That Democratic Fight Over Impeachment? It’s a Useful Fiction.

Sometimes, it all comes down to semantics. Reporters have noted a spike in the number of House Democrats supporting an impeachment inquiry. There are now, by one count, 116 of them, just shy of a majority of the party. That’s up quite a bit from a couple weeks ago. But the full story is a little more complicated.

It turns out that those who don’t support an impeachment inquiry instead favor continuing the current investigations. And as House lawyers basically admitted last week, that amounts to the same thing. It was once the case that the House Judiciary Committee required special grants of power to move toward impeachment, so beginning an inquiry had serious substantive implications. But that hasn’t been true for a while. Under current House rules and procedures, officially opening an impeachment inquiry is, for the most part, a formality.