House Democrats Renew Effort Impeach President Trump, Nancy Pelosi Resists

The drums of impeachment are echoing louder throughout Capital Hill this week as House Democrats, after reading special counsel Robert Mueller‘s charges against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, renew calls for the impeachment of President Donald Trump.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) is supporting the latest push by a group of Democrats, filing new articles of impeachment against President Trump charging he is “unfit” to hold the responsibility of the office.

“It is clear to us that he is unfit to be president of the United States of America,” Gutierrez said.

However, party leaders still remain divided on the timing of the latest draft expected to reach the House sometime before Thanksgiving. Democratic House leaders still see Trump as a valuable campaign issue in the upcoming 2018 elections where all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and a third of the seats of the Senate will be up for grabs. They want to focus the party’s attention on winning back the House before shifting to ousting the President. Party leaders are concerned that premature calls for impeachment could be viewed as politicizing the investigation into the extent of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

“It is not, obviously, off the table at some time in the future, but is premature at this point in time,” Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters last month echoing Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Gutierrez thinks the time for waiting is over, and that Mueller’s findings of financial ties between former Trump campaign chairman Manafort and the Kremlin and the Ukrainian government only will serve to fuel the effort.

Reps. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) and Al Green (D-Texas) also previously drafted articles of impeachment against the president. Sherman, alleging the president has committed high crimes and misdemeanors, the constitutional standard for impeachment, drafted articles of impeachment back in July. Green, drafted his in August in response to the president’s handling of the Charlottesville riots that resulted in the death of Heather Heyer at the hands of white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr., after striking her and several other protesters with his car.

Green acknowledged that the impeachment efforts are agitating for his fellow party members. He believes that “history wont be kind” to lawmakers who sit idle in the face of the many controversies swirling around the administration.