WASHINGTON — Speaker Nancy Pelosi always knew impeachment would end this way: with the acquittal of President Trump.
Now that it is all but over — and Mr. Trump is about to march onto her home turf, the Capitol, for his inevitable victory lap at his State of the Union address on Tuesday night — Ms. Pelosi must reckon with what she has wrought. Her Republican detractors say she put moderate Democrats in political peril and weakened the House inquiry by failing to wage a prolonged legal fight to obtain critical testimony that the president was blocking.
And Republicans gloat that the failed attempt at removing Mr. Trump has only made him more politically powerful, energizing voters to rally behind a president who survived the ultimate effort to take him down.
But Democrats argue that Ms. Pelosi won by losing, setting the stage for an election that is not only about the kitchen table issues that carried them to the majority in 2018, but also about exposing the president as unfit for office — and Republicans as complicit in his misbehavior. In an interview Monday, Ms. Pelosi said Democrats had forced Republicans to do what Mr. Trump never has: Admit that he was wrong to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals.
“I think that we have pulled back a veil of behavior totally unacceptable to our founders, and that the public will see this with a clearer eye, an unblurred eye,” she said, adding: “Whatever happens, he has been impeached forever. And now these senators, though they don’t have the courage to assign the appropriate penalty, at least are recognizing that he did something wrong.”
Impeachment has been a tricky enterprise for both parties on both sides of the Capitol. In the Senate, where Democrats are in the minority, Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial — which is expected to conclude with his acquittal on Wednesday — forced vulnerable Republicans in swing states to align themselves with a president who brooks no dissent. They bristled at being painted as beholden to Mr. Trump, reacting angrily when the lead House impeachment manager referred to a news report that said Republican senators had been told their heads would be “on a pike” if they voted against him.
But in the House, impeachment was widely viewed as a gamble for moderates who represent districts where Mr. Trump is popular. While Ms. Pelosi gets generally good marks from her rank and file, some centrist members now grumble privately that she made some tactical missteps.
Her refusal to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate for several weeks after the House adopted them, which forced a delay in the Senate trial, generated blowback in swing districts, said Democratic lawmakers who insisted on anonymity to speak candidly. They cringed when Ms. Pelosi made a spectacle out of the eventual signing of the articles in January, when she distributed commemorative pens to colleagues. Critics said it undermined her own oft-stated message that this was a “somber” and “prayerful moment” for the country.
“Her whole thing was this was a solemn moment, and that was undignified to do a pen ceremony,” said one moderate Democrat in Congress, who insisted on anonymity for fear of retribution from the speaker. “A lot of us in the front line felt that wasn’t helpful.”
Other Democrats have questioned the decision to impeach Mr. Trump without exhausting the House’s legal remedies to compel the testimony of key White House witnesses. Those fights could have taken months, potentially pushing a vote to charge him up against the presidential election, or even beyond.
But most Democrats defend Ms. Pelosi. With the economy booming and unemployment low, Mr. Trump should be coasting to victory in 2020, they say. Instead, Republicans like Senators Marco Rubio and Lamar Alexander now say Mr. Trump violated the bounds of appropriate presidential behavior. Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, on Monday called Mr. Trump’s behavior “shameful and wrong,” and said he had degraded the office.
“It has raised the stakes,” said Representative Tom Malinowski, a centrist freshman Democrat from New Jersey who faces a tough re-election challenge from the son of a popular former governor. “I don’t think it’s a loss. It illuminates that the next election isn’t just about whether we continue Trump’s crazy policies; it’s whether we remain a constitutional democracy. That is a debate I am absolutely confident we are winning.”
And at the end of the day, Mr. Trump will still go down as only the third president in American history to be impeached. It is an “ugly distinction,” in the words of Brian Fallon, the executive director of Demand Justice, a progressive advocacy group.
It is no secret in Washington that Ms. Pelosi was never eager to impeach the president. She resisted it for months — even after Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, outlined 10 possible instances of obstruction of justice by the president. She said it would be too divisive and that it ought to be bipartisan, comments that Republicans throw back at her today.
“She’s violated her own criteria in this case when she said it had to be bipartisan,” said Tom Davis, a former Republican congressman from Virginia. “If anything, it’s bipartisan — she lost two of her members. I think that’s the question she’s got to answer.”
(Mr. Davis was referring to Representatives Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey and Collin Peterson of Minnesota; both voted against impeachment, but Mr. Van Drew has since become a Republican.)
Ms. Pelosi has answered the question before. She argues, as she did on Monday, that in trying to use Ukraine to gain an advantage in the 2020 election, “the president gave us no choice but to protect and defend our Constitution and oath of office we take.” While some say that Mr. Trump’s acquittal will only embolden him, both Ms. Pelosi and Representative Adam B. Schiff, the lead House impeachment manager, insisted the inquiry and trial had, at the very least, increased scrutiny of a president who ordinarily feels no constraints.
“To those who would say that the president will now feel unbound, he already felt unbound,” Mr. Schiff said.
Ms. Pelosi put it this way: “I think the spotlight that is on him will be very hot for him to handle.”
Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, said that in impeaching and trying Mr. Trump on charges of high crimes and misdemeanors, Democrats had “not gained very much except for intensifying the feelings about the president, both pro and con.”
But Carlos Curbelo, a former Republican congressman from Florida who lost re-election in 2018, said that in pursuing impeachment, Ms. Pelosi may have created an opportunity for Democratic presidential candidates to follow the playbook of George W. Bush, who campaigned in 2000 on restoring dignity to the White House after the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.
“The opportunity for Republicans is to make gains with those voters who think impeachment is just out of step and a zealous enterprise,” Mr. Curbelo said, “and for Democrats, it’s with those voters who are growing tired of all the scandal and controversy and wanted a more fair and complete process in the Senate.”
In the interview, Ms. Pelosi took aim at both Mr. Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader. Mr. McConnell managed to eke out the 51 votes he needed to prevent the Senate from subpoenaing witnesses like John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, whose forthcoming book confirms the allegations against Mr. Trump. (Asked whether the House intends to subpoena Mr. Bolton, Mr. Schiff said Democrats would have “more to say about that later.”)
Calling Mr. McConnell a “wholly owned subsidiary of the White House,” and Mr. Trump his “puppeteer,” Ms. Pelosi said the president had also tarnished the Senate.
She lapsed into a tough-guy cadence as she described her view of the president’s message to senators, as delivered by the majority leader: “You don’t even have a choice, you ain’t gonna hear no witnesses, you ain’t gonna see no documentation, ’cause we’re not letting you do it — and by the way, you are going to put your imprimatur on it.”
On Tuesday evening, the fraught dynamic between Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Trump will be on display in the Capitol, at the very spot on the House rostrum where she presided over the votes to impeach him. During last year’s State of the Union address, Ms. Pelosi was photographed smirking as she clapped sideways at Mr. Trump. The image went viral, interpreted by many as a sarcastic gesture by the speaker, though she has said she did not intend it that way.
This time, Ms. Pelosi said Democrats stand ready to work with the president on the issues he is expected to discuss, like infrastructure and lowering the cost of prescription drugs, but she did not sound entirely eager to hear him speak.
“It will have a beginning, a middle and an end — and then it will be over,” she said. “So what’s the big deal?”
Ms. Pelosi said she had not spoken to the president since mid-October, when she went to the White House to participate in a meeting about Syria and abruptly left after a confrontation with Mr. Trump. (A White House photograph of her wagging her finger at the president went viral, too.)
When he arrives at the Capitol on Tuesday night, she said, Democrats would treat Mr. Trump “as a guest in our House — and we hope he will behave as a guest in our House.”
“But,” she added, “we never have that expectation.”
Trump on Trial is a continuing series of articles offering reporting, analysis and impressions of the Senate impeachment proceedings.
"back" - Google News
February 04, 2020 at 08:29AM
https://ift.tt/2GRn4gj
Pelosi Says Democrats Have ‘Pulled Back a Veil’ on Trump’s ‘Unacceptable’ Behavior - The New York Times
"back" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2QNOfxc
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Pelosi Says Democrats Have ‘Pulled Back a Veil’ on Trump’s ‘Unacceptable’ Behavior - The New York Times"
Post a Comment