The Impeachment Congress House Democrats need to vote to authorize an official inquiry.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-impeachment-congress-11569367442
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday endorsed an official inquiry to impeach President Trump, and there is joy across Resistance America—at least for now. The decision guarantees that this will go down as the Impeachment Congress, with little to show beyond investigations into the Trump campaign and now the Trump Presidency.
In one sense this moment was probably inevitable. Most Democrats and most of the media have never accepted Mr. Trump as a legitimate President. They can’t believe 63 million Americans voted for him over their nominee, Hillary Clinton, so they have looked every day since Election Night in 2016 for some reason to expel him from office.
They spent two years spinning a tale of Russian collusion that proved to be false. Then they hyped obstruction of justice because Mr. Trump fired James Comey as FBI director, but the public wasn’t persuaded. The payment to Stormy Daniels made a cameo, but that was too close to Democrats’ defense of Bill Clinton for “lying about sex” to fly.
Mrs. Pelosi has now found a rationale in a whistleblower’s accusation about Mr. Trump’s July 25 phone call to Ukraine’s President. Mr. Trump admits that he warned Volodymyr Zelensky about corruption, including Joe Biden ’s interventions in Ukraine against a prosecutor who was investigating a company with ties to Mr. Biden ’s son, Hunter. Mr. Trump also admits that he delayed U.S. aid to Ukraine in early July prior to the phone call out of concern for corruption and allied burden sharing.
Mrs. Pelosi has concluded that all of this is worth ginning up the impeachment machinery that has been exercised against Presidents only three times in U.S. history. “The actions taken to date by the President have seriously violated the Constitution,” she said after a meeting of House Democrats. “The actions of the Trump Presidency revealed dishonorable facts of the President’s betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security, and betrayal of the integrity of our elections.”
The American people will be the ultimate judge of that, and they will want to see evidence that warrants overturning an election. They haven’t yet seen the transcript of Mr. Trump’s phone call, which the President says he will release on Wednesday. They don’t know the context of Mr. Trump’s request to Mr. Zelensky and how much it related to overall U.S. policy toward Ukraine. And they don’t know the role, access and motivation of the whistleblower.
Mr. Trump’s invitation to Mr. Zelensky to investigate Mr. Biden, if that’s what it was, showed bad judgment in our view. Mr. Trump has no filter for separating the personal from the political. No President should invite a foreigner to investigate a domestic opponent, especially a President whose opponents sought foreign dirt to defeat him in 2016.
But bad judgment is not a crime, and voters may demand more to annul an election only months before they have a chance to render their own judgment about Mr. Trump’s behavior.
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Mrs. Pelosi’s decision will please her political base in Congress and the country. But she has also unleashed a political battle whose outcome is uncertain. For one thing she will now have an obligation to fairness. This should include an investigation into the actions of Mr. Biden and his son in Ukraine, and whether Mr. Trump had a point beyond self-interest in raising the issue with a new Ukrainian President who campaigned against corruption.
She will also need a commitment to accountability for the House. This means voting to authorize an official inquiry, as Republicans did in 1998 regarding Bill Clinton. Mrs. Pelosi can’t get away with merely declaring something “official” without honoring the proper procedure and making the Members declare themselves on the record. If she wants the constitutional privileges of the impeachment power, she has to be accountable for it.
Mrs. Pelosi has often said that impeachment won’t be credible with the public if it isn’t bipartisan. Yet so far it is entirely partisan. Mr. Biden proved that point by calling Tuesday for Mr. Trump’s impeachment if he resists the demands of Congress. The House can impeach on a partisan vote and define “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” as it wishes. But impeachment is ultimately political, and the voters will decide in 2020 if impeachment is what they voted for in 2018.
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