Sidelined for months, Judiciary Panel will reclaim impeachment drive it once led
The answer came back mixed, said people familiar with the private discussion in an office building opposite the Capitol, with many of the panel’s progressive firebrands saying impeachment was inevitable, while some of its more senior members held back, wary of embracing a process likely to unleash forces well beyond their control.
What comes next is likely to be a messy and raucous process. And there were already signs late Sunday that the panel, the arbiter of presidential impeachment proceedings past, was again at the center of the maelstrom its Democratic members have been expecting, one way or another, for months. “Even at this late date,” Cipollone wrote, “it is not yet clear whether you will afford the president at least these basic, fundamental rights, or continue to deny them.”
The Judiciary rules, instead, are fundamentally democratic, intended to provide wide latitude for divisive debates over the nation’s most pressing policy issues, many of them cultural hot-buttons that fuel each party’s activist base. Barring some momentous new evidence, not a single lawmaker on either side is expected to budge.
Republicans instead want to mire Democrats in a sloppy fight, making the hearings into such a confusing mishmash of competing information that even Republicans troubled by Trump’s actions see no upside in breaking with him. They plan to take advantage of early impeachment advocacy by Nadler and Democrats on the panel to portray the Ukraine matter as simply another attempt by Trump’s critics to take him down.
It will be up to Nadler, a loquacious progressive from Manhattan’s Upper West Side who is now one of the House’s leaders, to maintain order and inject gravity and fairness into the proceedings. Democrats have spent weeks speculating that his relationship with Pelosi had been badly strained by his earlier push for impeachment, which she publicly opposed, believing the process was too divisive and unlikely, in any event, to result in the president’s removal.
Articles of impeachment themselves will be drafted in private, but debated, edited and amended out in the open — a process that could take two to three days of public work.
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