At some point on Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is expected to announce a formal impeachment inquiry targeting President Trump. The exact form of that inquiry isn’t clear, but it marks a significant shift in Pelosi’s approach to questions about Trump’s actions — a shift that was driven largely by a sudden spike in the number of House Democrats seeking an impeachment probe.
Over the past 24 hours, as new revelations about Trump’s interactions with the president of Ukraine have emerged, nearly two dozen members of the Democratic caucus have joined the call for an impeachment inquiry. Tracking the increase in support for an impeachment inquiry over the course of the year, the rush to sign on this week stands out as a sharp upward spike.
Pelosi, who earned her position as speaker by demonstrating her ability to corral votes, found herself this time following her caucus. As of this writing, nearly two-thirds of House Democrats back an impeachment effort. Including Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.), who endorsed the idea in May before leaving the Republican Party, the total number of House members supporting an impeachment probe is 165.
Again, as of this writing. Things are changing rapidly. But in a key sense, things still need to shift in Pelosi’s direction quite a bit.
For months, much of the consideration of whether it made political sense for Democrats to push for impeachment hinged upon the ensuing vote in the Senate. If the House were to pass articles of impeachment, they’d then go to the other side of the Capitol for a vote on potentially removing Trump from office. If two-thirds of the Senate supported such a move, Trump would be gone.
But two-thirds of the Senate will almost certainly not vote to remove Trump from office, given that 53 of the 100 senators are Republicans. Not a single Republican in either chamber supports impeachment hearings; the idea that Democrats would be able to pull 20 Republican senators to their cause seems distant.
For Democrats who are advocating an inquiry, that’s irrelevant. Many have argued that there is a fundamental principle at stake, that the House should exercise its check on the executive branch as a part of its constitutional mandate.
Pelosi may have acquiesced to that line of argument, but there’s still a very important vote she needs to track: the vote in the House.
It’s easy to predict how Trump would respond to a vote in the Senate refusing to remove him from office. He’d be celebratory, claiming it as vindication. But that victory would carry with it the asterisk of having been a function of partisanship.
Now imagine if the House failed to approve articles of impeachment in the first place: If even in the Democrat-controlled House, Pelosi couldn’t get a majority to advance impeachment to the Senate. That would be a much bigger black eye for Democrats — and a much bigger win for Trump before the 2020 election.
In other words, if the House decides to move forward with articles of impeachment, Pelosi will need to increase support from 165 representatives to 218, a majority of the body. Assuming that no non-Democrats besides Amash come on board, that means wringing 53 more votes out of her caucus — from a pool of Democrats who represent more conservative districts than those who’ve already signed on.
There is some good news for Pelosi. Over the past two days, Democrats representing a number of Republican-leaning districts have joined the impeachment push, meaning that she needs fewer such Democrats to get on board. The new additions on Monday were so heavily skewed to the more-moderate end of the spectrum, in fact, that the average lean of districts whose representatives haven’t backed an impeachment probe actually got more Democratic-leaning.
Update: And as of 9:00 p.m., the magic number is down to 23.
At the moment, Pelosi needs at least three more Democrats from Republican-leaning districts in addition to every single other Democrat to hit 218 votes. There’s no immediate rush to do so, but it’s hard to see Pelosi allowing articles of impeachment to come to the floor before that level of support exists. Even then, the lack of Republicans signing on might itself be prohibitive.
Fifty-three is also a minimum. Pelosi will need to hold all 165 of the representatives above for the magic number to be that low. Since actual articles of impeachment are different from support for an impeachment inquiry, that’s not a given.
Again, though, things are moving fast. This may be another reason Pelosi is willing to take such an extraordinary step: The number of votes jumped from 140 to 165 basically overnight.
I started writing this article at about 2 p.m. The original headline was “The most important number in the impeachment fight right now: 64.”
