Nancy Pelosi’s brilliantly inside-out strategy to impeach Donald Trump is working perfectly
To anyone with a with a fairly decent political IQ who’s been paying close attention, a few things have been clear from the start: 1) The midterm results dictated that Donald Trump would eventually be impeached. 2) House Democrats would have a far better chance of getting a satisfactory result from the impeachment process if they waited a bit for public sentiment to get ahead of them on it. 3) When the time came, the Democrats would begin calling for impeachment from the bottom of the food chain upward. 4) Nancy Pelosi has been banking on this all along.
Things are now falling into place by the hour. For weeks, some fringe House Democrats – far enough removed from the House leadership that they could speak up without speaking for anyone else – have been calling for impeachment. Yesterday things escalated when Donald Trump illegally ordered Don McGahn not to testify. That enraged large chunks of the public, giving a number of members of the influential House Judiciary Committee (where the impeachment process begins) enough cover to publicly call for impeachment. Now it’s reached the committee chair stage, and that’s playing out in real time.
Last night the Washington Post reported that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler privately told Nancy Pelosi that he’s on board with an impeachment inquiry, before Nadler then publicly stated he’s deferring to Pelosi. Today, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff told the television cameras that the “case gets stronger” for impeachment, and House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings announced that “I’m getting there” on impeachment. It’s clear they’re all preparing to soon publicly call for an impeachment inquiry.
So do you really think these three key committee chairs, who are all intensely loyal to Nancy Pelosi, would be publicly committing themselves to this if she weren’t on board with it? This process of public calls for impeachment coming from the bottom-up has helped to stoke the general public’s desire for it. This means Pelosi and the Democrats can move forward with impeachment and be seen by the public as doing it at the behest of the people, as opposed to doing it for partisan reasons. That takes away Trump’s only real counterargument.
