Legislate, Investigate: With Impeachment Over, Congressional Democrats Are of Two Minds

Democrats are quick to point out too, that they never stopped legislating during the impeachment inquiry. It is Republicans, they argue, who have failed to act. “We have 275 bipartisan bills sitting in a huge wobbly stack on Mitch McConnell’s desk right now,” Congressman Jamie Raskin said, emphatically. “We need to press the Republicans to do something. They are an absolutely do-nothing Senate. They didn’t even conduct a trial, which was their constitutional mandate with an impeached president. They just don’t do anything. I don’t want to lose track of that; that is important.”

There is an argument to be made that with the impeachment over, GOP lawmakers have lost a line of attack against Democrats. For the better part of a year, if not longer, Republicans have insisted that lawmakers across the aisle were too focused on booting Trump from office to focus on the plights of the American people. That argument, now, is effectively neutered. “We were doing all this other work at the same time, and so maybe now that is the upside of completing impeachment—that we cannot allow the Republican Party to keep spewing falsehoods, that that is all we focused on,” Dean said.

But of course, the denouement of impeachment does not mean that Democrats are done investigating Trump and his administration. An appetite remains, particularly within the progressive flank of the caucus and the House Judiciary Committee, to continue to pull at strings of inquiry not tied up in the impeachment inquiry and trial. For instance, on Wednesday, Jerrold Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said it was “likely” that his committee would subpoena former National Security Adviser John Bolton. (Though Speaker Pelosi did say later there were “no plans right now” for such a move, noting ongoing court cases, such as the one involving former White House counsel Don McGahn.)

And then other outstanding issues, which some Democrats view as outside the scope of the Ukraine matter, but abuses of power nonetheless. Raskin, for instance, wants to focus on violations of the emoluments clause, which he characterized to me as “the original sin of this administration” because “the president has transformed the presidency into an instrument of self-enrichment, all over the world. And we have not had a proper reckoning with the emoluments clause.” Though he noted that Friday’s ruling in the D.C. district court was, “a lucky break for us, because the D.C. Circuit said that members of Congress do not have the power to sue to stop the president from collecting illegal foreign emoluments, it is up to Congress as a whole to act” and “so if one chamber denies its consent to the president, then he may not keep foreign government emoluments.”

But there is also the issue of the coming election. “He’s got priors now. In 2016 he asked the Russians to help him and 2019, he was impeached for asking the Ukrainians to help him. I think a leopard like him doesn’t change its spots.” Swalwell told me. “We should assume that he’s going to continue to seek foreign help in the elections.”

Raskin echoed the sentiment. “Donald Trump and the Banana Republicans continue to pose a clear and present danger to the integrity of Constitutional democracy, so we have to defend the security of the 2020 election with everything we’ve got,” he said. “We have to mobilize the majority of Americans who registered their approval of impeachment and conviction and then all other Americans who want to move the country in a different direction.”

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