Pelosi, Dems claim they didn't 'want to impeach' the president. Remember: 58% of Democrats supported impeaching Trump just five weeks into his presidency.

Wearing all black on the House floor Wednesday morning, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) opened up debate on the impeachment of President Trump "somberly and sadly."

Pelosi didn't want to impeach the president, CNN's Dana Bash reported. Pelosi contended, "He gave us no choice."

"You can feel it in the air here. It feels different," Bash said during live coverage of the proceedings, according to colleague Brian Stelter. "It is palpable — that this is momentous. That this is grave. And it is ... not something this speaker wanted to do..."

Pelosi was so committed to the somber act that she glared at fellow Democratic lawmakers for cheering the impeachment results like a mother scolding children for talking during a church service.

Democrats didn't want to impeach Trump? Is anyone buying it?

However, a Washington Post article from nearly three years ago on Feb. 24, 2017, told a much different story.

The article highlighted a poll from the Public Religion Research Institute that found that a majority of Democrats — 58% — supported impeaching Trump just five weeks into his presidency.

While the graphic below seems to show some parity among opposition support for impeaching a president from the other political party, the early timing of Democratic support for impeaching Trump is what set it apart.

The Post article even highlighted the fact that 58% is "not an unthinkable number in our polarized political climate, but it is extraordinarily early in a presidency for such a high level of support for impeachment."

"As PRRI notes," the article went on to say, "as late as 2014 — in the sixth year of Barack Obama's presidency — a similar proportion of Republicans supported impeachment: 56 percent. And even as the case for the Iraq War was being picked apart in 2006, Democratic support for impeaching George W. Bush was only at 48 percent — lower than it is today for Trump."

In other words, it took Republicans past Obama's first term and Democrats three years into an unpopular war under Bush before their support for impeachment rose to the level it was for Trump just over a month after he took office.

In a partisan vote on Wednesday, all but two Democrats — one of which has since formally switched to the Republican Party — voted to impeach the president, passing both articles of impeachment introduced against him. No Republicans voted in support of either article.

The Democrats' decision to proceed with impeachment comes as American citizens are cooling to the idea. A recent CNN poll, conducted in the lead-up to the vote, showed overall support for impeachment had dropped under 50% and Democratic support, in particular, had dropped by double digits in just a few weeks.

(H/T: Hot Air)