There was a rambunctious conference call amongst Dem national leaders yesterday. In the confab, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her tireless Tonto Steny Hoyer tried to pull the reins in on her more radical colleagues who are pushing for impeachment. She’s walking on thin ice. She has to keep the loons happy while knowing there is no evidence for impeachment and there likely won’t be. But more than that, she’s scared.
Little by little she can feel the caucus slipping away from her. Whether it’s the pressure from Bolshie idiots like AOC, the mind-numbing hatred of America on display by Rep. Omar, or the recent rash of Trump wins, she knows she probably peaked election day last November. However, one thing would drive the last nails in the coffin sooner rather than later. And that’s impeachment.
Unlike many of her younger and ideologically wackier colleagues, she remembers late 1998 and the Clinton impeachment. She gleefully saw then how moronic Republicans took a president who was slowly twisting in the wind and gave him an out by their partisan overreach. If they had left him to his own devices he would have been mired deeper and deeper in his own mess. They rescued him by giving him a legitimate target, the overzealous GOP, and a Senate trial he was bound to win. During and after the process, after being made a martyr by his opponents, his poll numbers actually went up.
Yes, impeachment made him more popular.
Pelosi knows the shoe is now on the other foot and she doesn’t want to pull a Market Garden when she knows full well XXX Corps will never get there. Numbers wise, Trump is not in a bad way presently and all impeachment will do is further solidify his base in opposition and make moderate Americans disgusted at the effort for naught, as the GOP solidly controls the Senate for any trial. That assumes the full House votes for a presidential indictment, something not assured. Nancy knows all this.
But her radicals don’t care about political reality and yearn for a scalp even if in the end they are the ones whose hair hangs from the president’s belt.
So pity poor Pelosi. Caught between a rock and a hard-left place. Over the next more than several months, as House hearings only wet Dem whistles to go after the president harder, it’s gonna get worse for her balancing act.
Then timed just right for Trump’s reelection kickoff, she has to cave one way or another. Go for impeachment and lose soon by poll numbers and certain acquittal in the upper chamber. Punt and get your radicals so cheesed off at you, you lose in 2020 by internal division. It’s almost as if her party has taken the bait and yet again fallen into one of the president’s well-laid traps.
Given her familiarity with the usual outcome of such, that has to be her ultimate horror.
