WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Constitution gives the House “the sole power of impeachment” — but it confers that authority without an instruction manual.
Now comes the battle royal over exactly what it means.
In vowing to halt all cooperation with House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, the White House on Tuesday labeled the investigation “illegitimate” based on its own reading of the Constitution’s vague language.
The White House on Tuesday wrote to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and three Democratic committee leaders to say it would not cooperate with the House’s ongoing impeachment inquiry into President Trump, framing the investigation as an effort to “overturn the results of the 2016 election.”
White House counsel Pat Cipollone accused House Democrats in an eight-page letter of making “legally unsupported demands” of the executive branch and accused them of violating the Constitution and past precedent in opening the impeachment inquiry into Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.
“Given that your inquiry lacks any legitimate constitutional foundation, any pretense of fairness, or even the most elementary due process protections, the Executive Branch cannot be expected to participate in it,” Cipollone wrote. “Because participating in this inquiry under the current unconstitutional posture would inflict lasting institutional harm on the Executive Branch and lasting damage to the separation of powers, you have left the President no choice.”
View the complete October 8 article by Brett Samuels and Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.
New public opinion surveys show signs of trouble for President Trump in the fast-evolving impeachment inquiry unfolding just 13 months out from Election Day.
Polls out this week show independents and a growing share of Republicans warming to the inquiry or expressing concern about Trump’s request that Ukraine investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.
While early shifts in support of impeachment appeared to be driven by Democrats, a Washington Post–Schar School poll released on Tuesday rocked Washington, finding that nearly 30 percent of Republicans support the impeachment investigation and nearly 20 percent support a Senate vote to remove the president if he is impeached in the House.
View the complete October 8 article by Jonathan Easley on The Hill website here.
‘There’s no more debating the facts. He did it,’ Walter Shaub saysPresident Donald Trump on Friday dismissed criticism from House Democrats and others over his renewed calls for foreign governments to investigate his domestic political rivals, even as text messages from U.S. diplomats suggest he insisted of trading a White House visit with Ukraine’s president for just that.
Experts see a president and administration only digging a deeper hole — and unable to help themselves or build a strategy to allow congressional Republicans to counter House Democrats’ message that Trump is corrupt and putting his own interests over those of the United States.
In a morning tweet, the president wrote that he has “an obligation to end CORRUPTION, even if that means requesting the help of a foreign country or countries.”
View the complete October 4 article by John T. Bennett on The Roll Call website here.
Donald Trump’s behavior with the president of Ukraine was so alarming that more than 300 former national security professionals have signed a public statement condemning his actions and applauding the House for opening an impeachment inquiry into the matter.
The statement, spearheaded by National Security Action and released Friday morning, garnered the support of many former federal officials who worked for both Republican and Democratic administrations. And the group expects even more signatures to be added on Friday afternoon.
“President Trump appears to have leveraged the authority and resources of the highest office in the land to invite additional foreign interference into our democratic processes,” the letter states. “That would constitute an unconscionable abuse of power. It also would represent an effort to subordinate America’s national interests — and those of our closest allies and partners — to the President’s personal political interest.”
View the complete September 27 article by Dan Desai Martin on the National Memo website here.
When asked if it was possible that impeachment might backfire, the Speaker of the House insisted that politics has nothing to do with it. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “He has given us no choice.”Before we begin to grapple with the gravity of the impeachment inquiry that is now upon us, can we acknowledge yet again the extreme weirdness of our times? If, through the distorting mists of time, the heroes and antiheroes of the Watergate saga seem positively Shakespearean in their stature—Nixon raging on the heath, his cunning satraps devising their poisoned betrayals—what to make of today’s dramatis personae of Kiev and Washington, Presidents Zelensky and Trump, one a comic actor turned fledgling statesman, the other a real-estate grifter turned . . . political grifter? Scholars of the Volodymyr Zelensky filmography will recall his appearances in “Love in the Big City 2” and “Rzhevsky Versus Napoleon.” And they will credit his work in the television show “Servant of the People,” in which he played the President of Ukraine, a role that set him on the path to being the actual President of Ukraine. Zelensky is an expressive comic artist. And so it is not hard to imagine his mask of terrorized bewilderment as he held a telephone to his ear in July and listened to the ex-star of “The Apprentice” deliver an implicit threat to deprive his country of military aid and diplomatic standing if he failed to interfere in the 2020 U.S. Presidential election on Trump’s behalf. This is our reality.
Into this reality has stepped, if belatedly, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, Speaker of the House. Continue reading “Nancy Pelosi: An Extremely Stable Genius”
Move comes as Senate passes resolution calling for whistleblower report to be turned overSpeaker Nancy Pelosi announced Tuesday that the House will move to open a formal impeachment inquiry, overriding the claims of Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler and other panel Democrats they’ve been engaged in one for months.
“I’m announcing that the House of Representatives will move forward with an official impeachment inquiry,” she said in televised remarks Tuesday after a meeting of House Democrats.
Pelosi briefed the Democratic Caucus on her plans for advancing the House’s investigations into President Donald Trump following allegations that the president pressured Ukraine to open an investigation into his potential 2020 rival, Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden.
View the complete September 24 article by Lindsey McPherson on The Roll Call website here.
