The Impeachment Trial: More Meh

Now that Her Holy Modal Majesty, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is releasing the articles of impeachment against Trump to the Senate, people are praising her deft move to get pressure on Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell to have fair trial, with key Republican senators demanding a fair process in which to call witnesses and with new information about the Ukraine scandal - including former White House national security adviser John Bolton's willingness to testify on the matter - during the Speaker's imposed interregnum.   

Don't you believe it.  It's more daft than deft.

Pelosi (above) never had any leverage in holding back the articles if impeachment.  McConnell never wanted to receive them anyway, and he has no interest in holding a trial that would, if not remove Trump from the White House, still make him look bad.  There are four to six Republican senators who could join the 47 senators in the Democratic caucus in allowing witnesses to be called who could easily stick with McConnell when it comes to actually calling the witnesses during the trial.  (Except maybe Mitt Romney, who has said he'd like to hear what Bolton has to say.)  If there is a trial; McConnell is seriously considering a dismissal of the trial so he can get back to packing the courts with right-wing judges that will dominate the federal judiciary at least until my generation dies off.  In short, Pelosi's intransigence changed nothing, and it helped not a single Democrat.

Except maybe Joe Biden.  With Senator Bernie Sanders surging in the presidential polls in New Hampshire and in both February caucus states (Iowa and Nevada), House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has opined that Pelosi delayed the submission of the articles of impeachment to ensure that Sanders is stuck in Washington as a juror in the impeachment trial to get him off the campaign trail in the crucial final weeks before Iowa and New Hampshire.  I don't agree entirely with McCarthy's assessment.  I think she did it to get Senator Elizabeth Warren off the presidential campaign trail as well.  Speaker Pelosi is officially neutral in the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination process, but she's already made clear her disdain for Grandpa Bernie's and Aunt Liz's policy positions, such as their support for Medicare for all and the Green New Deal (which went down like an old brown shoe).  The last thing she wants is to have either one of them as the Democratic presidential nominee, and their absence from the campaign trail wild help Biden gain traction in the state primaries and caucuses preceding Super Tuesday and possibly prevent the 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign from going all the way to New Jersey in June.

But Pelosi's gambit is not going to have a detrimental effect on Trump's standing or slow down or retard McConnell's progress in fighting progress.  It would only make sense that her moves are designed to affect the presidential trail more than the presidential trial.

Trail, trial . . . love those anagrams. ;-)