House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is facing severe pressure from progressives to impeach President Donald Trump on the alleged political pressure campaign on Ukraine, The Hill reported.
Democrats have raised howls after reports emerged that the President insisted that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky inspects former Vice President Joe Biden, as well as his son Hunter Biden – a move that was described as Trump’s most heinous in a long line of scandals.
However, the new and unexpected developments failed to change the Speaker’s strategy on impeachment, a move she has warned could be politically dangerous for the Democratic party in 2020.
Sources close to Pelosi say, barring some earth-shattering development, the Speaker is unlikely to make a dramatic 180-degree turn on her impeachment position. “This is chess, not checkers,” said one Democratic source, describing the Speaker’s big-picture approach to the impeachment question.
In both public and private, Pelosi, a 32-year House veteran who did not make any public remarks on Monday, has argued that Democrats should aggressively investigate Trump but shouldn’t move on impeachment without overwhelming support from the public and buy-in from Republicans, who control the Senate.
Some moderate House Democrats fear that impeachment could spark a backlash from voters and cost them Trump-district seats that helped propel the party to the majority in 2018. Freshman Rep. Conor Lamb (D-Pa.), who represents a district Trump won in 2016, called out the President in a statement Monday without mentioning the “I-word.”
“We cannot allow even the possibility to exist that our President used the immense power of that office to protect his own selfish interests, rather than to protect the American people. The safety and security of all Americans is at stake in Ukraine and anywhere that our adversaries threaten the cause of freedom,” Lamb said. “As lawmakers, we swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. We will get the truth.”
But in a sign of the growing pressure on Pelosi — and how the politics within her caucus are evolving — another moderate freshman Democrat, Dean Phillips of Minnesota, said he would back impeachment if the reports turn out to be true.
“This continues a pattern of behavior that is corrupt at best, treasonous at worst, and puts our rule of law at risk,” Phillips said in a statement Monday. “If the reports are corroborated, we must pursue articles of impeachment and report them to the full House of Representatives for immediate consideration.”
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