Nancy Pelosi Is ‘Committed to Avoiding Impeachment,’ New York Times Says

If a New York Times article
by Glenn Thrush is accurate, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi believes that President
Donald Trump is thoroughly unfit for office, but she
doesn’t believe impeachment is an appropriate strategy.

Instead, Pelosi, who spoke with Thrush earlier this week,
remains focused on handing Trump a resounding defeat at the ballot box in 2020.
One of the more disturbing things Pelosi said in the interview is that she
isn’t convinced Trump will leave office if he loses the next election.

Per the Times:

In recent weeks Ms. Pelosi has told associates that she does
not automatically trust the president to respect the results of any election
short of an overwhelming defeat. That view, fed by Mr. Trump’s repeated and unsubstantiated claims of Democratic voter fraud, is
one of the reasons she says it is imperative not to play into the president’s
hands, especially on impeachment.

So, according to Pelosi’s thinking, it’s crucial to beat
Trump in 2020 by a large margin so that challenging the election’s legitimacy
is out of the question.

Her plan to do that: “Own the center
left, own the mainstream.”

The Speaker clearly believes Trump is impeachable, even if
she isn’t exactly saying so directly. She told the Times that Trump has a short attention span, knows little about
important subjects, and has degraded the country and dishonored the
Constitution.

Yet, Thrush writes: “Ms. Pelosi remains committed to
avoiding impeachment, but it is clear that she is losing patience.”

Curiously, the same day the Times report was published, NBC News published
a story with a different take: that Pelosi has positioned House Democrats
on the same path as Congress did in the early 1970s, which resulted in
President Richard Nixon’s resignation.

Per NBC:

Today, Pelosi is supporting the ongoing
House Judiciary Committee investigation into President Donald Trump
and the Mueller report. Left unsaid is that this is similar to the kind of
investigation that would take place if the panel were conducting a formal
impeachment proceeding. The investigation will serve to educate the American
people about the depth and extent of Trump’s malfeasance just as the Senate
Watergate Committee’s investigation did with Nixon.

That part about educating the American people is important. The
latest NBC
News/Wall Street Journal poll shows that about half of respondents oppose
impeachment hearings. The other half either said they support
the immediate start of impeachment proceedings or congressional
investigations to study impeachment further.

A different survey, the Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll, found that
65% of respondents oppose
impeachment proceedings, according to The Hill.

The NBC report noted:

It is a mistake to assume that the American people know the
many important details of Trump’s wrongdoing revealed in the 448-page Mueller
report. That is why this story must be told to the American people through
televised congressional hearings. The Mueller report’s printed words of Trump’s
wrongdoings must be brought to life through televised hearings and other media
formats, just as the story of Nixon’s wrongdoings was told through the Senate
Watergate hearings.

There is another, more obvious, calculus in Pelosi’s
thinking, which she described as a “coldblooded” plan to get rid of Trump.
According to the Times, that plan is:
“Do not get dragged into a protracted impeachment bid that will ultimately get
crushed in the Republican-controlled Senate, and do not risk alienating the
moderate voters who flocked to the party in 2018 by drifting too far to the
left.”

I’m not sure I would describe that plan as “coldblooded.”
Exceedingly cautious might be a better way to characterize it.