US question, but why don’t Democrats just vote for impeachment basically every day? Whether it’s for the Jack Smith findings, the unwillingness to hold up the 14th amendment, whatever. Like, is there a statute of limitations for impeachment? Is there a limited number of crimes valid for it?
Even if it never succeeded, it would send a message that he needs to be careful and if he makes too many Republicans mad he could lose his job.
Impeachment must start in the House, and the rules of the House are heavily tilted toward majority rule. So it would need a majority vote to even get started, and it would be referred to a committee with a Republican majority. If, somehow, the investigation done there is fair and a recommendation to impeach passes the committee, it still needs to pass in the House again.
But then, it goes to the Senate, where a 2/3 majority (67/100) is required to convicted. So now we have gone from needing a handful of Republican defectors on the House (including at least one committee member) to needing 20 of 53 Republican Senators to agree to convict. That is an extremely high bar. If you were a Republican House member who is on the fence about Trump, it is simply not worth openly defying him unless you were certain Republican Senators would convict. Particularly after Trump just pardoned a bunch of folks who have already stormed the Capitol once.
Which seems to imply that the absolute first step is for there to be a vote.
So I think OP’s question is really- “Even though it’s not going to go anywhere, why can’t democrats just keep asking for that initial vote for different chargers to clog up the house?”
My guess is that they could do that, but eventually doing so would be called out as pointless time wasting and be disallowed.
I can see a directive going out that any participants are to be barred from participating in anything at all. Even if there’s some legislative rule that says they can’t be, because we all know how the new administration feels about old legislation. And then actual, literal guards will be brought in to keep those people out.
And maybe all others in the same political party “just in case they decide to try the same thing”.
TBH, the Trumpists are probably looking for any excuse to do just that.