And so we come to the end of the waiting period, controlled by Speaker Pelosi, between approving the articles of the impeachment of President Trump, finally followed by a party line vote to deliver them, and the actual ritual delivery.
Did the unexpected pause between approval and delivery actually work to the Speaker’s advantage? Since no one likes to take a politician at their word, most commentator’s have disregarded the Speaker’s contention that she wanted to understand how the trial in the Senate would be run, in order to select the ‘managers’ of the trial, and encourage Senate leader McConnell (R-KY) to run a “fair trial,” rather than a quick sham trial. Indeed, most commentator’s are guided by their divination of the Speaker’s “true” intentions.
Chris Cillizza of CNN thinks Pelosi gambled and lost:
Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s announcement Tuesday that the full House would vote on sending the articles of impeachment against Donald Trump to the Senate this week — a move that will formally trigger the start of the trial against the President in the upper chamber — amounts to a stark concession that her plan to delay that action for nearly a month failed. …
Pelosi’s goal was simple: To try to force Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s hand. Pelosi wanted to use her possession of the articles of impeachment to yield promises and/or compromises from McConnell — most notably on the issue of witnesses being allowed to be called in the Senate trial.
Except that McConnell wasn’t playing ball.
“There will be no haggling with the House over Senate procedure,” McConnell said earlier this month. …
Which left Pelosi hung out to dry. The leverage she imagined she possessed to get McConnell to accede to her wishes didn’t exist. McConnell was perfectly happy waiting while Pelosi held on to the articles of impeachment, probably believing rightly that these sorts of delaying tactics would look like just more Washington funny business to the average person. And he knew that whenever she decided to send the articles over, he had a majority waiting to open the trial without any promises made on witnesses.
Cillizza believes in playing the short game, evidently, in which success is measured against those goals associated with the impeachment & trial.
The Week’s Matthew Walther is of a like mind:
Which brings us back to the mystery that has been at the center of Trump’s impeachment since the beginning. Why did Pelosi, a sober-minded, no-nonsense centrist who declared over and over again that impeachment was not worth pursuing, finally change her mind? Why did she wait to do so until last October, at which point it would have been obvious that the process would overlap with this year’s caucuses and primaries? Why did she agree to draft and adopt articles of impeachment before she had secured the testimony of all the witnesses she and her members considered relevant? And why, finally, did she seem to have no coherent response prepared for the not exactly remote contingency in which McConnell refused to give her and her Senate colleagues the sort of trial they wanted? To quote an eminent anti-Boomer philosopher: “No thought was put into this.”
Though it is difficult to see what motivated Pelosi, especially in her decision to stall the inevitable handover of the process to the Senate, it is hard not to imagine that she had some sort of plan in mind. It just doesn’t seem to have been a very good one.
When faced with an impenetrable and unexpected response from a tactician with a series of successes behind them, mystification doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve failed – it may mean they’re playing for a different goal than you understand.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), meanwhile, has decided to express the belief that this is all about intramural politics:
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy suggested this week that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delayed sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate in order to harm Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.
The top House Republican said Pelosi’s decision to withhold the impeachment articles against President Trump for weeks while demanding that Democrats are assured a “fair trial” was aimed at ensuring that Sanders would be tied up with the Senate trial in the days leading up to the Iowa caucuses.
“This is the dirty little secret that nobody is talking about, why the speaker held these papers,” McCarthy told Fox News on Sunday.
“Remember what happened in the last nomination process, where the [Democratic National Committee] chairman, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz had to resign the night before the nomination convention started because they had found out they had cheated Senator Bernie Sanders from the opportunity to become the nominee. They are doing the exact same thing right now,” McCarthy said, referring to internal DNC emails leaked by Wikileaks in 2016 that showed Wasserman-Schultz and other DNC officials had exercised bias against Sanders in favor of Hillary Clinton. [National Review]
Despite the conspiratorial tone, and Rep McCarthy’s history of silly-ass remarks, this is a fair point. Back when the story about the incident came out, I expressed the thought that if independent voters and Democratic voters were sufficiently put off by the perception of manipulation of the 2016 Democratic nominating process, Trump might win.
All that said, McCarthy’s remark is somewhat dubious. After all, four Senators are impacted by this maneuver[1], and it presumes that Pelosi favors Biden, which may or may not be true: to my knowledge, she’s not expressed an opinion, and I would hope wouldn’t use her position to surreptitiously manipulate the nominating process.
And, you know, if Sanders wants the nomination, he should just bloody well join the party and stop trying to both have and eat his cake. Speaking as an independent.
Steve Benen has a more sanguine view of the delay:
But there’s a flip side to the picture. After holding the impeachment articles for nearly a month, Pelosi allowed investigations to continue and more incriminating information to come to light, which wasn’t yet available when her chamber voted on Dec. 18.
Her efforts also helped change the nature of the conversation — appetite among Senate Republicans for witnesses was at best muted a month ago, and it’s grown since — putting legitimate process concerns up front and center. Meanwhile, GOP opposition to a “motion to dismiss” has reached the point at which its support is evaporating.
It’d obviously be overstating it to argue that Pelosi got everything she wanted out of the delay, but all things considered, the White House appears to be in a worse position now than it was the day after the president was impeached. [MSNBC]
While the Parnas allegations are irrelevant until corroborated, this news is a good example of Benen’s assertion:
The Government Accountability Office, the federal government’s top auditing group, released a report on Thursday deeming the Trump administration’s hold on military aid to Ukraine illegal.
While Congress had earmarked $350 million in military aid destined for Ukraine over the summer, the Trump administration held up the transfer of the aid. The White House Office of Management and Budget explained in a December memo to the GAO that the holdup was intended as a routine review of the funds. However, the GAO eventually concluded that the measure was not in line with the law.
“Faithful execution of the law does not permit the President to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law,” the GAO wrote in its report. “The OMB withheld funds for a policy reason, which is not permitted under the Impoundment Control Act (ICA). [National Review]
If you’re a conservative reader who has been griping that no laws have been broken, and therefore impeachment lacks credibility, I’ll be handing you the spoonful of crow next time we meet.
But even Benen is a trifle too transactional in this regard. I suspect Pelosi is playing the long game, and the long game is to expose Trump’s corruption while tying the Republican Party so irretrievably to him that the independents and moderate Republics can no longer hold their noses. This delay built anticipation, opened many questions in even the casual audience’s mind, and permitted more opportunity for confirmation of corruption to appear – such as the above. She used her stated concerns, which were and remain quite valid, to leverage more distaste for Senators McConnell (R-KY), Graham (R-SC), and even Hawley (R-MO), each of whom have expressed no interest in a fair trial. The first two face re-election battles; Hawley does not, but this may damage him badly enough that an opponent can knock him down in the years ahead. The delay was not unseemly, although a bigger one would have been daring enough to excite both loathing and admiration; it’s hard to stick Pelosi and the Democrats with charges of playing politics. Her expressions of religious faith are important as well as an offering to the GOP base that the Democrats are just as much Americans as the Republicans. In my opinion, they are actually moreso.
The entire trial, and how the GOP votes at the end, will be tools in the hands of a Democratic Party with a great deal of corruption to use against Trump and the Republicans. That’s the real goal of the Pelosi strategy: to melt the Republicans into a puddle about nine months from now.
Pelosi may have their metaphorical nuts in the grinder.
