House of Representatives gears up for a historic Trump impeachment hearing

Trump is on course to become the third president in US history to be impeached.
The hearing is begins at 9 a.m. ET and will feature several hours of debate as Democrats make the case for impeachment and Republicans defend Trump.
Scroll down to follow Insider's live coverage of the hearing.
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The House of Representatives on Wednesday will hold a historic hearing that is on course to end in the impeachment of President Donald Trump .

The Democratic-controlled chamber has enough votes to impeach Trump and is expected to do so later in the afternoon.

The hearing will begin with a procedural vote on the terms of debate that the House Rules Committee fleshed out on Tuesday.

That vote is scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. ET. The final vote on impeachment is set to take place from 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

The hearing will be broadcast on the major cable news networks, and Insider will embed a livestream below when it begins.

Scroll down to follow Insider's live coverage of the proceedings:

What the House will vote on

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The full House will vote on two articles of impeachment against Trump; the first charges him with abuse of power and the second with obstruction of Congress.

Both articles are related to his dealings in Ukraine.

At the center of the impeachment inquiry are Trump's efforts to have Ukraine interfere in the 2020 election. At the time, the US was withholding military aid and a White House meeting that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky desperately sought.

The catalyst for the inquiry was a whistleblower complaint filed by an anonymous US intelligence official in August. The complaint detailed a July 25 phone call during which Trump repeatedly pressured Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, over baseless allegations of corruption related to the latter's employment on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural gas company.

Trump also pushed Zelensky to look into a bogus conspiracy theory suggesting that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 race. There is no evidence to support either of Trump's claims, and a slew of career national security and foreign policy officials testified that the president's efforts in that phone were unusual, inappropriate, and a threat to national security.

Witness testimony also showed that the phone call was just one event in a months-long pressure campaign in Ukraine that was spearheaded by Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, at the president's direction.