Time is running out for Democrats who want to begin impeachment proceedings against President Trump.
Even before Democrats won back control of the House of Representatives, there has been a raging debate within the party over whether to pursue impeachment.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has been desperately trying to avoid the prospect, knowing that without the support of the Senate, there would be no hope of removing Trump from office. Instead, she’s advocated a strategy of ramping up oversight of Trump, while pushing popular legislation that she believes will help expand the majority in 2020.
Pelosi’s strategy, however, is encountering twin problems. On the one hand, Trump has been thwarting the oversight process by denying Democrats access to documents and official testimony. And also, as the Washington Post reported, their legislative agenda is not breaking through with voters, who are mainly hearing about their battles with Trump anyway.
Pro-impeachment liberals have been stepping up their demands for at least getting the ball rolling by launching some sort of impeachment inquiry, and the number of House Democrats backing impeachment keeps growing, though still just 68 of them now back the step, not even a majority of the party.
Increasingly, however, the question of impeachment is going to run up against the congressional clock. The House calendar only lists 19 days in which the body is in session before the end of July (a period that includes the July 4 recess), and then the House is scheduled to be in summer recess from July 26 until Sept. 9.
By the fall, the 2020 Democratic presidential race will start to get fierce, and the field will start to get winnowed down to a smaller group of legitimate contenders.
Even if Democrats launch an impeachment inquiry immediately after getting back from summer recess, one would imagine that it would take months before they’d get to the point of holding any sort of actual impeachment vote. By that point they’d be into late this year, or early next year. Once the calendar turns to 2020, all the House Democrats are going to start focusing on reelection, and the presidential candidates will be at war with each other ahead of Iowa in early February — and then they’re into months of primaries and caucuses leading up to the Democratic convention.
Once they get into 2020, Democrats are going to want their case to focus on the need to replace Trump, rather than an effort to impeach him.
So it seems to me that if Democrats are going to impeach Trump, they’re going to need to start the process by the end of next month, before they leave town for recess. They can then use the summer recess to press their case back home and hear from voters and schedule any final vote for the fall.
Of course, they could always schedule more legislative time or cancel recess altogether if they decide down the road they want to impeach Trump. But my bet is that if impeachment proceedings don’t start by the end of July, we aren’t going to see them.
