While top Democrats in Congress have so far expressed no interest in pushing for the impeachment of Donald Trump, several rank-and-file members have come forward to state publicly their calls for impeachment. The move picked up new steam on Monday when another congressional Democrat, Washington State’s Pramila Jayapal, added her voice.
Jayapal, however, cautioned that because impeachment is a “political” process more than a legal one, Trump’s removal from office would not be possible without numerous members of the majority party in Congress, Republicans, signing on. The 52-year-old first-term representative from Washington’s Seventh District — encompassing large portions of Seattle and other areas of King County — made her comments during a radio interview on Friday, though her remarks were not widely reported until Monday. An audio file of the interview with liberal radio host Bill Press can be played below on this page.
By publicly declaring that “there are significant constitutional impeachable violations that Donald Trump has committed,” Jayapal joins such fellow Democratic representatives as Al Green of Texas and Steve Cohen of Tennessee, both of whom have gone the extra step of drawing up actual articles of impeachment against Trump. So far, however, neither of their impeachment moves have come to the House floor where other members can discuss and perhaps vote on them.
“Several of us have been really thinking about how we responsibly address the crisis that we have in front of us,” Jayapal said in the interview .
“I think that we have to, I don’t think there’s a question of law in terms of knowing that there are significant constitutional impeachable violations that Donald Trump has committed,” she continued.
Listen to Jayapal’s comments on the possibility of Trump’s impeachment in the audio file below.
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, however, has repeatedly shut down talk of impeachment in the House and stated once again in a Sunday interview that she opposed attempts by Democrats to impeach Trump, saying, “It’s not someplace I think we should go.”
Jayapal also acknowledged that as a practical matter, impeaching Trump at this time would likely be impossible — thanks to House Republicans who continue to support Trump and that an attempt to begin impeachment could “backfire.” But resistance on the part of Republicans to hold hearings on Trump’s potentially impeachable offenses has been “getting nowhere,” she said.
“They might drive us to having to file articles,” Jayapal said in the interview. “But I do think we have to make sure that they don’t backfire on us, and that we have a way to either be utilizing them to really show Americans what has happened. They have to be in my mind, very legally sound proof in the wording. ”
Also on Sunday, California Representative Maxine Waters, a longtime advocate of Trump’s impeachment, authored an article in the Los Angeles Times headlined, “It looks more and more like the Trump presidency will end in impeachment.”
In the article, Waters wrote, “I believe that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation will reveal the facts, and in the final analysis, Congress will have no choice but to impeach this president.”
Mueller, a former FBI director, is currently leading a wide-ranging investigation into possible collusion between the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and the Russian government to influence the outcome of last year’s election in Trump’s favor.
[Featured Image by Drew Angerer/Getty Images]
