Is it time to again march on Washington to get Pelosi's attention?

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has been very emphatic about not rushing to impeachment. But her caucus KNOWS Trump deserves to be ousted from office.

All the op-eds and blogs in the world seem not to be phasing Pelosi. Blogger Heather Digby Parton today was published in Salon, "Democrats still don't want to impeach."

We're still in the middle of the Russia scandal but I'd bet money that the line that will be most remembered is from the Mueller report, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions told President Trump that a special counsel had been appointed. He slumped in his chair and said, "Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I'm fucked."

We don't know at this moment whether that will have led to the end of his presidency or not. But it tells you something important about Trump's mindset. This investigation had him in despair from the very beginning. In fact, we now know that he was so anxious about it that he spent the next year and a half secretly obstructing justice in a dozen different ways, publicly trashing everyone involved in it and destroying the reputations of the FBI and the Department of Justice. Whether that reflected his guilt over his behavior in the Russia matter or concern that the FBI was turning over other rocks he'd rather not be touched is still unknown. But these were not the actions of an innocent man. [...]

He was nervous then and he's even more nervous now that the investigations have moved to the House. After all, Mueller's operation was secret. Congress operates in public. [...]

Trump's fear of high drama that he cannot control, starring someone who can potentially puncture the bubble that surrounds his supporters, is palpable. This could end his presidency one way or another. He's known that from the start.

This no doubt informs the White House's unprecedented decision to stonewall every request for documents and testimony from the House of Representatives. Sure, there's a movement within the administration (and now within the Department of Justice under William Barr) that hopes to use these circumstances to create legal precedents for their "unitary executive" theory. But Donald Trump is still the president, and his desire to keep anyone from looking too closely at his campaign, his presidency and — perhaps most importantly — his business is almost certainly the main reason for the total lack of cooperation. [...]

On Thursday the Washington Post reported that a day earlier, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had held a closed-door meeting with the Democratic caucus, telling them to stick to policy issues that people really care about and forget about impeachment. She acknowledged that some Democrats are feeling a little down about the refusal to consider impeachment, but no one in the room objected to her edict. Evidently, they are all convinced that voters are not concerned about whether their president is a criminal or the Constitution is in peril.

The vice chair of the Democratic caucus, Rep. Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, went on MSNBC and robotically laid out the case, making the rather strange argument that Trump is stonewalling because "he just wants to use this whole situation to deflect from the issues that we are working on, the legislation that we are passing, that affects real Americans." Somehow I don't think voters are going to buy that. People understand that getting a conviction in the Senate in an impeachment trial will be nearly impossible — but they also know that passing any of those great Democratic bills in the Senate, and then getting Trump to sign them, is just as unlikely. [...]

Many legal observers believe that only impeachment proceedings will give them the House leadership the clout they need with the courts to force compliance with subpoenas, so in that sense it's almost a necessity. House Judiciary Committee chair Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said on Thursday that "the president's policy now, the president's posturing now, is making it impossible to rule out impeachment or anything else." As the Washington Post's Greg Sargent writes in a scathing assessment of the Democrats' strategy, it just looks like "a muddled mess."

From Greg Sargent's piece in WaPo,

A new ad that impeachment proponent Tom Steyer is set to launch illustrates this well. Notably, rather than merely making the case for an inquiry, the ad trains its fire at Democrats for failing to initiate one.

Numerous Democrats did claim there was no need to decide on an impeachment inquiry until we saw Mueller’s findings.

In retrospect, this was a serious strategic failure. If it was intended as a stalling tactic — a way to delay the moment at which Democrats would reveal their real intention not to act — it only created a situation in which Mueller’s extraordinarily serious revelations made it more difficult to definitively close the door on it. [...]

But if this posture is underpinned by a secret intention to never pull that trigger, that creates yet another problem.

Pat Cipollone, Trump’s White House counsel, just announced that he will stiff-arm House oversight requests across the board, in effect declaring any further fleshing out of Mueller’s findings to be illegitimate. The administration is also unlawfully refusing to release the president’s tax returns, and will fight “all” subpoenas, a sweeping effort to place Trump beyond accountability entirely.

This means Democrats may be hamstrung from doing the very fact-finding they say is necessary to decide whether to launch an impeachment inquiry.

So... what's it going to take to get Madam Speaker's attention sufficiently to pull the string to initiate impeachment proceedings?



Hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go!