I read with great interest FiveThirtyEight‘s breakdown of “The Six Wings of the Democratic Party,” so you can imagine my amusement when “Progressive Old Guard” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) finally said what we all know to be true: the House would be ridiculously stupid to impeach President Trump.
Okay, she didn’t say it quite like that, but that was the gist of it. In an exclusive interview with The Washington Post, Pelosi announced that she was about to “give you some news right now because I haven’t said this to any press person before.”
She went on to say:
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.
At the beginning of the WaPo piece, the reporter notes that Pelosi reads a quote from Lincoln about the import of public opinion.
Nancy Pelosi stands up in her spacious office in the U.S. Capitol, walks past an enormous window with a commanding view of the Mall and the Washington Monument, and picks up a small plaque from her desk. A gift from Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.), the plaque has the familiar profile of a young Abraham Lincoln on one side. Pelosi returns to her chair holding the plaque on her palm and reads a quote from Lincoln etched on the reverse side: “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.”
Her stance against pursuing the impeachment of President Trump has been blasted by the House progressive cohort that, arguably following last week’s cave on the Ilhan Omar antisemitism resolution, has more power than Pelosi herself.
Pelosi’s not wrong, though, as I noted last year, “even if the Mueller report cobbles together something shady that the media spins into hyper-drive but that fails to resonate with even fence-sitting Trump supporters, impeaching a sitting president without the consent of the people is a big mistake. Big.”
The fact is that you cannot impeach and successfully remove a sitting president unless the people are behind the effort. That takes, as Pelosi notes, “compelling and overwhelming” evidence of an actual impeachable offense, one that resonates with the majority of voters. That standard requires going beyond Orange Man Bad.
Enter anti-Trump, pro-impeachment billionaire activist Tom Steyer. He’s outraged by Pelosi’s recognition of reality.
Steyer, of course, misses the point. Pelosi means that pursuing Trump’s impeachment is not worth the political losses the Democrats would experience as a result, including, but not limited to, the White House in 2020. They think they have a shot at it, and depending on their eventual nominee, they might. That all goes down the drain if the Democrat House attempts to remove Trump from office against the will of the people who put him there.
Pelosi wants to win back the Senate and the White House in 2020, and she knows that any move to impeach the president would put that in jeopardy.
WaPo continues:
For 2020, your goal is to keep control of the House and have a Democrat elected president.And the Senate, the whole thing.
This is the focus of Democrat leadership, and the demands of the far left impeachment fanatics are unlikely to gain much ground, particularly while the Senate is still Republican.
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