Although Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation has essentially concluded, President Donald Trump continues to face tough scrutiny from Congressional Democrats covering a whole host of other issues. This Wednesday, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) unveiled a resolution for a House Judiciary Committee investigation into whether Trump has committed impeachable offenses, making good on a promise she made on her first official day as a Congresswoman to “impeach the motherfucker!” At the time, Trump complained about Tlaib’s language, apparently hoping that we would all forget his Twitter feed existed.
The Congresswoman — who’s one of the first Muslim women to serve in the nation’s legislature — wasn’t deterred, insisting this week:
‘Doing nothing when we are seeing blatant disregard of the United States Constitution, to our ethical norms, is dangerous. No one, including the president of the United States, is above the law.’
Tlaib argues that Trump should be impeached because of issues well outside the scope of the Russia scandal like the president’s continued benefiting from foreign money flowing into his business, which many have alleged violates the Constitutional prohibition against the president garnering “compensation for services or from employment or an office” from foreign countries.
Repeatedly, foreign government money has propped up the Trump Organization since Trump has been in office, like when early on in his presidency Saudi-funded lobbyists spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at his D.C. hotel. It’s after that incident that Trump infamously dismissed the evidence of Saudi government responsibility for the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Tlaib also points to other issues, like Trump’s role in the illegal hush money scheme targeting women with whom he had affairs and his glaring obstruction of justice that Attorney General William Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein ever-so-suspiciously concluded recently did not rise to the level of a prosecutable offense.
Although House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) has made his intention to get more information on that point abundantly clear, he has not indicated he is on board with Tlaib’s proposal. Late last year, he said he didn’t want to rush the idea of impeachment before Mueller even finished his work; now that it’s concluding, he’s stuck to other talking points — although he has, in the past, expressly sought information on Trump’s conflicts of interest as indicated by violation of the Emoluments Clause. In 2017, under a GOP majority, he introduced a “resolution of inquiry” seeking information from the Justice Department on Trump’s assets.
Although Tlaib has been seeking support from her fellow Democrats for an impeachment effort, only already established impeachment advocate Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) spoke in support of Tlaib’s resolution this Wednesday. He has apparent plans on his own to again force a procedural vote on articles of impeachment against the president.
Besides Green and Tlaib, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) has already reintroduced articles of impeachment in this new Democratic majority House, but Democratic leadership have by and large declined to get on board with any of the measures. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said simply that Trump’s “not worth it.”
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
