First off, yes, talk of the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry into President Trump dominated the news last week, so we’ll be going into that in short order. (Though, we didn’t have space to get into Rudy Giuliani’s amazing interview in The Atlantic so we’ll just leave this link here.) But that whole Ukraine thing isn’t the only thing that happened in the world. Did you know the Senate has voted to end the president’s emergency declaration about the border? Because that happened. As did the release of a Senate report finding that the NRA was a “foreign asset” for Russia in the 2016 election. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, the Supreme Court ruled that proroguing Parliament was illegal, which meant that all the MPs returned to work in time to see Prime Minister Boris Johnson dismiss concerns that his rhetoric was putting people at risk, despite death threats that directly quote Johnson. Oh, and the creator of the labradoodle now regrets his work, but maybe that’s not entirely as important as everything else. It’s a mad mad mad mad mad world, and this is what the wide web of it has been saying this past week.
Impeachment Inquiry
What Happened: For more than two years, it has seemed as if nothing could prompt Congress to consider the possibility of impeaching President Trump. That ended last week.
What Really Happened: You’ll remember, of course, that the last installment of this column ended with news of a whistle-blower warning that President Trump had a disturbing and potentially illegal phone call with a foreign leader, who was later revealed to be the new Ukrainian president. As more details emerged—with it becoming clearer that Trump has asked for assistance in looking for dirt on Joe Biden—calls for the president to be impeached grew louder and louder.
After all, what President Trump was believed to have done—what he practically admitted doing, for that matter—was invite a foreign power to meddle in domestic US politics. That seems pretty impeachable.
And yet, despite this, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi remained famously reticent to impeach, even as pressure on her continued to grow.
And then, on Monday, it actually happened.
Technically, this was just the announcement of a formal impeachment inquiry, but it was enough to signal a significant shift in what had been the political status quo of the last two years, despite what was happening. (Anyone remember that time the president was more or less accused of colluding with Russia?)
