Quote Originally Posted by bae View Post
My further understanding is that the House's current rules allow committees to investigate things as they wish, without need for a full vote.

I believe that in the Nixon and Clinton area, the House hadn't delegated such powers to committees, but that those rules have changed since then.
That's my understanding as well. I believe they've even recently delegated subpoena power to committee's without the need for floor approval, eliminating several centuries of tradition designed to ensure all representatives of the people have a voice in this sort of thing. People are bothersome though, best to ignore them as much as possible. Small cabals working for their own interests seem to be the future role of governance .

Glancing at the news the past few days, it appears that the whole nation is putting the cart in front of the horse here, and trying to engage in the trial part of the process before we've even seen any articles of impeachment.

The trial has been ongoing in the press since 2017 and there have been at least 3 formal requests in the house to initiate impeachment inquiries, one in 2017, one in 2018 and one in 2019, all based on nothing more than a desire to reverse the outcome of a particularly troublesome election.

The sad part of the whole thing is the vehemence with which a large part of our citizenry embrace this sort of thing, going so far as to treat anyone cautioning against self-inflicted wounds as if they were Ellen DeGeneres attending a football game with George Bush.