Despite significant missteps, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s delay in formally presenting impeachment to the Senate achieved significant gains for her purposes.
Thanks to the delay, her impeachment managers will be far better prepared and will enjoy greater chances of calling key witnesses.
To be sure, Pelosi ran a highly flawed, initially unfair, impeachment process. She ineptly handled public relations both during the House’s impeachment investigation and in the month since the House voted to impeach. She never adequately explained a legitimate reason for the delay, adding to the unfortunate public impression that the whole drama is a political game rather than a serious attempt to define and enforce limits against an imperial presidency. Worse, she still hasn’t sufficiently elucidated a concise and compelling reason for the removal of President Trump from office.
And mind you, this has nothing to do with whether she rushed impeachment to begin with — a separate question. The point here is that once they did impeach, she was wise in slowing things down, withholding the articles from the Senate for four weeks.
The most important thing she gained was time for determination of whether former national security adviser John Bolton would be willing to testify. This question required two steps. First, a judge had to rule on, and make moot, the case on executive privilege upon which Bolton hoped to base his decision. Second, because the judge effectively threw the ball back to Bolton without clear direction, Bolton had to analyze relevant precedents himself and decide how to proceed.
As Bolton is one of the two most obvious people (the other being chief of staff Mick Mulvaney) to be able to provide first-hand accounts of Trump’s actions, his decision to make himself available for subpoena is of utmost importance for the case Pelosi’s team wants to make.
Relatedly, once Bolton did so decide, Pelosi needed time for the political ramifications of his decision to play out. They definitely played out in her favor, as some two-thirds of people believe Bolton should be called as a witness during the Senate trial. Concomitantly, that public sentiment surely played a large role in convincing a majority of senators not to dismiss the case before even bringing it to trial (if that’s even possible), and in convincing three or more key centrist Republicans to say they likely will support the calling of witnesses. A month ago, the anti-dismissal and pro-witness sentiments seemed far less likely to prevail.
The other consideration for Pelosi, far too little appreciated, is that it takes time to prepare for a trial. Existing rules provide for an impeachment trial to begin almost immediately upon the Senate’s receipt of the articles. In ordinary criminal cases of importance, no prosecutor would dare proceed from indictment to trial with just a weekend to prepare.
The extra month gave Pelosi time to carefully consider whom to choose as impeachment “managers” (in effect, her prosecutorial team) and for them in turn to plan their presentations. (I do not think she chose her managers wisely, but at least she had time to weigh all the possibilities.) This trial takes the nation into uncharted waters, because in President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial, both sides stipulated to most of the facts at hand, and because the trial of Andrew Johnson in 1868 took place in a pre-electronic age. Figuring how to best make a case both for internal Senate purposes and for public consumption is no easy task.
In sum, Pelosi’s team now has a better chance to make a better public case. Despite her public relations ineptitude, that’s a win.
