The Rank and File Are Starting to Defy Pelosi on Impeachment

When Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s findings were released last month, House Democrats were mostly united in their response: Impeachment shouldn’t be their first line of attack. Instead, they vowed to employ the full range of Congress’s oversight powers to discern whether the president had obstructed justice—a question Mueller left unanswered in his final report. They demanded to read the special counsel’s full, unredacted conclusions. And they summoned a series of key witnesses to testify.

But in the past two days, a slew of Democrats, most notably moderate members of the rank and file, have publicly abandoned that position and announced their support for—or at least their openness to—launching a formal impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. While most members of the caucus still publicly oppose