The House Killed Al Green's Impeachment Resolution 232-147, With 47 Democrats Voting 'Present.' Jeffries Called Impeachment 'Sacred' and Said 'None of That Serious Work Has Been Done.'

The House voted Tuesday to shelve Rep. Al Green's latest attempt to impeach President Trump, with Democratic leaders pointedly sitting out the fight rather than joining it.

The Republican motion to table the resolution passed 232 to 147, with 47 lawmakers voting present. The present votes came from Democrats who followed the guidance of Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Whip Katherine Clark and Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar, who announced Monday that they would neither support nor oppose the motion. Leadership did not whip the vote.

Green, a Texas Democrat, filed H.Res. 1486 on Aug. 24. It charged that Mr. Trump abused his power by allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection to "operate without accountability, assault civilians, and cover up killings." The resolution named four people killed by federal immigration agents this year: Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero. Green sent a letter to the White House formally notifying the president of the filing.

Green has now sought to impeach Mr. Trump more than half a dozen times across both terms, and the House has tabled each attempt. Last December, a similar motion passed 237 to 140, also with 47 present votes. He was censured by the House last year for shouting at the president during an address to a joint session of Congress. He will leave Congress in January after losing a primary in his newly redrawn Houston-area district.

The leadership statement was careful to reject the vehicle without rejecting the destination. "Impeachment is a sacred constitutional vehicle designed to hold a corrupt executive accountable for abuse of power, breaking the law and violating the public trust," Jeffries, Clark and Aguilar said. "The effort traditionally requires a comprehensive investigative process, the collection and review of thousands of documents, an exacting scrutiny of the facts, the examination of dozens of key witnesses, Congressional hearings, sustained public organizing and the marshaling of the forces of democracy to build a broad national consensus."

"None of that serious work has been done," they added, "with the Republican majority focused solely on rubber stamping Donald Trump's extreme agenda."

The vote comes as the question of what Democrats would do with a majority has moved from hypothetical to live. Jeffries has not ruled out impeachment if his party wins the House in November and holds it for the last two years of Mr. Trump's term. Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who would chair the Judiciary Committee under a Democratic majority, told NBC's "Meet the Press" earlier this month that the president has "undoubtedly" committed impeachable offenses and that "we will not hesitate" to use the tool if needed.

Aguilar, asked about it Tuesday, tried to lower the temperature. Impeachment, he said, is "not anything that is top of the agenda for House Democrats."

Republicans have used Green's resolutions as campaign material, arguing that a Democratic House would spend its first months on impeachment rather than prices or the war. The 147 votes against tabling on Tuesday, more than half the Democratic caucus, suggest that the appetite in the rank and file runs ahead of the leadership's public posture, and that the argument over what the party owes its voters on this question is not over.