Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) called for impeachment following former special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimonies on Wednesday, despite House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s efforts to keep impeachment at bay.
The Massachusetts senator and presidential candidate spoke at the NAACP convention Wednesday and renewed her calls for President Trump’s impeachment, contrasting many of her Democrat allies in Hollywood and the media, who begrudgingly admitted that Mueller’s performance failed to advance their hopes of a viable impeachment inquiry.
“I read the Mueller report the day it came out. And when I got to the end, I did not stick my finger in the air and ask about the politics. I did not hesitate,” Warren told moderator April Ryan, according to HuffPo.
“I read it. I knew what it said and I concluded first that this is a man who has broken the law and he should be impeached,” she continued.
“We have to make clear: No one is above the law ― not even the president of the United States,” she added. “It is time to bring impeachment charges against him.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), however, has not been as eager. She reportedly stiff-armed House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) in a closed-door caucus meeting Wednesday after he urged her to pursue impeachment. The speaker, according to Politico, thought it was “premature” to do so:
In the course of the wide-ranging discussion, Nadler countered Pelosi’s pushback by noting that polls showed limited support for removing President Richard Nixon from office when the House began impeachment hearings in 1973, but that public support for the effort grew as more evidence came out about Nixon’s illegal behavior.
As she has for months, Pelosi argued to her colleagues that the “slow, methodical approach” employed by House Democrats was the right way to move forward, despite the fact that more than 90 of her members have called for an impeachment inquiry to begin now.
Pelosi did not call for impeachment during the press conference with Democrat leadership Wednesday evening.
“The American people now realize more fully the crimes that were committed against our Constitution,” Pelosi stated, adding, “It is a crossing of a threshold in terms of the public awareness of what happened.”
Instead of calling for impeachment proceedings, Pelosi echoed what she reportedly told caucus members in their closed-door meeting:
My position has always been that whatever decision we make in that regard would have to be done with our strongest possible hand. And we still have some outstanding matters in the courts. It’s about the Congress, the Constitution, and the courts. And we are fighting the president in the courts.
“Watergate was when the [sic] got the information in the tapes that broke the case,” she continued, adding, “If we go down that path, we go in the strongest possible way.”
Warren addressed Pelosi’s hesitancy at the NAACP event, stating that impeachment is “above politics.”
“l understand that there are people who for political reasons say it’s not where we want to be. But my view is some things are above politics,” Warren said. “And one of them is our constitutional responsibilities to do what is right.”
“My view is whether it would pass the Senate or not … this is a moment in history and every single person in Congress should be called on to vote and then to live with that vote for the rest of their lives,” she continued.
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