THE US cannot “continue having a pathological liar in the White House,” socialist US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has said, after the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives voted yesterday to impeach President Donald Trump.

Mr Trump — who follows Bill Clinton in 1998 and Andrew Johnson in 1868 as the third president to be impeached — was charged with abusing the powers of his office by enlisting a foreign government to investigate a political rival and for obstructing Congress’s investigation.

“Today is a sad but necessary day for [US] democracy,” Mr Sanders said in a video posted to Twitter on Wednesday.

“The President of the United States is being impeached and that is the right thing to do because we have got to never forget that no individual in this country … is above the law or above the constitution.”

Mr Sanders called on the Senate’s Republican majority leader Mitch McConnell to “conduct a full and fair trial to hold this president accountable.”

But Mr McConnell said yesterday that the Democrats had let their “partisan rage at this particular president create a toxic new precedent that will echo well into the future.”

Communist Party USA co-chairs Joe Sims and Rossana Cambron told the Morning Star that the House had to impeach Trump, even if the Republican-controlled Senate rejects it.

Leaving Trump’s actions unanswered, they said, “would be a step towards dictatorship with everything that implies.”

They said: “Come what may from the impeachment process, Trump should be voted out in November for putting asylees in concentration camps, encouraging extreme-right, nationalist, racist hatred and violence, giving tax breaks to the rich, de-fanging regulatory agencies, hanging out with neo-nazis and reducing aid to the poor.”

“He should be voted out for trying to break the back of labour, attacking women and suppressing the black, Latino and youth vote.

“Comrades and friends: the battle is engaged. Whether it ends in dictatorship or greater and deeper democracy is up to us.”