Anyone who thinks House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., just wrote off impeachment as an option is deluding themselves. She would be stupid to preemptively discard that as a potential route and, contrary to the incisive analysis of Fox News contributors, Pelosi isn’t stupid.
Pelosi wrapped herself in the flag, telling the Washington Post in an interview published Monday that impeaching President Trump would be too “divisive” and that, “I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country.”
The New York Post ran an editorial in response, convinced that Pelosi must be backing away from impeachment because there’s nothing worthy of it in any of the endless investigations into Trump and Russia led by both houses of Congress, the Special Counsel and the news media.
It’s almost certainly true that there is nothing worthy of impeachment to come from all of the probes, but it’s a misreading of Pelosi as a sainted patriot rather than the political knife fighter that she is.
When a budding mutiny threatened Pelosi’s return to speaker, she strangled it in its crib. When Trump challenged her to a government shutdown, she took the bet, won and Trump credited her for it. You’re kidding yourself if you think Pelosi would surrender impeachment. If Trump were in her shoes, would he?
The New York Post’s news section article on Pelosi’s comments get closer to what she actually indicated.
“To me, she’s laying the foundation to impeach,” one unnamed Democratic congressional aide told the paper.
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., read Pelosi’s comment in the same way: “On the plain words of her statement, she did seem to open the door to the possibility that, if we could do this in a bipartisan way based on the evidence that might justify proceeding with the ultimate political death penalty, she wasn’t closing the door to that,” he said.
Correct!
The loudest Democrats in the House right now are making the whole party look insane and unserious. For Pelosi to join them in their premature calls for impeachment would be to surrender control to Rep. Rashida “impeach the motherfucker” Tlaib, D-Mich.
But abstaining from the hysterical impeachment calls for the moment isn’t the same as ruling out impeachment.
Impeachment isn’t in the trash. It’s in the fridge, and Pelosi is setting the table in case everyone gets hungry enough.
