Speaker Nancy Pelosi is using rhetorical volleys, like accusing President Trump of “a cover-up,” to ease the pressure on impeachment as she counsels a methodical strategy.
WASHINGTON — Speaker Nancy Pelosi hopped into her SUV on Wednesday for the short drive to the White House knowing full well that a presidential ambush awaited. President Trump needed a way out of negotiations over a $2 trillion infrastructure plan that he could not pay for, she told lawmakers at the Capitol an hour earlier.
But Mr. Trump’s offramp led to a topic Ms. Pelosi is trying to play down: impeachment.
If Mr. Trump’s preplanned Rose Garden explosion proved anything, it is that the president is willing to sacrifice his own stated policy agenda to keep “presidential harassment” front and center, and that the speaker, who wants to focus on policy, is leveraging decades of hard-won political capital to keep her party from pursuing an impeachment path that she believes could cost House Democrats their majority in 2020 and keep Mr. Trump in the White House.
The White House meeting, all three minutes of it, was only Ms. Pelosi’s second most important meeting on Wednesday morning. At 9 a.m., the speaker, seeking to head off a growing revolt by House Democrats calling for Mr. Trump’s impeachment, convened an all-hands meeting with her caucus to sell her members on her strategy of exhausting all legislative and legal avenues before taking up impeachment.
For now, she is guided by two political goals: protecting the 40 newly elected Democratic members, who largely come from moderate or conservative districts, and avoiding Mr. Trump’s traps. And Wednesday was a good day for her. A federal judge rejected Mr. Trump’s request to block congressional subpoenas for his banking records, the second such ruling this week and a boost to the speaker’s plea for patience as the House’s fight moves into the courts.
“Very excited, no surprise, two in one week,” Ms. Pelosi boasted.
And Mr. Trump’s public scuttling of infrastructure negotiations gave Democratic leaders the rare chance to change the subject back to policy fights: “Does Congressman Zeldin Agree With Trump on Blocking Infrastructure Bill?” read the headline of a House Democratic campaign arm blast email, one of several targeting a Republican House member, in this case Lee Zeldin of New York.
But even Ms. Pelosi’s closest allies wonder how long she can hold the line against impeachment if the president continues to ignore the House’s demands.
“This is a threat to the whole democratic system. It’s like being on the Titanic,” said Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee and a Pelosi supporter who has not ruled out supporting impeachment. “While she may be constrained, I think that thought may be the thing that may cause her to say, ‘Maybe I need to take another look at this.’ It’s a hard question for all of us.”
After Wednesday’s meeting, Ms.
