From the Heritage Foundation, I'm Michelle Cordera, and this is Heritage Explains.

Congress returned to D.C. this is Heritage Explains. Congress returned to D.C. this week, and the House impeachment inquiry is picking up steam with new testimonies.

In our final episode of a three-part series on impeachment, our guest today, John Malcolm, says that it's highly likely that the House of Representatives will impeach President Trump,

and it could be as soon as next month.

Today, Malcolm discusses why in moving forward with this impeachment, Democrats are playing a game of political high-stakes poker.

Malcolm is vice president of Heritage's Institute for

Constitutional Government and director of the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.

John, you recently wrote that because Democrats hold a comfortable majority of House seats,

it's entirely possible, if not likely, that the lower

chamber will impeach the president. Do you still believe this will happen? Yes, I do. I'm not sure

it's a great thing for the country, particularly we're going into an election year, of course,

and the public will have an opportunity to weigh in on what they think of President Trump.

But, yeah, look, the House under the Constitution has the sole power of impeachment.

It only takes a majority of the members of the House to impeach a president.

And I think it is likely that they will do so.

Now, there are a lot of people who think that once you impeach somebody that they are thrown out of office, that is not true. An impeachment is essentially the equivalence of a grand jury returning an indictment. And then it all moves over to the Senate for a trial.

And it takes two-thirds of the senators or 67 senators to actually approve an article of impeachment and remove somebody from office.

We've had two presidents who have been impeached Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, yet both of them were acquitted as the official term or not removed by the Senate.

So in reports that Heritage is published, I've read that the Senate has no obligation to act on a House impeachment.

But I've also read that Mitch McConnell said he has no choice that he'll have to take it up.

So which one is it?

Well, under the Constitution, it doesn't.

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