It is now three weeks after Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s chamber voted to impeach President Donald Trump. Democrats have pushed their decision to the center of every news cycle, pleading to the American people that the preservation of democracy was contingent on the impeachment and removal of President Trump. After Speaker Pelosi easily secured the votes from her caucus, some of whom have been calling for the president’s impeachment before he even took office, the sense of urgency slowly dwindled.
As Guy wrote yesterday, Speaker Pelosi has clenched her fist over the articles, quite literally refusing to hand them over to the upper chamber, per Constitutional impeachment procedure. The vast majority of those weighing in on this move are puzzled, given the narrative of urgency, and that Speaker Pelosi has no power over the upper chamber’s impeachment procedure. Speaker Pelosi’s upper chamber colleagues are even beginning to admit that she has lost this fight.
In a new profile in Time, Speaker Pelosi admitted that this highly controversial play was not even from her own playbook. Pelosi told Time that she had been contemplating the strategy since hearing John Dean pitch it on CNN. Dean was Counsel to the Nixon White House.
In new @TIME profile: Speaker Pelosi got idea to withhold impeachment articles from watching John Dean on CNN. https://t.co/0GuN6o9h9o pic.twitter.com/2llM9dhEdp
— Byron York (@ByronYork) January 9, 2020
It is baffling that Speaker Pelosi would admit that her strategy is not even of her own creation, given that she has the "master legislator" reputation locked down. This concession also makes an obvious case that Speaker Pelosi was, indeed, desperately seeking a way out of the hole she dug herself into, once her party’s credibility on impeachment began to diminish. It does not take a master of polling and data to see that the American people, especially independent voters, are overwhelmingly against impeachment. House Democrats had a majority of the country on their side initially, but once it became clear that the Constitutional basis was virtually non-existent, the average American voter became disenfranchised.
Luckily, no pundit can provide Speaker Pelosi with a strategy to stop Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell from continuing to reshape the federal judiciary and work for the American people.
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