The Pelosi impeachment blunder

Ben Domenech:

The decision by Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic House leadership to depart from Washington without resolving whether the Senate trial of the president will even happen is a blunder of potentially serious proportions. It totally undermines everything the Democrats have done narratively for the past several months, embracing their role as defenders of the Constitution against a clear and present danger to its tenets. Instead, impeachment now looks more like an example of that ancient term: a partisan traveshamockery.

Pelosi’s supporters who are hard core Democratic donors and partisans may like this move, since it denies the president the surety of what is almost assuredly going to be a bipartisan vote to acquit him on both charges in the Senate. These are the same people who wanted to extend the process by forcing Mick Mulvaney and John Bolton to testify via the courts, who hold out hope to this day that the Southern District of New York will turn up something on Rudy Giuliani that will make for even more articles of impeachment. They want impeachment now, impeachment tomorrow, impeachment forever – asterisks all the way down.

But for the approximately 30 members who stood with Pelosi to make this tough vote, they don’t want impeachment to extend further into the new year – they want it over as quickly as possible. The narrative argument they can make is obvious: “yes, we voted for impeachment, we had to do it because of the Constitution, but the very next day we proved we could work with the president on trade, and we’ll work with him on prescription drug prices and other issues moving forward.” That’s how they got elected in the first place, after all – and defending those members is what Pelosi has concentrated on. It’s why she didn’t want to do this in the first place.

The idea that Pelosi would hold on to these articles isn’t envisioned in the process or rules. Noah Feldman, who testified for the Democrats during their proceedings, maintains that Trump isn’t actually impeached until the House sends over the articles. It also prompts a host of questions about whether the Senate could hold a trial even if the House does not transmit the Articles of Impeachment. Weird granular debates about legislative rules seems like exactly what’s needed to increase the momentum toward removal, guys – great job.
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There is more.

The results are incoherence on the part of Democrats trying to justify the rush to impeach and then the failure to transmit the vote to the Senate.  It makes a mockery of their rationale for rushing to vote without calling fact witnesses.