Hundreds of Trump foes descend on downtown Reno ahead of historic impeachment vote

A pro-impeachment rally drew a few hundred demonstrators to downtown Reno on Tuesday night, part of a planned nationwide protest aimed at congressional lawmakers still unsure about an upcoming vote to oust President Donald Trump. 

The rally at City Plaza began just hours before House Democrats are expected to approve a pair of impeachment charges, sending the case against Trump to a Republican-controlled Senate that remains unlikely to actually remove the president from office. 

That didn’t bother Adrienne Morgenroth, one of several residents who said they attended the rally to send a message to Republican leaders.

"My prayer is that some of the Republicans will do the right thing," she said over chants from the crowd. "I'm so disappointed in Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham I can't even tell you."

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Jim Dakin, an electrical contractor and yoga teacher, said he braved the frigid mid-December temperatures to make a similar point.

"I'm here because I want to show support for impeachment," Dakin said. "The Republicans are trying to make (impeachment) into theater.

"I'm holding out hope the Republican Senators will wake up at the last minute. It's never too late."

A loose coalition of mostly Democrat-aligned activist groups — among them Indivisible Northern Nevada, Common Cause and MoveOn.org — helped organize the event. They said more than 100,000 people had RSVP’d to similar rallies in all 50 states and Washington D.C. 

Organizers billed the so-called “Nobody Is Above The Law” rallies as a “massive, grassroots effort to ensure Congress holds Donald Trump accountable for using military aid to pressure Ukraine to interfere in our 2020 elections.”

Reno attendees were encouraged to contact their congressional representatives ahead of Wednesday’s historic impeachment vote. Organizers singled out U.S. Rep. Mark Amodei as a particularly ripe target for lobbying, at one point staging a mass call-in to his congressional offices.

Amodei, the only Republican in Nevada’s congressional delegation, became the subject of intense media scrutiny in September, after telling reporters he would support Trump’s impeachment if the facts support it. 

But the longtime Carson City lawmaker has since repeatedly said he does not support Trump’s ouster, clarifying that he merely wanted to “follow the facts” surrounding the explosive whistleblower complaint that first prompted the impeachment inquiry. 

Amodei has also cast votes against impeachment proceedings and is expected to oppose Wednesday’s resolution. 

U.S. Rep. Susie Lee, a freshman Democrat representing a swing district in Henderson, is the only Democratic member of Nevada’s delegation that appears to have wavered on impeachment. 

Lee last week told the Washington Post that she was “still thinking it over.” Two days later, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported she would back Trump’s impeachment. 

Fellow Democratic U.S. Reps. Steven Horsford and Dina Titus have repeatedly said they will seek Trump’s removal from office. 

The Senate is tentatively scheduled to start the president’s impeachment trial in January. 

James DeHaven is the politics reporter for the Reno Gazette Journal. He covers campaigns, the Nevada Legislature and everything in between. Support his work by subscribing to RGJ.com right here.