Now that Democrats have impeached President Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has signaled that she may give in to the latest liberal fever dream: withholding the articles of impeachment from the U.S. Senate so that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell cannot dismiss the Ukraine matter with a quick trial. But all you have to do is think about this latest gambit for more than two seconds to recognize that it doesn’t make any sense.
The tactic of withholding articles of impeachment has gained traction this week as Democrats become frustrated with the recognition that — surprise! — McConnell plans to conduct a partisan trial in the Senate with the object of acquitting Trump as expediently as possible without calling witnesses. On Monday, liberal law professor Laurence Tribe wrote an op-ed proposing the strategy of refusing to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate as a way of forcing McConnell to conduct a trial in a manner more to Democrats’ liking.
Support has been building for the idea, and following the Wednesday impeachment vote, Pelosi added fuel to the idea by refusing to commit to sending over the articles. “We cannot name managers until we see what the process is on the Senate side,” Pelosi said. “So far, we haven’t seen anything that looks fair to us. We are hoping it will be fairer, and when we see that, we’ll appoint managers.” Managers would be lawmakers appointed to transmit the articles to the Senate, allowing a trial to commence, which McConnell has been planning for January. In clarifying comments Thursday morning, Pelosi said she had to see what the process would be like in the Senate before deciding how many managers to send. She did not say she was going to hold out for what she considered a fair trial, though she didn’t set any sort of timeline either.
In reality, it’s difficult to see what kind of leverage Pelosi has. McConnell may want to get impeachment over with, but Pelosi clearly has no interest in dragging along the process either. Pelosi has been in a race to get impeachment out the door. The whole point of refusing to fight in court to compel more witnesses to testify (and instead just using Trump resistance as part of an obstruction of Congress article) was so that she’d be able to hold the vote by the end of the year.
As long as Pelosi is holding the impeachment articles in her back pocket, she, along with swing district Democrats, will still be bombarded with questions about impeachment. If she was going to put them through that, she may as well have held off on voting for impeachment in the first place and keep investigating and fighting for more testimony so that Democrats could strengthen the case against Trump. The gambit of withholding the articles will be the worst of both worlds — drag things out without unearthing any new information.
Even if Democrats can exploit a loophole between the Constitution’s declaration that the House “shall have the sole Power of Impeachment” and that “the Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments.” And even though the articles of impeachment say that “the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United Senate,” it’s just hard to see that the public would react well to a childish tactic of the House trying to delay a trial. As it is, support for impeachment has already receded over time.
McConnell clearly understands that Pelosi has no real hand to play here. In remarks on the Senate floor, he seemed to relish the idea that Democrats would withhold the impeachment articles. McConnell said it showed Democrats were “too afraid to transmit their shoddy work product to the United States Senate” and called the idea “really comical.”
Pelosi already made the decision to pursue impeachment and to do so expediently. Democrats are just going to have to live with that decision and pat each other on the backs about the service they did to democracy. If they’re unhappy with the outcome of the Senate trial, they’ll now just have to make their case to voters.
