The March Toward Impeachment

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 10 December 2019

⏱️ 8 minutes

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Summary

It’s been a busy week, and it’s only Tuesday. The chair of the House Judiciary Committee unveiled two articles of impeachment against the President, which are nearly certain to be adopted by the House of Representatives. The same day, Congressional Democrats threw their support behind Trump’s renegotiation of NAFTA. Isaac Chotiner, who writes the Q. & A. column, calls the New Yorker’s Washington correspondent Susan Glasser to talk about the reaction in the capital to the fast-moving impeachment process and about the House leadership’s decision to focus on a small number of charges—abuse of power and obstruction of Congress—when so many were potentially on the table. “There’s nothing in there about a violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause,” Glasser says. “And there’s nothing at all about the Mueller report, which found ten alleged acts of obstruction of justice on the part of the President with no other remedy except for Congressional action.” But it is no coincidence that the House Democrats are proceeding impeachment and endorsing one of the President’s signature trade policies on the same day. According to Glasser, it may reflect a political calculation by Speaker Pelosi, aimed at helping Democrats running in districts where Trump won by large margins in 2016.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Isaac Chottner, a staff writer at The New Yorker, and this is a special edition of The New Yorker Radio Hour.
0:09.0	A president who declares himself above accountability, above the American people, and above Congress's power of impeachment, which is meant to protect against threats to our democratic
0:21.5	institutions, is a president who sees himself as above the law.
0:27.2	This morning, House Democrats unveiled two articles of impeachment against President Trump.
0:33.3	So I wanted to call up the New Yorker's Washington correspondent, Susan Glasser, to discuss the goings-on in the Capitol.
0:41.3	Hi, how are you, Isaac?
0:42.8	I'm all right. So tell me, what has the mood been like on Capitol Hill today?
0:46.9	You know, I mean, it's one of those epic days of the Trump presidency that, you know, seems like a week or a month, but it's just one day.
0:56.7	You have the House Democrats marching toward impeachment, unveiling the two articles of impeachment
1:03.7	against the president that'll be voted on in the House Judiciary Committee.
1:07.3	Then just one hour later, you have this major legislative breakthrough as well on
1:12.5	House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying she's made a deal and there are enough votes to move forward
1:17.1	with the rebranded U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement as well.
1:22.2	So I want to turn to the trade agreement in a second, but first, there are two articles of
1:26.2	impeachment against the president, one for abusive power, the other for obstruction of Congress. Congress, of course, has been
1:31.6	trying to investigate the abuse of power. Is it fair to characterize these articles as particularly
1:36.5	narrow and focus? I know there had been a debate sort of before impeachment really got going
1:41.0	about how narrowly any potential impeachment case should focus on
1:45.1	President Trump's apparent misdeeds about Ukraine and how much they should focus on his general
1:49.4	abusive office. So how would you characterize what Nadler is unveiling today?
1:53.9	Yeah, you know, it's very interesting. They're both very narrow in their essentially
1:58.1	focused to the very current proximate investigation of the Ukraine matter,
	...

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