Trump’s latest mess in the lap of Congress

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Tuesday that the House of Representatives will begin a formal impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump in the wake of Trump’s admission Sunday that he pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25 to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, the frontrunner among the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. Calls from Democrats to begin the impeachment process have been growing.

Add U.S. Rep. Antonio Delgado, D-19, to the chorus of voices.

Speaking the harshest words of his congressional term to date, Delgado had this to say: “The president has admitted to soliciting the Ukrainian president to investigate a political rival. In doing so, the president used the power of the presidency to pressure a foreign government to help him win an election. This, by itself, is an impeachable offense.”

As he has done through his entire presidency, Trump downplayed this new scandal to the point of absurdity. Trump defended his contact with Zelensky on July 25 as a “nice” call, which is disturbingly familiar to his remark about “some fine people” marching in a white supremacist rally in Virginia that turned violent and ended in the death of an innocent woman.

Trump admitted Sunday that he brought up Biden and his son Hunter during the call, accusing the vice president of corruption in connection with Hunter’s former business activities in Ukraine.

Then there was this confusing and confounding statement from Trump as he tried to explain what he did.

“The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, was largely corruption, all of the corruption taking place, was largely the fact that we don’t want our people, like Vice President Biden and his son, creating the corruption already in the Ukraine,” Trump said to reporters outside the White House.

Since then, calls for impeachment have amplified. On Monday night, Delgado was one of 146 Democrats who backed impeachment — well over the caucus majority. A growing number of Democratic senators and representatives are coming out with public calls for impeachment — as of noon Wednesday, the number was up to 206.

Congress is blind if it can’t see the damage Trump caused by this sad and clumsy attempt to undermine a candidate who may be his competition in November. Trump’s lame alibis are indefensible as statesmanship. The American people deserve to see Congress act on Trump’s latest grin-and-spin within the bounds of the U.S. Constitution.

If that happens, impeachment won’t be a question of if. It will be a question of when.