Steny Hoyer just became the last impeachment straw

| 6:05 pm EDT May 21, 2019
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Last night, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler privately told Speaker Nancy Pelosi that he thinks it’s time to begin the process of impeachment against Donald Trump. Today, House Intel Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and House Oversight Committee Elijah Cummings publicly leaned toward impeachment. That only left one straw – a fairly low profile yet highly influential guy named Steny Hoyer.

You should know Steny Hoyer’s name because he’s the House Majority Leader, just one rung below Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. But you probably know his name from earlier this year, when he said that impeaching Donald Trump wasn’t worth it at that time. But as of this afternoon, Hoyer is now singing a very different tune, telling reporters today that Trump is attempting the “broadest cover-up in American history” and that if it leads to “other avenues including impeachment, then so be it.” This matters for two reasons.

First, of all the people in the upper echelon of the Democratic House leadership, Hoyer has been the most publicly opposed to impeachment, more so than Pelosi. Now he’s making a point of leaning the other way. Second, he’s more or less Pelosi’s de facto deputy, he’s fiercely loyal to her, and he wouldn’t start publicly talking like this unless Pelosi signed off on it.

Steny Hoyer is the last straw when it comes to Donald Trump’s impeachment. It’s now clear that an impeachment inquiry is going to happen, and that it’ll happen sooner rather than later. According to NBC News, the Democratic House leadership is holding a meeting tomorrow to figure things out. We very much doubt the impeachment inquiry will be announced tomorrow – but our guess is that this meeting will be used to decide precisely when and how to launch that impeachment inquiry.