in the Senate: The Upper Chamber as a Pre-Programmed Acquittal Chamber

A Trial Staged to Acquit

On the Senate side, Mitch McConnell had been unusually transparent about his intentions. Even before the articles of impeachment reached him, he had stated that he would coordinate his strategy directly with the White House. He had rejected in advance any requests to call witnesses or produce documents, contrary to all historical precedents in an impeachment trial. When the articles finally arrived, he described them as “constitutionally incoherent” and the result of “factional rage.”

Yet, on camera, McConnell struck the pose of an impartial magistrate: “This is a difficult time for our country. But it is precisely for such moments that the Founding Fathers created the Senate.” He asserted that the Senate would be able to “rise above petty factionalism.” The contrast between this solemn speech and the organizational reality—a trial without witnesses or documents, conducted in about ten days—was striking. The Republican-controlled Senate of 2020 was not a court of law. It was a rubber-stamp chamber.

The Political Calculation Behind the Predetermined Acquittal

With 53 Republicans out of 100 senators and the two-thirds majority required for conviction (67 votes), the outcome was a foregone conclusion. No Republican senator had signaled an intention to vote guilty. On February 5, 2020, the Senate acquitted Trump on both charges: 48–52 on abuse of power, 47–53 on obstruction of Congress. Only Senator Mitt Romney voted guilty on the first charge—becoming the first senator in American history to vote to convict a president from his own party.

But this acquittal did not make the facts go away. Aid to Ukraine had indeed been withheld. The phone call to Zelensky had indeed taken place. The transcript, released by the White House itself, confirmed this. The Senate’s acquittal was a political act, not a factual refutation. And the truth about Ukraine’s vulnerability to pressure from Washington—and to the goodwill of its American supporters—became a lasting factor in Putin’s strategic calculations.

Mitt Romney. I want to name him. In this landscape of blind partisan solidarity, he was one of the very few Republicans to vote according to his conscience, even at the cost of his popularity within his own party. Democracy needs men like this. It doesn’t have enough of them.

The Only Dissident Democrat: Collin Peterson and the Realm of Ambiguity

Rural Minnesota vs. Partisan Washington

Among the 228 votes in favor, one Democratic vote was missing: that of Representative Collin Peterson of Minnesota’s 7th District, a deeply rural area where Trump had won two-thirds of the vote in 2016. Peterson was a conservative Democrat—one of the last representatives of this nearly extinct breed—serving on the Agriculture Committee and largely at odds with Washington’s culture wars. His district was not the same as that of Adam Schiff in Los Angeles or Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco.

Peterson voted “no.” It was a choice driven as much by local political survival as by personal conviction—or perhaps both, though it’s hard to tell which came first. He lost his seat anyway in November 2020, swept away by the Republican wave in the rural districts of the American heartland. His defection was symbolically used by Republicans as evidence of a “partisan impeachment.” But a single dissenting vote out of 228 Democrats represents a level of cohesion rarely seen in American parliamentary history. The argument fell flat.

Justin Amash, the lone Republican who became an independent

On the other side of the partisan spectrum, independent Justin Amash, a representative from Michigan and former Republican, joined the 228 in voting in favor of the resolution. Amash had left the GOP in 2019, after becoming the first elected Republican to call for Trump’s impeachment. He was a libertarian in his economic beliefs but a constitutionalist in his view of government institutions. For him, the facts described in the articles of impeachment clearly warranted a full-fledged trial.

His case illustrates a deeper divide in the American political landscape: those on both the left and the right who remain committed to constitutional checks and balances versus those who have made unconditional support for their political champion the sole criterion for their vote. Amash did not run for re-election in 2020. His career in Congress ended there. It is a fate that history often vindicates in hindsight—but too late for those who lived through it.

Justin Amash in the “yes” camp, Collin Peterson in the “no” camp. Two dissenting voices at opposite ends of the spectrum, and yet both instructive. One says: even on the other side, some people see the facts. The other says: territory takes precedence over principle. These two votes alone sum up the complexity of American democracy.

The Country's Divide: Two Americas That No Longer Speak to Each Other

Two Irreconcilable Narratives in the Same Public Sphere

On January 15, 2020, while Democrats were celebrating—soberly, cautiously—what they considered an act of constitutional accountability, conservative news networks like Fox News were continuously broadcasting a counter-narrative: the impeachment was a coup by the radical left, a baseless political maneuver, a betrayal of an elected president. Trump himself, from the White House, continued to call the whole thing a “hoax,” a “joke,” and a conspiracy hatched by his enemies.

Polls at the time showed a country split almost surgically in two. Roughly half of Americans supported impeachment, while the other half opposed it, with the dividing lines corresponding almost exactly to partisan affiliations. It was no longer just a difference of opinion on a public policy—it was a radical difference over the facts themselves, over what had or had not taken place, over what words like “abuse of power” or “obstruction” meant. Two Americas that no longer even shared a common reality.

Disinformation as a Systemic Weapon

The machine for generating doubt had been running at full throttle throughout the congressional investigation. Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, had waged a parallel campaign in Ukraine to fabricate compromising material against the Bidens. Conspiracy theories about a “DNC server in Ukraine”—debunked by all U.S. intelligence agencies—continued to circulate on social media and in right-wing media as established truths. Factual reality no longer reached a significant portion of the Republican electorate.

This disinformation was not accidental. It was strategic, deliberate, and fueled by political actors who knew full well that confusion and doubt served their interests better than clarity and facts. Russia—whose intelligence services had already interfered in the 2016 election, according to all U.S. investigative reports—was watching this fracturing of American democracy with interest. What it could not achieve by force, it achieved through the disintegration of the factual consensus.

When I try to explain to Europeans what was happening in America in 2020, I often run into this fundamental misunderstanding: how can two countries not share the same facts? Yet that is exactly what had happened. And this pathology has not been cured since—it has worsened.

The Historical Significance: The Third Trial of a President

Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump

With a vote of 228 to 193 on January 15, 2020, the House placed Donald Trump on an exclusive list of three names. Andrew Johnson, in 1868, had been impeached for firing his Secretary of War in violation of a congressional law—he was acquitted by the Senate by a single vote. Bill Clinton, in 1998, had been impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice related to the Lewinsky affair—he was acquitted. Trump became the third, and the only one to have been impeached on charges directly related to national security and the integrity of elections.

In January 2021, he would also become the first president in U.S. history to be impeached twice—the second time for inciting insurrection following his electoral defeat in November 2020. This double impeachment has no parallel in 230 years of American constitutional history. These two proceedings reveal something fundamental about the state of institutions in contemporary America and the fragility of constitutional safeguards in the face of a political will determined to circumvent them.

What the January 2020 Vote Reveals About Institutions

The 228–193 vote in January 2020 reveals a fundamental tension inherent in the American system. Impeachment is a constitutional procedure, but it is driven by partisan political actors. It requires a simple majority in the House—achievable with Democratic cohesion—but a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate to result in conviction. This structural asymmetry creates a situation where impeachment is relatively easy to initiate but conviction is virtually impossible when the president has a solid Senate base within his own party.

The Founding Fathers had designed this mechanism for extreme cases of abuse of power, hoping that senators—who are elected for longer terms and are more protected from the whims of the public—would be able to vote according to their conscience. They had not anticipated that partisan discipline would become so absolute that it would override all individual judgment. The vote on January 15, 2020, shows that institutions are only what the men and women who embody them decide to make of them.

I often return to this sentence from The Federalist Papers: institutions are designed to govern men who are not angels. But they still presuppose a minimum of institutional good faith. When that good faith vanishes entirely on one side, the safeguards no longer safeguard anything.

The atmosphere in the Capitol: marble, silence, and history

The Emptying Hallways, the Weight of the Moment

According to reporters present that day, the Capitol corridors were marked by moments of unusual silence. After the usual hustle and bustle of a legislative day—the comings and goings of staff, the swarms of lobbyists, the delegations of visitors—the corridors gradually emptied as the hours passed, as if the institution itself were holding its breath. Even Washington’s jaded insiders—journalists and political strategists seasoned by countless crises—spoke of a singular atmosphere, weighed down by a gravity that daily life usually erases.

Against this backdrop, the two blue folders containing the articles of impeachment became more than mere administrative documents. They carried considerable symbolic weight: the decision by the House of Representatives to bring a president’s conduct before the Senate for review. Democracy, in all its abstractness, was suddenly embodied in two blue cardboard folders, carried with both hands by a parliamentary official through the corridors of the world’s most powerful legislative building.

The Mechanics of Protocol in the Face of Eroding Norms

What also struck observers was the contrast between the ritual precision of the procedure and the prevailing chaos of American political life. Everything was choreographed down to the millimeter: the time of the signing, the order of the procession, the way the aides entered the Senate chamber with their hands clasped, and the formal greetings with Republican Senate Secretary Laura Dove. In a country where political norms had been crumbling one after another since 2016—insulting presidential tweets, attacks on the press, challenges to the legitimacy of judges—this adherence to constitutional ceremony had something almost poignant about it.

American democracy is not just about text and law: it is also about tradition, protocol, and repeated gestures that pass on their meaning from generation to generation. This protocol, carefully observed on January 15, 2020, against a backdrop of rapidly eroding norms, felt like an act of resistance. A way of saying: we are still here, the institutions are still standing, even when those who occupy them are challenging them from within.

Those officials marching in single file through Statuary Hall—I watched the footage several times. There was something strangely moving about their measured stride. As if protocol could compensate for powerlessness. As if form could make up for the lack of substance in the chamber that was about to receive them.

Adam Schiff and the executives: a team of litigants

A Deliberate Choice by Pelosi: Lawyers, Not Activists

When naming her seven managers this morning, January 15, Pelosi emphasized one criterion: “The focus is on litigators. The focus is on comfort in the courtroom.” She did not want a partisan spectacle, but rather a rigorous legal presentation. The team she assembled reflects this intention. The lead counsel, Adam Schiff, a former federal prosecutor, was an outstanding communicator, capable of distilling weeks of complex hearings into clear and compelling arguments. Jerry Nadler, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, ensured a deep legal foundation.

Alongside these two figures, Pelosi chose younger, more diverse profiles that reflected the 2019 Democratic coalition: Hakeem Jeffries, a New York lawyer and future Speaker of the House; Val Demings, former police chief of Orlando, Florida; Jason Crow, a veteran Army Ranger who served in Iraq and Afghanistan; Zoe Lofgren, one of the few people to have participated in the impeachment proceedings against Nixon, Ford, Clinton, and Trump; and Sylvia Garcia, a former judge from Houston. Seven individuals, seven stories, one mission.

Schiff and the Narrative That Goes Beyond the Facts

Schiff’s final testimony before the Senate at the start of the trial went down in history. His ability to weave the raw facts of the investigation—phone records, testimony from diplomats, messages from Sondland—into a coherent narrative about the erosion of American institutions even forced some Republican commentators to acknowledge the quality of his argument, while still voting for acquittal. Schiff’s rhetorical prowess was not in question. The Senate’s arithmetic, however, was.

For that is indeed the painful paradox of the 2020 trial: the case was solid, the facts established, the problematic conduct documented. And yet, the outcome was a foregone conclusion even before the first argument was articulated. The trial was not a process of seeking the truth—it was a confirmation of the partisan balance of power. Constitutional justice collided with political reality. And politics won, as it almost always does.

Schiff struck me with this statement: “If we cannot hold a president accountable for his actions, we will no longer have a president—we will have a king.” I don’t know if he was right about everything. But that particular statement—I can’t seem to shake it off.

Trump That Day: The Hoax, China, and Arrogance

Signing a trade agreement while facing impeachment

There is something almost cinematic about the simultaneity of the events of January 15, 2020. While the House voted 228-193 to send his articles of impeachment to the Senate, President Trump was at the White House to sign “Phase One” of the U.S.-China trade agreement, in the presence of Chinese Vice Premier Liu He. This trade deal marked the culmination of two years of a tariff war—a true economic success in terms of negotiation. And meanwhile, just a few blocks away, Congress was formally enshrining him in history.

To the Republican lawmakers present at the trade ceremony, Trump explicitly told them to leave so they could vote against the articles of impeachment: “I’d rather you vote than stay here listening to me introduce you.” This detail speaks for itself. Even in a constitutionally serious situation, Trump treated the impeachment process as an annoying formality, a matter to be dealt with on the side during an ordinary workday. His contempt for institutions was, in this sense, entirely consistent.

The “hoax” as a strategy for political survival

Trump called the entire proceedings a “hoax”—a scam, a farce, a conspiracy. He repeated this relentlessly on Twitter, at rallies, and in interviews. This rhetoric served a dual purpose: to consolidate his electoral base by turning the impeachment into an identity rally, and to preemptively discredit the process regardless of the outcome. If the Senate acquitted him, he would claim victory. If damning witnesses had emerged, he would have cried “fabrication.”

This framing proved incredibly effective. A large proportion of the Republican electorate accepted the “hoax” narrative as truth. Polls showed that among Republicans, fewer than 10% believed Trump had acted reprehensibly in the Ukraine affair. The fact that the president himself released the transcript of the call—which, incidentally, contained the words “do us a favor though” when the topic of aid to Ukraine came up—did nothing to change this perception. Post-truth had triumphed over the official transcript.

“Hoax.” Trump used that word to describe the impeachment, COVID-19, the investigations into his finances, and his 2020 defeat. By calling everything a hoax, he ended up casting suspicion on the word itself. This may be his most lasting contribution to American political discourse: the devaluation of the very notion of fraud.

The West Confronts Itself: Lessons from a Fractured Democracy

The message sent to allied democracies

This 228-193 vote was viewed with concern by the United States’ Western allies. In Europe, in particular, the question on everyone’s mind in the capitals was not whether Trump was guilty or innocent—it was whether the United States could be trusted. A president who used military aid to an ally under Russian military pressure for his own personal gain, and was then acquitted by his own political camp: what message did that send about the strength of U.S. commitments to collective defense?

NATO and the transatlantic partnership are built on institutional trust, which Trump’s behavior in the Ukraine affair had seriously eroded. European allies watched with painful acuity as the United States managed its own process of investigating abuses of executive power. The conclusion they drew—that no internal mechanism could effectively constrain a U.S. president as long as he retained his party’s support in the Senate—was a major piece of strategic intelligence.

Trump as a Necessary Evil: The West’s Irresolvable Contradiction

It is difficult—and intellectually honest—to acknowledge that Trump was not entirely negative for the West. His pressure on NATO allies to increase their defense budgets, his firm stance on trade with China, and his structural distrust of Russia on certain issues—all of this aligned with genuine Western interests. But this occasional firmness was always potentially sacrificed on the altar of his immediate personal interests, as the Ukraine affair demonstrated with striking clarity. This is the fundamental problem with an unpredictable leader: his strengths are also his weaknesses.

The West cannot afford to depend on a man whose foreign policy decisions are driven by domestic electoral calculations. American democracy offers, in theory, mechanisms to correct this problem—including impeachment. What January 2020 showed is that these mechanisms have structural limitations. The strength of the West depends on the internal democratic health of its members, starting with the most powerful among them.

I am pro-West. Deeply so. But I do not confuse the West with its current leaders. The West is an idea—that of the limitation of power, the accountability of those in government, and the rule of law. What January 15, 2020, showed is that this idea is more fragile than we think. And more precious.

Partisan division as a symptom of a deeper crisis

When Partisan Politics Erodes Institutions

228-193 is not just the result of a vote. It is a snapshot of an institution at a crossroads. Partisan polarization in the United States has reached levels unprecedented in the modern era. Since the 2010s, academic work by political scientists such as Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein has documented an asymmetry in this polarization: it is the Republican Party that has shifted toward more extreme positions—first under the influence of the Tea Party, then under the influence of Trumpism—rather than the Democratic Party moving to the left.

This asymmetry is significant because it explains the Republicans’ unanimous “no” vote on January 15, 2020. This was not a stance taken to defend a beloved president—many Republicans were wary of Trump or found him embarrassing. It was a stance of political survival: comply or be defeated by a Trumpist candidate in the primaries. The cost of dissent was too high. The party had created a culture of submission that made any independent judgment practically suicidal.

Congress as a Mirror of a Fractured Society

The House vote also reflects a deep geographic divide: densely populated, cosmopolitan, multiracial districts voted for accountability, while white rural and suburban districts voted to defend the president. These two Americas are drifting apart not only politically but also economically, culturally, and in terms of media consumption. They consume different information, envision different futures, and distrust one another with increasing intensity.

This divide is not unique to the United States. It can be found in most Western democracies, in various forms. What is specific to the United States is the intensity of the polarization, the absence of institutional safeguards capable of containing it, and the fact that this divide manifests itself in a democracy whose decisions have direct global consequences. The health of American democracy is a global geopolitical issue, not just an internal debate.

I do not claim to have a solution to American polarization. No one does. But I know that acknowledging it, naming it, and refusing to normalize it—that is already something. On January 15, 2020, a few hundred elected officials spoke out about the state of their country. What they said deserves to be heard, even years later.

Conclusion: The numbers remain, even when judgments fade away

228-193: A Score Set in Constitutional Stone

On January 15, 2020, the Capitol was turned upside down—not in the sense that the Senate was going to convict Trump, since everyone knew that wouldn’t happen. But in the sense that something irreversible had happened: a democratically elected House, after a thorough investigation, had deemed a president’s conduct serious enough to send his articles of impeachment to the Senate. Neither the president’s tweet, nor the Senate’s acquittal vote, nor the “hoax” rhetoric can erase that. Pelosi was right: he is impeached forever.

What will remain from this vote is less the legal outcome than the institutional lesson. Democracy is not merely a voting mechanism—it is a culture of accountability, of checks and balances, of shared adherence to rules that apply to everyone, including the most powerful. When that culture erodes, the numbers may be correct—228 to 193—yet democracy is weakened all the same. That is the tragic contradiction of January 15, 2020.

What that night says about us, collectively

The story of 228 to 193 is not some abstract American tale. It is the story of a democracy that tested its own limits and discovered, painfully, that institutions do not protect themselves—that they need men and women willing to defend them at the cost of their own political comfort. A few did: Pelosi, Schiff, Amash, and later Romney. Most did not. This is a lesson for all democracies, not just the one bordering the Potomac.

At a time when Russian autocracy is attacking its neighbors, when China is projecting its power by defying international norms, and when Iran is destabilizing an entire region, the ability of Western democracies to reform from within, to hold their own leaders accountable, and to keep their constitutional safeguards alive—that ability is a strategic issue of the highest order. 228–193: a vote that wasn’t enough, but was necessary. Like a sign of life in a weakened body. Like proof that something, still, was holding out.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist