https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...Ei8?li=BBnb7Kz
WASHINGTON — Even after President Trump
sued him last month to keep his business records secret, Representative Elijah E. Cummings kept his cool and urged Congress to move slowly on impeachment. But with Mr. Trump manning a full-scale blockade of Democrats’ access to documents and witnesses, the ordinarily careful Democrat is, like the rest of his caucus, growing impatient.
“It sounds like he’s asking us to impeach him,” Mr. Cummings, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and a top lieutenant to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said in an interview last week. Ticking off all the ways Mr. Trump is stonewalling Congress, he added, “He puts us in a position where we at least have to look at it.”
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Mr. Cummings’s remarks, which have been echoed by Ms. Pelosi, represent a significant shift for top Democrats, who have been trying to maneuver carefully around the impeachment issue. But with Mr. Trump standing in the way of their investigations — on Wednesday he asserted executive privilege over the unredacted version of the special counsel’s report and on Tuesday he tried to block the former
White House counsel from handing over documents — their strategy of holding impeachment-like hearings without declaring a formal impeachment process is looking like a dead end.
The frustration is showing.
Mr. Cummings called the White House effort to block multiple lines of inquiry “far worse than Watergate.” He sees a “constitutional crisis” that even the founding fathers did not envision when they created the system of checks and balances that has kept American democracy intact.
“They put up strong guardrails, saying, ‘O.K., this will keep America on course. It will not allow us to deviate from our democratic values,’” Mr. Cummings said. “But the one thing they did not anticipate was that we would have an administration that came in and threw away the guardrails.”
Related video: Trump can't "dictate' what we look into: Cummings (Reuters)
With Mr. Trump vowing to
fight “all the subpoenas,” Democrats appear to be struggling to come up with a strategy to enforce them. On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee is expected to vote on whether to hold Attorney General William P. Barr in contempt of Congress for refusing to provide Democrats an unredacted version of the report by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel.
If the resolution passes, it would be the first time Democrats have moved to punish a Trump administration official for blocking a congressional inquiry. Mr. Cummings said party leaders would “look at all the tools that we have in our toolbox — even inherent contempt” — a reference to the congressional power, last used in the 1930s, to jail uncooperative witnesses.
Would he exercise that authority against Mr. Trump?
“I didn’t say that. I said we were studying,” Mr. Cummings snapped. “Don’t put words in my mouth.”
As chairman of the oversight panel, Mr. Cummings has sweeping power to investigate Mr. Trump and his administration, and just about anything else he finds compelling or of societal interest. In decades past, the panel has often operated in a bipartisan way. In 2005, for instance, it investigated the use of steroids in Major League Baseball.
Its current inquiries run mostly along partisan lines. Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the committee’s top Republican, accuses Mr. Cummings and his fellow Democrats of being “much more focused on going after the president than they are with trying to work with Republicans.”
In addition to policy matters like the high cost of prescription drugs and military suicides, Mr. Cummings is looking at whether
Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, was truthful in explaining why he added a citizenship question to the 2020 census. Mr. Cummings is also examining the accusations of a
whistle-blower who has told the committee that senior Trump administration officials granted security clearances to at least 25 individuals whose applications had been denied by career employees for “disqualifying issues.”
But the move that really rankled Mr. Trump was Mr. Cummings’s decision to subpoena 10 years of the president’s financial records. The president is seeking to quash the subpoena; oral arguments are scheduled for next week in Federal District Court here.
At 68, Mr. Cummings is in his 13th term serving as a representative for Maryland. He can often be found in the Speaker’s Lobby outside the House chamber, fielding reporters’ questions or quietly reading in the motorized wheelchair that he has been using after a series of health problems, including a knee infection that landed him in the hospital last year for several months.
A son of South Carolina sharecroppers who moved to Baltimore and later became preachers, Mr. Cummings last grabbed the national spotlight in 2015, when he took to the streets, bullhorn in hand, to plead for calm after
riots erupted in his neighborhood after the funeral of Freddie Gray, a young black man who died in police custody. (Mr. Cummings had delivered a eulogy.)
He is a spiritual man, which comes through in the speeches he delivers in his booming baritone voice. When the president’s former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, testified before his committee in February, Mr. Cummings’s closing statement brought the room to a hush.
“We have got to get back to normal!” he cried.
“He tells us all that this is the fight of our lives,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland. “He has a sense of destiny about this moment.”
That sense may stem from his health challenges; when he was in the hospital for two months in 2017 after complications from a heart valve replacement, Mr. Cummings was convinced, he said, that he was “living on borrowed time.” He likes to tell the story of how one day, when he was in so much pain he thought he might faint, a hospital worker turned up at his bedside, saying the Lord had sent her to deliver a message: “I’m just trying to get your attention. I’m not done with you.”
In the Capitol, Mr. Cummings tends to reserve his voice for occasions that warrant it. He is not a fixture on the Sunday talk shows and is careful never to criticize Mr. Trump in personal terms. He prides himself on his friendship with Republicans, including Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina, the chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.
“He is not a bomb thrower, he’s not a shrill person, he is smart as hell and he is thorough and careful,” said Norman J. Ornstein, an expert on Congress at the American Enterprise Institute.
Republicans have generally held him in high regard, though that may be changing. Jason Chaffetz, the Utah Republican who led the committee before retiring in 2017, calls Mr. Cummings “a good man with a big heart.” But he and Mr. Jordan both accused Mr. Cummings of overreaching, and of using his committee to run a partisan fishing expedition into Mr. Trump’s activities before he became president.
“I think he’s got a lot of external pressures from Speaker Pelosi and others to maybe do some things he wouldn’t naturally do himself,” Mr. Chaffetz said.
The request for financial records grew out of the hearing with Mr. Cohen, who
reported to federal prison on Monday to begin
serving his sentence for crimes including lying to Congress and arranging hush money payments on Mr. Trump’s behalf. Mr. Cohen called the president a “con man” and a “cheat” who had intentionally misrepresented his assets and liabilities. Republicans say Mr. Cohen perjured himself.
“Ten years of business records based on Michael Cohen’s testimony?” Mr. Jordan asked. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Mr. Cummings said the committee has every right to the records to investigate “various conflicts of interest” and whether Mr. Trump has used the presidency to advance his business interests.
“If there’s nothing,” he said, “there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
But more than that, he said, there is a principle to uphold: “One thing I do know is that this issue of being blocked, with regard to access to personnel and access to information, it is a struggle that we cannot afford to lose.”
Poor, Poor DPsT's - Trump is taunting us and he made me do It"!!!!!
Barr is voted in contempt despite the material being illegal for him to hand over, and trump invoked executive privilege.
Stupid DPST's they have only one agenda item - get Trump- Regardless.
Voters are getting tired of their harassment shenanigans, and abject failure to cooperatively govern the country.
The unbridled partisan Hatred will cost them in 2020.
Trump Is Pushing Democrats to the Brink. Look at Elijah Cummings.
