By David Harsanyi
Thursday, January 09, 2020
We are in the midst of an imaginary impeachment standoff
between House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.
“Both have drawn firm lines in the sand. Someone’s got to give,” one reporter
recently declared.
There is, of course, nothing to “give.” Pelosi has no
standing to dictate the terms of a Senate trial; no constitutional right or
political leverage. Why she has put herself in a position that will ultimately
end, one way or another, with her surrendering to McConnell is perplexing.
A new piece in Time magazine does shed some light
on the thought process behind Pelosi’s decision to refuse to hand over articles
of impeachment to a Senate whose majority doesn’t want them. One of the most
interesting nuggets in the piece isn’t that Pelosi — portrayed as courageous
risk-taker — had gotten the bright idea from CNN; it’s that she specifically
got it from noted felon John Dean, Nixon’s former White House lawyer. Now, Dean
is often portrayed as a patriotic, whistleblowing impeachment expert — which is
true insofar as he planned the Watergate coverup, and then informed on everyone
whom he conspired with after they were caught. His real expertise is cashing in
on criminality for the past 50 years (I wrote about Dean’s slimy past here).
Surely Pelosi, blessed with preternatural
political instincts, wouldn’t rely on Dean’s advice? Surely Pelosi wasn’t
browbeaten into doing this by podcast bros and talking heads on America’s least
popular major cable-news network?
Because whatever you make of the case against Donald
Trump, it’s getting increasingly difficult to argue that this amateurish,
constantly shifting effort by the House has been effective. After two dramatic
emergency impeachment hearings, a pretend standoff, and massive cooperative
coverage from the media, poll numbers haven’t budged. They may even have ticked
back toward Donald Trump.
Yet, to hear Time tell it, Pelosi has micromanaged
every step of this process, from signing off on every committee report and
press release — “aides say she caught typos in the Intelligence Committee’s
final report before it went out“ — to picking furniture that would make Adam
Schiff and the more diminutive Jerry Nadler look like equals.
My working theory is this: Pelosi realized that
impeachment was a mistake. She didn’t want the president to be able tell voters
that he had been exonerated by Senate. The only way to mitigate the damage was
to undertake a ham-fisted effort to attack the Senate trial and dampen, or
perhaps circumvent, that inevitable moment.
In the process, however, Pelosi destroyed the Democrats’
justification for rushing impeachment in the first place. Nadler and Schiff
both argued that Trump’s tenure in office constituted a national emergency, and
that the only way to save the republic from another stolen election was to move
quickly.
McConnell, on the other hand, had to take only a short
break from confirming judges to inform the House that the Senate would treat
the impeachment of Donald Trump the same way it treated the impeachment of Bill
Clinton — with a rules package that passed 100–0 in 1998. Under the Clinton
precedent, the Senate would allow both the House impeachment managers and
Trump’s lawyers to make their case, with questions from the Senate to follow.
Pelosi’s defenders are running out of arguments. Washington
Post blogger Jennifer Rubin now says that acting on the Clinton precedent
means that moderate Republican senators such as Susan Collins “will face the
real possibility that conclusive evidence of Trump’s wrongdoing will come to
light after a sham trial. That would make for a disastrous, humiliating legacy.”
The gaping hole in this argument, and the reason
Democrats are losing the debate, is that they’ve already claimed to have
conclusive evidence of Trump’s wrongdoing. They claimed they had proof of
bribery, but they didn’t include it in the impeachment articles. They claimed
to have proof in the Mueller report that Trump obstructed justice, yet it’s not
in the article of impeachments either. Rubin herself has alleged, dozens of
times, that we already have definitive proof Trump has committed an impeachable
offense.
In truth, if the House had made a persuasive case, there
would be public pressure on Republicans to act in a different manner. That the
House did not is the only reason Pelosi embraced John Dean’s silly idea — which
has drastically backfired.
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