This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 26, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The House has begun a presidential impeachment inquiry.

What will it look like?

How might it compare to impeachment proceedings in the past?

Gene Healy is author of the recent Cato paper,

Indispensable remedy, the broad scope of the Constitution's impeachment power, he comments.

As best as you can tell, why has Nancy Pelosi chosen now to begin potential impeachment proceedings?

Yeah, well up until this week she'd been a major speed bump for anybody pushing towards impeachment.

She thought the polls showed that it wasn't very popular.

She was worried about Democrats in Trump favorable district, but the ground seems to have shifted

under a number of Democratic members in those vulnerable districts have come out in favor of impeachment in the wake of this is

revelations about this July 25th phone call with the Ukraine's newly elected president.

This really seems to have moved a substantial number of the Democratic caucus into the pro-impeachment camp.

So when we're trying to evaluate exactly what the smoking gun is or anything like that what did this so this call between

President Trump and the newly elected president of Ukraine what did they

actually discuss?

So the allegation that we first started hearing about recently involved this July 25th phone

call with the President Selensky of the Ukraine and the story was that President Trump was holding

hostage almost 400 million dollars in foreign and military aid in order to get the Ukraine to

investigate Joe Biden and Joe Biden's son. In other words with Joe Biden's son. In other words, with Joe Biden, his likely opponent for the

2020 presidential campaign. And that moved a lot of Democrats off the fence and seems to have pushed Speaker Pelosi

...