Plus, hundreds of historians condemn President Trump.
Welcome back to the Impeachment Briefing. As the House vote on impeachment nears, we’re looking at the risk it poses for some moderate Democrats. |
- A string of moderate House Democrats — including Representatives Elissa Slotkin, Joe Cunningham, Ben McAdams, Jason Crow, Andy Kim and Abigail Spanberger — announced their plans to support impeachment. The Democrats, all first-term members who flipped their districts, had previously been reticent about such a move.
- One Democrat who does not support impeachment: Representative Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, who told aides on Saturday that he planned to switch his party affiliation to Republican as soon as this week. Nearly all of his staff in Washington has resigned in the wake of his decision.
- Ahead of a likely Senate impeachment trial, Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, called on four White House officials to testify about their involvement in Mr. Trump’s Ukraine dealings. Yesterday Mr. Schumer wrote a letter to Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, outlining his proposals for the trial. The two are expected to meet this week.
- The House Judiciary Committee formally presented its case for impeaching Mr. Trump in a 658-page report published online early this morning. The report echoes similar documents produced after the committee’s approval of impeachment articles for Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.
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How the moderates are voting |
My colleague Sheryl Gay Stolberg was in Michigan today with Ms. Slotkin, who held a town-hall meeting that quickly got contentious. I called Sheryl this afternoon to ask her about what the tension around moderates voting for impeachment looked like on the ground. |
Sheryl, why was Ms. Slotkin’s decision to back impeachment such a big deal? |
She’s one of the members who resisted impeachment for a long time, for months, even after the release of the Mueller report. She flipped a Republican district in 2018 that had been in G.O.P. hands for two decades, and she ran on a theme of bipartisanship. |
How close of a call was this? |
She said she didn’t make her decision until yesterday. She spent much of the weekend in her farmhouse in Holly, Michigan, a rural town north of Detroit, going over impeachment evidence and reports, in addition to the House manuals of rules and procedures. |
What do these moderates have to tell us about the case Democrats have built? |
She was effectively saying: “If I lose my seat, so be it. I will have gone down on the right side of history.” Other moderates are saying the same thing. They’re aware that this comes with a big political cost. Impeachment investigators built a very narrow, careful case because they knew they had to build one in order to get the votes of members like Ms. Slotkin. |
What did the mix of constituents look like at the town hall? |
It was raucous. There was like a spontaneous combustion in the back of the room at one point near the end, where pro-Trump protesters were shouting and some anti-Trump people started to get in their faces. The protesters didn’t want to hear what Elissa Slotkin had to say. They wanted to drown her out. |
At the end, she told me that there was only one moment where she felt her blood pressure go up: when she tried to speak about how much she cares about foreign influence in the elections, and she was being heckled. |
A (very large) group of historians weighs in |
Not long ago, Sean Wilentz, a professor of American history at Princeton, talked to other historians who were frustrated about not having an easy way to voice and organize their concerns over Mr. Trump’s Ukraine pressure campaign. |
So, working with Brenda Wineapple, the author of a recent book on President Andrew Johnson’s impeachment, he drafted a statement and sent it to a long list of historian friends. |
The resulting text — which they shared for the first time with this newsletter tonight — now has over 750 signatures from historians across the nation, including some of the field’s most well-known figures: Robert Caro, Ken Burns and Ron Chernow. (Read the full statement here.) |
“President Trump’s numerous and flagrant abuses of power are precisely what the Framers had in mind as grounds for impeaching and removing a president,” the statement says. “The President’s offenses, including his dereliction in protecting the integrity of the 2020 election from Russian disinformation and renewed interference, arouse once again the Framers’ most profound fears that powerful members of government would become, in Hamilton’s words, ‘the mercenary instruments of foreign corruption.’” |
The statement “is a form that historians and others have used over the decades to express collective opinions. It’s a kind of petition to the public,” Mr. Wilentz said. “We have a civic role, as keepers in some ways of the nation’s heritage, as people who have devoted our lives to studying this country.” |
Ms. Wineapple said the text is also a reminder of how much a scholar can influence how others think about current events. |
“If a historian is an educator, that person walks into a classroom and faces questions from young people. If a historian is a writer, one is talking not just to other like-minded historians, but to the public,” she said. |
The idea has company: Over 850 legal scholars signed a letter earlier this month arguing that the president had engaged in “impeachable conduct.” But Mr. Wilentz said that a historian has a role at this stage of impeachment that no other figure in American life does. |
“American culture is not a terribly historical culture,” he said. “We’re much more forward-looking than backward-looking." |
The attention to a meaningful record, Mr. Wilentz said, “becomes deeply important when you come to this kind of crisis. That’s something that only historians can provide.” |
- Over the weekend, my colleague Emily Cochrane wrote about another moderate House Democrat, Antonio Delgado, who is trying to show his upstate New York constituents that he has been getting things done during the impeachment inquiry.
- The New Yorker published a long profile of Yuriy Lutsenko, Ukraine’s recently fired prosecutor general who has helped wage a smear campaign with Rudy Giuliani against the Bidens.
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