Going rogue, 80-year-old House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that she would consider impeaching 74-year-old President Donald Trump and 70-year-old Atty. Gen. William Barr over the decision to replace the late Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg after her long battle with pancreatic cancer. Pelosi’s talk of impeachment shows how she’s willing to shred the U.S. Constitution for political purposes, angry that Trump gets to pick his third Supreme Court justice. Pelosi accused Trump of saying he wouldn’t accept the outcome of the Nov. 3 election, when, in fact, 72-year-old Democrat Party elder former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Aug. 26 that “under no circumstances should 77-year-old former Vice President Joe Biden concede the election.” If that’s no violating the Constitution’s orderly transfer of power, then what is?
Yet the Democrat-friendly press says nothing about Pelosi going rogue, violating her oath of office and Article 1 authority to use the Constitution’s impeachment clause to prevent Trump from appointing a replacement for Ginsburg. Pelosi’s legal advisers can’t possibly tell her that it’s a high-crime-and-misdemeanor for the president to exercise his Article 2 authority to send the U.S. Senate a nominee for advice-and-consent. Pelosi likes to bring up 78-year-old Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who refused in 2016 to entertain another Supreme Court pick from former President Barack Obama. With Democrats in charge of the White House in 2016, it was McConnell’s right controlling the GOP senate to not act on Obama’s request for advice-and-consent. With Republicans in charge of the White House in 2020, it’s McConnell’s prerogative to move forward with the Republican incumbent’s request.
Pelosi’s threat to impeach Trump and Barr shows for all to see how she exploits her Article 1 impeachment power to harass the president and now Barr. “We, we have our options,” Pelosi said, it response to Stephanopoulos question about how to stop Trump from replacing Ginsburg. “We have arrows in our quivers that I’m not about to discuss right now, but the fact is we have a big challenge in our country. The president has threatened to no even accept the result of the election with statements that he and his henchman have made,” Pelosi said, exposing her extreme partisanship. Pelosi knows the Hillary said she wouldn’t accept the outcome of the election, with Biden announcing last week that the Democrat Party has hired hundreds, if not thousands, of election law attorneys to deal with Nov. 3. By all accounts, Democrats, not Republicans, plan to contest the Nov. 3 vote.
When Pelosi announced two articles of impeachment against President Trump Dec. 10, 2019, they weren’t based on the Constitutional standard of high-crimes-and-misdemeanors. Trump held a phone call with 41-yea-old Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which he asked him if he could find any information on Biden’s work in Ukraine. It was widely reported that former Vice President Joe Biden landed his 50-year-old son Hunter an $83,000 a month job at a corrupt Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings. No one in the Democrat-friendly press are allowed to ask questions about how Hunter landed the job on Burisma’s board with Joe’s help. When’s Biden’s asked about Hunter’s lucrative job, he says it’s off limits, not something the press can question. Yet Biden himself admitted to the Council on Foreign Relations Sept. 27, 2019 that he got Ukraine’s chief prosecutor fired.
Pelosi had no problem ignoring what Joe did but announced two articles of impeachment at time before anyone knew a thing about the deadly coronavirus AKA SARS CoV-2 or Covid-19. No, Pelosi spent the next two months before Trump was acquitted Feb. 5, impeaching the pressient. It’s it ironic that Trump’s been accused by 78-year-old former Washington Post journalist-turned-political-hack Bob Woodward of not doing enough in Jan. and Feb. Woodward knows that Trump’s impeachment trial was over a month before the World Health Organization [WHO] declared a global pandemic March 11. “So the president is rushing to make some kind of decision because he doesn’t want to crush the [pandemic],” Pelosi said. Pelosi didn’t care about the pandemic when she wasted on month impeaching the president. Pelosi thinks nominating Ginsburg’s replacement can’t be done until after the pandemic.
Pelosi’s threat to start another impeachment process shows her flagrant disregard of the U.S. Constitution. To Pelosi, it’s all about the politics, who can control the Democrat agenda. Weaponizing her Article 1 powers to start impeaching the president or attorney general goes beyond the pale. No supreme court would accept Pelosi’s interpretation of her article 1 power. When she impeached the president last year, she showed that she doesn’t have to meet a constitutional test of high-crimes-and-misdemeanors, only using the impeachment power in an arbitrary and capricious way. Whatever McConnell did in 2016 during Obama’s lame duck year is no longer relevant because Republicans control the Senate. Whether Republicans control Senate much longer is anyone’s guess. One thing’s for sure: President Trump has the Article 2 right to appoint a replacement for Ginsburg.
About the Author
John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnit.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.
