With the release of the redacted Mueller Report momentum has been building for Impeachment. The first step would be an Impeachment Inquiry. This is the fact finding stage before deciding on enumerated Articles of Impeachment. It can begin with a simple majority vote in the House Judiciary Committee. The benefit of starting the Impeachment Inquiry is that Courts recognize it grants additional strength to subpoena requests. www.politico.com/...
Activists, including some from MoveOn, said they had more than 10 million signatures for an online petition to impeach Trump. At a press conference steps from the Capitol, they held up signs that read, "Trump Must Go," and chanted, "I’m fired up, can't take it no more!"
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Speaker Pelosi has been giving mixed signals on Impeachment. I can’t figure out if she is for or against it. I am not sure she even knows. If there is no move to begin an Impeachment Inquiry before the August recess, I fear Pelosi will say time has run out. Something must happen by July or the game is up and Trump’s egregious actions will go without rebuke from Congress. Our base will be demoralized right before the most important election in the history of this nation.
Below are some recent quotes from Speaker Pelosi in no particular order. What do you think? Does she have a plan leading us somewhere; or is she against impeachment and is running out the clock; or is she watching and waiting for events to unfold? Skim through the quotes and vote in the poll below.
Pelosi has long said impeachment is divisive and would not be successful unless Republicans get on board. In an exclusive interview with USA TODAY in March she said it would be "a gift to the president."
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Pelosi has not ruled out impeachment but said Democrats should focus first on investigating Mueller's findings. If the facts lead to impeachment "that's the place we have to go," the speaker has said.
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But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told Democrats in a closed-door caucus meeting Wednesday morning to stick to their policy agenda ahead of the 2020 election rather than initiate impeachment proceedings. And not a single lawmaker challenged her, according to a person in the room who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private meeting.
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But House Democratic leaders have yet to schedule a vote for the first package of contempt resolutions, including one for Attorney General William P. Barr.
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“Trump — I use his name — Trump is goading us to impeach him. That’s what he’s doing. Every single day, he’s just like taunting, taunting, taunting.” [...] “he knows that it would be very divisive for the country, but he doesn’t really care. He just wants to solidify his base.”
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“In terms of owning the center ground, I think the center ground can be owned by the left,” Pelosi said, listing issues such as raising the minimum wage, protecting the environment and preventing “taking babies out of the arms of their parents,” an apparent reference to the Trump administration’s immigration policy.
The subtext was clear, however: Impeachment is not one of the issues that will help Democrats “own the center ground.”
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Pelosi described impeachment as a difficult political situation for Democrats, in which the party risks alienating one bloc of supporters on the left if they refuse to impeach Trump, and another bloc of potential supporters in the middle if they proceed with impeachment.
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"I think the President every day gives grounds for impeachment in terms of his obstruction of justice. You never say, blanketly, I'm not answering any subpoenas," Pelosi said at an event hosted by the Georgetown University Law Center [...]
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But Pelosi also said at the event, "Now I don't want to impeach," adding, "I want them to give us the information before they have to spend too much money on lawyers. No offense," a remark that met with laughter in the crowd.
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Pelosi declined to say whether she supports imposing fines on individuals who defy congressional subpoenas, but reiterated that "nothing is off the table" when asked about that possibility during the press conference.
"I'm not saying we are going down that path, I'm just saying that it is not to be excluded, nothing is off the table," Pelosi said.
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"We have a path where we are investigating, exercising our constitutional responsibility to have oversight and also our constitutional responsibility as a separate branch of government to hold the other branch accountable predicated on the fact that no person is above the law, not even the President of the United States," she said.
"This isn't about passion, it's not about prejudice, it's not about politics, it's about the presentation of the facts. It's about patriotism and wherever that path takes us, we cannot resist," Pelosi said, "but on the other hand we have to exhaust every other remedy on the way."
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"As we proceed to uncover the truth and present additional needed reforms to protect our democracy, we must show the American people we are proceeding free from passion or prejudice, strictly on the presentation of fact,"
"While our views range from proceeding to investigate the findings of the Mueller report or proceeding directly to impeachment, we all firmly agree that we should proceed down a path of finding the truth."
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"Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there's something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don't think we should go down that path, because it divides the country," Pelosi told the Washington Post in March. "And [Trump's] just not worth it."
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At a press conference on Thursday, Pelosi justified her long standing reluctance to begin the impeachment process, calling it "the easy way out" for Republicans who are "complicit in the special-interest agenda," because they know the effort would "end at the Senate's edge."
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"I think I'm an expert on why he shouldn't be president of the United States," Pelosi said during a private meeting, according to notes from unnamed sources that were cited in The Washington Post. "I think impeachment is too good for him."
"But one person knows more why he shouldn't be president of the United States, and that is Donald Trump," she said. "And he tells us every single day."
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