Back in the spring, Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton said it would be “a waste to squander our first majority in eight years on a futile impeachment process.”
But now, D.C.’s sole representative on Capitol Hill has changed her tune, calling for an impeachment inquiry for President Donald Trump following the testimony of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
“I believe that it is imperative for Congress to obtain additional, redacted information from the Mueller Report and other information in order to decide whether Articles of Impeachment are warranted,” Norton said in a statement on Tuesday, which did not include the name “Trump” in it. As a delegate, Norton does not have full voting rights in the House, though under the Democrats, she has a floor vote in the Committee of the Whole.
Norton’s support for an impeachment inquiry adds her to the list of more than a dozen House Democrats who have joined the call since Mueller’s testimony last week. The surge in support comes after Mueller said during his testimony that Trump had not been cleared of obstructing justice and had tried to undermine the special counsel’s investigation, among other takeaways.
There were already regional legislators among the more than 100 members of the House of Representatives who publicly back an impeachment inquiry (all Democrats but for Justin Amash, a Republican from Michigan who became an independent after calling for impeachment proceedings)—Don Beyer of Virginia and Jamie Raskin of Maryland. The same day as Norton’s statement, Virginia’s Jennifer Wexton also announced she was backing an impeachment inquiry.
Indeed, Raskin said this week that the House is already engaged in an impeachment investigation. “We’ve been confronted with overwhelming evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors by the president,” Raskin told Montgomery County Media, listing instances of presidential obstruction of justice, witness tampering, concealment of evidence, and lying as outlined by Mueller. “That’s all totally impeachable,” he said.
But pro-impeachment Democrats have yet to win over House leadership, including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who maintains that investigating Trump, rather than impeaching him, is the way to go. The argument is that the Republican-held Senate wouldn’t move forward with impeachment proceedings, and the inquiry could hurt Democratic representatives running for reelection in battleground districts.
Only about 4 percent of voters in D.C. supported Trump in 2016.
While Norton is now on board with the impeachment process, she doesn’t want it to “consume all the oxygen from the people’s agenda,” she said in a statement. “It would be legislative malpractice and a disservice to our constituents to fail to highlight the many bills we have sent to the Senate.”
This story has been updated with Jennifer Wexton’s call for an impeachment inquiry.
Rachel Kurzius