The Democrat Who Could Lead Trump’s Impeachment Isn’t Sure It’s Warranted
BROOKLYN—“Right now, I don’t want to talk about it,” Jerry Nadler told his curious, concerned constituent. “We don’t want to talk about it.”
The man positioned to lead the House of Representatives’ impeachment effort against President Donald Trump next year was holding court on a suffocating early August afternoon outside a Walgreens in the Brooklyn half of his New York City congressional district. This was a “Congress on Your Corner” event, and the 71-year-old Nadler—dressed sensibly for the heat in a light-blue button-up shirt without the suit jacket—was answering questions from a gaggle of local residents on whatever topics happened to be on their mind.
It was Robin Bady, a 67-year-old neighborhood resident, who asked about impeachment: What were the chances, she wondered, that it could happen if Democrats won back the House majority this fall?
It’s a question likely on the minds of millions of Americans at the moment, and more than just about anyone else in the country, Nadler is the person to ask. After a quarter century in Congress, the liberal stalwart is now the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee—the panel that would consider articles of impeachment—and if a blue wave does crest in November, he would become its chairman.
Nadler wasn’t dismissing Bady’s question—the fast-talking New Yorker will offer his two cents on pretty much any subject. But he was sharing the not-so-secret political strategy of the Democratic Party during the midterm campaign: Impeachment, though it looms over both Congress and the presidency, is a topic for others to discuss.
“It doesn’t serve the function of a Democratic House to talk about it,” Nadler said on that street corner in Brooklyn.
For nearly a year, the billionaire Tom Steyer and a small but growing group of progressive House Democrats have been making the case for impeaching Trump over a variety of alleged crimes and abuses of power, and Republicans are using the specter of a Democratic bid to oust the president as a way to spur Trump’s die-hard supporters to the polls. In released late last month, nearly half of respondents (49 percent) said Congress should begin impeachment proceedings following the of the president’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and the guilty plea of in the violation of federal campaign-finance laws.
