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Democrats face Catch-22 with Trump impeachment strategy

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Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) near-term effort to tamp down talk of impeaching President Trump could have the paradoxical effect of building support…
Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) near-term effort to tamp down talk of impeaching President Trump could have the paradoxical effect of building support for that very step.
Pelosi and Democratic leaders this week launched a series of aggressive investigations into the myriad allegations facing the president, many stemming from special counsel Robert Mueller’s recently released report on Russia’s 2016 election interference.
The strategy is designed, in part, to dampen the growing calls for impeachment — a move Pelosi considers premature — by assuring her troops that party leaders have no intention of letting Trump off the hook. The Catch-22 for Democratic leaders is that the more dirt the investigations uncover, the louder the impeachment drum will sound.
“There is the likelihood that as the hearings are being conducted, impeachment fervor may grow, because people are getting information,” Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), who supports Pelosi’s cautious approach to impeachment, said Tuesday by phone. “But that’s organic. It’s the natural flow of things.”
For Pelosi, the strategy is on brand. The Speaker frequently pulls a page from Abraham Lincoln, arguing that “public sentiment is everything.” And she and her top lieutenants were all on Capitol Hill in 1998 when Republican leaders moved forward with impeaching former President Clinton without the support of either the public or Democrats in Congress — and suffered the consequences politically.
Pelosi and her leadership team are fighting to avoid the same mistake, frequently noting that impeachment without GOP buy-in is a futile cause while Republicans control the Senate.
“I do believe that impeachment is one of the most divisive forces, paths that we could go down to in our country. But if the facts, the path, fact-finding takes us there, we have no choice. But we’re not there yet,” Pelosi said Tuesday at the Time 100 summit.

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