US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi started an impeachment inquiry into whether US President Trump pressed Ukraine to probe former vice president and potential 2020 election candidate Joe Biden, CBS reported.
The decision on September 24 came after a White House whistleblower told The Washington Post that Trump discussed Biden and his son Hunter Biden, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company, during a phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in July. The whistleblower claimed that Trump froze US$391 million in aid to Ukraine as a threat.
Pelosi is clear that impeachment would be impossible with the current Republican-controlled Senate, Xiao He, associate researcher at the Institute of World Economics and Politics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, wrote for newspaper The Beijing News.
But impeachment may not be the goal. As long as the campaign produces hard proof that Trump abused his office’s rights, the Democrats can still deliver a huge political blow to the GOP, Xiao said.
Although most Republicans expressed support for Trump, the support is not 100 percent reliable, he argued. Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer, for example, proposed the call transcript should be passed over to congressional intelligence committees, to which no Republican senators raised an objection, he wrote.
This reflects that even with partisanship deepening, members of Congress won’t turn a blind eye to the Trump’s alleged actions to improve their chances at reelection, the expert wrote.
Li Mo and Sun Chenghao, both associate researchers from the Institute for American Studies, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, told The Beijing News that neither Trump nor Biden will emerge unscathed by this event, and predict that Elizabeth Warren, Biden’s main rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, will climb in the polls.
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