Impeachment talk flares after Dems take power

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been in office for only a few hours when a handful of Democrats defied her persistent calls not to begin the new Congress by talking about impeachment.

Just after Pelosi was sworn in Thursday, longtime Democratic Reps. Brad Sherman of California and Al Green of Texas introduced articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. Later that evening, newly elected Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan riled up a supportive crowd by calling the president a profanity and predicting he will be removed from office.

Tension over impeachment is likely to be a persistent thorn for Pelosi, who will have to balance between a small, vocal group of the most liberal members of her caucus, who want to see Trump removed immediately, and the majority of her members who want to wait for special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation to finish. Pelosi purposely avoided – and encouraged most fellow Democrats to avoid – any talk of impeachment during the election, believing there could be backlash from voters.

While many Democrats might favor impeachment, those calling for it now are largely outliers. Most Democratic lawmakers listened to Pelosi and campaigned on kitchen table issues such as health care and jobs and prefer to keep them at the forefront of the party’s focus.

Still, it will be hard for Pelosi to quiet some on her left flank who see their new majority as a direct challenge to Trump.

“Impeachment is on the table,” Sherman said. “You can’t take it off the table.”

The division delights Republicans, who have used impeachment calls to fire up their base of voters. Trump was eager to immediately seize on the topic, asking in a tweet Friday, “How do you impeach a president who has won perhaps the greatest election of all time, done nothing wrong.”

Speaking later Friday to reporters in the Rose Garden, Trump said he thought Tlaib’s comments were “disgraceful” and she “dishonored herself.”

Tlaib, who represents liberal Detroit, exclaimed at an event late Thursday that Democrats were going to “impeach the mother------.” She didn’t back down Friday, tweeting that “I will always speak truth to power.”

Her spokesman, Denzel McCampbell, said in a statement that Tlaib, one of only two Muslim women in Congress, “was elected to shake up Washington” and will not stay silent.

“The congresswoman absolutely believes he needs to be impeached. She ran and won by making this very clear to the voters in her district,” McCampbell said.

House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the new head of the Republican conference, denounced the comments. It’s “a level of vitriol that’s not good for this country,” Cheney said.

Pelosi said Friday at an MSNBC town hall that the House shouldn’t move to impeach Trump without more facts. She said, as she has many times before, that impeachment is “divisive,” and she wants the new Democratic majority to be unified.

On Tlaib’s language, Pelosi said she doesn’t like it and wouldn’t use it. But she also said it’s no worse than things Trump has said, adding that she wouldn’t censor her colleagues.

Top Democrats have supported Pelosi’s approach to impeachment, with House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler also saying it is a divisive, even traumatic, process that should be done only with Republican support. Both Nadler and Pelosi were in Congress when the Republican-led House impeached President Bill Clinton in 1998.

Even if the House should approve articles of impeachment – very unlikely at present – a two-thirds-majority vote to convict Trump in the Republican-led Senate and remove him from office would seem out of the question, barring new revelations or a dramatic decline in the president’s political support.