The Democrats are going ahead with impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump — at least, so they say. Even after special counsel Robert Mueller’s spectacularly embarrassing testimony, House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) said Thursday that his panel has formally launched an impeachment inquiry. Nadler has sparred with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who still opposes impeachment, on the matter.
However, Nadler’s threat is likely just more empty rhetoric about Trump’s imminent demise to keep the liberal base on the hook. Nadler said that the House should be ready to vote on whether to impeach Trump by the end of the year, nearly a full year after Mueller concluded his investigation in March.
House launching an impeachment inquiry
Democrats have repeatedly insisted on more “fact-finding” while simultaneously claiming that Trump committed impeachable offenses. But this is a contradiction: why is further fact-finding necessary, if Trump is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors? If Democrats really believe that Trump should be impeached, they should have launched impeachment proceedings months ago.
Rather than vote and get it over with, Democratic Party leaders have insisted on endless sham investigations into Trump. It’s not clear that things have really shifted after Nadler declared the Democrats have launched an impeachment inquiry to gather “facts” supporting Trump’s impeachment — this, after Democrats dragged the country through two years of a pointless, destructive investigation into collusion.
Haven’t they done enough fact-finding? Nadler thinks not. When pressed by CNN’s Erin Burnett, Nadler insisted that his panel was moving forward with the real deal. He said that Democrats aren’t waiting for Pelosi’s green-light, but that she has been “cooperative.”
“This is formal impeachment proceedings,” Nadler said. “We are investigating all the evidence, we’re gathering the evidence. And we will at the conclusion of this — hopefully by the end of the year — vote to vote articles of impeachment to the House floor. Or we won’t. That’s a decision that we’ll have to make. But that’s exactly the process we’re in right now.”
However, Nadler has repeatedly issued empty threats to impeach Trump. Ranking member Doug Collins (R-GA) suggested that Nadler was bluffing. “Chairman Nadler is either uninformed about what a formal impeachment inquiry is or he is deliberately misleading the American public to score cheap political points. Which is it, Chairman?” he tweeted.
Sham impeachment circus continues
Democrats have taken steps to show that they’re serious, like suing former White House counsel Donald McGahn for testimony and petitioning for grand jury testimony in Mueller’s report. (Again, why do they need to know more if they already know Trump obstructed justice?)
But, like everything else — the contempt threats, the farcical hearings, the interminable investigations, the frivolous subpoenas — it’s hard to gauge how serious a threat Trump actually faces. Democrats are not, by any means, saying that they will impeach Trump in one voice. Pelosi doesn’t support impeachment, while Nadler told CNN not to get “hung up on semantics.” That’s an apt summary of this sham: don’t get hung up on the meaning of words. For Democrats, Trump’s alleged crime has always been a nebulous moving target.
Now, Democrats are saying that Trump might be impeached a few months from now, by which time they will likely have moved onto some new outrage. At the end of the day, there is no chance that Democrats will force Trump from office anyway. Even if they impeach him — which doesn’t seem likely — the Senate Republicans will never vote to boot him out.
Remarkably, despite Mueller’s deeply underwhelming testimony, support for impeachment has risen in the House to more than half the caucus. It seems like the more impeachment eludes the Democrats, the more fervently they believe in its inevitability.
Rather than bring the Russia clown show to an end once and for all, Democrats will drag things out for several months more. With the Russia hoax all but dead, the Democrats have begun to pivot to a new story to pin the president as a white supremacist. The outrage will never stop until Trump is out of the White House.
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