First, the Trump presidency was a “national emergency” that demanded swift action via Congress.
Then, just as suddenly, Speaker Pelosi refused to allow the Senate to review the paltry case cobbled together by wild-eyed House Democrats. Apparently the Trump presidency wasn’t nearly the “national emergency” they said it was.
And now? The Democrat Party is a laughing stock mishmash of low IQ anti-American moments and repeated political failures.
… Pelosi has no standing to dictate the terms of a Senate trial; no constitutional right or political leverage. Why she has put herself in a position that will ultimately end, one way or another, with her surrendering to McConnell is perplexing.
Because whatever you make of the case against Donald Trump, it’s getting increasingly difficult to argue that this amateurish, constantly shifting effort by the House has been effective. After two dramatic emergency impeachment hearings, a pretend standoff and massive cooperative coverage from the media, poll numbers haven’t budged. They may even have ticked back toward Trump.
Pelosi realized that impeachment was a mistake. She didn’t want the president to be able tell voters that he had been exonerated by Senate. The only way to mitigate the damage was to undertake a ham-fisted effort to attack the Senate trial and dampen, or perhaps circumvent, that inevitable moment.
In the process, however, Pelosi destroyed the Democrats’ justification for rushing impeachment in the first place. Nadler and Schiff both argued that Trump’s tenure in office constituted a national emergency, and that the only way to save the republic from another stolen election was to move quickly.
Pelosi’s defenders are running out of arguments. Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin now says that acting on the Clinton precedent means that moderate Republican senators such as Susan Collins “will face the real possibility that conclusive evidence of Trump’s wrongdoing will come to light after a sham trial. That would make for a disastrous, humiliating legacy.”
The gaping hole in this argument, and the reason Democrats are losing the debate, is that they’ve already claimed to have conclusive evidence of Trump’s wrongdoing. They claimed they had proof of bribery, but they didn’t include it in the impeachment articles. They claimed to have proof in the Mueller Report that Trump obstructed justice, yet it’s not in the article of impeachments either. Rubin herself has alleged, dozens of times, that we already have definitive proof Trump has committed an impeachable offense.