Hours after Democrats retook the House of Representatives halfway through President Donald Trump’s first term in 2019, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) made a controversial but true statement.
“We’re gonna go in there and we’re gonna impeach the motherfucker,” Tlaib, a member of an informal group of freshly elected young progressives known as “The Squad,” said at an event hosted by the liberal group MoveOn.
Tlaib faced intense backlash for the remark, with Republicans eager to point at examples of liberal derangement and senior members of the Democratic Party angry at her overeagerness.
Now, with Democrats on the verge of retaking control of the House, a new group of incoming progressive freshmen, already nicknamed “The Bloc,” are decidedly cooler on impeaching the president. It’s a vivid display of how the party and its voters have lost interest in the idea after two failed impeachments even as Trump’s corruption reaches new heights in his second term.
Asked whether she would support impeaching the president, Darializa Avila Chevalier, a socialist and the likely next Democratic member of Congress from New York’s 13th district, said not necessarily.
“That is something that Trump himself seems to want, and so my question is: Is that actually going to be meaningful accountability for the Trump administration?” Chevalier told Politico’s Dasha Burns in an interview posted Friday. “We are going to have to think about what is actually going to hold their feet to the fire.”
Melat Kiros, a socialist who won the Democratic primary for a House seat representing Denver, seconded the sentiment in the same interview.
“I’d have to learn more about what the case would be,” Kiros said. “I think [Trump] has committed multiple impeachable offenses, without question. But I want to make sure, you know, like Darializa said, the accountability has to actually lead to some material changes.”
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Meanwhile, the sitting Democrats who’ve most loudly championed impeaching Trump in his second term, Reps. Shri Thanedar of Michigan and Al Green of Texas, both lost their primaries and won’t return to Congress. The incumbent Democrat whom Kiros ousted, Rep. Diana DeGette, touted her work as a House impeachment manager during the campaign to little effect.
And in competitive general election races, impeachment has not been a major topic of discussion, even as President Trump repeatedly complains he’ll get impeached if Democrats win control of the House.
“I can’t speak for everybody else, but I would not support an impeachment of Trump. There’s just simply no reason for that, no matter what happens in the midterms,” former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who is challenging Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) in a bid to return to the Senate, told the Columbus Dispatch this week.
Democrats impeached Trump twice in his first term, in 2019 and then again in 2021, and each time a majority of Senate Republicans voted to acquit him of high crimes and misdemeanors. And he still came back.
Since the first two impeachments had such a seemingly small impact, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) suggested this week that impeachment is just kind of boring now.
“We’ve seen that movie before. We may have to see it the third time, whether we like it or not. But I don’t think that’s going to get anybody excited,” Schatz told The Bulwark.
MoveOn spokesman Joel Payne said there might be more energy to impeach cabinet officials like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth than to impeach Trump. Still, Payne said MoveOn’s members don’t want impeachment taken off the table.
“There’s a lot of ways to hold folks accountable. I think impeachment is one of them, and I think just from the perspective of our members at MoveOn, our members don’t want to take any of those options off the table,” Payne told HuffPost.
The House is already set to vote on an impeachment resolution against Hegseth next month, as soon as lawmakers return to the campaign trail. But it’s not a Democrat forcing the vote — it’s longtime Trump antagonist Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) — and with at least one Republican in support, the vote will be close, and if it succeeds and Hegseth is impeached, it could scramble impeachment politics next year.
Already, several Democrats have said impeaching Hegseth and other cabinet officials would be a better way to pursue accountability against the administration.
Still, it would be somewhat surprising if there’s really less appetite for impeaching Trump next year considering how much more obviously the president has ignored traditional, legal and constitutional limits on his power, such as by directing prosecutions of political enemies, literally bulldozing the White House, and enriching himself with business ventures that pose a massive conflict of interest.
Kiros suggested voters might care more about presidential accountability if Democrats link political corruption to the broader economy, an idea that’s been common in Democratic messaging this election cycle.
“I think the voters are much more concerned about learning the kind of corruption that has a direct impact on their wallets, that has a direct impact on the way that the economy is growing in a way that is completely concentrated with the billionaires and the corporations, and totally leaving working families behind,” Kiros said.
Democratic leaders in the House have sought to balance the ideal of holding Trump accountable with the reality of what they can actually deliver. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who would likely lead any impeachment inquiries as chair of the House Judiciary Committee next year if Democrats control the House, told HuffPost last month the president has committed a dozen impeachable offenses.
“Democrats in Congress have proven that we are not afraid of impeachment in any way,” Raskin said. “At the same time, having been through the prior two, we also understand it’s not a panacea.”