Credit: (Carlos Barria/Pool via AP)

WASHINGTON — A majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives including four from New Jersey joined Republicans to block impeachment of President Donald Trump over military actions he ordered against Iran.

Texas Democrat Al Green, who represents a Houston-based seat in the House, brought the impeachment measure to the chamber floor this week as a “privileged” resolution, a method that allows the sponsor to fast-track their motion and force a vote.

“I believe he is a would-be dictator who would become a dictator,” Green said of Trump. “Are we going to go down and choose the path of democracy, or will we allow ourselves to choose the low road of autocracy?”

Trump deserved to be impeached because he did not adequately inform Congress about U.S. military plans before he ordered the bombing, on Saturday, of Iranian nuclear facilities, Green said.

The president violated the U.S. constitution, which gives Congress the sole power to declare war, by approving those strikes, Green said.

The House voted Tuesday 344-79 to table, or block, Green’s resolution. New Jersey Republicans Jeff Van Drew (R-2nd), Chris Smith (R-4th) and Tom Kean (r-7th) all voted to kill the measure, while Democrats from the state split.

Overall, 128 Democrats voted with Republicans to table the resolution. Removing Trump from office would require the Republican-majority Senate to vote to convict the president, something politically unimaginable.

Herb Conaway (D-3rd), Josh Gottheimer (D-5th), Frank Pallone (D-6th) and Nellie Pou (D-9th) voted to block the impeachment measure as Reps. Donald Norcross (D-1st), Rob Menendez (D-8th), LaMonica McIver (D-10th) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-12th) voted to proceed.

Congress twice impeached Trump during his first term in office, once when he tried to withhold aid from Ukraine in exchange for political blackmail against former President Joe Biden, and again for inciting a mob of his supporters to ransack the U.S. Capitol in January 2021 by lying that the 2020 presidential election results were fraudulent.

Van Drew was the lone New Jersey lawmaker to vote against congressional certification of the 2020 election outcome — a critical but, until 2021, a little-noticed step in federal elections.

The Senate voted to acquit Trump during both impeachment trials.

Early October 2017, a few months into Trump’s first term, Green moved to impeach him over a host of topics, including his response after the march that year of white supremacists holding torches in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Green later pulled back on that effort. A liberal Democrat not shy from national attention, Green interrupted Trump in March during the president’s annual address to Congress, shouting at the president.

“The president was saying he had a mandate, and I was making it clear that he has no mandate to cut Medicaid,” Green told reporters, alluding to the national health insurance program for the low-income and disabled. After the House voted to censure him, Green said he would do it again.

Republicans are writing legislation that would remove an estimated 10.9 million people from Medicaid enrollment over the next decade.

The constitution assigns Congress the right to declare war, though the last time it formally did was at the start of World War II.

In the decades since, presidents have used their authority as commander in chief to order military actions, sidestepping Congress.

As public support for the Vietnam War sagged in the 1970s, Congress wrote and passed the War Powers Resolution, which requires the president to inform Congress within 48 hours of ordering troops into conflict.

Because the White House did not adequately brief Congress the Iran strikes, Trump violated that statute, Democrats said, a charge Republicans dismissed.

“There was no briefing that anyone received in advance of the unilateral strike ordered by Donald Trump,” Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat and the party’s top official in the House, said Wednesday.

Top Democrats received a “perfunctory” call over the weekend “that something was going to occur in the Middle East,” Jeffries said. “That is not a briefing.”

Republicans said Trump was within his rights to order the bombings.

“Leaders in Congress were aware of the urgency of this situation,” said Speaker Mike Johnson, the Republican who leads the House.

Only three presidents have been impeached — Andrew Johnson in the 1860s, Bill Clinton in the 1990s and Trump — and the Senate has not convicted any of them.

This spring a series of heavy-duty tents was erected outside Union Station near the U.S. Senate. Inside the tents are protestors advocating, at all hours of the day, for Trump’s removal from office, saying they will not leave until the president is removed from power.