My personal take? I’m not seeing any overarching Pelosi strategy.
But she’s got this one lever - holding onto the articles of impeachment - and she’s using it, and that’s good. When Congress comes back from its recess, the focus will still be on the withheld articles, and with that the fact that McConnell’s promised to rig the game.
The real game here should be for the Dems to keep the pressure on the handful of GOP Senators who might be vulnerable in November. I have no idea whether the DNC/DSCC/whoever is actually doing anything with this, like running ads in those states. But since the Dems really stink at playing politics, I’m rather concerned that they might not be.
I agree - Pelosi is using what leverage she has and she’s not going to waste her time trying to use leverage she knows she doesn’t have.
She will eventually relent on impeachment and give the articles to McConnell, who will undoubtedly sweep the entire ordeal under the rug. But McConnell’s strategy isn’t without risk: if something happens that makes Trump wildly unpopular, Trump will take the entire Republican leadership down with him. This impeachment will result in an exoneration for Trump, but this will be a bookmark, and McConnell can’t change that. People will remember that we had a chance to get rid of Trump and that Republicans went out of their way to defend him.
That’s what Pelosi is left with at this point. She’ll play the long game, just like she has been all along - it’s why she was never that enthusiastic about impeachment on one hand but understands that she may see some value in it down the road. The entire time, Pelosi’s strategy has been the same: let Trump be Trump and use his aggression against him. I think more than anyone, she understands how to slay the beast of Republican corruption. It just takes time and patience, and capitalizing on opportunities when they emerge.
This sounds like a statement from a forgetful or limited perspective. The 2018 midterms were within “the last three years” and Democrats gained 41 seats in the House and the majority. That’s a pretty significant political win. The same year, Democrats took nine state and territorial governorships from Republican incumbents (Republicans took one, from an independent).
In each of the 2017 and 2019 governor races, one state changed parties. Want to take a guess if they went Red-to-Blue or Blue-to-Red?
I’m of the opinion that the articles should not be delivered to the Senate until McConnell pledges to allow the Democrats to call X witnesses. Whether X is 3, 4, 5 or whatever is unimportant, what we need to do is get him to pledge to allow it. Also if witnesses deny the subpoena then the trial shuts down until the appeal is resolved or the witness drops the case.
The Republicans are the ones who want the trial. Let them be the ones to make accommodations.
No, Trump has no answer (as to why, if any Bidens need to be investigated, he hasn’t asked US agencies specializing in investigation to, you know, investigate).
And Trump’s fans have no answer, either, I notice. They just do what Trump did: assert baldly that there’s A Lot of Corruption and the Real problem is that The Fake Media Won’t Cover It.
It’s very helpful to Trump defenders to have extremely low IQs; otherwise their task (to defend him) is quite hard to manage.
Or if they are too terrified to make those accommodations, they could push the task onto the shoulders of the Chief Justice. That would give them political cover: 'sorry, Mr. President, we didn’t want this to happen but Roberts forced it on us!!’
I think Pelosi is waiting until there’s a new Senate. She’s hoping there will be enough votes to convict after Jan 3 (or whatever) 2021 with a bunch of new Democrats in the Senate. But if Trump doesn’t get re-elected it’ll be moot.
I’d like to see this for one reason only- convict him and deny him future Secret Service protection. We don’t need to be paying top dollar for golf cart rental for agents to follow his fat orange guilty ass all over his overpriced golf courses.
How many times does Pelosi have to prove herself before everyone realizes that she is a much better politician than most other politicians and certainly better than you or me.
Right now she has a lottery ticket that she got for free. The impeachment itself cost her nothing. It might even have helped her and now she has every Republican congressman on the record voting to protect Trump from impeachment in spite of significant evidence (but not proof) that he did something that demands impeachment. Three things can happen:
nothing. In which case she can keep the impeachment in her back pocket and use it to needle and annoy republicans into making unforced errors.
the case to subpoena trump’s advisors gets decided in her favor in which case she gets a second bite at impeachment hearings to amend the original articles of impeachment.
enough evidence is presented to convince the senate to remove Trump and now all those republican congressmen have to answer for their vote
I mostly agree with this (shocking, isn’t it?). Pelosi gets to choose the timing of the Senate trial. She’s proven to be an extremely skilled legislative politician. I trust that she’ll choose the most damaging timing to Trump and the Republicans and the most helpful timing for the Democratic party.
Does this work? Does an impeachment survive from one Congress to the next, or does it expire (like unresolved Contempt of Congress charges) when the current Congress expires?
I don’t see her holding onto the articles of impeachment for long. There’s no point in just holding them. Senators wouldn’t have the balls to tell the public that they have no intentions of a fair and impartial trial if they worried for a moment about the public backlash against them – they’re not worried about said backlash. And without the backlash, you can’t have an impeachment. In short, the public isn’t sufficiently behind the impeachment and the Senate knows it. If Nancy just holds them in the House indefinitely, then it risks making the House Dems look like cold, naked partisans. Moreover, it becomes a major distraction during a presidential campaign cycle in which they’re desperate to retake the WH.
I admit that I don’t read minds and I could be way off base - will admit it later (reluctantly) if I’m wrong - but I think she’s just using the recess time that she has to point out that Senate Republicans have no loyalty to the Constitution or the rule of law and she’s bookmarking this moment for later reference, which is probably the smart move. She’s banking on the idea that Trump will eventually fuck up so badly - either at home or abroad - that the public will turn against him, and the Republicans will be brought down with him*. Nancy has never really felt like she could beat Republicans with impeachment or prosecution. All along, she’s known that the way to beat Republicans is at the polls by letting the public see them for the sociopaths that they are.
I predict that Pelosi may drag her feet a wee bit when the Senate comes back, and there’s no harm in seeing if she can’t put some pressure on Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski and others. But keep in mind for every possible Republican defector, there are at least two Democratic defectors in the other direction: Doug Jones and Joe Manchin. I think this will be over and done with by the end of February.
*Watch what happens in Iran. I suspect that Iran is setting a trap for the anti-Iran hawks, and if they take Iran’s bait, that has the potential to be a catastrophic clusterfuck that would almost certainly turn into a massive waterfall of shit that rains down on Trump’s head.
The Constitution offers no guidance on these questions, and there have been so few impeachments of a President (three, now) that there is no real precedent.
So the answers will depend on some combination of Congressional compromise and/or leverage, potential Supreme Court rulings, and public opinion.
Other federal officers have been impeached (indicted), tried, and sometimes removed. Did any of those lesser-office impeachments cross Congressional sessions?
Now I’m looking at two pages: one with those 64 initiations of impeachment proceedings, and one with the dates of the various Congresses. Right away I see an example of proceedings beginning during one Congress—the 7th, which ended on March 3, 1803—and concluding during the next Congress (the 8th, which began on 4 March 1803). The impeachment was of John Pickering:
That conviction and removal occurred on 12 March 1804 (again, according to Wikipedia), which was during the 8th Congress.
There may be more, but at least the question ‘has an impeachment process crossed sessions of Congress’ has been answered (in the affirmative).
The pages of lists: