House Speaker Nancy Pelosi still isn’t calling for impeachment but did ramp up her anti-Trump rhetoric Wednesday, calling attempts to block congressional investigations into the White House “immoral, unethical, corrupt and unpatriotic.”
A day after meeting with President Trump and promising to work together on infrastructure, Mrs. Pelosi unloaded on the president, saying he’s refusing to help Congress do its oversight job.
“President Trump is taking extraordinary and unprecedented measures to conceal information about himself and to cover-up his Administration’s dangerous and secretive activities from the public. This is part of a massive, unprecedented and growing pattern of obstruction,” she wrote.
Democrats say the administration has ignored several subpoenas, refused to send top officials to meet with Congress, and delayed responses to inquiries on allegations of inappropriate lobbying at Mar-a-Lago and the legal strategy toward the Affordable Care Act.
“Congress is a co-equal branch of government, intended to serve as a check on executive power and prevent the rise of a tyrant,” Mrs. Pelosi said. “Preventing Congress from exercising any oversight as the president intends fundamentally impairs the balance of power.”
Mrs. Pelosi didn’t broach impeachment, but she frustrated rank-and-file Democrats who say the president’s stonewalling could build an impeachment case against him.
“I think the president has escalated the conflict with Congress. The obstructionism we read about in the report has come galloping off the page to our front doorstep,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, a member of the Judiciary Committee and Maryland Democrat, told reporters Tuesday. “Members aren’t happy.”
House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, also of Maryland, said the party needs to employ “every legal process” available to them to enforce their requests for documents and testimonies, but impeaching the president is still on the table.
“Obviously, impeachment is the ultimate [option],” Mr. Hoyer told reporters on Wednesday. “But we need to pursue this in a very vigorous way.”
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Source:Washington Times
