Evan Vucci/AP Photo Politics Democrats Are Totally Impeaching the President The hardest, but most important, part will be to pick just one good reason first.

Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee wants to convince the public that he is not on an inevitable path to impeaching the president of the United States.

“We do not now have the evidence all sorted out to do an impeachment,” Jerry Nadler told ABC’s “This Week.” “Before you impeach somebody, you have to persuade the American people that it ought to happen.” Irrefutable evidence of “high crimes and misdemeanors," he said, would convince supporters of President Donald Trump that this is not just a partisan effort to overturn the election.


“Yeah, it is a high bar,” Nadler said. “We may or may not get there.”

In that same interview, however, Nadler offered a less tentative judgment. It is, he said, "very clear that the president obstructed justice”—the very term used in the impeachment efforts against Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. And last month, he delivered a starker assessment of the president.

“His conduct and crude statements,” Nadler said in a statement announcing that his committee had hired two anti-Trump litigators, “threaten the basic legal, ethical, and constitutional norms that maintain our democratic institutions.”

If there’s any doubt that the House is planning to impeach Trump, consider what some other committee chairs have said. The chair of the Financial Services Committee, Maxine Waters, tweeted this week: “Obstruction of justice reality show: Firing Comey, sending coded messages to Manafort & others that he has the power to pardon; lying abt Trump Tower meeting; threatening Cohen's in-laws; attempting to destroy Mueller. What more do we need to know? Impeachment is the only answer.”

The chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, told CNN last month, “You can see evidence in plain sight on the issue of collusion, pretty compelling evidence.”

The committees headed by Waters and Schiff, as well as several others, will be following in the footsteps of Judiciary, which asked for documents this week from 81 people and businesses, touching on everything from the firing of James Comey to the mingling of Trump's official and business activities to payoffs to cover up marital infidelities to the financial dealings of the inaugural committee to Trump’s behavior as a school hall monitor (OK, I made that last one up).

This seems to be what the Democratic rank and file wants; one recent survey says more than half want the House not just to pursue a path to possible impeachment, but to make impeachment a top priority of the new Congress. Billionaire Tom Steyer, who has spent a fortune in TV ads urging impeachment, is threatening to run ads in the districts of Democratic House leaders and committee chairs if they do not get on board.

Given Trump’s conduct in office and in business, and the refusal of Republicans to seriously examine that conduct in the two years they held the House majority, it is understandable that Democrats are about to launch a series of investigations so sweeping that there will not be a single unemployed process server in the District of Columbia.

There are, however, two obstacles to impeaching Trump, and only one of them can be blamed on the Republicans.

The vast scope of the inquiries into Trump makes this story hard to follow—not just for voters but even for journalists who spend all day on this stuff. Half a dozen committees may pursue a dozen or more allegations of impropriety, and many of those committees may bring the same witnesses in front of the members (and the cameras) to talk about a dizzying series of questions. Is this an investigation into tax evasion? Insurance fraud? Campaign violations? Financial links with foreign governments? Witness tampering? The Trump story sometimes becomes a blur, as one outrage bleeds into another.

In the past, successful probes into political misconduct have almost always featured one committee pursuing one story: the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, the investigations of union racketeering in 1957, the Vietnam hearings of 1966, the Watergate hearings of 1973, the Iran-Contra investigation. With too many probes, Democrats risk a loss of clarity, not to mention a numbing effect.

And then there are the Republicans. Nadler says he wants to make a bipartisan case, but the elephants in the room have protected Trump for three years now. There is apparently no conduct that will persuade the core of the Republican Party to remove the protective cocoon in which they have wrapped the president.

In the latest example, Michael Cohen produced checks to prove that Trump personally authorized hush money payments to conceal an affair that would have jeopardized his election as president. Wait a minute, says Rep. Jim Jordan: There’s no indication of what the checks were for! After all, Trump did not write in the memo field: “Money to pay off porn star so she wouldn't reveal I slept with her which could screw up my election.” And Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota said the president’s payments to Cohen showed that “he loves his family and I don't think he wanted his family to go through this.” I don’t know that there is a Hallmark card for this particular expression of familial love.

The potent mix of transactional GOP support—we ignore Trump’s conduct, he gives us judges, cuts taxes and guts regulations—and the fear of an overwhelmingly pro-Trump Republican base—has been the root fact of political life since Trump emerged as the party’s presidential nominee in 2016. It has endured through the “Access Hollywood” tape, the abandonment of basically every key Republican defense and foreign policy belief, and the seemingly endless stream of evidence from within the White House that this president is by every measure seriously unfit for the office.

What might these half-dozen committees uncover that would alter this fundamental fact of political life? What could they possibly find that would persuade 20 or more Republican senators to remove Donald Trump from office, given what they have accepted from him so far?