Some of the most outspoken House Democrats who pushed to impeach President Trump early in his first term say doing so again over filling Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat before the election may not be the right strategy.
During an interview on ABC News’s This Week on Sunday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked if she and House Democrats would attempt to impeach Trump or Attorney General William Barr as a way to prevent the Senate from confirming a Trump-appointed Supreme Court nominee.
“We have our options. We have arrows in our quiver that I’m not about to discuss right now. But the fact is we have a big challenge in our country,” Pelosi said. “This president has threatened to not even accept the results of the election.”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy responded by saying about his fellow Californian, “I will make you this one promise, listening to the speaker on television this weekend. If she tries to move for an impeachment based upon the president following the Constitution, I think there will be a move on the floor to no longer have the question of her being speaker. She may think she has a quiver — we do too.”
Not all House Democrats, however, were sure what Pelosi meant by her comments on Sunday.
“I am the original impeachment person. So, I would love to do that if it was possible. You have to take into consideration the time prior to the election. I don’t know if there’s enough time,” California Rep. Maxine Waters told the Washington Examiner. “And I don’t know what she was thinking when she said that, or whether or not there’s something in the rules that you can use from the last impeachment effort that could carry over that you wouldn’t have to duplicate, so I don’t know a lot about it.”
New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to see impeachment proceedings move forward on Barr but felt differently over impeaching Trump over a Supreme Court nominee.
“I think Barr should have been impeached a long time ago, and he’s absolutely unfit for office. Now, whether that leads to impeachment proceedings or not, I think it’s a question between the House Judiciary Committee and the state of their investigation as well as the speaker’s judgment,” she told the Washington Examiner. “I don’t think [Trump] filling [a Supreme Court seat] is an impeachable offense, but I do think he’s committed plenty of other impeachable offenses.”
Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin thinks it is more important for Democrats to wait until they know who the Supreme Court nominee is and what the confirmation timeline will be before their caucus makes any decisions.
“I’m an old union organizer, and one of the things I learned was you don’t make decisions until you have to,” Raskin told the Washington Examiner. “We will have so much more information about who the nominee is about what their timeline is, and so on and so forth. So I’m not into making decisions prematurely. I just think we need to explore all of our options and leave them on the table until we really feel like we fully understand them.”
