This is a grave moment for our country.
—Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA)
Abigail Spanberger came to Congress to do everything but impeach Donald Trump. Then came Ukraine.
She was sitting in the passenger seat of her Honda CR-V, watching the stupefying news unfold on her phone as a driver hustled her between weekend events in her suburban Richmond district. The former CIA operations officer, among the most conservative of the Democratic freshman women, prided herself on careful deliberation, especially around the issue of impeachment.
She had read the Mueller report more than once, and then, at the suggestion of a constituent, she listened to the audiobook—sometimes in bed, since it made her sleepy, sometimes in the car. “I am trying to take in this information in every way possible,” Spanberger had told me over the summer, “because you just keep hearing more and more.” She added, “And the more you’re digesting it, the more there is that really needs to be discussed.”
But the late September revelation that the president of the United States had called the newly elected leader of Ukraine after withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in much-needed military aid, and requested that the Ukrainian leader investigate one of the president’s political opponents felt very different. Spanberger began furiously texting her best buddies in Congress, other freshmen, many of them women with a national security or military background, most of them from difficult districts where they had beaten a Republican not quite a year before, to see if they were thinking what she was thinking.
She discussed the matter with her husband, Adam, over 11 p.m. bowls of cereal. “We talked about it nonstop,” she said. “If these allegations are true, this is a grave moment for our country.”
About the same time, Democratic congresswoman Elaine Luria, the US Navy veteran who also had won a Republican district in 2018, was sitting on a folding chair in her outdoor den of sorts (really, her garage), sipping coffee with her husband, when they, too, turned to the news on their phones. “I said, ‘This can’t be true.’ ” she told me. “You know, this is the president. And he is now asking a foreign leader to conduct an investigation to dig up dirt in order to bolster his opportunities to win the next election?”
The development, in Luria’s view, had “nothing to do with the previous things,” such as the findings of the Mueller report, the accusations of obstruction of justice, the failure of the White House to allow witnesses to come to the Hill, or the payments of hush money to a Playboy model.
“This,” she said, “was something separate.”
She, too, took her feelings to the group chat with other freshman congresswomen on the encrypted texting app Signal. Also on the chat were former air force officer Chrissy Houlahan, former navy helicopter pilot Mikie Sherrill, and former CIA analyst and DOD official Elissa Slotkin.
The five women refer to themselves as the Badasses, their own sort of Squad. At times, they have infuriated that other “squad” and their progressive colleagues, especially those who had been pushing impeachment from day one. The Badasses had watched with increasing alarm as the message about Trump’s infractions became muddled and confusing to their constituents, as the hearing with special counsel Robert Mueller fizzled like so many Pop Rocks, and as another hearing, this one with former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, devolved into a clown show. There was no unified message, they thought; there was no central goal. There were only spinning wheels.
“When we were sworn in we were not presented with facts that in my mind warranted a true and significant impeachment inquiry,” Slotkin told me. “It was not that I agreed with Donald Trump, and I certainly didn’t appreciate much of the tone, but that is different from the series of events that lead to an impeachment inquiry.”
That was before Ukraine, however. Now, the text exchange was fast and constant. “It was, ‘Have you seen this article? Have you heard this tape?’ pinging back and forth,” Slotkin said, adding that the words they all used seeing the leader of the free world essentially shaking down a security partner for dirt on a political opponent were, “This is something different.”
Each felt it was time to make a move.
The power to impeach is one of the most awesome powers given by the nation’s founders to the House of Representatives, one to be exercised in the case of treason or high crimes and misdemeanors. But it had been degraded by partisans in both parties over the last two decades. In 1998, Bill Clinton became the first elected president ever to be impeached—over lying under oath about sex with a former intern. Liberals had called for President George W. Bush’s impeachment over the Iraq War, conservatives had declared any number of Barack Obama’s missteps—from the deaths in Benghazi to a failed gun-tracing operation called Fast and Furious—to be “high crimes.”
The question of whether or not to seek impeachment proceedings against Trump, or even to speak about the topic, had loomed over the new Congress from the day it was sworn in. Impeachment has been historically unpopular with American voters, especially in districts full of voters from the party of the person in the White House, and it was an issue that most Democrats who won Republican districts in 2018 had hoped to avoid, even as their progressive colleagues from safe seats pressed on. The liberals felt they had been elected in large part to rid the nation of Trump’s presidency. Nancy Pelosi, well aware that moderates had given Democrats the majority and, in turn, handed her back the Speaker’s gavel, knew whose political fortunes she had to protect. Trump appalled her. But she wasn’t going to lose the House over him.
House Judiciary Committee chair Jerry Nadler, whom Trump had tangled with off and on for years back in Manhattan, was among the six committee chairs taking the lead on the early investigative efforts of an impeachment inquiry. Nadler and his staff—under pressure back home in New York from constituents who were angry that the House was not moving to impeach—pushed the effort past Pelosi’s comfort zone, using terms like “formal inquiry” when that was not where she headed at the moment. In particular, according to several people involved in the impeachment discussions, Nadler’s staff had personally called other members of the Judiciary Committee to press them to come out for said inquiry, greatly irritating the Speaker.
Pelosi, holding major decisions on how to move forward in her own hands, responded by pulling a series of rugs out from under him week after week (in the view of Nadler allies, slow-walking things like lawsuits, which the Speaker’s office denied) and undermining him by bad-mouthing his process to fellow Democrats in a meeting, then encouraging people in the room to leak her ire to the press.
When the House left for an extended summer recess, progressive groups declared it Impeachment August, fanning out to town hall meetings and lawmaker appearances to raise the pressure on the moderates. It didn’t work. To add to the fears of worried Democrats, the Judiciary Committee’s first impeachment hearing on September 17, before the Ukraine issue had surfaced, was viewed by most Democrats on the Hill as an unmitigated disaster. Member after member failed to rattle the recalcitrant Lewandowski, making the Democrats look like feckless peacocks bested by an insect they were seeking to devour.
The Badasses had made their distaste for all of this known to House leaders. By September 18, everyone in Washington understood: impeachment was DOA.
Then came Ukraine. The whistleblower’s claims fell clearly under the jurisdiction of Pelosi’s fellow Californian Rep. Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, on which Pelosi sat for years. Schiff was a respected and ambitious former prosecutor with a deliberate manner and a disciplined and astute staff that understood the ways of Pelosi Land and how to succeed there. (Improbably, but somehow perfectly, Adam Schiff’s wife is named Eve.)
The incident also had the benefit of being digestible. “This was a clean shot,” a senior Democratic staff member told me. “This was clearly a national security issue, clearly a violation of oath and an effort at undermining the integrity of our elections. It was very simple and made it easier that this was the president’s words. Schiff is insanely talented. He is almost the perfect person to pursue this.”
After conferring over texts and the phone, the five national security freshman women agreed that moving to impeach was necessary, and they decided to make a public statement together—along with two freshman men, Rep. Gil Cisneros (D-CA) and Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), who came from similar national security backgrounds. The seven had a conference call on September 23 with Pelosi, who was in New York for a panel related to the United Nations General Assembly. They warned her of their decision, and told her they were about to publish an op-ed in the Washington Post that concluded Trump’s actions were “an impeachable offense.”
“Of course we made a point of informing the Speaker before the op-ed came out,” Elissa Slotkin said. “We practice the doctrine of no surprises, which comes from our military background.” She said Pelosi was interested in their approach and willing to meet with them.
The op-ed was a bombshell. “Our lives have been defined by national service. We are not career politicians,” wrote the seven. “We are veterans of the military and of the nation’s defense and intelligence agencies. Our service is rooted in the defense of our country on the front lines of national security.
“We have devoted our lives to the service and security of our country, and throughout our careers, we have sworn oaths to defend the Constitution of the United States many times over. Now, we join as a unified group to uphold that oath as we enter uncharted waters and face unprecedented allegations against President Trump.”
Nancy Pelosi read the published piece on her 9 p.m. flight from New York to Washington, DC, and took furious notes. She spoke to some congresswomen individually, encouraging them to follow their own instincts on the impeachment issue.
The next day, in a meeting with the entire Democratic caucus, the national security women made their case. Where the progressive Squad had brought passion and righteous outrage to Twitter, TV, and press conferences, the Badasses brought an almost affectless cool, like contract killers about to take care of business.
“I laid out what I thought would be important points to get across if we were going to do this,” Slotkin told me. “We need the inquiry to be qualitatively different than the processes that came beforehand, where we largely confused people. It needs to be strategic, clear, and efficient . . . I believe Democratic leadership has heard us on this.”
Other moderates had come along as well.
In the spring of 2019, a constituent of Angie Craig’s named Kim Westra had sat, frowning, in the bleachers of Cottage Grove Middle School outside Minneapolis, where the congresswoman was holding a town hall meeting. Mueller had just released his report, and Westra had asked Craig her views on impeaching the president.
“I believe the next step is for the committee chairmen to call a number of folks forward to testify, to fill in the facts for the American people,” Craig said, demurring. “I am very troubled by the number of potential areas of obstruction of justice that are mentioned in the report.”
Westra found the answer wholly unsatisfying. If this was going to be the response of Democrats, what really was the purpose of electing them to begin with? she asked me.
Six months later, on that same Monday that the op-ed was released, Craig was mulling her decision on a plane from Minnesota. “At the end of the day, I asked myself, if this were a Democratic president with exactly the same set of admissions, or behavior, would I have the courage to stand up and call for an inquiry on my own Democratic president?” Craig told Politico. She decided she would.
A tsunami of other House Democrats joined the fray that Tuesday, including many members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who had until then held their fire under Pelosi’s direction. “They come from a sense of extreme credibility,” New Orleans lawmaker Cedric Richmond said of the national security women, with their nod to impeachment. “A lot of them are not very progressive, so for those moderates who were looking for some subject expertise to validate them, they gave it to them.” Richmond was among the scores of members to join the impeachment wave.
Politically, impeachment would begin when Nancy Pelosi said so. Now, at last, on September 24, the troops were on board, not just the committee chairs or the elected leaders, but also the rank and file, helped along by the Badasses. “The op-ed was the inflection point,” a senior aide told me. “There was no Pelosi coming out without it. They are security eggheads. It’s their issue. Them doing what they did gave everyone else cover. The silent majority want him impeached.”
Drew Hammill, Pelosi’s deputy chief of staff, said that Pelosi came to her conclusions independent of other members based solely on the underlying facts, though he noted that the Badass group had been key in influencing the messaging.
The next day, Abigail Spanberger stood in front of a camera near the Will Rogers statue in the Capitol, waiting for her hit. She bounced on her toes and tapped her fingers together nervously while her spokesman gave her reassuring head nods from behind the videographer.
A few feet away, fellow freshman Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D-FL) stood regally in spike heels, bellowing, “This president is undermining our national security!” to a different disembodied voice piping through a tiny earpiece as she looked into another television camera.
When it was her turn, Spanberger spoke carefully. “This is a different set of circumstances,” she said.
For some of the freshmen, this was supposed to be the Congress that focused on health care and clean drinking water and prescription drug prices. But the impeachment fight was inescapable. “This is not why we ran for Congress,” Mikie Sherrill told me. The New Jersey congresswoman looks like that mom at school that other moms want to resent, because she has four darling children, an amazing résumé, perfect teeth, and is a member of Congress, but is impossible to dislike, because she is so incredibly warm while also being extremely practical. She is, in short, the sort you would turn to for good legal advice and a hearty casserole if your spouse were to leave you. But, Sherrill said, as we stood a few days later in the autumn sun on the East Front of the Capitol, “The threat was so great that we had to act.”
That reasoned, agonized tone fits the gravity of the task ahead, the third impeachment proceedings in the history of the nation. But it is all the more remarkable when considering how the House of Representatives got there. Just nine months before, Rashida Tlaib had been the first to raise the battle cry “Impeach the motherfucker!”—and the Squad had carried the torch in the intervening months. And then the Badass women finished the job, influencing what would almost certainly be the most monumental move of the Democratic majority in this Congress, and possibly of Pelosi’s storied career.
Five years ago, most of the key players in this most consequential drama had never even seen themselves in public office—and the Badass freshman women told me it was equally unclear where they would be five years from now. Still, they stand firm on impeachment.
“I understand that this could have implications about my reelection,” Elaine Luria said. “I was chosen by the voters in my district to make tough decisions. And I think part of the reason they chose me to do that is because they know I spent an entire career, twenty years in the navy, making tough decisions, deploying six times on combat ships and operating weapons systems and nuclear reactors.”
By early October, Elissa Slotkin already had a Republican challenger, whose central campaign theme out of the gate was anti-impeachment. Others would certainly follow.
“It’s a really solid and grave responsibility, central to who I am,” said Chrissy Houlahan, calling the vote among the most difficult things she had ever done. “We do things as a collective, we try to work together. This is not an insignificant event. I hope it’s an indication of things to come.”