Impeachment, sort of

Speaker  Pelosi announced a formal “impeachment inquiry,” to be conducted by six House committees. Pay close attention to her words:“Today, I am announcing the House of Representatives is moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry,” she said at a Tuesday afternoon press conference, after hours of meetings with Democratic leaders, committee chairs, and the rest of the House Democratic Caucus. “I am directing our six committees to proceed with their investigations under that umbrella of impeachment inquiry.” BTW, she also quoted in Latin the phrase Caesar used when he crossed the Rubicon to attack Rome.

This responds to the political pressure in her caucus but doesn’t require anyone to vote on it yet. In 1973 and 1998, the House formally voted to begin an impeachment inquiry. Not this time, at least not yet. CNN reported that she discarded the idea of a special committee because it would anger the 6 chairmen who have the jurisdiction now for issues likely to be part of any impeachment.
[FWIW, I still doubt that the transcript due to be released today will be clear and compelling enough to convince undecideds, and I still believe that if the goal is to remove Trump from office, the advocates still lack the GOP support needed to accomplish that.]
WaPo reports that Giuliani took over from the regular executive branch people and processes to run Ukraine policy, leading to confusion and anger among the professionals.
NYT has an interesting story on how Trump’s international phone calls are conducted.
House Republicans are considering changing their term limit rules because of so many retirees.

Congress often outsources strategy on foreign policy to others. It created the Quadrennial Defense Review in 1986 and regularly requires an outside panel to review the QDR. It requires the President to submit a National Security Strategy and other such documents. In 2006 it created a special panel to study Iraq policy. Yesterday came the report of a similar panel created last year to study Syria policy. Here’s a story and the actual exec summary.
It’s always worth reminding people, as 538 does, that there really are very few independent voters, and not many of them are centrist or moderate.

My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. If you want to get it directly, To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).