22 Time October 7, 2019
Over the course of her first nine months
in Congress, she said so over and over.
She was there to serve her constitu-
ents near Richmond, Va., who wanted
safe streets and health care and good-
paying jobs. As her colleagues ranted
about Russia and racism, she kept say-
ing she was focused elsewhere—until
Donald Trump did something she felt
she couldn’t ignore.
Spanberger, a former CIA officer, was
elected as a Democrat last November
to represent a House district that went
for Trump by a 7-point margin in 2016.
Supporting impeachment could hurt
her image as a moderate more focused
on getting things done than on partisan
crusades, and put her re-election at risk.
But on Sept. 23, she joined other centrist
colleagues and, for the first time, en-
dorsed impeachment proceedings after
a whistle- blower reportedly complained
that the President had pressured a for-
eign leader to investigate one of Trump’s
top rivals in the 2020 election. “It wasn’t
that my mind was changed, it’s that we
were presented with new information,”
Spanberger told TIME as she cut across
the Capitol lawn the next day.
That information helped change
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s carefully
America’s vast wealth and the presidency’s
unmatched sway to hold onto power for
himself. In this era of hyperpartisan poli-
tics, the impeachment process will test the
mechanisms of accountability built into
our system of government by the Found-
ers, who anticipated many things—but
could not have envisioned Trump.
The President, for his part, responded
to the House’s action with characteristic
fury, denying wrongdoing and accus-
ing his critics of “presidential harass-
ment.” Trump was in New York City for
the meeting of the U.N. General Assem-
bly when the dam broke. Speaking to re-
porters on his way to a meeting with the
President of Iraq, he said, “Listen, it’s
just a continuation of the witch hunt.” In
shifting statements as the Ukraine story
unfolded, Trump has offered differentNation
calibrated position on impeachment.
Though she leads a Democratic majority
elected in part as a check on the Presi-
dent, Pelosi spent months tamping down
impeachment talk expressly to protect
members like Spanberger. But as details
emerged about Trump’s conversations
with Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky, long- wavering Democrats
made the decision for her. At least 60
new Democrats in the House have an-
nounced their support for an impeach-
ment inquiry since Sept. 23, bringing the
number to over 200, or roughly 90% of
the caucus. The question was no longer
whether the impeachment process would
begin, but how.
And so, on Sept. 24, Pelosi finally
made her move. Trump’s actions were a
“betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of
our national security and betrayal of the
integrity of our elections,” Pelosi said in
a brief televised address from her offices
in the Capitol. “Therefore, today I’m an-
nouncing the House of Representatives is
moving forward with an official impeach-
ment inquiry.”
The accusation Trump faces is grave.
The President allegedly pressured Zel-
ensky to reopen investigations into pre-
viously dismissed and widely debunked
accusations involving Joe Biden, the for-
mer Vice President. Before making the
call, Trump took extraordinary steps to
withhold aid approved for Ukraine by
majorities of both parties in Congress.
These and other actions by Trump so
alarmed an intelligence- community of-
ficial detailed to the White House that
the official filed a whistle- blower com-
plaint. By law, the complaint would be
forwarded to Congress. The Administra-
tion blocked it.
If the accusations are true, Trump’s
behavior would be an abuse of power
unseen since the Nixon era: using the
presidency and the powers of the U.S.
government to conscript foreign help in
a domestic political campaign. “These
allegations are stunning, both in the
national- security threat they pose and
the potential corruption they represent,”
Spanberger and six other Democratic
freshman members wrote in an op-ed in
the Washington Post.
The implications go beyond the fate
of a presidency to the heart of our de-
mocracy. Trump stands accused of usingAbigail
Spanberger
didn’t go to
Washington
to impeach
the President.