Brad Sherman to introduce impeachment articles against Trump on first day of Democratic Congress
Pelosi: ‘We shouldn’t be impeaching for a political reason, and we shouldn’t avoid impeachment for a political reason’
Rep. Brad Sherman is wasting no time letting President Donald Trump feel the pressure from a Democrat-controlled House.
The California Democrat plans to reintroduce articles of impeachment against Trump on Thursday, the first day Democrats retake a majority they have not enjoyed in the House since 2011.
The Los Angeles Times first reported this story.
The articles accuse the president of obstructing justice by firing former FBI Director James B. Comey after Comey refused to stop investigating former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Sherman first introduced the articles back in 2017. But they carry more significance now that Democrats will control the House and will force a Congress with a Democratic majority to a vote on the measure.
Watch: How does impeachment work?
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“There is no reason it shouldn’t be before the Congress,” Sherman said. “Every day, Donald Trump shows that leaving the White House would be good for our country.”
The move comes as a thorn in the side for House Democratic leadership, which has swatted away impeachment chatter for now. Incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others have said they want to wait for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to issue a final report from his Russia probe before moving to impeach Trump — if they even do.
One thing is for certain, Pelosi said in an interview on NBC’s “Today” on Thursday: Politics will not play a role in whether Democrats decide to impeach the president.
“We shouldn’t be impeaching for a political reason, and we shouldn’t avoid impeachment for a political reason,” Pelosi said.
That statement appears at odds with previous comments made by incoming House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, who told Roll Call in November that the final hurdle for any impeachment proceeding is determining whether or not voters want it.
“If you’re serious about removing a president from office, what you’re really doing is overturning the result of the last election,” Nadler said. “You don’t want to have a situation where you tear this country apart and for the next 30 years half the country’s saying ‘We won the election, you stole it.’”
“I’m talking about the voters, people who voted for Trump,” he said. “Do you think that the case is so stark, that the offenses are so terrible and the proof so clear, that once you’ve laid it all out you will have convinced an appreciable fraction of the people who voted for Trump, who like him, that you had no choice? That you had to do it?”
Mueller’s probe has yielded dozens of indictments, seven guilty pleas, and one conviction, including top officials on Trump’s 2016 campaign team.
