Nancy Pelosi, the majority leader in the House of Representatives is dead wrong about not starting impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump. Yet there is a method to her madness. Does she know something we don’t know? The answer is a resounding, yes! She is a brilliant and principled leader of the Democratic Party, but her experience with impeachment has paradoxically blinded her to present reality—even though her thought process is reasonable and rational. Once we understand why Nancy Pelosi thinks the way she does, we can see that, although her thinking is strategically logical, it no longer applies today.
There are three main theories why Pelosi has failed to jump on the impeachment bandwagon, which have been reflected in the diaries and comments here at Daily Kos, and also touted by various political pundits both on the air and in written articles.
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Trust her. She knows what she’s doing. We don’t know what she is doing, but she does. It doesn’t seem to make sense, but we should just accept that she is much smarter and more experienced than anyone else. As Walter Dellinger wrote in the Washington Post a few days ago, “I’m not one to second-guess Nancy Pelosi. She is the greatest majority leader of the House of Representatives in my lifetime.”
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She’s right and here's why: The Senate will never convict Trump, impeachment will be divisive, and the Republicans will win in 2020 if we try to impeach him.
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She’s nuts. (Or too timid to take on the big bully.)
Of these three common theories, I previously favored the third. That is, until I read something in the book, To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment, on page 178. Suddenly Nancy Pelosi’s seemingly irrational reluctance to impeach Trump made sense. Mind you, I didn’t change my mind. I still think she’s wrong. But I least I can now appreciate just why she is so reticent to pick up the gauntlet and proceed toward impeachment against the worst President in our history.
Previously, I criticized others who only focused on the Clinton impeachment, as if the only one they experienced or remembered was the only one that mattered; or even the Nixon impeachment if they were as old as I am. Even fewer today look at the impeachment proceedings against Andrew Johnson, as that now seems like ancient history.
Yet it never occurred to me that one, such as one Nancy Pelosi, could become obsessed with a more recent impeachment—the impeachment of George W. Bush!
In my previous diary, Self-Impeachment Isn’t a Thing: It’s a Cowardly Misnomer, I pointed out that none of three scholarly books about impeachment ever mentioned self-impeachment. But apparently, the impeachment of George W. Bush was a thing—and might have happened if Nancy Pelosi hadn’t nipped it in the bud. Moreover, as far as I can tell, Nancy Pelosi was right, at least over ten years ago. As bad as George Bush was as the President, trying to impeach him was likely to hurt the Democrats and not Bush or the Republicans.
I remember detesting George W. Bush. Yet I don’t ever remember thinking he did anything worthy of impeachment. There is a huge difference between being a perpetrator of bad policies, even immorally bad policies like torture, and being someone who threatens to undermine our constitutional government. If I remember correctly, Congress voted to go to war with Iraq, even if there were no weapons of mass destruction there. Now if Congress voted not to go to war, and Bush violated the will of Congress and went to war anyway—then there would have been grounds for impeachment.
Yet not all Democrats were willing to see it that way. Remembering the highly-partisan and unjustifiable impeachment of Bill Clinton, it was natural for many Democrats to call for the impeachment of a far worse president. Nancy Pelosi, using keen judgment on a difficult call, decided differently.
Allow me to quote from To End a Presidency...
…After his [George W.] reelection in 2004 Americans soured on the deteriorating situation in Iraq, especially when it became clear that Bush had built his case for war on faulty intelligence. Bush’s popularity also declined amid revelations of torture, black sites, extraordinary rendition, and illegal surveillance. His gross mishandling of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath inflicted further political damage…
…32 percent of Americans agreed that Bush should be impeached and removed from office…the 2007 poll disclosed a stark partisan divide on impeaching Bush: Republicans were 9 percent in favor and 91 percent opposed, while Democrats were 58 percent in favor [and] 39 percent opposed…
Those figures revealed that impeachment was a classic wedge issue: it split Democrats but unified Republicans.
Just for comparison, today 45% of Americans (not 32%) and 70% of Democrats (not 58%) want to see impeachment hearings proceed. These figures reveal that opposing impeachment will split the Democratic Party, and that supporting impeachment will unite the Democratic Party. Things have changed a lot in eighteen years. Nancy Pelosi hasn’t changed. She has hardening of the attitudes.
Also note that when Nancy talks about impeachment being divisive, it is easy to assume she means impeachment will divide the country. Yet looking at the page from her political playbook she was far more concerned about dividing the Democrats. This might explain why her saying impeachment will be divisive rings hollow. Thanks to Trump, America is already divided; impeachment won’t make this any worse. But back in the days when Nancy Pelosi stated that George W. Bush was a “total failure,” she was keenly aware that right-wing Republicans like Rush Limbaugh, would exploit impeachment hearings to “fire up the base” to win the midterm elections in 2006.
Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi was sick of it. At a party meeting she made clear that “impeachment is off the table”—a commitment she had to repeat many times over the next six months…She stood by it as sound electoral strategy…It was unprecedented, however, for the President’s own allies to rely so heavily on impeachment threats to turn out their own base…Never before had a Speaker of the House traveled the country explaining why she didn’t want to impeach the president.
Back then, the Republicans really were trying to goad Pelosi down the path of impeachment, as the popular support for impeachment had already peaked. But good old Nancy Pelosi stuck to her guns at the time when impeachment wasn’t as compelling as today. Ironically, even one Donald J. Trump criticized Pelosi for being afraid to bring the impeachment of George W. to the table. You could say Trump was trying to personally goad Pelosi into impeachment. Here is what Trump said to Wolf Blitzer in October 2008:
“I was surprised that [Pelosi] didn’t do more in terms of Bush and going after Bush. It just seemed like she was really going to look to impeach Bush and get him out of office. Which personally, I think would have been a wonderful thing.” Blitzer asked, “To impeach him?” And Trump replied, “For the war. For the war! Well, he lied! He got us into the war with lies!”
No wonder Nancy is sensitive about being goaded into impeachment by Donald Trump. She’s been there, done that, and got the T-shirt. Of course, the Trumpster did have a case. Any President who flagrantly lied to the American people should be impeached.
The problem is that today, when most Democrats see Trump thumbing his nose at subpoenas and obstructing justice in plain sight in violation of the law, Nancy Pelosi sees someone goading her to make a strategic mistake. Pelosi had witnessed how wrong it was for the Republicans to impeach Bill Clinton primarily for political advantages; and knowing two wrongs don’t make a right, was adamant about not impeaching George Bush primarily for political reasons.
But my, how the times have changed.
I submit that what was sound electoral strategy for the Democrats in 2006, is a recipe for disaster in 2019. Then Republicans wanted Pelosi to proceed with impeachment hearings as it would help them “stir up the base.” Now, all Trump has going for him is his base, which is already so-stirred-up they have lost all power of rational thought. Trump won’t win one vote if the House impeaches him. But the Democrats can gain millions of votes striving to do anything they can to save our constitutional democracy.
Meanwhile, if impeachment proceedings commence, the Republicans will be in a no-win situation; either they will have to blindly support an increasingly tyrannical president, or they will have to offend Trump’s base of brainwashed supporters. Some, like Senator Lindsey Graham have an easy calculation: better to blindly support Trump as your State went bigly for Trump in 2016—while lying through your teeth and hypocritically spitting on every principle of impeachment you spouted when Bill Clinton was impeached; while simultaneously reversing your loathing of Donald Trump when you were running against him, and engaging in a sickening sycophantic ass-kissing love-fest now you are up for re-election. Rick Wilson claimed in his book, Everything Trump Touches Dies, that anyone who gets too close to Trump becomes ruined. And so it is with Lindsey Graham. The pathological liar of a President has transformed Graham, once the close friend of the honorable John McCain, into a servile pathological liar himself.
One could argue, and argue eloquently, that the House should impeach Trump regardless of the political implications. I have already done that, and more recently AndySchmookler did it better than I did in his diary, The Democrats Moment of Truth. Yet the thesis of this diary here is that the page from Nancy Pelosi’s Political Playbook relies on a political strategy that was perhaps appropriate years ago, when Trump was just an onlooker, but isn’t today now he is a President run amok.
In conclusion, there are three possibilities…
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Nancy Pelosi was wrong before when she decided not to try to impeach Bush, just as she is wrong now.
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Nancy Pelosi was right before when she decided not to try to impeach Bush, just as she is doing the right thing avoiding impeachment now.
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Nancy Pelosi did the right think resisting impeachment before, but this page from her political playbook no longer works under completely different political conditions.
I put my money on the third option. Political strategy needs to change with the times. What was shrewd strategy yesterday, is no longer tenable today. If Pelosi doesn’t soon wake up and smell the Constitution burning, she will end up as a follower of the Democratic Party rather than its leader.