House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has long resisted sanctioning a full-blown impeachment inquiry into President Trump, may now have no choice but to give it her blessing.
Powerful voices on the Left have ramped up calls for Pelosi to greenlight a full House impeachment inquiry following the revelation through a whistleblower that Trump reportedly urged the Ukraine government to investigate Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden.
“At this point, the bigger national scandal isn’t the president’s lawbreaking behavior — it is the Democratic Party’s refusal to impeach him for it,” liberal freshman New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 29, tweeted to her 5.4 million followers.
The increased urgency follows weeks of Pelosi, 79, slow-walking an impeachment probe by instead directing six House committees to investigate the president relating to a variety of allegations involving his campaign, administration, and personal businesses.
But the whistleblower complaint, leaked to the press last week, may lead to an impeachment breaking point in the House. “Begin Impeachment hearings now,” a Washington Post opinion page headline urged Pelosi on Monday.
When House lawmakers return to the Capitol Tuesday, Pelosi will face new impeachment pressure from throughout her caucus, nearly two-thirds of which already support an impeachment inquiry. “There has been a shift,” Democratic Washington Rep. Ro Khanna told MSNBC. “Many Democrats, even those who were reluctant about impeachment, are now much more concerned.”
Even House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, who has sided with Pelosi’s non-impeachment approach to investigating Trump, is now edging into the impeachment camp. “We may very well have crossed the Rubicon here,” the California Democrat said on Sunday.
On Sunday, Pelosi stopped short of threatening impeachment but warned that if the administration does not hand over the whistleblower complaint, “they will be entering a grave new chapter of lawlessness which will take us into a whole new stage of investigation.”
The center-left think tank New Democrat Network implored Pelosi to “make the case against Trump now” in a blog item authored by Simon Rosenberg. “The case against him is a powerful one, but we need to make it,” Rosenberg wrote. “Impeachment and potential removal will come only if we lean in and make the case, recognizing along the way that at some point reticence and restraint becomes cowardice.”
The whistleblower’s complaint has not been made public. Trump is considering releasing the transcript of the call, which took place on July 25 between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Trump called the whistleblower allegation “fake news” but also revealed he asked Zelensky to investigate the corruption allegation against Biden, who is the leading candidate in the Democratic primary.
Democrats believe Trump dangled an offer of security money to Ukraine in exchange for government officials investigating a claim about Biden potentially abusing his power when he was vice president in order to protect his son Hunter’s role on the board of a Ukraine gas company.
Democrats make the case that, unlike past accusations against the president, the whistleblower complaint is evidence Trump is attempting to influence the upcoming presidential election.
“Here’s what makes it different,” Khanna said. “This is forward-looking. This is something that he’s trying to do for the 2020 election. We’re no longer relitigating the past.”
But dozens of Democrats remain opposed to impeachment, particularly lawmakers who in 2020 will be defending seats in swing districts and regions where voters have no appetite for impeaching Trump.
Democrats hope to learn more about the whistleblower complaint on Thursday, when the House Intelligence Committee will hold an open hearing featuring the acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, who has been invited to testify about why he will not give the details of the complaint to Congress.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called on Senate Republicans to open an investigation into the matter and issue a subpoena to obtain the whistleblower complaint. “The Republican Senate’s ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ attitude toward such a serious national security concern is unacceptable and must change,” Schumer wrote to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
