Pelosi Is Hoist On the House’s Own Petard

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Speaker Nancy Pelosi certainly chose the right moment to declare that she’s against impeaching President Trump. The special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, is, if one believes the papers, only days away from handing in to the attorney general a report on what he found out in respect of collusion with the Russ regime. Must be that Mrs. Pelosi thinks he’s come up with zilch.

After all, if Mr. Mueller were to conclude the president committed high crimes or misdemeanors, which is what a president has to have done to be ousted via impeachment, then there’s only one constitutional thing do be done with it. That would be to hand the report over to the very House for which Mrs. Pelosi speaks. It’s the only body with the constitutional power to impeach.

Yet here’s what Mrs. Pelosi said, according to a Washington Post scribe: “I haven’t said this to any press person before. But since you asked, and I’ve been thinking about this: Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.”

If we were Mrs. Pelosi — a stretch to be sure, but the honor would be ours — we’d have stood pat. Just said nothing. After all, she’s got several committees investigating the President, not to mention his children. They’re saying the most horrible things about him. Congressman Nadler, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has already said that Mr. Trump has obstructed justice.

That’s what Mr. Nadler, who chairs the very committee that would hand up any articles of impeachment, said, right on ABC. It may be that Mrs. Pelosi would have preferred to stand pat but is actually worried more about what her colleagues in the House are going to do than she is about what Mr. Trump has — or, better yet, hasn’t been shown to have — done.

William Shakespeare, call your office. It’ll take someone with his abilities on a typewriter to capture the exquisiteness of Mrs. Pelosi’s predicament. She’s got such radicals as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley and a whole socialistic camarilla pressing her from the one side — a new generation challenging her with the idea of socialism.

Plus, too, Mrs. Pelosi is faced with fiercely ideological committee chairmen like Adam Schiff at Intelligence, Eliot Engel at Foreign Affairs, Elijah Cummings at Oversight, Richard Neal at Ways and Means, and Maxine Waters at Financial Services. All competing with an injudicious Judiciary chairman who’s gone and declared the President guilty of obstruction before his own committee has spoken.

What in the world would it mean if after all this, the House fails to find something to use for an impeachment the House’s own speaker doesn’t want? Not to mention the prospect that if the House does impeach, the Senate — at least on the current evidence — is unlikely to convict. That, of course, could change, but Mrs. Pelosi’s new formulation on impeaching the President is: “He’s just not worth it.” From her lips to God’s ears.


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