Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) said that 80%-90% of Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee support launching impeachment proceedings against Trump.
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House Judiciary Democrats Want To Move Forward With Impeachment
Cohen said on MSNBC’s The Beat with Ari Melber:
The Judiciary Committee as a whole is for at least an inquiry of impeachment. I don’t think any member, there might have been two members, that were particularly close to Speaker Pelosi that were not on board. But I would say, 80, 90% of the committees on board to go forward.
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I can’t speak for the chair, but I know they’re in that most of us are lawyers. We have the Constitution in our heart, and most of us have probably had more interaction with the Mueller report and the facts than most of the rest of Congress because it has come to us. We wanted to prep for Barr and McGahn.
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Cohen was also quick to point out that a majority of Democrats in the House caucus still support Speaker Pelosi’s position of letting the investigations and court cases do their work.
House Judiciary Democrats Are Frustrated
The frustration of House Judiciary Democrats was evident during the hearing that Don McGahn didn’t show up to testify at. They clearly want more tools to break Trump’s obstruction so that they can do their jobs and conduct oversight. The problem, as my colleague Sarah Jones has pointed out, is that the beginning of any impeachment investigation is going to be spun by Trump as impeachment. The president will spin any investigation into impeachment and play the martyr.
Pelosi is right to tread carefully on impeachment because the “rule of law” means nothing if Democrats impeach in the House, and Mitch McConnell ignores it and doesn’t hold an impeachment trial in the Senate. Democrats are impatient, but Trump wants to use their impatience to make the 2020 election about impeachment, and ride that to a Republican take back of the House and a second term.
Democrats need to work through the process. Impeachment will come, but the goal is to make sure that it doesn’t come soon enough to reelect Donald Trump.
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Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
