Democratic Calls for Impeachment Inquiry Grow as Leaders Instead Vow to Toughen Tactics

Nicholas Fandos of The New York Times wrote:

WASHINGTON — A bloc of liberal Democratic lawmakers began a new push on Tuesday over the objections of their party’s leaders to open an impeachment inquiry of President Trump, underscoring a divide among House Democrats over how to uphold Congress’s oversight powers in the face of Mr. Trump’s stonewalling.

Democrats were at odds about how to fight the latest defiance of a House subpoena, this time by the former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II, who skipped a scheduled hearing on Tuesday about Mr. Trump’s attempts to obstruct the Russia investigation.

Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the House Judiciary Committee chairman, promised to hold Mr. McGahn in contempt of Congress and warned Mr. Trump and other potential witnesses to expect new hardball tactics. Democratic lawmakers and aides said they could include new subpoenas, possible rules changes allowing the House to fine people held in contempt, and threats to Mr. Trump’s legislative priorities as leverage for compliance.

“We will not allow the president to stop this investigation, and nothing in these unjustified and unjustifiable legal attacks will stop us from pressing forward with our work on behalf of the American people,” Mr. Nadler said during a brief hearing of an emotionally raw Judiciary Committee. “We will hold this president accountable, one way or the other.”

The Democrats’ divisions spring from a shared fear that Mr. Trump is succeeding not just in evading congressional accountability himself but in permanently rewriting the rules of engagement between the legislative and executive branches, freeing future presidents from one of the Constitution’s most potent checks on their power.

“We can focus on McGahn. We can focus on Barr. We can focus on Michael Cohen. We can call the roll,” Representative Val B. Demings, a Florida Democrat on the Judiciary Committee who supports impeachment, said in an interview. “But the problem here is the president of the United States.”

Their concerns that Mr. Trump might be permanently weakening Congress’s powers prompted prominent progressive lawmakers on and off the Judiciary Committee to declare in private meetings and public statements in the past 24 hours that they saw no choice but to initiate an impeachment inquiry.

The new supporters of impeachment included Representative Mark Pocan, Democrat of Wisconsin and a co-chairman of the influential Congressional Progressive Caucus, and Representative Mary Gay Scanlon, Democrat of Pennsylvania and the vice chairwoman of the Judiciary Committee.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/us/politics/mcgahn-subpoena-house-impeachment.html