Donald Trump Impeachment Off The Table, Say Top Democrats
“Together with millions of Americans, I demand that members of Congress” act “to protect the investigation and start impeachment proceedings against Trump immediately,” billionaire liberal activist Tom Steyer’s statement reads, echoing other activist calls for the impeachment of President Donald Trump.
With the Democratic Party winning back control over the House of Representatives, and with Trump firing Jeff Sessions and promptly naming Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general, calls for Trump’s impeachment have only intensified.
Further intensifying the calls for impeachment, media resurrection of Whitaker’s 2017 CNN op-ed, in which he argues that Robert Mueller is “crossing the red line” by probing Trump’s finances and calls for the limiting of his probe, seems to have lit a fire under liberal activist groups who remain adamant that Donald Trump has to be impeached.
But according to top Democrats, impeachment is off the table, Bloomberg reports. At least for now.
Impeachment “would be an enormous waste of resources at a time when efforts need to be focused on protecting Mueller and his investigation,” Democratic member of the House Judiciary Committee Jamie Raskin said.
“Now is not the time to consider impeachment,” the second-highest ranking Democrat in the House Judiciary Committee Steny Hoyer said, “Special Counsel Mueller must be allowed to complete his investigation.”
Instead of trying to impeach Donald Trump, top members of the Democratic Party remain focused on Robert Mueller’s probe, while pushing for legislation to protect the special counsel from presidential interference, according to Bloomberg.
At a 90-minute White House press briefing this week, President Donald Trump sounded optimistic about working with the Democrats, arguing that their takeover of the House could be a “a beautiful, bipartisan type of situation,” according to the Washington Examiner, but promised “war” and retaliation if the Democrats try to impeach him.
The Democratic Party appears to have taken Trump’s threats seriously, or at least come to terms with the reality of impeachment proceedings: impeachment by the House would likely not result in the removal of the president, given that the Republican Party has not only managed to preserve its Senate seats, but gained a few.
Democratic Representative Gerald Connolly of Virginia said that introducing impeachment now would be “politically toxic” for Democrats, adding that such moves would have to be “the result of a process — not the beginning of one.”
Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic Leader and likely the next House Speaker, similarly opined that the Democratic Party has “a constitutional responsibility to have oversight,” but refused to address the prospect of impeachment, ignoring pleas from liberal activists many of who, so it seems, had viewed the midterms as a potential tipping point.
