The NPR Politics Podcast - Judiciary Takes Up Impeachment As House Intelligence Panel Prepares To Release Report

Episode Date: December 2, 2019

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff will reveal his findings in the impeachment probe, and the House Judiciary plans a hearing with experts on constitutional grounds for impeachment. This episode: political correspondent Scott Detrow, political reporter Tim Mak, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Connect: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, I'm Mark Anthony. I'm Sean. And I'm Megan. Hey everyone, this is Hampton. And this is Gary. This is Marie calling from a hospital parking lot early on Thanksgiving morning. I'm about to head into my 12-hour nursing shift in the ICU. I'm driving back home right now for my Thanksgiving break. It's the week of Thanksgiving, a perfect time for a stress-free visit to the grocery store. It's Thanksgiving morning and I just finished the Arlington Turkey Trot five-kilometer race, where I ran into Tamara Keith. This podcast was recorded at...

It is Monday, December 2nd at 2.40 Eastern. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. I know I'll be arguing with my grandparents about politics, but other than that, happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Happy Thanksgiving to everybody working on the clock this holiday and to my little turkey at home. Love you. That was delightful. A lot of people were running over Thanksgiving.

A lot of people were working over Thanksgiving. A lot of people were working and running. Including me. I was on all things considered on Thanksgiving. It's my favorite holiday. We're just bringing the Thanksgiving into guilty exercising and eating normally or not Monday. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the campaign.

I'm Tim Mack. I cover Congress. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And how were your Thanksgivings? Excellent. I didn't have any turkey. I was actually on vacation. I was in Panama.

You know what I did? I smoked a turkey successfully for the second year in a row. I can claim it now as a new tradition. In a green egg? In a Weber Smoky Mountain. Wow. I cooked a capon and I have a lot of leftovers. So I think we would all like to keep talking about our relaxing and well-fed weekends. But the fact is the news machine rolls on and we are bracing for a very frantic few weeks on Capitol Hill that could

culminate in the impeachment of the President of the United States. So let's shift back to the news. There are two big things happening on the impeachment front this week. Tim, walk us through the first one. So the first one is that the House Intelligence Committee is going to put together this report that summarizes its findings and any recommendations it might have for the House Judiciary Committee. As we all know, the House Intelligence Committee has been doing this investigation, bringing witnesses both behind closed doors and in a public setting to ask them questions about whether the president leveraged U.S. foreign policy for personal gain. So the impeachment rules state that the Intelligence Committee

needs to write a report, has to bring its evidence, and transmits that report along with any minority Republican views to the House Judiciary Committee. Is this a report that is going to provide us new information about what happened? Or is this a summary of what we've seen and heard in public hearings and read in transcripts of interviews? Well, Republicans over the last few weeks have really been critical about the process, right? They've said, oh, so many of these things happened behind closed doors. But the reality is that those closed door hearings, the transcripts for them were shortly thereafter released. And we've had hearing after hearing after hearing hours of fact witnesses appearing before both Republicans and Democrats to answer tough questions. I don't think that the report will say anything wildly new because there isn't material

that hasn't been public. Mara, if you have been following this, whether you're a lawmaker, whether you're a voter, whether you're just a news consumer, you have read news stories about this. You have read transcripts about this. You have heard hearings about this. Do you expect this report to move any minds or have any effect on this? that committee are concerned. They feel they did establish the fact that the president asked the president of Ukraine to open an investigation into a potential 2020 rival of Trump's, Joe Biden, and at the same time withheld military aid to Ukraine, and they collected testimony that those two things were connected. They feel they've established that. Now the question is, are those actions an abuse of power? And if so, are they a big enough abuse of power to warrant the president's removal? That's what the Judiciary Committee is doing.

They're going to eventually, we assume, draw up articles of impeachment. And they're starting this week on Wednesday. Their first witnesses are constitutional scholars, legal experts who are going to explain what is an impeachable offense. And we're going to talk a bit more about that hearing itself in a bit. But the report, Tim, you're saying is basically the end of the Intelligence Committee's work, handing it over to the Judiciary Committee. Mara, do we have a sense yet what specific articles of impeachment Democrats are thinking about drafting? Well, we certainly have heard the word bribery. That's something that is spelled out in the

Constitution. We have certainly heard them talk about obstruction of justice. They mean by that refusing to send up White House officials who have been subpoenaed, Mick Mulvaney, for instance, who got a subpoena, defied it, but did not challenge it in court. And there are some Democrats who think there should even be broader articles that go beyond just the Ukraine episode and delve back into things that Bob Mueller investigated, but that's not necessarily a consensus position among Democrats. There's a big divide even among Democrats about whether to look back to the Mueller investigation. A lot of Democrats, particularly the most vocal progressive voices in the caucus, are saying that they have to move forward with Mueller articles of impeachment,

that what the president was revealed to have done through the Mueller report was certainly impeachable and worthy of inclusion in this process. All right, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we'll look at what the Judiciary Committee will be doing first and how public perception of impeachment may have shifted over the last week or so. Support for this podcast and the following message come from the Walton Family Foundation, where opportunity takes root. More information is available at waltonfamilyfoundation.org. Irene Pemberton is a very responsible person,

so it's hard for her to understand how she made the same risky decision twice. I was telling my friend about this and I'm like, I don't know that girl. How we become strangers to ourselves on Hidden Brain from NPR. OK, we're back. So the two weeks of Intelligence Committee hearings were dramatic. You had this this fact by fact, blow by blow account from people who were involved in the process. Tim, this Judiciary Committee is going to be a little bit more or isn't an impeachable offense, right? The Constitution makes reference to a number of specific offenses, but also says that you can remove a president from office for unspecified high crimes and misdemeanors. So the question is, what does that mean?

The Judiciary Committee has decided that it's worth having a hearing with some academics to outline exactly why that is the case. Do we know who these people will be and what their role is? We know that they're not fact witnesses, but we don't know who they are yet. And it's unusual this late in the process not to know who is appearing at a hearing. Now, Republicans aren't showing their hand either. They're saying they don't want to say who they've asked for for their witness. The high drama of which academics will to say who they've asked for, for their witness. The high drama of which academics? Everybody's on the edge of their seats.

But one group that will not be sending a representative is the White House, which is confusing to me because for weeks it's been, we're not represented at these hearings and that's not fair. Right. The White House has had two basic messages. The president has complained bitterly that he said he wasn't represented, he wasn't able to question witnesses, even though there were sometimes up to 45 Republicans in both the closed door depositions and the public part of the hearings. But at the same time, the White House has argued very strongly that the entire process is illegitimate. The president has called it a hoax. So they were offered an opportunity to send a lawyer to the Wednesday

hearing and they said, no, thank you. We won't be doing this. We think this is a biased partisan exercise. But they have not ruled out participating altogether in these hearings. Chairman Nadler of the Judiciary Committee has given the White House until Friday to tell him if they're going to participate at all. We know they're not showing up on Wednesday, but they haven't said that they're going to boycott the whole thing. But I don't want people's eyes to glaze over just because we're talking about academics, right? That there are a number of reasons why House Judiciary Democrats feel like it's necessary to hold this hearing. Firstly, there's been some talk that Republicans in the Senate might admit that the president has engaged in some misconduct, but that it doesn't rise to the level of an impeachable and removable offense.

And so this hearing is meant to set that bar. There's also polling in America that shows that a lot more people believe that the president committed misconduct than should be removed for an impeachable offense. 70% of Americans felt that the president has done something wrong. Only a very slim majority in polling recently says that the president should be removed for that action. Well, Mara, you made this point about halfway through the Intelligence Committee hearings, and I thought it was such a great point that if that number stayed about the same, you know, 50, 51% of people saying, yeah, he should be removed for office, that that would be a huge political win for the Democrats. It seems to have receded a little bit. A little, but we're still look, we're a 50-50

country. Surprise, surprise. Here's another issue where we're divided right down the middle. I mean, we see this on a lot of things, but the public seems to be making a very clear distinction between what they thought about the president's behavior. They seem to accept the witness's testimony that, yes, he did ask the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, and they feel that was wrong. Then when it comes to the punishment part, as Tim just explained, do you think it's wrong enough, a big enough abuse of power, that he should be removed from office because of it. And that's where a large number of people who think the president did something wrong do not think he should be impeached for it. Now, there are a few pollsters who've tried to delve into this and ask

the people who thought it was wrong, but also that he shouldn't be removed, why they thought that. Some of them thought, well, it just isn't bad enough. Others thought this is too close to an election. And voters feel pretty strongly about their power in a democracy to decide if someone is the president or not. So before we go, we need to shift gears to the presidential race because we need to say bye bye bye to two Democratic presidential candidates. I knew this would happen. Over the holiday weekend, maybe it was long talks at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Maybe it was other factors. Former Representative Joe Sestak and Montana Governor Steve Bullock both announced they're dropping out of the race. And that brings NPR's tally down to just 16 Democratic candidates.

So Bullock, I think, is worth focusing on for just a minute here because his entire shtick was, I won a red state, I was elected governor twice in Montana, and I got Democratic stuff done. And in this environment where Democratic voters are obsessed with finding someone who can beat Trump and win back Republican voters, he got like zero traction. This was almost a non-starter of a campaign, which is kind of on paper, at least, a disparity. You need more to get traction than just having the right ideological and experiential profile. I mean, you need to have a kind of viral ability to go viral, to raise tremendous amounts of money, to have name recognition. Don't forget, you know, Elizabeth Warren, who has done those things, has been, you know, a regular on late night talk shows for years and years talking about consumer finance. In other words, she was a household name before she started running. So I don't think that

Bullock's departure means, oh, voters don't want a moderate, you know, or a governor. Yes, or a governor. I mean, Amy Klobuchar, who also makes the same kind of claim, I won many red parts of Minnesota, is still hanging in there. She's in the lower tier. But there's no doubt that the race right now has four top candidates, Biden, Warren, Buttigieg, Sanders. more significant about Bullock dropping out is that he also seems to have categorically said that he will not be running against Steve Daines, the Republican senator. And that is something that a lot of Democrats really hoped he would do. He was a governor. He had won statewide. They are desperate to pick up seats in the Senate. And he says he's not going to do it. Now, there are many people in Montana who thought even a popular former Democratic governor could not beat an incumbent Republican senator in a presidential year. But that's a big disappointment to a lot of Democrats. And you were right. We are now all three of the Democrats that a lot of Democrats

said, don't run for president, run for senator instead. All three of them have now dropped out of the race. But one of them, only only John Hickenlooper is going to run against the sitting Republican incumbent in his state, Cory Gardner from Colorado. But only one of those three decided to go home and run for Senate. All right. That is a wrap for today. Before we go, a reminder, a couple of live shows coming up January 10th in Chicago and January 22nd at Drew University in New Jersey.

You can get tickets at Nprpresents.org. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the campaign. I'm Tim Mack. I cover Congress. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast and bye, bye, bye until tomorrow.