Why Speaker Nancy Pelosi finally dropped her resistance to an impeachment inquiry of President Trump
Speaker Nancy Pelosi dialed her long-time deputy, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, on Monday afternoon to let him know she’d come to a momentous decision: she was going to endorse an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.
Pelosi’s decision followed months of Democratic infighting. She had also faced a barrage of criticism from the party’s activist base, which had begun to question her once-impeccable progressive credentials.And the move comes with risks. Public opinion, for now, still remains against impeachment, and the inquiry could jeopardize her majority in 2020 while giving Trump a boost in his reelection bid.
But there was a hiccup: “I put down some notes on the plane at 10 p.m. at night but then I left it on the plane,” Pelosi said. For the Democrats who had been pressing for an impeachment probe for months — at times experiencing Pelosi’s wrath along the way — the speaker’s words were stunning. Just a week before, those very same Democrats were privately lamenting that their campaign to impeach Trump was quickly running out of time after several attempts to win public support had failed to materialize.“I’ve always thought it was inevitable,” Rep. Jamie Raskin said of impeaching Trump.
That was when Rep. Cheri Bustos, an Illinois moderate who chairs the House Democrats’ campaign arm, made a pronouncement that stunned the room. That meeting was the beginning of a rupture that consumed the Democratic Caucus for months. It marked one of the first times Pelosi tried to walk the tightrope between the liberals who helped elect her as speaker and the moderates who delivered Democrats the House in 2018 — a delicate balancing act that became ever more difficult to manage.
In the weeks and months following the release of the Mueller report, pro-impeachment Democrats believed that the holdouts in the caucus were underestimating Trump’s ability to “self-impeach” through his actions and penchant to“I feel like we were indecisive and overly cautious,” said Rep. Jared Huffman , an early impeachment supporter.
“Here we’re talking about potentially ongoing, gross abuses of power. We’re talking about a sitting president, not a candidate for president. And we’re talking about the current campaign, not a past campaign,” Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi said in an interview just minutes after viewing the classified whistleblower complaint in the Intelligence Committee’s underground bunker at the Capitol Wednesday night.
One other important factor weighed heavily on Pelosi — her “frontline” members in the toughest swing districts were overwhelmingly opposed to impeaching Trump, and some had Meanwhile, a thousand miles away, other Democrats were also coming to their own painful conclusions about Trump’s alleged behavior and what needed to be done.For two of Minnesota's vulnerable Democrats, the move to support impeaching Trump was a deeply personal decision made at 30,000 feet.endorse an impeachment inquiry while on a flight returning to Washington on Sunday. On her own D.C.-bound flight the next day, Rep.
In Washington, much of the attention on the shift within the caucus has focused on the seven battleground freshmen who published the op-ed on Monday night.
"Don't get caught up with the party," the conservative Democrat cautioned. Other party elders, like Reps. Kurt Schrader , nodded in agreement, according to multiple people in the room. “If I serve one term, and do it with honor and principle, and lose because of that, so be it. I’ve done my job,” Phillips said. “Has it crossed my mind? Of course. But it’s very liberating to reflect my truth, and I think the nation’s truth.”Hours before her historic announcement on Tuesday, Pelosi received a call from Trump. The conversation was ostensibly about gun control, but Trump veered into the Ukraine controversy.
Australia Latest News, Australia Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she will make an announcement after Democrats discuss impeachmentMore than a dozen Democrats have already come out for impeachment within the past week, following bombshell reports that Trump had asked Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Biden's son, Hunter Biden, multiple times during a phone call in July.
Read more »
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi expected to announce impeachment inquiryMore than a dozen Democrats have come out for impeachment in the past week, after bombshell reports that President Trump had asked Ukraine's president to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, multiple times during a phone call in July.
Read more »
Nancy Pelosi Expected to Announce Impeachment InquiryNancy Pelosi is expected to announce an impeachment inquiry Tuesday afternoon
Read more »