As Pelosi announces impeachment inquiry, Philly-area Democrats mostly line up in support

Philadelphia-area House Democrats who for months had resisted pressure from the party’s liberal base to try to remove President Donald Trump from office signaled on Tuesday that they would support the impeachment inquiry announced by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Reps. Susan Wild of Lehigh County and Andy Kim of Burlington County — both of whom won Republican-held districts in last year’s midterm elections — declared they would support impeachment if Trump had in fact sought to condition hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Ukraine on the country’s agreeing to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.

Their statements echoed an opinion article in the Washington Post on Monday night coauthored by Rep. Chrissy Houlahan of Chester County.

The legislators were part of a groundswell of Democrats across the country representing more moderate districts who said this week that Trump may have committed an impeachable offense. The development comes as the Trump administration has defied House Democrats’ demands for a copy of a complaint filed by a whistle-blower in the intelligence community. The complaint reportedly involves a promise Trump made to the leader of Ukraine. The White House says it will release an unredacted transcript of their phone call.

The numbers matter because the House needs at least 218 votes to successfully impeach — or formally charge — Trump. Before this week, about 165 had publicly pledged to support an impeachment inquiry. Any impeachment would trigger a trial in the Republican-controlled Senate, where the president is likely to have far more support.

Sen. Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican, has said he wants more information from the White House.

“As I have said repeatedly, a candidate for federal office seeking the assistance of a foreign government would be inappropriate," he said in a statement Tuesday. "[Wednesday] will shed more light on what transpired as President Trump has decided to release an un-redacted transcript of his call with the Ukrainian president. Further, the Senate unanimously approved today a resolution calling on for the full whistleblower complaint to be given to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. The administration should comply with this request.”

Trump has acknowledged that he brought up Biden, the leading Democrat in the race for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination, in a July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and that he ordered his administration to halt nearly $400 million in aid that had been appropriated by Congress. But the president said that he had done nothing improper and that the delay in aid was related to his desire for European countries to contribute more to Ukraine’s defense.

In an interview Tuesday, Houlahan, who won a GOP-held district in 2018, said her potential support for impeachment hearings did not stem from a culmination of concerns about Trump or a “straw that broke the camel’s back.”

“I think that it is a particular situation that has been identified by our intelligence community of being worthy of finding out more information and being of an urgent nature,” she said. “This is a combination of all kinds of worries. It’s a national security concern on a very high level. It’s also a really high-level concern of corruption at the highest level of our government.”

Other House Democrats had already announced their support for an impeachment inquiry, based on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and Trump’s possible obstruction of that inquiry.

Those Democrats included Reps. Dwight Evans and Brendan Boyle of Philadelphia, Madeleine Dean of Montgomery County, Mary Gay Scanlon of Delaware County, and Donald Norcross of Camden County.

Besides Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Bucks County, the lone holdout in the region as of Tuesday was Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a Democrat from Cape May County.

“As we move forward, if we have clear evidence of impeachable offenses, if the president said, ‘You must investigate Biden’s son and if you don’t I will not help you with your defense,’ then it’s an issue we have got to look at,” Van Drew told the Atlantic City Press on Tuesday.

But other Philadelphia-area Democrats who won Republican seats in last year’s midterm elections said if the Trump administration continued to flout Congress’ demand for the whistle-blower complaint, they would have no choice but to use the impeachment process to conduct oversight.

Wild said in a statement that because the House had “thus far been deprived of its ability to check the Executive in the way our nation’s founders intended,” she viewed an impeachment inquiry “as the only way to get all of the facts and establish whether this President did, in fact, leverage the disbursement of foreign aid in exchange for Ukrainian interference in our election.”

Kim, who represents a South Jersey district that Trump carried by 6 percentage points in 2016, said Trump had abused his power as commander in chief. “If the facts are corroborated, that violation, and my understanding of its implications, has led me to come to the conclusion that the President has committed an impeachable offense,” he said in a statement.

In response, the Republican National Committee said that “New Jerseyans deserve someone who will represent them — not the far left.”

Pennsylvania Republicans said Democrats were “rushing to impeachment without the facts,” as Rep. Lloyd Smucker of Lancaster County put it.

There hasn’t been broad public support for impeachment to date. A slight majority of Americans have opposed impeaching Trump over the Russia investigation, according to polling on the subject.