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President Donald Trump yesterday vowed to fight any effort by congressional Democrats to impeach him after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia inquiry, promising to take the matter to the Supreme Court even though the United States Constitution gives Congress complete authority over the impeachment process.
“If the partisan Dems ever tried to Impeach, I would first head to the U.S. Supreme Court,” the Republican president, who is seeking re-election next year, wrote on Twitter, without offering details about what legal action he envisioned.
Democrats, who control the House, remain divided over whether to proceed with the impeachment process even as new fights flare in their intensifying investigations into Trump and his administration. A fierce legal battle is taking shape over Trump’s bid to fight House subpoenas for documents and testimony from his administration that potentially could head to the Supreme Court.
The Constitution gives the sole power of impeachment and removing a president from office to the House of Representatives and the Senate, not the judiciary, as part of the founding document’s separation of powers among the three branches of the federal government.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders have remained cautious over launching impeachment proceedings against Trump ahead of the 2020 election, although they have left the door open to such action. Others in the party’s more liberal wing have demanded impeachment proceedings.
Mueller’s findings, released in a redacted report last week, detailed about a dozen episodes of potential obstruction of justice by Trump in trying to impede the inquiry but stopped short of concluding that he had committed a crime.
The report said Congress could address whether the president violated the law. Mueller separately found insufficient evidence that Trump’s campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Russia in the 2016 presidential race.
