Send Nancy home

Speaker Nancy Pelosi told senior Democrats that she’d like to see President Donald Trump “in prison” as she clashed with House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler in a meeting on Tuesday night over whether to launch impeachment proceedings.

  Politico

Go home, Nancy.

Pelosi met with Nadler (D-N.Y.) and several other top Democrats who are aggressively pursuing investigations against the president, according to multiple sources. Nadler and other committee leaders have been embroiled in a behind-the-scenes turf battle for weeks over ownership of the Democrats’ sprawling investigation into Trump.

This is why we can't have nice things. Get your act together, ffs, and work together. Jesus.

Nadler pressed Pelosi to allow his committee to launch an impeachment inquiry against Trump — the second such request he’s made in recent weeks only to be rebuffed by the California Democrat and other senior leaders.

I didn't realize she has the command of what the Judiciary Committee does or does not launch.

Pelosi stood firm, reiterating that she isn’t open to the idea of impeaching Trump at this time.

“I don’t want to see him impeached, I want to see him in prison,” Pelosi said, according to multiple Democratic sources familiar with the meeting.

Nancy is full of shit. Both things can happen.

They said she was expressing solidarity with pro-impeachment Democrats who want to hold the president accountable while disputing the idea that it is now time to take that step.

Sure, let's wait until he does something even worse than what he's already done.

Pelosi has long argued that certain conditions must be met before Democrats begin impeachment — public support and strong bipartisan backing, neither of which have so far materialized.

And neither will materialize until impeachment hearings are televised.

Other Democrats said Pelosi’s comment wasn’t that surprising given her previous criticisms of the president, including saying Trump “is engaged in a cover-up,” that his staff and family should stage an intervention and that the president’s actions “are villainous to the Constitution of the United States.”

Making it mandatory that impeachment hearings are held. FFS, Nancy.

Ashley Etienne, a Pelosi spokeswoman said Pelosi and the chairmen “had a productive meeting about the state of play with the Mueller report. They agreed to keep all options on the table and continue to move forward with an aggressive hearing and legislative strategy, as early as next week, to address the president’s corruption and abuses of power uncovered in the report.”

You mean those investigations with subpoenas that Trump is ordering everybody to ignore?

House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) and Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) were also present for the meeting. Financial Services Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) — a vocal impeachment supporter whose panel is probing Trump’s finances — was not in attendance.

Did Nancy not invite her, or did she not want to risk putting her boot up Nancy's ass?

Both Schiff and Neal argued that if Democrats are going to open an inquiry, they should also be prepared to impeach Trump, which the caucus isn’t ready to do, they said. Cummings also sided with Pelosi, according to a source.

Neal also grumbled about Democrats who have come out in favor of impeachment, saying it puts pressure on members in bordering congressional districts to explain why they don’t feel the same way. House Rules Chairman Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) — whose district touches Neal’s — came out for impeachment last week.

[...]

The gulf between Nadler and Pelosi was on full display Wednesday as the New York Democrat dodged questions about whether he and Pelosi were in agreement on Democrats’ impeachment strategy.

“We are investigating all of the things we would investigate, frankly, in an impeachment inquiry,” Nadler said on CNN. He then paused for several seconds when asked if he and Pelosi were “on the same page.”

“When that decision has to be made, it will be made not by any one individual, it will be made probably by the caucus as a whole,” Nadler added. “Certainly Nancy will have the largest single voice in it.”

[...]

In reality, the speaker and her top lieutenants have been trying to tamp down a rebellion within the caucus, as close to 60 members have publicly declared they want to begin impeaching Trump.

Time for a new Speaker.

Party leaders have tried to relieve some of the pressure by taking more aggressive public action against the White House’s repeated defiance, including scheduling a contempt vote on the House floor next week against Attorney General William Barr and former White House counsel Don McGahn.

And Democratic leaders continue to emphasize that their methodical, step-by-step oversight process is working, pointing to recent federal court victories Democrats have secured against Trump’s efforts to block them. Nadler is also still trying to secure Mueller’s testimony before his committee.

[...]

Reps. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Joe Neguse (D-Colo.), all members of Democratic leadership and the Judiciary panel, first raised the idea of launching an impeachment inquiry during a private leadership meeting late last month only to be shot down by Pelosi.

Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) and other top Democrats met with Nadler separately that night as he again unsuccessfully argued for opening an impeachment inquiry.

[...]

Pelosi has repeatedly said she doesn’t think trying to impeach Trump is “worth it,” arguing that without the public on their side, the best way to beat the president is to persuade voters to kick him out of office in 2020.

If the public isn't on the side of impeachment, why would they be on the side of voting him out of office?

“I’m not feeling any pressure,” Pelosi told reporters Wednesday.

Well, it's time she did. Send Nancy home.

It is possible to argue that impeaching President Trump and removing him from office before the 2020 election would be unwise, even if he did cheat his way into office, and even if he is abusing the powers of that office to enrich himself, cover up his crimes and leave our national security vulnerable to repeated foreign attacks. Those who make this argument rest their case either on the proposition that impeachment would be dangerously divisive in a nation as politically broken as ours, or on the notion that it would be undemocratic to get rid of a president whose flaws were obvious before he was elected.

  WaPo

Neither argument is valid. Our nation is as divided as it can possibly be. Impeachment would not make it any worse. And Trump's flaws may have been obvious, but his financial shenanigans, his many business failures, his crimes and his criminal connections to mafia figures both domestic and international were not widely known. What most Americans outside of New York City knew about Donald Trump was the illusion created of him on that stupid TV show that presented him as a successful businessman who liked to fire people and get things done. It's what Trump voters thought they were getting.

[M]uch of the House Democratic caucus, at least one Republican member of that chamber (Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan) and more than a third of the nation’s voters disagree. They treat the impeachment power as a vital constitutional safeguard against a potentially dangerous and fundamentally tyrannical president and view it as a power that would be all but ripped out of the Constitution if it were deemed unavailable against even this president.

That is my view, as well.

And that's the clear view.

Just as a prosecutor might hesitate to ask a grand jury to indict even an obviously guilty defendant if it appeared that no jury is likely to convict, so, it is said, the House of Representatives might properly decline to impeach even an obviously guilty president — and would be wise to do so — if it appeared the Senate was dead-set against convicting him.

In this case, what that might do instead is show the public exactly what the Republican Senators are willing to allow, crimes and all, at the highest office in the land. Or, by some miracle, it might just make those same Senators pressure Trump to take the Nixon route and leave rather than face conviction in the Senate.

It seems fair to surmise [...] that an impeachment inquiry conducted with ample opportunity for the accused to defend himself before a vote by the full House would be at least substantially protected, even if not entirely bullet-proofed, against a Senate whitewash.

The House, assuming an impeachment inquiry leads to a conclusion of Trump’s guilt, could choose between presenting articles of impeachment even to a Senate pre-committed to burying them and dispensing with impeachment as such while embodying its conclusions of criminality or other grave wrongdoing in a condemnatory “Sense of the House” resolution far stronger than a mere censure. The resolution, expressly and formally proclaiming the president impeachable but declining to play the Senate’s corrupt game, is one that even a president accustomed to treating everything as a victory would be hard-pressed to characterize as a vindication. (A House resolution finding the president “impeachable” but imposing no actual legal penalty would avoid the Constitution’s ban on Bills of Attainder, despite its deliberately stigmatizing character as a “Scarlet ‘I’ ” that Trump would have to take with him into his reelection campaign.)

The point would not be to take old-school House impeachment leading to possible Senate removal off the table at the outset. Instead, the idea would be to build into the very design of this particular inquiry an offramp that would make bypassing the Senate an option while also nourishing the hope that a public fully educated about what this president did would make even a Senate beholden to this president and manifestly lacking in political courage willing to bite the bullet and remove him.

If anyone but Mitch McConnell were in charge, that is.

By resolving now to pursue such a path, always keeping open the possibility that its inquiry would unexpectedly lead to the president’s exoneration, the House would be doing the right thing as a constitutional matter. It would be acting consistent with its overriding obligation to establish that no president is above the law, all the while keeping an eye on the balance of political considerations without setting the dangerous precedent that there are no limits to what a corrupt president can get away with as long as he has a compliant Senate to back him.

Which is where we are now.

And pursuing this course would preserve for all time the tale of this uniquely troubled presidency.

Which needs to be done to salvage what is left of our democracy. It would include not just the Mueller findings, but all the other impeachable offenses he commits on a near daily basis.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.