About 50 protesters in San Francisco on Wednesday demanded that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) schedule a vote in the House to impeach President Donald Trump.
During an hour-long protest outside of a hotel where Pelosi was receiving a lifetime achievement award, the protesters held “Impeach!” signs and chanted, “Nancy Pelosi, do your job!”
Nicole Regalado, a digital organizer for progressive group CREDO Mobile, yelled into a megaphone, “Speaker Pelosi is right inside, about to receive a lifetime achievement award. But her legacy is at a crossroads.”
“She tells us to wait for the Mueller report. Wait for the unredacted Mueller report. Wait until impeachment polls better. Wait for 2020,” she continued.
“I’m here to say that my family, my community, our families, our communities cannot afford to wait any longer for impeachment. Our families are hurting, our country is hurting, our planet is hurting. We need our leaders to stop the hurt by removing what is causing it.”
The protest is just one of many targeting Democrats across the country as they go home for their August break. Twelve progressive groups have banded together under the campaign “Impeachment August,” aimed at getting as many Democrats to back impeachment as possible.
So far this August, 16 Democrats have come out in favor of impeachment but none from vulnerable districts and only one from House leadership — Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM), who is campaigning for a Senate seat.
Pelosi has resisted calls for impeachment, wary of the effect it had on Republicans when they demanded the impeachment of then-President Bill Clinton in 1998.
Further, a new poll on Thursday shows that a majority of Americans oppose impeaching Trump. The poll, by Monmouth University, showed that 59 percent of those surveyed said Trump should not be impeached and compelled to leave office.
The poll also showed that while 72 percent of Democrats believe that an impeachment inquiry is a good idea, only 39 percent of independents and eight percent of Republicans share that belief.
While 131 Democrats and one independent now support impeachment, they still need 86 more votes in the House to reach a simple majority to begin proceedings. One hundred and five Democrats have either opposed or not clarified where they stand on impeachment, many from vulnerable districts.
Protesters at the Pelosi event on Thursday did not acknowledge that even if the House votes to impeach Trump, with zero support among Senate Republicans, there is virtually no chance of Trump being forced to actually leave the White House.
“We need Speaker Pelosi to publicly support impeachment and set a date for a vote in the House of Representatives. If Speaker Pelosi cares about protecting our families and communities she needs to publicly support impeachment and call a vote in the House of Representatives,” Regalado said.
“While Donald Trump empowers white supremacists who are gunning down our communities, locks up migrant families in concentration camps, strips away health care protections for transgender people, and cuts millions of women off from accessing health care from Planned Parenthood, Speaker Pelosi keeps telling us to wait on impeachment,” she said.
Another protester named Steve from Indivisible’s San Francisco branch said impeachment could not wait since, “if he wins the next election, the statute of limitation runs out on all of his crimes.”
He said impeachment was the only way to get Trump out of office, “other than revolution in the streets.”
“You don’t get to say I’m not going to do this now bc it’s not politically opportune,” he said.
He also echoed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) language in calling migrant detention facilities “concentration camps.”
“There are children in concentration camps … there are people dying in these concentration camps every day,” he yelled into the megaphone. Pelosi, he said, “is not listening to her constituents.”
“We demand an impeachment. The constitution demands it,” he continued. “Her constitutional duty is to impeach.”
“This is not about civility politics is not what we’re about. We’re about supporting our leaders when they stand with us and being out in the streets to hold them accountable when they don’t.”
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