Harry Litman approves Lawrence Tribe's alternative path in impeachment. [View all]

[Grasswire2]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/10/can-democrats-break-republican-hammerlock-impeachment/?utm_term=.9442d52a829c

Here's part of it.

Tribe’s fundamental insight is that the House could pursue a full-bodied investigation of the president, including an opportunity for Trump to mount a defense, without committing itself to a referral for trial in the Senate.

Rather, the House could culminate its investigation with independent “fact-findings” leading, if those facts bear out, to a “Sense of the House” resolution detailing Trump’s offenses against the Constitution.

There are a number of apparent virtues to Tribe’s proposal. Perhaps most importantly, it provides an outlet for House members to respond to the extraordinary gravity of the president’s assault on the rule of law.

However politically expedient, the idea that the House could simply give a pass to the president’s conduct and await the electorate’s verdict in 2020 is intolerable. Doing nothing is an offense to their own oath of office, and would at worst sanction and at best trivialize Trump’s shameless ransacking of constitutional order.

Second, an investigation culminating in a full factual account and a Sense of the House resolution would be a counterweight to the official narrative from the Justice Department in the form of Attorney General William P. Barr’s ludicrous reading of the Mueller report, which, as it stands, is the sole official judgment on the facts of Trump’s conduct. As with the reports of the 9/11 Commission and the Warren Commission, the country needs a credible official narrative that fairly lays out the facts and reaches fair and broadly accepted conclusions.