House Dems pass high-water mark in fights against Trump

Bloomberg

Democrats scored a series of damaging revelations about Donald Trump when they launched their impeachment investigation, but now they’ll begin a crucial election year with the challenge that the most dramatic moments are likely behind them.
Even by the time Nancy Pelosi banged her speaker’s gavel on Trump’s impeachment — once for abuse of power, again for obstruction of Congress — the House chamber was full of history but devoid of excitement. Now the process has settled further into a languor that lawmakers attribute to the inevitability of the outcome.
“I guess it was anti-climatic,” said Representative Mike Quigley, adding that the response he has heard in his solidly Democratic Illinois district has been positive. “At some point in time, people just came to expect this.”
That means Democrats will head into 2020 as Trump has the last say in the impeachment process on the friendly turf of the Republican-led Senate. Months before he runs for re-election, and with the facts of the case already shrugged off by his supporters, Trump could conceivably enter the House chamber to deliver the State of the Union address on February 4 with Republicans celebrating his rapid acquittal by the Senate.

Pelosi’s Timing
Pelosi, who shrewdly calculated two years of Trump investigations and their political impact, suddenly appeared to be winging it December 18 when she said she wouldn’t immediately send the impeachment articles to the Senate to start the trial. Some of her Democratic colleagues argued that she should cling to the last bit of leverage in the House’s final procedural steps to pressure Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to hold a fair trial.
Lawmakers left town for the holidays last week with McConnell scoffing at Pelosi’s hesitation to send over what he described as an “unfair, unfinished product.” Leading up to the vote, Pelosi stressed the need to act quickly to curb Trump’s attempts to influence the 2020 elections, and she hasn’t fully explained why she will wait until January to name the impeachment managers who will present the House’s case in the Senate.
After the 1998 impeachment of Democratic President Bill Clinton, the then-Republican House named 13 House managers to prosecute the case in the Senate, including now-Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina. Pelosi is expected to name fewer managers, according to those familiar with her thinking, and has said she needs to know more about the structure of the Senate trial before picking names.
Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler and Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff will likely be included as impeachment managers. McConnell last week dismissed the House’s impeachment inquiry as sloppy and rushed to meet a Democratic political timetable, but he’s refused to entertain demands from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to call four current or former administration officials to testify in the Senate trail.
The rules of the trial, over which US Chief Justice John Roberts will preside, will ultimately be determined by a simple majority of 51 senators. That leaves the slight chance that four Republicans could join all Senate Democrats on some procedural demands.