Members of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s own leadership team confronted her in a contentious Monday night meeting and argued that it was time to begin an impeachment inquiry into President Trump, according to multiple sources in the room.

At least five members of Pelosi’s leadership team — four who also sit on the House Judiciary Committee with jurisdiction over impeachment — pressed Pelosi to allow the panel to start the inquiry, which they argued would help investigators attain documents and testimony Trump has blocked.

Pelosi, according to sources in the room, pushed back on the idea with senior leaders, including House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.). Pelosi has also long been an impeachment skeptic and tried to tamp down impeachment talk in her caucus as recently as last week by encouraging members to focus on their legislative agenda.

...The meeting underscores the first time Pelosi’s rank-and-file members — including members of her leadership team — have lobbied her to change her long-held position on impeachment. Judiciary members for days have discussed how to move the speaker toward their thinking, but few have been willing to break with her publicly.

However, a core group of Judiciary Democrats on Tuesday plans to begin calling for an impeachment inquiry if former White House counsel Don McGahn does not show for subpoenaed testimony at 10 a.m., according to multiple sources familiar with the plan. The White House on Monday moved to block McGahn from showing up, arguing that he is exempt from testimony.

House Democratic leaders sparred internally on Monday over whether to begin an impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her allies rejecting the call to move forward for now, according to multiple sources.

Reps. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), and Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) — all members of the Democratic leadership — pushed to begin impeachment proceedings during a leadership meeting in Pelosi's office, said the sources. Pelosi and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) — one of her key allies and a member of leadership herself — rejected their calls, saying Democrats' message is being drowned out by the fight over possibly impeaching Trump.

...Cicilline said he supports impeachment inquiry if McGahn doesn't show tomorrow.

"I think if this pattern by the president continues, where he's going to impede and prevent and undermine our ability to gather evidence to do our job, we're going to be left with no choice," Cicilline said about initiating an impeachment inquiry. The Rhode Island Democrat insisted that simply beginning an inquiry doesn't mean that there will be a formal vote to impeach Trump.

"It's a means where we can collect that information... We need to have the ability to gather the evidence," Cicilline added.

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), another member of the Judiciary Committee, is also in favor of an impeachment inquiry if McGahn doesn't appear on Tuesday.

"If McGahn doesn't show tomorrow, I think we're at an inflection point," Lieu said. "If we can't get information, I think we have to start proceeding down this path."

More at https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/20/nancy-pelosi-impeachment-1336587

Brian Fallon was once one of the most sought after operatives in Democratic politics: a brass knuckle brawler with experience at the highest levels of government, a cellphone filled with the top journalists in town, and a reputation for being preternaturally on message. Most offices would have died to hire him. But that was before he decided to devote his career to making the courts more progressive—and to doing so with little care for who he pissed off along the way. Now, many top Democrats can’t stand him.

...In the wake of that Clinton loss, he started the progressive organization Demand Justice in the spring of 2018. In theory, it was dedicated to stopping President Donald Trump’s judicial appointments. But in practice it’s been about redirecting the Democratic id as it pertains to the judicial wars. The group has rattled many Democratic senators who, Fallon believes, are supporting the president’s judges as an olive branch to Republicans or out of some bygone commitment to courtesies and norms. The group has issued report cards going after Democratic senators’ voting patterns, run ads calling out Democrats who vote with Trump the most, and pushed progressives to embrace new liberal priorities like getting rid of the legislative filibuster and expanding the Supreme Court.

...he gradually became irked by how quickly many Democrats expressed willingness to work with the incoming Trump administration. During the campaign, they’d called Trump a threat to the foundation of the United States. But within days of the election, some were already positioning themselves to cut legislative deals with him. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the willingness of some Senate Democrats to greenlight Trump’s judicial appointees.

“This seemed like an issue where Trump was having an immense impact, in fact arguably going to be his biggest legacy beyond the tax legislation or anything he’s done administratively,” Fallon said. “You have these Democrats, some of whom now want to run for president, that present themselves as champions on climate change or champions of reproductive rights but they’re voting for huge swaths of Trump appointees that when those cases touching those issues reach them they’re going to rule exactly the wrong way. Why is that viewed as acceptable?”

...That Fallon spends a good chunk of his days calling his fellow Democrats squishes isn’t lost on him. Nor is he entirely unmoved by the argument that his time would be better spent focused on Republicans exclusively. It’s just that he no longer buys into that worldview. If anything, he’s grown more convinced that the lack of political willpower of the “centrist go-along, get-along Democrat[s]”—as he calls them—is the fundamental hurdle Democrats face.

“I suppose we could take the very dog bites man approach to focusing attention on Republicans,” he said. “But no one would be surprised or fault Republicans for voting for judges that they agree with. The twisted thing that’s going on is Democrats are voting two-thirds of the time for judges that they don’t agree with.”

More at https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-brian-fallon-hillary-clintons-press-secretary-self-radicalized-and-became-a-resistance-leader?ref=scroll

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi derided the Trump administration’s efforts to obstruct Congress, and said that Trump “is becoming self-impeachable,” which is not how impeachment works.

During a Washington Post Live interview with Pelosi, reporter Robert Costa asked Pelosi about the possibility that former White House counsel Don McGahn might refuse to testify before Congress.

“Can you hold him in contempt, Mr McGahn, for refusing congressional demands?” Costa asked.

“Well, we don’t know that he has yet,” Pelosi replied. “Let’s take it one step at a time, let’s see where it goes.”

“And I have said the president is goading us into, wants to goad us into impeachment because he knows, as do I, that that’s not a good thing for the country,” Pelosi continued, and added “But the point is is that every single day, whether it’s obstruction obstruction obstruction obstruction of having people come to the table with facts, or ignoring subpoenas, every single day the president is making a case.”

“He’s becoming self-impeachable, in terms of some of the things that he is doing,” she added.

...Despite Pelosi’s turn of phrase, Trump is actually not going to impeach himself. The House of Representatives that Speaker Pelosi leads would have to do that.

https://www.mediaite.com/donald-trump/not-a-thing-nancy-pelosi-says-trump-is-becoming-self-impeachable/

Is Donald Trump an aberration? If he is, Joe Biden is the perfect Democratic candidate to defeat him next year, the steady hand that can restore decency, steer a middle course between Wall Street and Main Street, and reinvigorate the shaken liberal democratic order.

I don’t think Trump is an aberration. On the contrary, he’s the face, however duplicitous, of a revolution against the Party of Davos, the network of elites whose economic and cultural prescriptions came to be seen by myriad voters across the United States and Europe as camouflage for a self-serving heist.

...For all his Scranton blue-collar beginnings, Biden will be pilloried as a faithful servant of the Party of Davos that secured impunity for the financiers behind the 2008 meltdown, a heady growth in inequality, China appeasement and the arrogance of money-wooed Democrats estranged from their working-class constituency. Unfiltered politics, technology’s dubious gift, will hurt him. These politics prize agility more than honor. The world has moved on. Whither I’m not sure, but it has. Things shift. That’s the way of the world — inexorable as biology.

...One of the most significant exchanges so far of the fight for the 2020 Democratic nomination came in the last few days when Biden said of China: “I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.” To which Bernie Sanders shot back that the United States had lost three million manufacturing jobs to the 2000 China trade deal. “It’s wrong,” he tweeted, “to pretend that China isn’t one of our major economic competitors.”

Not only economic, I would add. China is set on an implacable course to run the world in the second half of this century. If that is not precisely what you want for your children, thinking that “they’re not competition for us” is precisely the wrong place to start. It’s lazy thinking — and laziness has hurt the liberal center a lot over the past decade.

More at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/opinion/joe-biden.html