Impeachment fever will test Pelosi's grip as Congress returns this week
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will face a significant challenge this week: keeping Democrats united as they return to Washington following a Memorial Day recess in which the push for impeaching President Trump gained new momentum.
“Right now Pelosi looks at polling, and it’s just not there,” said Paul Kane, chief congressional correspondent for the Washington Post, in an interview for the Yahoo News podcast, “The Long Game.”
“A majority of Americans think Trump committed crimes, but a similar majority doesn't think he should be impeached,” Kane said. “There’s that middle ground of voters right now who just see impeachment as another thing, another Washington thing that happens that they will just tune out.”
Pelosi had kept her caucus behind her heading into Memorial Day weekend, before special counsel Robert Mueller gave a televised public statement last Wednesday. That statement fanned the flames among Democrats who want to begin impeachment proceedings in the House now.
“Everybody was on the same page. Almost everyone, anyway. Then Mueller happens a couple days ago, and boom,” Kane said. This first week back, Kane said, will be a clear “test to see whether or not this Mueller statement changed the game.”
“I hate using the high school metaphor, but the House of Representatives is a lot like high school. Once they’re all back in the cafeteria together ... the views begin to coalesce and come together,” he said.
Pelosi’s concern is that an impeachment proceeding in the House would “allow Trump to play it off as a reality show event,” Kane said.
If the House votes to impeach Trump, there would be a trial in the Senate, where the Republicans hold a 53-47 majority.
“They know the Senate is going to end in deadlock, and you would have essentially a symbolic rebuke of the president that wouldn't go anywhere in terms of actually removing him from office, and politically it might not be very good for Democrats either,” he said.
And so, at the moment, Kane said, Pelosi’s challenge is that the country is not persuaded that impeachment is needed and there are doubts about whether there’s enough of a case for Democrats to make.
“She keeps saying this has to be an overwhelmingly compelling case,” Kane said. “Right now, it is a case in which the underlying crime of collusion with Russians in 2016 was left unsettled, not a provable case, as Mueller says. The obstruction case is there, but it's not fully defined, and it's going to take an incredible effort to fully lay the case out to the public, and convince them that this is a truly impeachable offense that could involve removal from office.”
There are also questions about whether the House Judiciary Committee is “capable of really prosecuting the case, and turning public opinion ... in a way that would make Pelosi comfortable politically moving toward impeachment,” Kane said.
“These Democrats on Judiciary, they're smart people, but they've never had to do this before. [Committee Chairman] Jerry Nadler never was the full chairman of a committee before in his life,” Kane said.
Kane also said that how Democrats proceed on the question of impeachment will play a big role in whether or not a deal is reached to raise the debt ceiling this summer before the nation gets close to defaulting on its debt obligations this fall, which could send the stock market and the economy into a tailspin.
In addition, Kane said that the Senate’s recent vote to ban earmarks “permanently” was merely “symbolic” and does not necessarily spell the end of pork-barrel spending. Congress could easily hold “another vote that says, ‘OK, we can bring them back,’” he said.
A temporary ban that passed in 2010 has contributed to Congress’ inability to move significant legislation over the past several years, or even to pass budgets, Kane said.
“It's been 10 years without earmarks,” Kane said. “It's a lost decade of Congress in so many ways.”
“The reality is nobody really knows what their local congressman is doing for them anymore. There's probably a way you could bring earmarks back if you figured out a way to just literally take lobbyists out of the equation, take political donations out of the equation,” he said.
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