Impeaching?

House Dem: Impeaching Trump on party lines would 'tear the country apart'

By CAITLIN OPRYSKO

Rep. Jerry Nadler warned Monday that any impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump that begin in the new, Democrat-controlled House of Representatives would need to clear an obvious partisan bar.

Nadler, who is set to take over as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and would oversee a potential impeachment process, outlined in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” a three-pronged test that he said would make for a legitimate impeachment proceeding, including that the offenses in question must be so grave and the evidence so clear that even some supporters of the president concede that impeachment is necessary.

Once it’s determined that a president has committed an impeachable offense, Nadler said, lawmakers need to consider whether the offense will “rise to the gravity where it’s worth putting the country through the trauma of an impeachment proceeding.”

The New York Democrat, who voted against impeaching former President Bill Clinton, said that the impeachment process must transcend party lines “because you don't want to tear the country apart.”

“You don't want half the country to say to the other half for the next 30 years, ‘We won the election. You stole it from us,’” Nadler said, arguing that “you have to be able to think at the beginning of the impeachment process that the evidence is so clear, of offenses so grave, that once you've laid out all the evidence, a good fraction of the opposition, the voters, will reluctantly admit to themselves ‘They have to do it.’”

“Otherwise you have a partisan impeachment, which will tear the country apart,” he said.

He indicated that he had yet to see evidence that impeaching Trump was warranted, but said that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election as well as future investigations into Trump by Nadler’s Judiciary Committee could yield material for an impeachment proceeding.

“If Mueller shows us that the president has committed impeachable offenses, we'll have to make judgments as to how serious those impeachable offenses are and whether we should undertake an impeachment. If we see evidence of impeachable offenses not from Mueller the same question will arise,” he said, noting that not all crimes are considered an impeachable offense and vice versa.