CNN's Chris Cuomo tells House Democrats to stop playing Hamlet and start impeaching Trump already

The short version of Chris Cuomo's argument for the House to start impeachment proceedings against President Trump, which he laid out on CNN Thursday night, is that Democrats are shirking their constitutional duty to check-and-balance the president because they are scared of the future. He started with a literary reference.

Right now, Democrats "are collectively Hamlet, pondering to be the party of impeachment or not to be," Cuomo said. "And just like Hamlet, they're torn on their existence because they're not sure what comes next." Forget that, he said. The first step is to get Special Counsel Robert Mueller to testify on camera, laying out for the public "what the president said and did and asked of others, what it means legally and ethically," because nobody's read Mueller's report and people trust him more than they do lawmakers.

Cuomo suggested starting with "an impeachment inquiry — not official proceedings," for "maximal effective force of Congress in the courts. Consolidate all the efforts into one committee and then get it done quickly, and don't you showboat! Let the other committees work on the myriad matters of importance to the American people. Where it leads, how it ends, you can't know, and that should not be your guide. Do your duty."

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"This won't be an easy call," but "it is instructive that almost every one of the people running to be nominee in the next election for president are in favor of taking this step — remember, they're going to pay the biggest price if this is judged to be a bad or just political move," Cuomo said. "People will punish you doing nothing or going in different directions at once, and rightly so."