There isn’t an emergency on the Southern border according to Democrats but there is a national emergency as long as President Trump is in the Oval Office. Wednesday Rep. Rashida Tlaib said she will be introducing a resolution to urge the House Judicial Committee to move forward with impeachment hearings. She joined a group of protesters on Capitol Hill to explain that her supporters in Michigan want Trump to be impeached, too.
“We want to be able to work on these economic justice issues, racial justice issues and everything. But guess what? There is a wall there, and a constitutional crisis that is not going to be able to have us be able to do our jobs as American Congress members to push a lot of these agendas forward.”
It sounds like she wants to get the impeachment train going down the tracks because her social justice warrior agenda is being slowed by President Trump. I know she’s a newbie in Congress but surely she understands that the job of the opposition party is to slow the advancement of policies of the majority. She is a Democrat and President Trump is a Republican so it’s no surprise that Trump is throwing up a “wall” to push back on her agenda. When she was asked by journalists if she thought an unfounded demand of impeachment hearings would sink the Democrats in 2020, as Democrat leadership says, she brushed off the question. According to Fox News online, she claims that the mid-term election was a “calling to elect the jury that would begin the impeachment proceedings to Donald Trump.”
We know Tlaib has fantasized about President Trump’s impeachment since she arrived in Congress. Her only real attention has been for a video clip of her in a group of supporters celebrating being sworn-in and she blurted out, “We’re gonna impeach the motherf—-r.” She is a part of a far-left clique of new congresswomen like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep.Illhan Omar. They are the most vocal of the freshman that Speaker Pelosi is having difficulty reining in. Now Tlaib says she’s just representing her district.
While Tlaib’s resolution is not expected to gain much traction in the immediate future — Democratic leadership and key committee chairs have stressed that they’re not at the impeachment stage in their investigations — Tlaib’s proposal highlights the extent to which a vocal faction of the House Democratic caucus is intent on pushing the issue immediately.
Tlaib downplayed any differences with House Democratic leaders, saying, “when I speak to leadership they constantly remind me I have to represent my district.”
She added, “I think every single colleague of mine agrees there’s impeachable offenses. That’s one thing that we all agree on. We may disagree on the pace.”
Does every single colleague think there are impeachable offenses? I don’t doubt a majority of them do but all of them is a stretch. The desire is clearly there in the House Judiciary Committee, for example as Chairman Nadler has stated that he believes Trump obstructed justice but the whole House would have to vote on impeachment after it was voted out of the committee. Polling shows that 59% of voters say they don’t want President Trump impeached. I am sure some of those more moderate Congressmen and women just elected would have pause to vote in the affirmative.
There’s been no hint of Russian collusion from Team Mueller, at least not yet. I don’t think there will be, so Democrats are now hurriedly scrambling to open as many investigations as possible to scrape together some excuse to call for impeachment. Republicans learned the lesson the hard way that Americans don’t want to be dragged through an impeachment scenario over personal peccadillos or character issues. Perhaps there’s an opening if the payments to women turn out to be after Trump was in the White House and a violation of campaign finance law but that’s not at all clear right now.
We are a long way from impeachment, absent any bombshells from the Mueller investigation. The Southern District of New York is diligently digging into whatever they think Cohen gave them and they will be more of a threat to Trump’s presidency than Mueller, I think. Tlaib promises to make her move by the end of the month. We’ll see what happens.