General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I think the alleged conventional wisdom is wrong. I think Dems retake the Senate BY Impeaching Trump [View all]Tom Rinaldo
(22,911 posts)A formal impeachment inquiry solidifies the Democratic House's standing in federal courts when seeking cooperation and/or documents from witnesses. At that point there would be no remaining issues of "legislative intent" relevancy when the House is involved in a procedure laid out by the Constitution. Once the high constitutional impeachment remedy for resolving disputes between branches of our Federal government is invoked, the federal courts will be impelled to fast track cases before the judiciary involving those disputes to the Supreme Court level judiciously. I think it is our best shot at gaining Congressional access to those witnesses and evidence in a timely manner.
But even were that not the case, even were Democrats reduced to reading portions of the Mueller Report out loud to expert legal authorities to comment on during open session, millions more Americans would become aware of those findings through that process. For a sports analogy, relatively few Americans tune in live to a televised broadcast of a regular season baseball game. Standard congressional oversight hearings are like a regular season baseball game. Few will see them, some will catch a few highlights after the fact, more will scan the headlines later just to see "who won". Impeachment hearings though are different. They are the equivalent of a World Series game. It can be the exact same two teams that played against each other a month ago during the regular season with the same players, for the same nine innings, using the same rules; but live viewership geometrically increases for a World Series game. The same is true of impeachment vs standard oversight hearings.