By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In an extraordinary political turnabout, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made an appearance on national television late Tuesday afternoon and announced that a formal impeachment inquiry would be launched in the House against President Donald J. Trump.

What prompted this political change? The Speaker has resisted calls to impeach President Trump even in the wake of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report documenting foreign influence on the 2016 election and obstruction of justice on the part of the president. The political calculation had been that an impeachment inquiry and trial — that was sure to fail to result in a conviction in the Republican controlled Senate — would only rile up Trump’s base and help him more than hurt him in the 2020 election.

Ever since that report was released and was seen to exonerate Trump without an explicit call for indictments or impeachment on the part of the special prosecutor, the political calculation has been to find a clear winner in the Democratic Party’s primary and simply defeat Trump and prevent his reelection in 2020.

But in the absence of an active investigation against him, Trump has been emboldened in his actions to run the country as a king or dictator who is in fact above the law. His attorneys — and the United States Department of Justice — have even made legal arguments in court cases saying a sitting president cannot be investigated or indicted, which in fact would place him above the law.

So apparently this whistleblower complaint alleging a potential quid pro quo with Trump withholding $391 million in military aid to the Ukraine in exchange for help investigating Democrat Joe Biden, who could end up being Trump’s opponent in the 2020 general election, and the fact that it was not turned over to Congress by the inspector general as required by law, changed the legal as well as political calculation.

“The actions taken to date by the president have seriously violated the Constitution,” Speaker Pelosi said in a brief speech invoking the nation’s founding principles. This president, she said, “must be held accountable — no one is above the law.”

Speaking of what we know of the president’s conduct in this new case, she said, constituted a “betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections.”

What moved the ball in this case?

Was it former Vice President Joe Biden himself, who issued a statement late Tuesday calling on Congress to impeach. A preliminary inquiry into Biden’s actions in this case show he did nothing wrong on behalf of his son’s company, which does business in the Ukraine.

“Like many of you, I’ve watched President Trump’s ongoing, grave abuses of power with horror,” Biden said in an email blast to supporters in a fund raising appeal. “This latest news about pressuring a foreign leader is only one instance in a long list of corruption.

“We need to get to the bottom of this,” he continued. “Congress must use its full Constitutional authority to fully investigate the President’s conduct. And President Trump must give them his full cooperation. If Donald Trump does not comply, Congress has no choice but to initiate impeachment.”

Or perhaps it was Pelosi ally and Georgia Congressman John Lewis who tipped the scales. He has stood by the Speaker all along in not moving to impeach Trump for political reasons, not legal ones.

He took to the House floor on Tuesday afternoon and began making the case for impeachment to the American people.

“There comes a time when you have to be moved by the spirit of history to take action to protect and preserve the integrity of our nation,” Lewis said. “I believe, I truly believe, the time to begin impeachment proceedings against this president has come. To delay or to do otherwise would betray the foundation of our democracy.”

In a banner headline lede story on Wednesday morning, the New York Times reported that the move to impeach will “set the stage for a history-making and exceedingly bitter confrontation between the Democrat-led House and a defiant president who has thumbed his nose at institutional norms.”

Impeachment is “the most severe action that Congress can take against a sitting president,” according to the Times, and “could usher in a remarkable new chapter in American life, touching off a constitutional and political showdown with the potential to cleave an already divided nation, reshape Mr. Trump’s presidency and the country’s politics, and carry heavy risks both for him and for the Democrats who have decided to weigh his removal.”

If the House concludes that this president should be censured with the taint of articles of impeachment, and finds enough votes to send it to the Senate for trial, Trump would become only the fourth president in American history to face impeachment. Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were both impeached but later acquitted by the Senate. President Richard M. Nixon resigned in the face of a looming House impeachment vote.

“It was the first salvo in an escalating, high-stakes standoff between Ms. Pelosi, now fully engaged in an effort to build the most damning possible case against the president, and Mr. Trump, who angrily denounced Democrats’ impeachment inquiry even as he worked feverishly in private to head off the risk to his presidency,” the Times wrote.

As for Trump, who has dared Democrats to impeach him almost since the day he was sworn in, in New York for several days at the United Nations, issued a defiant response on Twitter.

“PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!” Trump tweeted. “Such an important day at the United Nations, so much work and so much success, and the Democrats purposely had to ruin and demean it with more breaking news Witch Hunt garbage. So bad for our Country!”

But the move to impeach puts Trump back on his heels and on the defensive as he was all while the Mueller investigation was underway, almost every day calling it a “witch hunt,” which may have been popular with his hard core supporters, but helped keep his public approval well below a majority of 50 percent.

Whatever moved her to change her mind and take on Trump directly with an impeachment inquiry, Speaker Pelosi decided the time was right.

“Right now, we have to strike while the iron is hot,” Pelosi reportedly told House Democrats in a closed-door meeting on Tuesday in the basement of the Capitol.

Moments later in front of a phalanx of news cameras, the Speaker haltingly invoked the Constitution and the nation’s founders as she declared: “The times have found us.”

On Wednesday morning, in an effort to thwart the impeachment investigation, the White House issued what was reportedly a partial transcript of the conversation with Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of the Ukraine. But it was not an exact verbatim transcript, so it should do little to stop the inquiry, and in fact it seems to confirm that Trump asked a foreign leader for help in his political campaign during a call setup to talk about military aid.

Speaker Pelosi said she had directed the chairmen of the six committees that have been investigating Mr. Trump to “proceed under that umbrella of impeachment inquiry.”

In a closed-door meeting earlier in the day, according to the Times, she said the panels should put together their best cases on potentially impeachable offenses by the president and send them to the Judiciary Committee, potentially laying the groundwork for articles of impeachment.