Charles P. Pierce: Congress Can't Wait for Mueller. It's Time to Start the Impeachment Process.

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Congress Can’t Wait for Mueller. It’s Time to Start the Impeachment Process.
Donald Trump is as crooked as Richard Nixon ever was.
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By Charles P. Pierce
Jan 18, 2019


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There is no reason anymore for the House Judiciary Committee to delay at least opening its own inquiry into whether or not the president* is liable to impeachment. Yoni Appelbaum made the case in compelling fashion in a story in The Atlantic that was released Thursday morning, which makes me wonder what kind of deal Appelbaum cut with the Journalism Fates.





During the extended Watergate investigations, we had the Senate Watergate Committee, chaired by the late Sam Ervin and, later, the House Judiciary Committee investigation, led by the late John Doar, and both of these went on simultaneously with the probe being conducted by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force. All three of these investigations had different missions. They occasionally rubbed each other the wrong way. They occasionally stepped on each other's toes.

In Not Above The Law, his superb account of his days as the public face of the Watergate Special Force, James Doyle explained how that body's purpose differed from that of the House Judiciary Committee's. Doyle writes that Doar and special-prosecutor Leon Jaworski, who had replaced the fired Archibald Cox, circled each other warily. "John Doar began meeting with Jaworski, but the meetings proved unproductive," Doyle writes. "Jaworski did not want the evidence he had fought for to be squandered in a leaking match between Republican and Democratic members of the House." Nevertheless, the prosecutor's office did its job, and the committee did its job, and the nation was rid of Richard Nixon by the end of the summer of 1974.

In other words, the systems necessarily to decide whether or not to get rid of a president can work in ultimate (if uneasy) harmony, and all of them can accomplish their independent missions. Waiting For Mueller is now an unacceptable and inadequate response from the national legislature. Mueller's job is to see if the president* and his minions should go to jail. The House's job is to determine if the president* should not be the president* anymore. Jaworski sent John Mitchell to prison. John Doar sent Richard Nixon home. Both outcomes were just, even with the Gerry Ford ex machina of the Nixon pardon.

It's time.

Just so we're all on the same page.