Remember when Democrats said that the whole purpose of attempting to remove President Trump from office before the next election was for the sake of the election? What happened to that?
At a CNN town hall last month, a college student asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi what a lot of people wanted to know: Why not just wait for the next election and let voters decide how they feel about the president?
That couldn’t happen, Pelosi said, because impeachment was about the sanctity of the election itself.
“One of the things that the president did was to undermine, jeopardize the integrity of our elections by asking a foreign power to intervene,” she said, adding that “if he isn’t stopped from doing that, he will continue.”
She said that if Trump weren’t impeached, “he will continue” asking that foreign governments interfere in the 2020 campaign.
Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, said the same thing.
“We are all aware that the next election is looming,” he said with grave severity. “But we cannot wait for the election to address the present crisis. The integrity of that election is one of the very things at stake.”
And yet here we are, three weeks after Democrats voted on the articles of impeachment, and Pelosi still hasn’t sent the charges to the Senate for a trial. The first contest of the Democratic presidential primary is less than a month away, and with every second that passes, Democrats, by their own logic, are allowing Trump to continue attempting to corrupt the race.
If we “cannot wait for the election” to address this “crisis,” what are we waiting for? Pelosi has said she wanted to be sure the Senate trial would be fair, but that’s not really up to her. Republicans control the Senate, so it’s up to them. Plus, Pelosi knows the Senate will never vote to convict Trump, so her delay is just a political gambit.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he’s ready to receive the impeachment articles. If the integrity of the election is at stake and every moment counts, why aren’t Democrats pushing the process along?
Instead, they’ve indefinitely stalled it, likely because they’ve seen that the public recognizes that this was nakedly partisan and ultimately pointless.
Voters should consider holding Democrats responsible for jeopardizing the integrity of our elections.
