US question, but why don’t Democrats just vote for impeachment basically every day? Whether it’s for the Jack Smith findings, the unwillingness to hold up the 14th amendment, whatever. Like, is there a statute of limitations for impeachment? Is there a limited number of crimes valid for it?
Even if it never succeeded, it would send a message that he needs to be careful and if he makes too many Republicans mad he could lose his job.
The Speaker of House wields a lot of power, including deciding what gets brought up to vote in the House.
The current speaker is not a Democrat.
One major thing holding the Democrats back from this is that the Democrats still haven’t had it beaten into their skulls that the rules of politics are dead, dead, dead. They still seem to think that decorum matters and that if they just sigh and accept the Republicans’ actions now they’ll eventually get their turn later.
It takes a certain number of votes to begin impeachment proceeding. There are currently not enough decent Representatives in the House to pass such a vote.
Impeachment must start in the House, and the rules of the House are heavily tilted toward majority rule. So it would need a majority vote to even get started, and it would be referred to a committee with a Republican majority. If, somehow, the investigation done there is fair and a recommendation to impeach passes the committee, it still needs to pass in the House again.
But then, it goes to the Senate, where a 2/3 majority (67/100) is required to convicted. So now we have gone from needing a handful of Republican defectors on the House (including at least one committee member) to needing 20 of 53 Republican Senators to agree to convict. That is an extremely high bar. If you were a Republican House member who is on the fence about Trump, it is simply not worth openly defying him unless you were certain Republican Senators would convict. Particularly after Trump just pardoned a bunch of folks who have already stormed the Capitol once.
it would need a majority vote to even get started
Which seems to imply that the absolute first step is for there to be a vote.
So I think OP’s question is really- “Even though it’s not going to go anywhere, why can’t democrats just keep asking for that initial vote for different chargers to clog up the house?”
My guess is that they could do that, but eventually doing so would be called out as pointless time wasting and be disallowed.
I can see a directive going out that any participants are to be barred from participating in anything at all. Even if there’s some legislative rule that says they can’t be, because we all know how the new administration feels about old legislation. And then actual, literal guards will be brought in to keep those people out.
And maybe all others in the same political party “just in case they decide to try the same thing”.
TBH, the Trumpists are probably looking for any excuse to do just that.
I mean everyone does not have the floor all the time and the speaker has a lot of control over that. Im sure there are procedures and such but there is the whole maturity thing. Republicans are pretty good at not getting work done and believe it or not there are some regular congressional things that need to get done or its bad for the country (us/everyone) also the less congress does things the more it falls on the president to do whats required.
Holding presidents accountable kicked the dodo as soon as Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon. If you hold one accountable, then the precedent is that you have to hold them all accountable. The list of war crimes and domestic use of violent force to curb peaceful protest from US presidents on both sides of the aisle would have to be interrogated for one. Neither party wants that.
FWIW, impeachable offenses from the POTUS go back a lot further than Nixon. More serious, too. But yes, Nixon/Ford showed us the process doesn’t work.
