Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, a longtime ally of President Trump, has a theory for some of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent political machinations: She’s afraid of a future Trump reelection win.
Gingrich proposed the possibility in a tweet on Tuesday morning, writing, “The will of the American people has to be subordinate to the will of Pelosi. Trump has to be impeached to stop him from running again. Pelosi fears the American people might pick him if they were allowed to. What a formula for expressing Washington’s contempt for the people.”
The will of the American people has to be subordinate to the will of Pelosi. Trump has to be impeached to stop him from running again. Pelosi fears the American people might pick him if they were allowed to. What a formula for expressing Washington’s contempt for the people.
— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) January 12, 2021
In a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, Lesley Stahl asked Pelosi a question by raising the prospect that “after all of this, there’s no punishment, no consequence, and he could run again for president.”
Pelosi acknowledged the possibility, saying, “And that’s one of the motivations that people have for advocating for impeachment.”
The prospect of removing Trump from office prior to his Jan. 20 departure remains unlikely given the composition of the federal government. Vice President Mike Pence has signaled that he won’t exercise his option to remove the president from office via the 25th Amendment, leaving Congress with the only viable avenue for his removal.
The House’s expected vote to impeach Trump for “incitement to violence” on Wednesday would require a two-thirds vote in the Senate to convict, a decreasingly probable outcome given Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin’s declaration that impeachment would be “ill-advised” at this juncture. If two-thirds of the Senate did vote to convict, however, then the president would be barred from running for federal office again.
The Washington Examiner reached out to Pelosi’s office for comment.
