Why are Democrats hesitating on impeaching Donald Trump?

The US House Intelligence Committee chairman has warned that Donald Trump could be impeached if he pressured his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate former US vice president Joe Biden.

Talk of impeachment seems to have surrounded Trump since the day he became US president and it is intensifying. Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren and New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez have called for Democratic leadership to pursue impeachment immediately.

So why have party leaders not taken this step? House speaker Nancy Pelosi is one Democrat who has argued against the move. Pelosi believes that impeachment needs to be a bipartisan process, and that without the support of Trump’s Republican colleagues, impeachment would be an empty threat that would harm Democrats in the 2020 presidential elections.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Impeachment proceedings in Congress can lead to a president being removed from office, but Democrats would need support from Republicans who control the Senate. With few Senate Republicans speaking out about the recent revelations, Pelosi’s misgivings could be proven legitimate.

This means, says the Washington Post, that for most of 2019, the Speaker has “put the brakes on impeachment”.

There is also a sense of fatigue among some of Trump’s opponents, with so many reasons to impeach that they are left overwhelmed. As David Leonhardt of the New York Times says, the Ukraine scandal is just one of many pointers that Trump “is the president of the United States, and he is a threat to virtually everything that the United States should stand for”.

Democrat trepidation over impeachment is a longstanding obstacle. In August last year, Democrats expressed concern that even talk of impeachment would cause Republican Party voters to rally around Trump at the November mid-term polls.

However, the tide could be turning. The Washington Post reported at the weekend that Democratic members of the House “believe their reticence to move forward on impeachment emboldened Trump to act egregiously”.

Democrat Adam Schiff told CNN on Sunday: “If the president is essentially withholding military aid at the same time that he is trying to browbeat a foreign leader to do something illicit, to provide dirt on his opponent during a presidential campaign, then that (impeachment) may be the only remedy that is co-equal to the evil that conduct represents.”