Democrats vote to establish impeachment ground rules.

We may have learned the identity of the original whistleblower,

and Nancy Pelosi comes out in strong defense of Katie Hill.

I'm Ben Shapiro.

This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

The Ben Shapiro show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.

Protect your online privacy today at ExpressVPN.com

slash Ben. Okay, so yesterday impeachment got real because Democrats finally voted on procedures

for impeachment. Now, Republicans had been saying for a while that all of this was

illegitimate because Democrats had not held an official vote on whether there ought to be

an impeachment inquiry. Basically, Nancy Pelosi had gone out there and said, impeachment inquiry declared. That has no legal status. It has no legal effect. She's the Speaker of the House, but she is saying a thing. It's the equivalent of Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy in the office by standing in the middle of the office and shouting, I declare bankruptcy. So Republicans kept saying, well, you've established no

procedures. The procedures that you haven't established are obviously bad for us. All of this stuff

is being hidden behind closed doors. So how are we supposed to take any of this seriously?

Well, the Democrats were holding off from officially declaring an impeachment inquiry and setting

the ground rules because they didn't really know where this was going to go. Originally, all of this was expected to be quick and dirty. Originally, the Democrats said that within a month, like by Halloween, they were already going to be voting on impeachment. Why? Because they felt like the transcript of the call was going to be the nail upon which they hung the impeachment. And then that was going to be it. Right? They were just going to move forward. It was going to be completely partisan. They were just going to do their interviews behind closed doors, vote for impeachment, done. And then the Senate presumably acquit the president, and we'd all move on to the election. Well, as they have dug into this, they actually think they have something here. This is what this vote betrays. The Democrats actually believe that they now have

enough material to at least damage President Trump. And let's be straight about this. In order for

Republicans in the Senate to vote, to actually convict the president and remove him from office,

it's going to take a lot more than what Democrats have right now. Again, the entire allegation

against President Trump relies on his intent, on his intent level. Was he intending

to militarize a foreign government by using taxpayer dollars as leverage to get them specifically

to target an American citizen Joe Biden for political purposes? Not as part of a broader

anti-corruption rubric, not as part of a broader 2016 investigation, not as part of a broader

...