The NPR Politics Podcast - Democrats Prepare To Advance Impeachment Articles After Fractious All-Day Hearing

Episode Date: December 12, 2019

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee expect to give their final vote of approval on two articles of impeachment against President Trump Thursday night.The vote is expected after a day of partisan fighting, with Republicans advancing a series of doomed amendments in protest of a process they see as unwarranted. Democrats again insisted that the president must be removed from office for his behavior in the Ukraine affair.This episode: political correspondent Asma Khalid, congressional correspondent Kelsey Snell, and senior editor and correspondent Ron Elving.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Andy. This is Andrea calling from Poole, England. Hi, this is Claire in London, UK, and I've just voted in the UK's third general election in five years. This podcast was recorded at 2.45pm on Thursday, December 12th. Things might have changed by the time you listen. We might have a new Prime Minister, or maybe a hung Parliament. OK, enjoy the show. I am not envious of you, you Brits and your politics. But hey, there it is, the NPR Politics Podcast.

I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Ron Elving, editor-correspondent. And before we talk politics, we actually need to say welcome back, Kelsey Snell. Thank you. We have missed you. I missed you guys. I'm excited say welcome back, Kelsey Snell. Thank you. We have missed you. I missed you guys. I'm excited to be back.

So it's been quite the baby boom here on the Washington desk. So congratulations. I know you've been out on maternity leave. Yes, I've been narrating the process of making my morning oatmeal. And then I all of a sudden started narrating impeachment. It's very different. All right, well, let's get down to business. Judiciary Committee, will please come to order.

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee expect to give their final vote of approval on the articles of impeachment against President Trump tonight. And right now, they are in the midst of an all-day hearing. I now call up H. Rez, a 755 impeaching Donald John Trump, President of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors. for purposes of markup and move that the committee report the resolution favorably to the House. The articles are going to come before the full House sometime next week. So, Kelsey, let's just start with an explanation of what this hearing is and why it's expected

to go on all day. Yeah, so this hearing is called a markupup and a markup is basically just Congress speak for an opportunity for a committee to make changes to last thoughts, their last attempts at taking kind of the spotlight in this conversation and putting out their own positions. For Republicans, that is defending the president. And for Democrats, it's about making the case that they didn't come to Congress to impeach this president, but they view it as their constitutional duty based on his actions with regard to Ukraine. And for those who are watching this and noticing how much repetition there is, it is also an opportunity for each individual member of the committee on both majority and minority sides to have their say and make a little videotape to show back home.

So it sounds like what you both are describing is sort of a spectacle. It's for the public audience consumption, whether you're Republicans or Democrats, right? I mean, at this point, it's just grandstanding, it sounds like. If you're a Republican, you have particularly an audience of one. The president has been retweeting some of the things that people say in the committee that is among the Republicans only and objecting to things that the Democrats say. So Republicans know that the boss is watching and they want to please him. And I think to things that the Democrats say. So Republicans know that the boss is watching and they want to please him. And I think to some degree, Republicans also feel that they have a responsibility to demonstrate to voters that they did everything in their power to try to stop this from happening.

And it makes it easier for them to say, you know, we tried to change this and Democrats stood in our way. So many people here have been screaming about the president's crimes. And we're even hearing today, like we just did, oh, yes, there were crimes. Well, then why aren't they in this impeachment document? Because they don't exist. So what about Democrats? What are they saying now? Because they're doing this partly for the consumption of their folks back home and for their constituencies, they want to show themselves making the essential points. So each one of them is making many of those essential points over and over so as to make the points their own. There are no crimes here. That is the defense my

colleagues across the aisle are putting forward. How about the highest crime that one who holds public office could commit? A crime against our Constitution. And I think that there's also a little bit of Democrats needing to, again, to say that they are doing something deliberately and, as Nancy Pelosi often puts it, soberly. They need to kind of show the people, the American people, that this is not, as the president would call it, a witch hunt. So Kelsey, how has the day been going so far? I mean, what's the tone like in the room? Well, to kind of give you an idea of how long this is taking, they started voting on this amendment from Jim Jordan of Ohio, Republican of Ohio, to basically strike out the entire first

part of the articles of impeachment. They started that at the very beginning of the hearing. It took them two hours of basically yelling at each other before they even got to a vote. And things got kind of testy and they got a little bit, I guess, you know, I think there was a low point. The low point I can think of was when Republican Matt Gaetz of Florida introduced his own amendment trying to rename portions of the articles of impeachment that refer to Joe Biden so that it will talk about Burisma, the company that his son Hunter worked for instead. As part of his setup, he started referring to Hunter Biden, Joe Biden's son's history of drug use.

And I don't want to make light of anybody's substance abuse issues. I know the president's working real hard to solve those throughout the country. But it's a little hard to believe that Burisma hired Hunter Biden to resolve their international disputes when he could not resolve his own dispute with Hertz rental car over leaving cocaine in a crack pipe in the car. Oof. Yeah. So that that was, like I said, kind of the political low point here. And while we're at that point, of course, the Democrats weren't going to let that go because there was a certain amount of eye rolling going on during Matt Gaetz's presentation that we knew the Republicans were going to figure out some way to go after the Bidens and particularly Hunter Biden. But for it to be Matt Gaetz, who is a person who himself had a DUI arrest back in 2008,

he was not convicted, but his mugshot is still floating around the internet. People can still find that pretty easily. So that prompted Hank Johnson, one of the Democrats from Georgia, to have this response. The pot calling the kettle black is not something that we should do. I don't know. I don't know what members, if any, have had any problems with substance abuse, been busted in DUI. I don't know. But if I did, I wouldn't raise it against anyone on this committee. Yeah, to be clear, this is the kind of, you know, kind of circus that Democrats were trying to avoid here in the House and, you know, that that senators want to avoid once this gets to a trial in the Senate. This is the kind of stuff that turned people off of what they expect to be a really serious process. All right, well, we're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, we'll talk about where the public is on this impeachment. Support for this podcast and the

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Get the full story on NPR's Code Switch podcast. And we're back. And it's worth talking about for a second how inevitable all of these dynamics feel. You know, we know where the Democrats on the committee are and we know what the Republicans are going to say. But this whole week, to some extent, I mean, I would say this whole impeachment process has felt like we're going through the motions to reach a conclusion that we already know. I mean, isn't that essentially what's happening? Yes, that's right. But the Democrats, I think, feel that they were forced to go ahead with this impeachment after playing around with the idea of impeachment after the Mueller report

and deciding that they didn't have enough to go forward. Nancy Pelosi was planning on when exactly she was going to announce that. And then the whistleblower came forward. And when the whistleblower happened, they felt their hand was forced. They had too much information. The Ukraine affair pushed it over the line, and they had to do something to react to that. They know perfectly well what the votes are in the Senate, and they can fantasize about how they might turn some Republican votes, but that just doesn't seem to be in the offing. They just think they have to play through this process and put

their case before the American public. I do think it's interesting that we actually did get to this point, because there was a period of time there where we were constantly having conversations about how long would Nancy Pelosi be able to hold her members back? If you remember, she was a major skeptic about the concept of doing impeachment at all if there was an overwhelming bipartisan support in the country. There isn't a lot of evidence that that overwhelming bipartisan support for impeaching and removing this president exists. But she says that she and the country saw a turning point when the Ukraine whistleblower came forward. And it is a little bit surprising, or at least a little bit, I guess I don't want to say remarkable, but it's something to take pause and look at to remember that this isn't necessarily where we were inevitably heading. So, you know, even though we essentially know what the final

result is going to be there in the House, Kelsey, I've been intrigued that there seem to be some Democrats who are in vulnerable districts who haven't yet officially announced where they're going to come down on this debate. And even if it won't matter in the final tally, why do we see them keeping quiet? Well, one of the things that I have heard members and their staff say is that they need to go and announce their position back home in their district and announce it as a conversation with the people they represent. You know, it's part of this whole theme that we've been going back to with the Democrats where they feel the need to display that this wasn't what they came to Congress to do, that they are here to do legislating. They're here to do things like getting this free trade agreement passed. And so some of these moderates need to

go home and tell their voters to their faces that they are actually going to be doing impeachment, too. Is the sense that these vulnerable Ds, that they're actually going to go against their party on impeachment? I don't think there really is that sense at this point. There could be a few, and Democrats are prepared to lose a couple of their members who may just not be able to get there, who would prefer to go a step not as far as impeachment, I guess. They would like to step back a little bit and go for something like censure. But by and large, Democrats seem prepared to support these elections in 2018. That means 40 seats that used to have a Republican, used to vote for a Republican pretty recently, now suddenly have a Democrat. They could switch back just as fast. And so a lot of these people have that in mind,

and they know that. And a number of the members who have been there a longer time have districts that, while electing them as Democrats to the House, voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and may very well do so again in 2020. And they're mindful of that. Oh, and Republicans on the Judiciary Committee were happy to remind them of that last night repeatedly. Well, this, of course, all will come down to a vote in the House next week and then eventually into the Senate for a trial in January. And even though it seems like the president is all but certain to remain in office. Do you feel like the tone or the debate will change once we get to the Senate? I think that there's a there's a large expectation that the tone will change because in part they're expecting it to be a much shorter and less.

I guess the circus like atmosphere may not follow them if Mitch McConnell has anything to say about it. He wants to keep this very brief and he wants to keep it very serious. And if one of the things they're considering is maybe not calling any witnesses at all. So that would really limit the opportunity for senators to make this into a grandstanding opportunity. And remember that the Supreme Court's Chief Justice, John Roberts, is by the Constitution directed to preside. And the senators must attend. They don't have a choice. They must attend. And they must attend six days a week until the thing is done and sit at those 19th century desks and look like so many schoolchildren being called to attention. They sit silently. They don't get to

even talk unless they... it's just so different. All right. That is a wrap for today. We'll be back tomorrow. Until then, send us your timestamps for the top of the show. Maybe you're celebrating a big life event or you're just hanging out with friends. Either way, we would love to hear about it. Just record yourself on your phone and send the file to NPR politics at Npr.org. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the 2020

campaign. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Ron Elving, editor-correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.