House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hasn't played all her cards yet, and she's already declaring the Senate trial a sham. “I disagree with the idea that he could be acquitted," Pelosi told the South Florida Sun Sentinel Editorial Board on Friday. “You can’t be acquitted if you don’t have a trial, and you can’t have a trial if you don’t have witnesses and you don’t have documents."
Pelosi made the comments heading into a day of closing arguments in which Senate Republicans appeared poised for a vote to quash witness testimony entirely with an acquittal vote soon to follow. (That vote is now expected to be held next Wednesday, following the State of the Union.)
Pelosi also directed withering criticism at Trump's defense team. "To say in a proceeding in the Senate if a president thinks that his election is in the best interests of the country anything is justified," she said, referencing the argument made by Alan Dershowitz, "I don’t know how they have any integrity or respect left.”
Pelosi said the argument was completely antithetical to the Constitution. “What you heard the president’s lawyer say so undermined what is a democracy, our republic, [by suggesting the Constitution’s] Article II says I can do whatever I want," she said. "No, it doesn’t. That’s not what the Constitution is about."
Pelosi also laid blame for the procedure squarely at Leader Mitch McConnell's feet. “The founders always had in their mind that there could be a rogue president, and that’s why they put guardrails in the Constitution. And impeachment," she noted. "But they probably didn’t figure we would have a rogue president and a rogue Mitch McConnell."
Pelosi said in the interview that House Democrats would continue their push in the courts for oversight and more subpoenas to be honored, “or else we have a monarchy.”
Pelosi clearly isn't finished yet. And given all the loose ends being left by Senate Republicans, she will almost surely spend the rest of 2020 pulling those threads. It's honestly a mystery that McConnell thinks he's going to get away without calling witnesses without Pelosi making life a living hell for Senate Republicans from here till November.
