How Should Pelosi Conduct the Presidency?

I am starting to see Pence implicated in the Ukraine impeachment scandal. If Trump and Pence get impeached simultaneously, Speaker Pelosi is 3rd in line to become president.

How should she handle the office? I can see spiking-the-football Nancy: “McConnell stole a SCOTUS nomination, and now we are stealing the White House!” It would be provocative to call it “stealing” since the whole process is entirely legal and avoidable if the current occupants don’t commit high crimes and misdemeanors, and also because incredulous Magas would not be able to do anything whatsoever about it.

I can see Ford Nancy: “I humbly accept that I was not elected to this office, and therefore am not planning any major policy initiatives.” But, yeah right.

I can see I’m Still the Same Old Nancy: Talks the same. Acts the same. Dresses the same. Just like she is as Speaker. But, if she leads an impeachment investigation that results in yoinking the White House away from the pubbies and installing herself there, it will go down as one of the most famous political moves of all time. She’s not an egomaniac I don’t think, but it is hard to imagine acting as if nothing big just happened.

I can devise wrong hypotheticals, but right this moment anyway I am not imagining how that actually could/should play out. Maybe some dopers want to take a crack at it.

…not gonna happen. Not even worth while theorizing about it. Pence doesn’t just have to get impeached. He has to get removed. And while there is an ever-so-slim chance the Senate might remove Trump, they won’t remove Pence. They wouldn’t hand over the reigns to the Dems. Not gonna happen.

But, doesn’t the law apply to Pence? The alternative is to have an honest-to-God criminal cabal running the country. How is that supposed to work?

…of course it does.

We have that now. People have been yelling this out since 2016. Sarah Kendzior puts it bluntly:

This isn’t an alternative. Its what you have.

The way that its working now?

If both Trump and Pence are impeached: they both still remain in office. Pelosi doesn’t get elevated. If they are impeached then it goes to trial at the Senate: and if the Senate votes to remove only *then *are they removed from office. (Thats a really simplified distillation of the process)

There is close to zero chance the Senate votes to get rid of Trump. There is absolutely no chance they would vote to get rid of Pence if it meant Pelosi would get made President.

Its not gonna happen.

I don’t see it happening. But if it did start to look like a real possibility, Pence would cut a deal and resign and the Senate would quickly confirm a new Republican VP with no connection to the various Trump scandals.

Two catches:

  1. A new VP has to be nominated by the president. There’s no way Trumpelthinskin would nominate anybody but an abject bootlicker.

  2. A new VP has to be confirmed by both houses. The only kind of Republican with any chance for House approval is one of the few old-style honest public servants (Huntsman, perhaps).

Anyone capable of navigating past Scylla would be gobbled up by Charybdis, and vice versa.

Well, they won the election with what I’ll call a veneer of plausible deniability. Now though, if a couple dozen well documented and irrefutable Articles of Impeachment come down for both of them, and the GOP dismisses them in front of the whole world on the grounds of, “The law does not serve our interests”, well, it seems like that could be fatal for the GOP brand. “Vote GOP- We’re Bald-Faced Pirates!”

I can’t predict the future. I grant it isn’t the likeliest outcome, Justice being merely a word and all. But if Trump and Pence are both guilty of international election fraud, the right thing to do is to give them both the boot and install Pelosi. A certified and approved criminal cabal is a whole lot worse than an administration gone wrong and chastised.

The law does not apply to Republicans. We will see that when the Senate votes to ignore Donald’s crimes.

Let’s say by some miracle the right thing happens and we have President Pelosi. I think she would be very humble and earnest in her short time in office, Seeking to do the right thing and appointing an able cabinet. I think the transition from Pelosi to Biden or Warren would be the smoothest in history.

There is absolutely ***no ***way the Republican Senate would allow Trump and Pence to be deposed in a way that leads to President Pelosi. They’re not dumb. They’ll find a way to get a new Republican vice president in. It’s not like they’ll press a button that deposes Trump and Pence and then be suddenly aghast like, “Whooop, President Nancy - how did we not see that coming? Undo button, undo button!”

There is a substantial part of the US population that LIKE this. It’s a feature, not a bug. They would like to see the Democrats outlawed and jailed, and have a single party, Authoritarian state run by a Strong Man Leader.

There is another large group who will not believe this. They will believe their favoured media, who will tell them that this is a partisan witch hunt, that Trump and Pence are completely, 100% innocent and were railroaded.

Finally, there is the largest group who don’t even know any of this is going on. They are completely oblivious.

There is little danger to the GOP as long as they can get votes from these three groups.

…and your point is?

We all know this. I’ve been in favour of impeachment long before everyone jumped on the bandwagon. But what you’ve just written has nothing to do with your OP. A “decision fatal to the GOP” will very likely have an impact on the next election. But it won’t make Pelosi President.

I’m not discussing “what is right.” I’m telling you that Trump and Pence are not both going to get thrown out of office making Pelosi President. It isn’t going to happen.

She should not. Pence will have some plausible deniability in whatever it is that would cause Trump to be removed from office. Sure, Pence listened in on calls where Trump orchestrated crimes but he didn’t know in advance that was the plan and he didn’t actively participate in the cover up. At the very least, Pence’s crimes will be views as lesser than Trump’s and so Trump, having moved the Overton window on the acceptability of public corruption so far, will have made Pence seem like a saint in comparison. Pence should serve as president until he loses the next election. President Pelosi would have no legitimacy since Democrats lost the last presidential election and Republicans would scream “coup” at the mere idea her taking the reins. Democrats in the House should take the high road and allow a Republican to remain in office. If Pence has stepped down or died before Trump is hypothetically removed from office, the House majority should agree to allow the confirmation of any moderate, centrist Republican as a caretaker until the next election, e.g., Gerald Ford.

I should also point out, there is no chance of it happening anyway. The Senate will not vote to remove a Republican from office if it means Pelosi becomes President. Removing one president from office would be viewed as sufficient rebuke to criminality that they would not feel compelled to repeat the gesture very soon.

The problem is that there are a lot of people who will refuse to believe any Republican wrong-doing occurred as long as the Republican in question denies doing it. So all Trump has to do is refuse to hand over the evidence of his crimes and then claim that the evidence he refused to hand over proved he’s innocent. And his followers will believe him.

Sure, the House can go ahead and impeach him for withholding evidence and obstructing justice. He’s guilty of those crimes. But his followers will refuse to believe he’s guilty. So the Republican majority in the Senate will refuse to remove Trump from office and his followers will claim that’s vindication. They’ll be angry at the Democrats for attacking an innocent man.

The collusion is going to protect Trump. I don’t think he’ll be kicked out of office. And some of his followers - the Fifth Avenue crowd - will always support him no matter what. So the question is how good a public case the Democrats will be able to make and how many voters will see that Trump was actually guilty and only walked because other Republicans cover for him. If enough people see that then there could be a backlash against the Republicans in the 2020 election.

TLDR version: Trump’s going to get away with his crimes. But the Democrats might be able to show that he got away with his crimes.

I also think that Pelosi is politically savvy enough not to try to impeach both of them even if she had a evidence to do it. She is having a hard enough time convincing people that the impeachment against Trump is based purely on partisan spite. If she tried to do both, it would raise the question as to whether this was all just a personal power grab on her part, tarnishing the whole prospect. So I think for everyone involved, Republicans, Democrats and the country as a whole, it is best not to have the stakes so high.

The only way that Pelosi becomes President is if one or probably both of them die. Which could of course happen, but it’s unlikely.

If I try not to fight the hypothetical here… (I’m in agreement that Pelosi has about a 0.0000001% chance - and only if a meteor takes out both Trump and Pence at the same time)

Pelosi’s first act should NOT be to just forget about the past, and give marvelous tributes to our now incinerated former leaders.
She should move to root out all of the stinking corruption that has infested the halls of power for the past two years. Investigate any and all crimes, conspiracies and cover ups. I expect Guiliani will be in a jail cell for the rest of his life, along with Barr and half of Trumps’ cabinet.

Yeah, she should go all Oliver Cromwell on the lot of them. Now THAT would drain the swamp! But, if I were a betting man, I would place my hard earned money on an alien invasion happening over Pelosi in the White House.

I think that’s going too far. Let’s face facts; Trump’s probably innocent of something. If he’s been accused of a hundred crimes, he’s probably only guilty of ninety of them.

And if the House went after him for all one hundred crimes, Trump would end up being exonerated for the ten he’s innocent of. And that would be the conservative talking point; how Trump was persecuted by the Democrats for crimes he didn’t commit.

So I think the Democrats would be smarter to limit themselves to just the crimes where they know they have a solid case. Of the hypothetical hundred crimes, pick twenty sure things and nail him on all twenty. Twenty-out-of-twenty convictions is better than ninety-out-of-a-hundred.

I delineated my fantasy “Pelosi’s Path to the Presidency” some time last year. Someone makes a statement impugning the A-HFS’s physical fitness. In an attempt to respond to this, he accepts a challenge to run up the staircase to the top of the Washington Monument. Sycophantic Pence insists on completing the challenge with him (but he has to stay behind the A-HFS for the whole thing, because do I even need to explain why?). Halfway up, the A-HFS has the heart attack he’s been courting for several years. It’s survivable, or would be, but for the fact that he tumbled down some 450 stair steps, breaking his neck. Incidentally, he lands on the Veep, on the way down, squishing him like a bug (an incident which is NOT survivable).

A hastily-sworn-in President Pelosi declares a week-long national period of foot-shuffling, awkward throat-clearing, and not-directly-meeting-anyone’s-gaz-ing.

No muss, no fuss.