WASHINGTON — Where President Donald Trump goes, impeachment follows.
At the start of 2025, two weeks before Trump’s second inauguration, then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) introduced measures to expunge Trump’s two historic first-term impeachments.
Republicans didn’t stop there. With federal courts routinely ruling against the president in the last two years, 10 House Republicans dropped 15 impeachment measures against 12 federal judges.
In fact, of the 30 articles of impeachment introduced in the 119th Congress, only six of them are directly aimed at the president, though you wouldn’t know that from listening to him.
“It's terrible. All they do is they talk about impeaching everybody,” Trump told reporters on the tarmac in South Carolina Thursday in between campaign stops. “I mean, honestly, if we wanted to play that game, we could play it just as well.”
While Democrats are broadly running against Trump corruption this midterm cycle, the party is far from settled on an impeachment strategy if they regain control of Congress.
“There's a lot of evidence there that shows there’s a massive amount of, in my opinion, possible impeachable offenses,” Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) told Raw Story this fall. “That's going to be investigated pretty quickly.”
Garcia, who’s expected to chair the Oversight Committee if Democrats retake the House, is in line with congressional Democratic Party leaders who are taking a wait-and-see approach, even as many in the party’s base are itching for righteous retribution after two years of watching Trump flaunt the Constitution’s Emoluments Clauses and make money off the White House.
“There has to be a statement that's made that clarifies that what he's done is unconstitutional — clearly," Rep. John Larson (D-CT) — one of three House Democrats who’ve introduced articles of impeachment against Trump during the current Congress — told Raw Story.
Even with the Nov. 3 election just around the corner, the internal Democratic debate over the party’s impeachment agenda is expected to stretch well into the new year.
Allegations of a pay-to-play presidency abound.
Since returning to the Oval Office, Democrats accuse Trump of illegally accepting a luxury jet from Qatar, taking $2 billion from the United Arab Emirates for the First Family’s World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency venture, exchanging pardons for millions of dollars in political contributions, steering federal loans and grants to family and friends — to name just four of dozens of examples.
That long and expanding list seems to be why more than half of American voters now believe Trump has committed impeachable offenses in his second term, according to recent polls.
The mounting examples of grift and souring public sentiment haven’t changed the math for congressional Democratic leaders, though.
“We haven’t ruled anything in, and we haven’t ruled anything out,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has repeated in recent months when asked whether Democrats will seek an unprecedented third Trump impeachment should they win.
That’s not good enough for rank-and-file Democrats.
“It has to be taken head-on,” Congressman Larson of Connecticut told Raw Story.
Larson’s one of three House Democrats who’ve introduced those six impeachment measures against Trump over the past two years.
“In a time of messaging, is it more about the message or is it more about the actual thing?” Larson rhetorically asked Raw Story recently.
After 14 terms in Washington Larson, who was a history teacher before being elected to Congress, is eager for his electorally beleaguered party to go on offense to combat Trump and the bully pulpit he wields like a bludgeon on anyone who crosses him.
But it’s moved well beyond optics for Larson.
The last straw was the Iran war, which Trump has continued waging despite both the House and Senate passing a concurrent war powers resolution disapproving of it — the first joint disapproval measure passed since the War Powers Act of 1973 was signed into law.
“When you violate the War Powers Act and the Constitution, that's clearly an impeachable offense,” Larson said.
While Larson listened to party leaders and never forced a vote on his articles of impeachment, Rep. Al Green (D-TX) has annoyed his fellow Democrats by deploying procedural mechanisms that forced House floor votes on three of four separate Trump impeachment measures he’s dropped throughout the 119th Congress.
“The president himself has shown us that he is not a president who is of the people, by the people, for the people,” Green told Raw Story. “He seems to be of the billionaires, by the billionaires, for the billionaires.”
In February, again to the annoyance of Democratic leaders, Green was kicked out of the State of the Union address for holding a “Black people aren’t apes!” sign on the House floor during the president’s address, a reference to a Trump Truth Social post that depicted President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as the animals.
“If you tolerate this level of racism, you perpetuate it. I refuse to tolerate it. I don’t want to see it normalized,” Green told Raw Story at the time. “On some issues it’s better to stand alone than not stand at all.”
And it’s surely been lonely for Green, Larson and Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-MI) — the third Democrat to introduce articles of impeachment since Trump retook power at the start of last year.
The other thing the three have in common is that they all lost their Democratic primaries earlier this year, meaning they’re on the outs even as the impeachment efforts they helped spur are growing more popular nationwide.
This spring, before being primaried out of office in August at the urging of Democratic leaders like Hakeem Jeffries, Thanedar backed down from his threat to force a full House vote on his Trump impeachment effort.
But the two-term Congressman never changed his underlying position.
“I do believe that we should pursue impeachment of President Trump,” Thanedar told Raw Story this fall.
Impeachment’s complicated, though. It’s not a progressive versus moderate fight, as Thanedar knows from experience.
In 2022, the multi-millionaire businessman ran and won his first national election as a progressive, but in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, Thanedar and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) publicly parted ways.
Then in August, after paying for impeachment billboards in his Detroit-area district, Thanedar lost his Democratic primary to state representative Donavan McKinney, who had the backing of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), AOC Squad member Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Justice Democrats.
In 2019, during Trump’s first administration, Tlaib rallied progressives by promising to "impeach the motherf-----," but, like many elected Democrats on Capitol Hill, she’s been more cautious in Trump’s second term, dismissing many impeachment efforts as more performative than substantive.
“What do you make of some people in your party who think it was a mistake to do the two impeachments in the first term?” Raw Story asked Thanedar.
“It's never a mistake to do the right thing, and the right thing is to hold this president accountable, and that's what the impeachment efforts did,” Thanedar, who wasn’t in office during Trump’s first administration, replied. “And we should continue to pursue it until we achieve our goal.”
“Look, we gotta fight the corruption,” Thanedar continued. “We gotta fight this incompetence, and we can't have the president and his family benefiting to the tune of billions of dollars. This just never was done. We never had a more corrupt government in the United States. Never.”
“I'm just curious about the party, because I know the base is hungry for impeachment,” Raw Story asked Thanedar, “and here in Washington, it's a little different story?”
“That's true,” Thanedar told Raw Story.
Like the party’s base, Thanedar believes justice doesn’t stop with a third Trump impeachment.
“We should also pursue impeachment of some of his Cabinet members who are corrupt and/or also incompetent,” Thanedar said.
After a recent Democrat-only forum at the Capitol with the families of people killed by ICE agents, Raw Story pressed Democrats on whether they wanted to pursue impeachment of current Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.
“Do you think it's time for Secretary Mullin to go?” Raw Story asked the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee. “Should you guys explore impeachment?”
“The person that I think is the most responsible for the horrors is [White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy] Stephen Miller,” Garcia, the California Democrat, told Raw Story.
Even if Democrats retake the House, Stephen Miller will remain largely out of reach because he’s not in a Senate-confirmed position, though if they win back both chambers the party may be able to defund Miller’s salary using what’s known as the Holman Rule.
While Garcia and most Democrats continue to rail against ICE these days, they don’t seem to have a problem with Mullin after a whopping 187 House members co-sponsored an effort to impeach his predecessor, Kristi Noem, organized by Rep. Robin Kelly (D-IL), who lost the Democratic primary for Illinois’ open U.S. Senate seat earlier this cycle.
Why’s Mullin getting a perceived pass?
“They're committing horrific injustices, and I think that the whole Trump administration — it's not just Secretary Mullin — I think they’ve all committed impeachable offenses,” Garcia said.
If Democrats have warmed to Mullin, it could be because Washington’s collectively cooled to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who’s increasingly angered his fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill, including retiring Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY).
Massie dropped eight articles of impeachment against the former Fox and Friends Weekend host in September, which House Speaker Mike Johnson will be forced to hold a vote on when Congress returns after the election.
“Pete Hegseth needs to be number one. That man is completely incompetent and has executed an illegal war and killed hundreds of people illegally,” Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) told Raw Story. “And he’s committed, in my opinion, war crimes. I think he needs to be first.”
Congressional math is sometimes hard to read, though. Especially because impeachment as a political bludgeon has rapidly evolved in recent years, with former President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, becoming the first Cabinet secretary to be impeached in more than 100 years after the GOP targeted him in 2024.
In this 119th Congress, there are currently 16 House sponsors of a measure to impeach Hegseth, even as 21 House Democrats have signed onto the effort to impeach Education Secretary Linda McMahon.
After that, there’s minimal support of the articles of impeachment introduced against Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought (2 cosponsors), Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (1 cosponsor) or even Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts (0 cosponsors).
Impeachment has become so common these congressional days that there doesn’t appear to be a formal measure aimed at impeaching FBI Director Kash Patel, even as Rep. Marc Veasey’s (D-TX) office announced an impeachment measure was being crafted last fall after the congressman tweeted on X that Patel and former Attorney General Pam Bondi were liars.
There may not be a Democratic impeachment strategy, but party leaders are surely feeling the growing frustration.
While Minority Leader Jeffries has rebuffed calls to impeach Trump, he seems to be warming to calls to go after Hegseth.
“One of the first things we’re going to do in the majority, we’re going to run Pete Hegseth out of town,” Jeffries told Pennsylvania voters at a recent rally.
Many forget that in 2020, Jeffries was tapped by then-Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to be a manager of Trump’s first Senate impeachment trial, which may be why he’s tried to keep questions of a third Trump impeachment at bay this Congress.
But to an increasing number of Democrats who weren’t in Washington during the president's first term, Trump himself remains a top target.
“He clearly committed high crimes and misdemeanors and the current crimes dwarf what happened in the first term,” Congresswoman Stansbury of New Mexico said. “The failure by the Senate to remove and bar him for life from serving again was the biggest failure in modern, not just political history but the future of our country.”
Stansbury speaks for many when she says the politics of impeachment will work itself out, but only if the people put Democrats back in power.
“The United States story isn't over,” Stansbury told Raw Story. “It's a constantly evolving play between people who are trying to grab power and people who are trying to expand democracy.”
