WASHINGTON — Casting the evidence that President Donald Trump abused his power as overwhelming, Speaker Nancy Pelosi addressed the nation Thursday and solemnly announced that the House will begin drafting articles of impeachment.

Texas Republicans remained unpersuaded, even as Pelosi insisted that impeachment has become unavoidable because “the facts are uncontested.”

“His wrongdoing strikes at the very heart of our Constitution. Our democracy is what is at stake,” Pelosi said. “The president leaves us no choice but to act because he is trying to corrupt, once again, the election for his own benefit.”

Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Kay Granger of Fort Worth called Democrats’ actions “shameful.”

They and other Texas Republicans shrug aside testimony from White House aides and diplomats showing that Trump tried to squeeze Ukraine, using withheld military aid and the prospect of a coveted meeting at the White House, to deliver the favor of a corruption probe targeting rival Joe Biden.

Some insist that despite weeks of hearings, Democrats unearthed no evidence whatsoever to support the allegation.

Some concede that there was a clear link between the aid and the ask, but argued that doesn’t justify impeachment.

Some call impeachment premature before Trump and his inner circle testify – though the president has refused to cooperate and barred top aides from testifying at the House impeachment hearings last month.

“I would hope that they would get some of the more substantive witnesses in before they go forward — all the president’s men. Get somebody close to the action there,” said Rep. Kenny Marchant, R-Coppell. “But they’re in such a hurry to do the impeachment.”

Not that it would change his mind.

“There’s nothing I’ve heard that would make me open to his impeachment,” Marchant said.

White House side of the story

Rep. Pete Olson, R-Sugar Land, also called for testimony from people closer to Trump.

Democrats have sought testimony from Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, who went before the White House press corps and described a quid pro quo involving the frozen aid and the president’s demand for a Biden probe; former Energy Secretary and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, one of the “three amigos” who worked on Ukraine relations outside ordinary diplomatic channels; and former National Security Adviser John Bolton, who derided the back-channel pressure on Ukraine as a “drug deal.”

Trump refused to let them speak to House investigators.

“That’s his prerogative,” Olson said. “That’s between Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi.”

Based on the evidence so far, he said, “He did things I wouldn’t do, but there’s nothing that’s impeachable. … Nobody’s given me what he’s done. I don’t like the way he talked to Ukrainians?”

In a campaign email blast, Cornyn asserted that “these sham hearings have failed to produce a single verifiable fact.”

Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., announced a hearing on Monday morning at which investigators from his panel and the House Intelligence Committee will present evidence. Democrats are expected to seek a House impeachment vote by Christmas.

A dissenting scholar invited by Republicans testified that the evidence produced so far is insufficient to justify impeachment.

“Why don’t we just have an election, the old fashioned way?” Cornyn said on a call with Texas reporters.

“That’s really not the question,” Cornyn said. “I don’t see anything that’s come to light yet that deserves that treatment, particularly less than a year before the election. … He said that he wasn’t going to send foreign aid to Ukraine, to a corrupt country, where taxpayer dollars were going to be squandered and perhaps stolen. And in the process asked for an investigation into one aspect of that corruption, which happened to involve the vice president’s son.”

Both sides insist that the other’s stubbornness, for or against impeachment, will come at a high political price.

Given that Trump sought dirt on Biden from Ukraine, Cornyn was asked if he would accept dirt from Afghanistan on former combat pilot MJ Hegar, one of his own Democratic challengers. He called that hypothetical and declined to say.

Hegar pounced, noting that she “took a bullet” upholding her own oath to defend the Constitution.

“Asking for foreign interference in our election is unpatriotic, unlawful and wrong. John Cornyn is unfit to be a senator if he can’t answer an immediate and emphatic `no’ to this. This is not a complicated question if your loyalty is to our country,” she said.

Impeachment case

Democrats began building a case after a CIA whistleblower reported concerns by national security officials about a July 25 call between Trump and Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Trump pressed him to investigate a company on which Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, held a lucrative board seat.

At the time, Trump had frozen nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine without explanation, leaving his own national security and budget aides puzzled. Ukraine needed the aid to deter Russian aggression, and sought a White House meeting to underscore U.S.-Ukraine solidarity in the face of that threat.

Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and allies have pushed a debunked theory that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election, rather than Russia, as the U.S. intelligence community concluded. They also have sought to deflect allegations over his own actions by citing a lucrative job Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, held on the board of a Ukrainian gas company while his father was vice president.

Trump tweeted that if Democrats “are going to impeach me, do it now, fast.”

He said he wants to get on to a “fair trial” in the Senate, which is controlled by fellow Republicans.

“We will have Schiff, the Bidens, Pelosi and many more testify, and will reveal, for the first time, how corrupt our system really is,” Trump asserted, referring to Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who chairs the Intelligence Committee and led the impeachment inquiry.

Granger, the top Republican on the powerful Appropriations Committee, which controls much of the federal budget, rejected the idea that Trump did anything inappropriate by freezing military aid to Ukraine.

She chaired the subcommittee that controlled foreign aid last year, until Democrats regained control of the House in the 2018 midterms.

“There is a responsibility to say, is that money used correctly? Are there problems with it? Whenever he asked that question, I think it’s appropriate,” she said. “I think the impeachment has wasted enormous amounts of time. I don’t agree with that at all. Absolutely not.”

The aid was frozen for months without explanation. Trump later cited concerns about corruption in Ukraine. He released the funds in mid-September, after learning of the whistleblower report and under near-universal pressure from lawmakers in both parties.

“Nobody’s really been able to say what he did wrong,” said Rep. Roger Williams, R-Austin. “All the witnesses that they brought forth are like third- and fourth-generation. In other words, well I heard, I heard of, a friend of mine said.”

Some of the testimony was firsthand. Gordon Sondland, a Trump megadonor and ambassador to the European Union, testified that Trump spoke with him repeatedly about pressuring Ukraine to announce an investigation of the Bidens.

“They haven’t showed me that anything rises to the level of impeachment,” Williams said.