Republican Justin Amash says Trump has done enough to be impeached — but it's the Democrats who will suffer

What Amash has done shouldn't be seen as a signal of change within the GOP. He has always been an outlier

As the country gets closer to summer and people prepare for the doldrums in Washington DC, the past weekend had a spark when Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) came out and said President Trump committed impeachable offenses after reading the 448-page Mueller report.

Amash became the first Republican to break ranks with his party, and it invited immediate scorn from some fellow Republican colleagues. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) accused Amash of seeking “attention” and of taking a contrarian position on impeachment for the sake of doing so.

“You could have a bill with 400 votes all supporting it, there will always be one opposed and that is Justin Amash,” McCarthy quipped during an interview with Fox News.

Amash is not a typical Republican. He has staked out libertarian positions on so many issues that he’s been accused in the past of “voting with Nancy Pelosi”, especially when he opposes Republican-sponsored legislation he says doesn‘t fit within the bounds of the Constitution.

People who support Trump’s impeachment shouldn’t get their hopes up that Amash represents a shift within the GOP. Amash is an anomaly. Additionally, he immediately faced what may scare other House members away: a GOP primary challenger.

What does make Amash’s move interesting is that it creates a bigger headache for Democratic House leadership than it does for the GOP.

Since the day Trump took office, Democrats have lodged complaints about their Republican Congressional colleagues, accusing them of refusing to engage in the oversight role afforded them by the Constitution. Almost daily, one could turn on cable news or read a newspaper and consume endless examples of Democrats griping Trump was “not getting held to account.”

Despite that talk, Democratic leadership tiptoed around impeachment. Before the Mueller report’s release, they outright rejected it. While I was with The Dallas Morning News editorial board, we met with then Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in May 2018. Concerning impeachment, she said, "Go vote if it’s a policy thing and a behavior thing. I don’t know if you can get impeached for being a jerk, but if we did, this guy would be long gone. But that’s not unifying.”

Even after the release of the Mueller report, Speaker Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer took a cautious approach to impeachment. These days, the rhetoric coming from Democratic circles, including Pelosi, makes it appear that putting off any move toward an impeachment inquiry is all about presidential politics in 2020 instead of “holding Trump accountable.”

Earlier this year, House Minority Whip Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) compared the Trump administration to the Hitler regime and said, “This man and his family are the greatest threats to democracy of my lifetime.”

In recent weeks, the Trump administration refused Congressional subpoenas, prompting several Democratic House committee leaders, such as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff and Rep. Gerry Connolly of the House Oversight Committee, to discuss impeachment. Both Speaker Pelosi and Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler have both said Trump’s refusal to honor Democratic subpoenas makes up a “constitutional crisis.”

Well, what are they waiting for?

If Trump got the country embroiled in a constitutional crisis and is a danger to democracy who has already committed impeachable offenses, why are House leaders not launching an impeachment inquiry? The talk of whether the president committed a crime is irrelevant. Impeachment is a political exercise, and the constitution leaves it up to the House to determine what “other higher crimes and misdemeanors” means — whether it's lying under oath about an affair with an intern or dangling a possible pardon in exchange for refusing to cooperate with Mueller’s team.

While impeachment is a political exercise, House Democrats have a duty to launch an impeachment inquiry and not just use the rhetoric they’ve espoused as of late to have a better chance of winning back the White House next year. It’s up to them to make the case and present it to the people and let the chips fall where they may. Democrats delegitimize their case for “holding Trump accountable” if they continue the amped-up rhetoric without taking concrete steps to confront it.