Members of the U.S. public from all over the country are planning a major sit-in on Capitol Hill Tuesday morning to demand that Congress begin impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump.
Organizers with the grassroots group By the People will risk arrest by assembling in the nation's capitol, hoping not only to convince lawmakers that many Americans want the president to be impeached, but also to ask the public to join the call.
The action will be largely focused on "inviting the rest of the public to take action with us in order to force Congress to do its job," organizer Alexandra Flores-Quilty told Common Dreams. "This really requires the American public to lead."
The demonstration comes three months after By the People circulated a petition to all members of Congress, asking them to pledge to vote for impeachment proceedings. Since then, a number of prominent Democrats have claimed that impeaching Trump would be politically unwise and that Americans should focus solely on making sure a Democrat wins the 2020 presidential election.
Abandoning the possibility of impeachment proceedings, Flores-Quilty argued, "is really [an] abdicated responsibility."
"A lot of our elected officials are really scared and unwilling to take bold action right now, and want to wait and have elections be a remedy," she said. "However, elections are not the same thing as impeachment."
The latter, proponents argue, would ensure that future presidents are not able to profit from the presidency, incite violence, obstruct justice, violate immigrants' rights to due process, attack the free press, and disregard the U.S. Constitution in other ways.
According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll last week, 45 percent of Americans now support impeachment proceedings against Trump. In March 1974, just 43 percent of the public believed Congress should impeach President Richard Nixon, a few months before a House Committee passed articles of impeachment against him.
By the People says Tuesday's action will be a launching point for a number of other demonstrations around the country.
"It's really going to take us, the people, leading in order to see any meaningful change, and we can't expect that anyone is coming to save us," Flores-Quilty told Common Dreams.
