Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump spent much of the week goading each other with increasingly direct insults, but the House Speaker has many reasons for…
Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump spent much of the week goading each other with increasingly direct insults, but the House Speaker has many reasons for resisting what could be her ultimate weapon: impeachment.
Pelosi is watching more than just the national polls that show most of the public doesn’t support impeachment. She is also wary of animating the president’s voter base for the 2020 election and opening a trial that would give the Republican-led Senate the chance to acquit him.
Even while Pelosi urges restraint, she has sharpened her response to questions about impeachment, saying Trump is “obstructing justice,” and “engaged in a cover-up.” She said at a Thursday news conference that Trump, for political reasons, actually wants Democrats to try to impeach him, and she characterized him as frustrated that they are not yet “on the path to impeachment.”
These mixed messages from Pelosi – urging caution and recognizing that impeachment could be “unavoidable” – reflect the delicate job of balancing aggressive congressional oversight with the need to preserve her majority in the House and deny Trump re-election in 2020.
Faced with resistance from the Trump administration to committee probes, some Democrats are increasingly looking to an impeachment inquiry as the legal justification to enforce subpoenas, pushing Pelosi to begin the process despite the political risks.
“Ignoring subpoenas, obstruction of justice – yes, these could be impeachable offenses,” Pelosi said Thursday. “How we deal with it is a decision that our caucus makes, and our caucus is very much saying, whatever we do, we need to be ready when we do it.”
In a series of press statements, public letters and an aborted meeting this week, Pelosi and Trump, two of the most powerful people in the U. S., traded taunts and questioned each other’s sanity. They faulted each other for abandoning bipartisan negotiations on infrastructure and trade. Trump called Pelosi “a mess” and “crazy.” She said she prays for the president and suggested his family or staff should have “an intervention.”
Trump tweeted a video clip that had been altered to exaggerate stumbles in Pelosi’s speech.
“She said terrible things so I just responded in kind,” the president said Friday before leaving on a trip to Japan. “You think Nancy’s the same as she was? She’s not.”
While she has long questioned Trump’s fitness for office, for almost two years Pelosi said Democrats should withhold judgment on impeachment until they saw Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Yet that report, released in a redacted form last month, failed to give Democrats a clear path forward by neither conclusively clearing Trump of wrongdoing nor providing irrefutable examples of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” the Constitution says would merit removal of a president.
