Why The Impeachment Hearings Are Getting So Much Messier

On Tuesday (December 3), the impeachment proceedings leapt from the Home Intelligence Committee to the Residence Judiciary Committee — and in case you thought the last few weeks of impeachment hearings were rough, buckle up. It’s about to get a lot messier.


The Intelligence Committee has spent the past few weeks researching and interviewing witnesses group in attempt to make two reports intended to serve because the structure for impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump: one prepared by Democrats, and another prepared by Republicans. The Judiciary Committee right now needs to study those reports, and hold hearings on the “constitutional grounds for Presidential impeachment.” A panel of expert witnesses — including Professors Noah Feldman of Harvard University, Pamela Karlan of Stanford University, Michael Gerhardt of the University of North Carolina, and Jonathan Turley of George Washington University — will publicly testify beginning on Wednesday (December 4). (Shivering with anticipation? They’ve already released their beginning statements here.)


The Judiciary Committee is one of the final helps prevent in the House’s long, meandering road to impeachment. Their task is to use these hearings and the Intelligence Committee’s report to decide if they can charge the President with the “bribery, treason, and high crimes and misdemeanors” that are necessary for impeachment. If they can, they'll create the final articles of impeachment and vote on those articles — if it passes the committee (which has a Democratic majority), the vote will go to the whole Residence of Representatives (which also has a Democratic majority) and may lead to an impeachment by Christmas. However remember: Just as the president is impeached, doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll be booted from office. That’s where the Senate comes in.


At first glance, it would appear that there isn’t much difference between the Home Intelligence Committee and the Home Judiciary Committee: Both are bipartisan, both include a lot of white male representatives, Democrats have most of them in both committees, and both groups participate in some public hearings.


However there’s a big distinction between how each committee handles hearings overall, and that’s likely to be amplified as they nickname one of the most-watched hearings of the decade.  The Intelligence Committee is known for being bookish and quiet, since so much of the intelligence they performer name must be done in private to keep national security intelligence secret, according to the New York Times podcast The Daily. The Judiciary Committee, on the other hand, is raucous — they publicly oversee the federal courts and judiciary system, so vocal members like Representatives Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), and Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) have their hands on social issues like abortion rights and gun rights.


Generally, the Intelligence Committee gives the minority party fewer possibilities to take over the proceedings than the Judiciary Committee does. We saw this whenever, while in an impeachment proceeding on November 15, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) tried to question former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, although was pretty rapidly shut off by Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) for violating the rules of the Intelligence Committee that the Residence approved for the impeachment hearings. Schiff had a lot of control over the witness list, also. Certainly, Republicans never love that most of them (in this case, Democrats) have considerably more power here, because, well — they’re not most of them this time around. Yet such rules created less space for partisan arguments, since most members weren’t allowed to speak.


In the Judiciary Committee, it’s a large amount more open: Most members on the Committee gets the chance to speak and it’s unlikely that several representatives would pass that up. Nevertheless because so several people have the chance to speak at such a critical time in American history, you’ll likely hear Representatives on both sides of the aisle attempting to get in good sound bites rather than investigate the inquiry.


The hearings started on Wednesday morning, the day soon after Chairman Nadler told Democrats in a closed-door prep session Tuesday that he isn’t “going to take any shit” from Republicans or Democrats who might scrutinize his role in the impeachment probe, according to Politico. Although that vow was tested almost immediately, because the Judiciary Committee wasted no time in launching into more arguments than throughout nearly all the live hearings in the Intelligence Committee. Republicans attempted to interrupt beginning statements with a procedural motion, and Chairman Nadler tried to quiet each person down.