Democrats and a cheerleading press corps are accelerating their drive to impeach President Trump, with the release Thursday of the whistleblower complaint and a harangue of the acting director of national intelligence. Not to spoil the fun, but when is the House going to hold a roll call vote to authorize this effort to oust an elected President?
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Tuesday she now supports an “official” inquiry, but nothing changed other than the political momentum for impeachment. The same committees investigating all things Trump are doing what they were doing before her statement. Mrs. Pelosi seems to think something is “official” merely because she deems it so.
This isn’t how impeachment worked against Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. In those cases the full House voted to authorize the Judiciary Committee to investigate if impeachment was warranted.
On Feb. 4, 1974, Democratic House leaders introduced H.Res. 803 authorizing Judiciary “to investigate fully and completely whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to impeach President Richard M. Nixon,” according to the Congress.gov summary. The vote in favor was 410-4. The bipartisan support gave the inquiry more than partisan legitimacy, and six months later Nixon resigned after tapes were released finding he had ordered the coverup of the Watergate break-in.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Tuesday she now supports an “official” inquiry, but nothing changed other than the political momentum for impeachment. The same committees investigating all things Trump are doing what they were doing before her statement. Mrs. Pelosi seems to think something is “official” merely because she deems it so.
This isn’t how impeachment worked against Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. In those cases the full House voted to authorize the Judiciary Committee to investigate if impeachment was warranted.
On Feb. 4, 1974, Democratic House leaders introduced H.Res. 803 authorizing Judiciary “to investigate fully and completely whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to impeach President Richard M. Nixon,” according to the Congress.gov summary. The vote in favor was 410-4. The bipartisan support gave the inquiry more than partisan legitimacy, and six months later Nixon resigned after tapes were released finding he had ordered the coverup of the Watergate break-in.
Nancy Pelosi by Gage Skidmore is licensed under Flickr Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
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