For months, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) cited one compelling reason to hold off impeachment proceedings against President Trump: “public sentiment.” Pelosi regularly mentioned an Abraham Lincoln quote about shaping support for abolishing slavery — “Public sentiment is everything,” the future president said in a 1858 speech — to set […] Read more »
As Impeachment Divide Persists, More Voters Embrace an Inquiry
Over lunch at the Frost Cafe, a corner diner in a picturesque pocket of Virginia that President Trump won handily in 2016, opinion over his impeachment is as varied as anywhere in the country. Garland Gentry, 74, a pro-Trump retiree, declared the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry “another in a long […] Read more »
How Impeachment Is Being Spun
… Impeachment, as it turns out, is really about politicians selling the public on the facts as they’d like them interpreted; it’s a public relations operation as much as a constitutionally-allotted power. We decided it makes sense not just to keep track of the inquiry’s pile of evidence, but to […] Read more »
Politics with Amy Walter: Digital Campaign Advertising and 2020
The week started with a letter from White House Counsel Patrick Cipollone to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, informing the House leader that the White House was not going to participate in an impeachment inquiry that it considered unconstitutional. Resistance to the impeachment inquiry escalated when the White House refused to let […] Read more »
Impeachment and American Political Development
A president is facing impeachment, nearly exactly when Arthur Schlesinger anticipated. At the conclusion of The Imperial Presidency in 1973, he offered a warning: “We have noted that corruption appears to visit the White House in fifty-year cycles. This suggests that exposure and retribution inoculate the Presidency against its latent […] Read more »
The Triple Threat for Trump
The impeachment process has three prongs – the inquiry, impeachment, and the Senate’s vote to convict and remove the president from office. The NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll has newly released data on President Trump and impeachment and gauges Americans’ attitudes about each facet of the process. We dig deep into that […] Read more »