While Republicans run from the facts, House Democrats continue to grapple with the facts of President Donald Trump’s belligerent at times legally questionable at best behavior. At the annual convention of the California Democratic Party, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) adamantly insisted that Trump will be held accountable as calls continue to pile up for impeachment. She and other Democratic leaders have insisted that impeachment should not be rushed because of the political ramifications; considering the fact that it’s not as though there’s a Democratic majority in the Senate that would support such efforts, they want to reveal the relevant information in plain sight and build, as Pelosi put it, an “ironclad case.”
She told California Democrats at an event where protesters shouted their support for impeachment:
‘This isn’t about politics, it isn’t about partisanship, Democrats versus Republicans, no. It’s about patriotism, it’s about the sanctity of the constitution and it’s about the future of our nation. We will go where the facts lead us. We will insist on the truth. We will build an ironclad case to act. President Trump will be held accountable for his actions. In the Congress, in the courts, and in the court of public opinion.’
The Democratic leader has previously spoken along these lines, sharing with late-night television host Jimmy Kimmel that her caucus believes “it has to be clear to the American people” that the path of impeachment is a fitting solution to the problems of the Trump presidency before they were to actually go down that path.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) has shared similar sentiments. Although he has repeatedly been harsh with the Trump administration’s behavior and subsequent stonewalling in the face of investigative efforts covering that behavior, he shared bluntly:
‘You cannot impeach a president if the American people will not support it. The American people right now do not support it because they do not know the story… We have to get the facts out.’
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has said that an impeachment push against the president could be an appropriate and importantly, effective means to get those facts, but Democrats are pursuing numerous other means. They’ve launched multiple subpoenas for testimony and relevant information from the Trump administration, and although these subpoenas have since been ignored, the cases will likely soon proceed to court. An impeachment case could provide clear grounds for a Democratic victory in court, considering the action is expressly legally provided for, but so could subpoenas and other steps.
Generally, as Democratic leaders suggest, only a plurality of the public supports impeachment and at least as many if not more oppose it. Roughly 43 percent of voters supported no such action against the president in a recent poll, and only 37 percent supported impeachment, although that number includes some 60 percent of Democrats.
Trump, for his part, continues to consistently deny that anything is wrong that could even warrant impeachment, asserting himself as one of the best if not the best president in American history and that the entire Russia investigation was a sham to begin with, despite the fact that half a dozen of his former associates have faced criminal charges in connection to it.
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