Reply #22: Dems need to find out if they have actual public support.

[longship]

Months old polls are not going to do it. The people deserve more than opinion testing to justify the impeachment of a president or other high officials. There has to be a ground swell for it.

Kind of like *this* kind of public support...
John Chancellor, NBC News on a Special Report on October 20, 1973:

Good evening. The country tonight is in the midst of what may be the most serious Constitutional crisis in its history. The President has fired the special Watergate prosecutor, Archibald Cox. Because of the President's action, the attorney general has resigned. Elliott Richardson has quit, saying he cannot carry out Mr. Nixon's instructions. Richardson's deputy, William Ruckelshaus, has been fired.

Ruckelshaus refused, in a moment of Constitutional drama, to obey a presidential order to fire the special Watergate prosecutor. And half an hour after the special Watergate prosecutor had been fired, agents of the FBI, acting at the direction of the White House, sealed off the offices of the special prosecutor, the offices of the attorney general and the offices of the deputy attorney general.
All of this adds up to a totally unprecedented situation, a grave and profound crisis in which the President has set himself against his own attorney general and the Department of Justice.

Nothing like this has ever happened before.

More than 50,000 telegrams poured in on Capitol Hill today, so many, Western Union was swamped. Most of them demanded impeaching Mr. Nixon.
...

In my career as a correspondent, I never thought I'd be reporting these things.

Within two months, the cry for impeachment compelled the House Judiciary Committee under Peter Rodino to convene the official inquiry. Six months later, articles of impeachment were approved and Nixon resigned in the face of overwhelming support for his removal.

This is the kind of support the Democrats will need.