It’s Nancy who should be censured
BECAUSE a presidential impeachment is such a rare event, the end of the trial should be a moment fraught with gripping tension and historic significance. Should be, but Wednesday’s conclusion was decidedly ho-hum.
There is far more passion in a New York neighborhood debate over pooper scoopers than there was in the United States Senate, and not just because Republicans hold the majority. It’s because it was clear long ago that there were never 67 votes for conviction and removal in a case so thin on substance and so fat with politics.
Never before had single-party charges been levied by a House of Representatives, and despite Democrats increasingly wild claims and Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s bizarre holding of the articles for 33 days, the case was dead on arrival in the Senate. There is zero reason to believe that even added witnesses and a months-long fishing expedition would have changed a single vote.
In fact, the end was foretold just a day after Pelosi authorized the House inquiry, based on leaks of a so-called whistleblower complaint. That was last Sept. 24th, and a day later, President Trump released the transcript of his call with the president of Ukraine.
As I wrote then, “Imagine if Pelosi had held her impeachment fire for 24 hours.”
Then she would have seen that the leaks were wrong in major ways and that the call came nowhere near the standards required to remove a sitting president.
Naturally, the left-wing media is spinning the final vote as proof that Trump holds a “vice grip” on the GOP, as the New York Times put it. It and others cite Mitt Romney’s lone GOP vote for conviction, on the first article, as proof that everyone else in the GOP is a coward and corrupt blah, blah, blah.
It never occurs to the Times and its ilk to look at Democrats’ straight-line conformity and declare that they are the ones in the vice grip of madness. For the truth, they need look no further than Pelosi’s initial warning against partisan impeachment, which came before she plunged the country into a failed disaster that further inflamed national divisions.
As majority leader Mitch McConnell told reporters after the trial, Pelosi “was right in the beginning” to resist impeachment and her flip-flop was “a colossal political mistake.” The proof is that the polls have switched in favor of both the president and the GOP.
All true, but I also believe the Pelosi who resisted impeachment for the first eight months of 2019 is not the same Pelosi who disgracefully tore up her copy of the president’s State of the Union speech on national television.
The new Pelosi, I am convinced, has fallen victim to Trump Derangement Syndrome and like all its victims, her brain is fogged by personal hatred of the president and she can’t see straight.
Consider that she told TV anchors Tuesday that, apparently with pride, she has not spoken to the president since they had a blowup in an October meeting at the White House. He called her a “third-rate politician” and she said that with Trump, “All roads lead to Putin.”
The personal attacks were biting, but that’s hardly unique in Washington. It is, however, a historic anomaly that a Speaker reacts to such fights by using the nuclear weapon — impeachment.
Thankfully, she failed in her putsch, and the realization of that must have landed like a bomb on her Tuesday, leading her to shame her office, Congress and Americans everywhere with her televised temper tantrum.
I hope the talk of censuring her is not just talk. She made a crusade of declaring the president unfit, and after failing to bring him down, demonstrated her unfitness to the world. Now it is she who must be held accountable for her reprehensible conduct.