James Carroll

Opinion contributor

Democrats turned out in force Nov. 6 and helped deliver their party a House majority. They also delivered an implicit demand that President Donald Trump be impeached. In CNN exit polls 77 percent of Democrats supported impeachment.

But likely Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said multiple times that she opposes starting an immediate impeachment inquiry. “Impeachment doesn’t fit into the equation until we hear what Robert Mueller says,” she told The New Yorker. “If the evidence from Mueller is compelling, it should be compelling for Republicans as well, and that may be a moment of truth,” she said in a New York Times Magazine interview.

In other words, the country has to wait for the special counsel's Russia report and maybe even for the Republicans to concur with it before she’ll allow an impeachment inquiry.

This would be a mistake. Even the hard right expects impeachment proceedings now. As Steve Bannon put it, “It’s very simple, November 6, up or down vote on the impeachment of Donald Trump.” And there might not be much of a country left if we wait for Mueller’s Russia report.

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Trump has committed innumerable impeachable offenses not involving Russia collusion, right out in public. He continues daily to launch impeachment-worthy broadsides that are chipping away at the country’s democratic institutions and the rule of law.

Trump’s offenses unrelated to Russia collusion include relentless obstruction of justice in the form of attacks on Mueller, the Justice Department, FBI, the media, former attorney general Jeff Sessions (fired), former FBI director James Comey (fired), and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein; dangling of pardons for former campaign manager Paul Manafort and former personal lawyer Michael Cohen; writing a false statement for Donald Trump Jr. about the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting; and promising a “warlike posture” in response to any House investigation, including using the Senate to retaliate.

“If we allow presidents to block, tamper with, and destroy the machinery of justice that is aimed at them, we do so at our peril," Elizabeth Holtzman, a member of the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate, wrote in Salon. The rule of law will "go up in smoke," she said, and "we will find ourselves on the road to tyranny.”

Stop Trump before democracy fades

We don't need proof of Russia collusion to hold Trump accountable for refusing to call Russia to account for its cyberattacks during the 2016 election and since then and his role in the illegal payment of hush money to two women in order to influence the 2016 election.

In Watergate, the House Judiciary Committee completed a comprehensive impeachment inquiry, drafted articles of impeachment and approved them — all before the special prosecutor completed his work.

Pelosi has said that impeachment proceedings would be divisive. We’re already divided, and destruction of our democracy would divide us irreparably. The House has to act before Trump finishes wrecking our democracy.

The presumptive speaker wants to focus on pursuing an ambitious legislative agenda. That won’t get far with block-everything Mitch McConnell running the Senate and a budding authoritarian in the White House. In any event, the House can do more than one thing at a time, and the top priority is the impeachment inquiry, which the House can pursue to conclusion regardless of McConnell.

Good reasons to impeach even if Senate resists

The House also needs to start an impeachment inquiry now so it can pick up the pieces if Mueller is fired, or take up the slack if Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker constricts Mueller.

Many suggest impeachment by the House would waste everybody’s time because the two-thirds majority necessary to convict in the Republican-controlled Senate will never be achieved. That’s putting the cart way before the horse. We can’t predict what the Senate will do after a thorough House impeachment inquiry (eventually including Mueller’s findings), which will play nonstop for months on national television. More than half the public disapproves of Trump's job performance and that will climb as the revelations mount. Republican senators at some point will have to take note.

But say for argument’s sake that the Senate doesn’t convict. What then? As incoming House Judiciary chairman Jerry Nadler said recently, even if Trump is not convicted, impeachment “may in fact be necessary and successful at saying, in effect, ‘You have violated the constitutional order, you are threatening the constitutional order, you will stop threatening the constitutional order. You will stop threatening the rule of law.’” In addition, the revelations that emerged in the impeachment inquiry would be of great interest to voters in deciding whether to remove him in 2020.

The House should initiate an impeachment inquiry as soon as the new Congress is sworn in.

James Carroll is an attorney and Democratic activist in West Palm Beach, Florida.