Impeachment inquiry sets House along path with no clear map

Bloomberg

Nancy Pelosi set House Democrats on a course towards an impeachment of President Donald Trump without a clear road map for where it will go and how long it will take.
Democrats accelerated their inquiry, issuing a subpoena and setting plans for witness interviews. But Pelosi, the House speaker, must still settle internal divisions over the scope of the inquiry. Then will come a decision about whether to vote to impeach Trump, a process could reach a climax amid the 2020 election campaign.
Pelosi said the newly intensified impeachment process — focussed primarily on whether Trump tried to coerce Ukraine’s leader to investigate Joe Biden, one of the president’s chief
political rivals — “should move with purpose and expeditiously.”
“It doesn’t have to drag on,” she said.
Yet if history is a guide, the process could take several months, at the very least. A generation after the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton, Pelosi is grappling with a different set of circumstances — and mindful of the risk that pursuing Trump poses to Democrats’ hopes of defeating him in the 2020 election and keeping control of the House.
Clinton and Andrew Johnson were the only presidents to be impeached by the House, and each was acquitted by the Senate. Richard Nixon resigned after the House Judiciary Committee advanced articles of impeachment.
The Johnson proceedings spanned three months of 1868, from beginning to acquittal, and Clinton’s lasted four months. The Nixon inquiry stretched from October 1973 to July 1974.
The cases of Trump and Clinton have one interesting parallel: Both came after lengthy probes by a specially appointed counsels charged with looking into a politically sensitive episode. But the trigger for the impeachment inquiry in both cases sprang from a different matter.
Clinton was investigated by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr who was examining an Arkansas real estate deal known as Whitewater.
The focus ultimately pivoted to the question of whether the president had lied under oath about his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky when deposed in a separate harassment lawsuit.
Trump had just survived
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of his 2016 campaign’s possible involvement in Russian election interference before the Ukraine allegations sent fresh shock waves through the political establishment.
But there’s also a key difference in the cases. Starr was given a broad mandate and at the conclusion of a four-year investigation his report laid out 11 possible grounds for impeachment. That gave the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee a ready framework to move quickly without conducting their own inquiry.
This time, the investigation is carried out by the House. While Pelosi seems determined to advance through the process well before next year’s elections, it could be protracted, said Julian Zelizer, a history professor at Princeton University.
The scope, the number of committees and the number of witnesses involved are critical, Zelizer said.