House Republicans Monday rebuffed claims by top Democrats that the House is pursuing an impeachment inquiry against President Trump.
“The House has not taken any action to approve a formal impeachment inquiry,” a Republican committee aide on the House Judiciary Committee said Monday.
Democrats on the Judiciary panel last week insisted that impeachment is underway.
They announced they are conducting an “impeachment investigation” and said they would use impeachment to seek the release of redacted grand jury testimony from the Mueller report.
Grand jury material cannot be disclosed under a law passed by Congress nearly two decades ago, but Democrats believe it will further make the case that Trump tried to obstruct Mueller’s two-year probe into his campaign’s alleged but never proven collusion with Russians.
“We are telling the court that what we are doing is not just part of normal oversight but part of our Article 1 authority and responsibility to consider all remedies, including the possibility of articles of impeachment,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler said.
But GOP aides on the committee said the court would likely reject such an argument because an impeachment inquiry hasn’t begun and can’t start unless the House votes to authorize it.
“Impeachment is an authority of the House, not the Judiciary Committee,” the aide said.
Panel aides pointed to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.
Before the House voted to impeach on Dec. 19, 1998, they first passed a resolution on Oct. 8, “Authorizing the Committee on the Judiciary to Investigate Whether Sufficient Grounds Exist for the Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton, President of the United States.”
The House hasn’t taken such a vote.
House lawmakers have instead voted three times over the past two years to block resolutions calling up articles of impeachment against the president. The last such vote garnered 95 Democrats, but still far short of a 218 majority needed to bring an impeachment resolution formally to the House floor.
The committee Republican aide said Democrats are trying to conflate their oversight powers with impeachment, which would broaden the material they can access.
The aide called it “a very dangerous thing to do” that mixes “legal rules and political validation.”
Democrats last week looked to recover from what many called a disastrous testimony provided by Mueller to the Judiciary and House Intelligence panels.
More than a dozen Democrats added their names to the pro-impeachment list following Mueller’s testimony, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi was not among them and said Democrats should pursue oversight through committees and the courts and did not have enough to make the case for impeachment.
Nadler suggested Pelosi’s permission isn’t needed.
“Whether you call that an inquiry, whether you want to call it that, it’s what we’ve been doing and it is what we’ll continue to do,” Nadler said.
