Ian Millhiser discusses the new impeachment rules

Ian Millhiser discusses the new impeachment rules

The House of Representatives voted 232-196 Thursday morning to approve a resolution laying out how public impeachment hearings will be conducted on “whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to exercise its Constitutional power to impeach Donald John Trump, President of the United States of America.”

Much of the resolution is symbolic. Neither the Constitution nor any House rule requires the full House to hold a vote on impeachment before the final vote on whether to impeach Trump. Other parts of the resolution resolve questions about who has the power to do what during the public phase of the inquiry. The House Intelligence Committee will hold public hearings, and Republicans will need approval from at least some Democrats to call witnesses or to otherwise issue subpoenas.

The most significant provision in the resolution exempts the Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings from a rule that ordinarily limits questioning of witnesses to five minutes per committee member. Though the resolution leaves the five-minute rule in place for most members, it allows Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff to extend his own question time to as much as 45 minutes, so long as he gives equal time to Republican ranking committee member Devin Nunes.

These are important changes because they will allow Schiff and the team of lawyers working for him to focus their time on the impeachment hearings and to spend significant amounts of time asking probing questions during those hearings. The new rules help ensure that the hearing will not be a disjointed process, constantly jumping from one questioner to the next, without giving anyone time to build a coherent narrative.

House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) arrives for a deposition from acting US Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor on October 22, 2019.

Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

The resolution provides that “the chair may confer recognition for multiple periods of such questioning,” so Schiff could potentially spend an indefinite amount of time questioning witnesses if circumstances warrant such an extension.

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