جريدة الأهرام الجديد الكندية 
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Jihan Thabet
The House will vote on a resolution Thursday to guide the impeachment process as it heads into a more public phase.
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The House is preparing to vote on the resolution. Follow our live vote tracker.
The House on Thursday will take its first formal vote on the impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Lawmakers are expected to vote largely along party lines to adopt a resolution that will set rules for the next phase of the inquiry, including public hearings and the drafting of articles of impeachment against the president.
The vote is a striking turnabout for House Democrats. For weeks, they have resisted formal floor action, fearing that a vote could hurt the re-election prospects of members in Trump-friendly swing districts where voters want them to focus more on issues like jobs and the high price of prescription drugs than on a seemingly futile effort to oust the president.
But after a series of bombshell revelations about the president’s pressure campaign to enlist Ukraine to investigate his political rivals, Democrats are convinced the public is behind the inquiry, and are ready to call the bluff of Republicans who have been demanding a floor vote.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi has scheduled the vote for Thursday morning
“I don’t know why the Republicans are afraid of the truth,” she said, adding that nothing less than the country’s democracy is at stake.
No House member would vote to impeach the president, Pelosi said, “unless his actions are jeopardizing our honoring our oath of office.”
She cited “the genius of the Constitution — a separation of powers, three coequal branches of government to be a check and balance on each other — and it is to that that we take an oath of office
House investigators are preparing to hear from four more witnesses on Monday, including White House officials John Eisenberg and Robert Blair, according to an official working on the impeachment inquiry who requested anonymity to discuss closed-door proceedings.
Eisenberg is the White House’s legal adviser on national security issues. According to testimony this week by Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the top Ukraine adviser at the White House, Eisenberg proposed moving a transcript of Trump’s call with Zelensky to a highly classified server and restricting access to it.
Blair is a top national security adviser to acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney
Others called to testify on Monday include Michael Ellis, a legal adviser to the National Security Council, and Brian McCormack, an official with the Office of Management and Budget It was not immediately clear how likely it is the four individuals will appear
Rules Chairman Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said he “never wanted the country to reach this point” as debate got underway on the resolution that defines the parameters of the next phase of the impeachment inquiry.
“We are not here in some partisan exercise,” McGovern said on the House floor. “There is serious evidence that President Trump may have violated the Constitution.”
The resolution lays out the rules for what McGovern described as “the public-facing phase of this process,” which will include nationally televised public hearings.
Tom Cole (R-Okla.), the ranking Republican member on the Rules Committee, unsuccessfully sought to expand debate on the resolution from one hour to four hours.
