The release of the Mueller report last month escalated calls from House Democrats to begin impeachment proceedings against President Trump, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is keeping it off the table by giving members a politically safer avenue to attack him.
Five House committees have the power to subpoena the Trump administration, and one of them, the House Judiciary panel, is weighing contempt charges against Attorney General William Barr.
The ongoing and broad investigations into Trump, his family, and his administration, all operating with Pelosi’s blessing, have provided Democrats a public forum to air their grievances against the president while at the same time showing their base they are holding him accountable.
But the investigations stop far short of an all-encompassing congressional impeachment inquiry, which longtime lawmakers know backfired politically when Republicans used it two decades ago to try to oust President Bill Clinton.
[Related: Trump: If Democrats try to impeach, I’ll go to Supreme Court to make it stop]
While Pelosi has identified “very serious” evidence against Trump in Mueller’s 400-page report on alleged Russian collusion, she hasn’t wavered from her skeptical view of an immediate impeachment inquiry.
“I have great confidence in our committees,” Pelosi told reporters last week. “My judgment will spring from the judgment of our committee chairs.”
Pelosi is among a small number of lawmakers still serving in the House who sat through Clinton’s impeachment two decades ago. Republicans rammed through two articles of impeachment, even though polls showed strong opposition from the public and high approval ratings for Clinton, who was winning credit for a robust economy.
The House GOP paid for the impeachment at the polls in November 1998, losing five seats from their already thin majority and bolstering Clinton’s approval ratings. Then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., one of the most powerful figures in the GOP, was blamed for the losses and forced to resign.
[Also read: Poll: Majority of Americans oppose impeachment]
Pelosi is taking a lesson from history. In private conversations with Democrats, Pelosi has urged the rank and file to focus on winning in 2020, lawmakers familiar with the conversations told the Washington Examiner. Democrats feel confident they can oust Trump through the ballot box and impeachment would be futile and politically dangerous.
Impeachment, Pelosi often reminds Democrats, isn’t worth it, since the GOP-led Senate would never vote to oust Trump.
“That is why I say sometimes that impeachment is the easy way out for some of these people,” Pelosi explained last week. “Because, they know it will end at the Senate’s edge.”
Pelosi’s head deputy over the caucus, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., has helped steer members with the message that House lawmakers plan to conduct intense oversight of Trump without allowing it to dominate their agenda, which is centered on legislation that will resonate with the Democratic base.
[Opinion: Go ahead, impeach Trump]
“We’ve been working on two tracks since we took the majority, with our priority being the For the People agenda, which we have been working on, and moving bills,” Jeffries said after a closed-door meeting with Democrats in the Capitol basement last week.
“We had a caucus meeting. We discussed infrastructure. We discussed prescription drugs. We discussed our response to the climate crisis. Not a moment of an hour meeting, the largest gathering of House Democrats in Washington, D.C., after a two-week recess, was spent on impeachment.”
Jeffries said Democrats won’t back down on Trump, who has so far resisted subpoenas and demands that his close aides testify before Congress.
“We will use every available legal means to make sure that the administration complies with our constitutional responsibility to conduct oversight on behalf of the American people,” Jeffries said.
The two-track tactic is satisfying Democrats, for now. The staunchest advocates for impeachment within the House Democratic Caucus are clamoring for action, but they are making their demands on social media and television, not in Pelosi’s office.
House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters, D-Calif., has subpoenaed Trump’s bank records and has called for his impeachment. But she’s not fighting Pelosi’s effort to keep impeachment proceedings off the table.
“The speaker has an awesome responsibility to act in the best interest of the entire caucus,” Waters said. “And she’s doing that. I get that. And those of us who chair committees have the responsibility to do the work the Constitution mandates us to do.”
