Monday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing gives Democrats perhaps their last chance to make a televised case for removing President Trump from office before the committee moves on to finalizing articles of impeachment. The Intelligence Committee held public hearings and heard from 12 witnesses. Judiciary has held just one public session, hearing from constitutional experts. An impeach-by-Christmas deadline looms.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler tried to explain why Democrats are racing to finish their work. The reason, Nadler said, is that if the president is not removed from office immediately, he will cheat in the next election.
“The integrity of our next election is at stake,” Nadler said. “Nothing could be more urgent.” Impeachment is so pressing, Nadler said, because the president represents “a continuing risk to the country.”
On Sunday, Nadler appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press. He argued that impeachment is a “matter of urgency” because “we have to make sure that the next election is conducted with integrity and without foreign interference.”
“The president, based on his past performance, will do everything he can to make it not a fair election, and that is part of what gives us the urgency to proceed with this impeachment,” Nadler said.
In other words, this is a preemptive impeachment.
Nadler’s words echoed those of other top Democrats, who after several tries, have settled on preemption as a key reason for their race to impeachment. “The president leaves us no choice but to act because he is trying to corrupt, once again, the election for his own benefit,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last week when she announced that she had told her committee chairman to proceed with articles of impeachment.
Judiciary Committee Democrats, who in March of this year sent letters to more than 80 people “demanding all communications from a host of controversies surrounding Trump” (in the words of the Washington Post), and who used their new majority to launch a broad range of investigations targeting the president, are deeply concerned by the prospect of a government official using his or her office to investigate political opponents. So now, they have adopted the doctrine of preemptive impeachment. In other contexts (such as the Iraq war), preemption has proved to be an enormously controversial political rationale.
It will likely prove equally contentious in the context of impeachment.
