SCHNECKSVILLE, Pa.—Representative Susan Wild isn’t ready to impeach the president, and until she is, impeachment probably isn’t happening.
Wild is a 62-year-old lawyer who won her first race for Congress in November to capture a district in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley that Republicans had held for the past 20 years. Last Wednesday, a couple hundred of the citizens who sent her to Washington gathered at a local community college to hear their representative tell them why she doesn’t want to oust Donald Trump from the White House—at least not yet.
Wild has held town-hall-style meetings about once a month since she took office, but her staff was expecting this to be the largest—about 300 people had RSVP’d to the event.
It’s not that Wild is a particularly powerful rookie lawmaker. She’s a low-key moderate who, unlike some of her more outspoken, famous freshman colleagues, hasn’t really made a name for herself yet in the Capitol. She isn’t a member of the party leadership. She doesn’t sit on the House Judiciary Committee, which says it is now formally investigating whether to recommend articles of impeachment against President Trump. The only vote Wild controls is her own.
But Democrats begging for an effort to remove Trump from office will have to get members like Wild—a so-called majority maker—on board with the plan. Though she won her 2018 race by 10 points, her reconfigured district is one of the most closely divided in the country; voters in the territory Wild represents supported Hillary Clinton over Trump by just a single point in 2016.