If House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plays her cards right, she has already won her high-stakes match-up with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell over the Senate impeachment trial. McConnell said Tuesday that he has enough Republican votes to proceed to a Senate trial without committing to the inclusion of witnesses and new documents, and he called on Pelosi to send the articles. Pelosi responded Tuesday night with a statement urging McConnell to "immediately publish" the resolution he plans to pass so that she can appoint floor managers and transmit the articles.
Analysts and experts are divided on what Pelosi should do from a strategic standpoint, while outlets such as Politico have already touted "McConnell's win" on the impeachment trial. Not so fast, I say. Even though some Democratic senators are starting to nudge Pelosi to transmit the articles, she can still prevail over McConnell by setting him up for disaster in 2020.
If Pelosi continues to hang on to the articles, she can simply store them in her back pocket and transmit them at some truly inconvenient time for both McConnell and Trump. Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic made this point in The Atlantic, writing that by keeping the articles, Pelosi maintains the ability to “trigger” the Senate trial at any given moment. Pelosi could, for instance, opt to transmit them after Democrats are well on their way to coalescing behind a Democratic nominee, especially if that person is not a sitting U.S. senator. "The country then has to watch a spasmodic and bitter few days or weeks of argument over the president’s conduct even as Democrats are unifying behind someone far away from the skirmishes," they write. Or how about sending them the week before the Republican convention is to nominate Trump? That would be fun. Plus, the closer we are to the election, the harder those votes will be for vulnerable GOP senators.
The other possibility is that Pelosi transmits sooner rather than later to avoid looking overly political. In that case, she still has another card to play, and it's a whopper: subpoenaing former national security adviser John Bolton. Since Bolton has agreed to testify if subpoenaed in the Senate, the House could just go ahead and subpoena him anyway. Even if he decides to fight the House subpoena, he's already weakened his legal position by saying that he would testify in the Senate. Or perhaps he agrees to testify in the House. Either way—whether Bolton testifies or the specter of his testimony looms—Republican senators will have to deal with the fallout of potentially voting to exclude witnesses such as Bolton, who was a key player with plenty of access to Trump throughout the entire Ukraine episode. The vast majority of Americans, including those in swing states, want a fair trial that includes witnesses and key documents. Voting against the public’s wishes will likely not play well for the GOP senators most at risk of losing their seats.
Whether Pelosi transmits now or later, she's still in a better strategic position than McConnell. He may indeed get the trial he wants the way he wants it, but Pelosi is positioned to help make both Trump and vulnerable Republican senators suffer at the ballot box for delivering a sham trial.