Considering how conservative and buttoned-up Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been about this whole thing — keeping the charges narrowly focused on Ukraine, and resisting every attempt to include Robert Mueller's material or the emoluments violations in the impeachment inquiry — it came as something of a shock on Wednesday night when she abruptly announced that she would not name House managers for a trial or send the articles of impeachment to the Senate until she knew how that body planned to proceed.I hope something good comes out of this approach. But I just don't understand why Pelosi thinks she has leverage over McConnell. The whole plan seems to turn on this assumption: "Trump also wants to stage a full trial because he believes that what he did was perfect and wants 'total exoneration' on TV."
It was an unexpectedly bold power play, upending what Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his lieutenants had hoped to turn into a dull, perfunctory affair in order to spare their vulnerable swing-state Republican incumbents as much damage as possible. They know that holding a real trial with witnesses could be disastrous, and they have been fighting both the Democratic leadership and the White House on that point.
We'll see if that works. But if Pelosi doesn't send the charges to Senate for trial, the Republicans will declare complete exoneration for Trump anyway. It's possible that Trump is so intensely fixated on having the Senate find him innocent that he will insist on having witnesses called, for which Pelosi is supposedly holding out.
But to me, this looks very uncomfortably like Pelosi finding an excuse to make the impeachment just go away, which was her position in her first six months as Speaker this year.
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