OPINION

BRUMMETT ONLINE: On the Pelosi path

Whenever House Speaker Nancy Pelosi speaks these days about the notion of impeaching President Trump, three matters come instantly to mind.

One is that former U.S. Rep. Marion Berry, Blue Dog Democrat from the 1st District of Arkansas, always said Pelosi was the smartest political operator he'd seen.

The second is that Clarke Tucker found it advisable last year while running as a Democratic candidate for Congress in the 2nd District to endorse "new leadership" for congressional Democrats, meaning the supposed ouster of Pelosi. But now Pelosi is what she always might have been--the vital and pragmatic leader of the party.

She surely is that now in the context of the socialist and generational emergence led by, or personified by, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Republicans who found Pelosi a handy target for riling up the superficial fears of the dormant base now see a young socialist woman as even handier. Everything being relative, Pelosi seems less scary.

And the third factor is that, in 1998, the Republican House impeached the Democratic president, Bill Clinton, and he was spared Senate conviction on a party-line vote as his approval rating shot up 10 points while the approval rating of the Republican Congress plummeted 10 points.

So, on Sunday, The Washington Post Magazine ran a lengthy article on Pelosi in which she laid out what we might call Pelosi's Law on impeachment.

We could rephrase it this way: "Don't impeach unless you possess such plain damning criminal goods that the other side will have no good option other than to join you in convicting or pay a severe price for not doing so. In the absence of that, you'll be the one to pay the price. You will have wasted the voters' time on what will look like the kind of over-the-top and destructive partisan obsession of which voters are sick."

Pelosi told The Post she doesn't favor impeachment unless solid and overwhelming criminal bona fides arise from the Mueller report or some other source, because, absent those overwhelming criminal bona fides, Donald Trump is "just not worth it."

Be advised that she stressed that Trump was wholly unfit to be president by standards of emotion and intellect. But her point is that those are political judgments addressed appropriately in an electoral process.

It's that the vital political job will be made harder if the Democrats impeach Trump on some arguable point and hand him the Clintonesque appearance of vindication on the inevitable occasion of the Senate's failure to achieve the requisite conviction super-majority requiring Republican votes.

Yes, that would be some smart politics, wouldn't it--scripting Trump's not-guilty verdict in the middle of the re-election campaign?

Four things seem likeliest to begin soon happening:

One is that the Mueller report will deliver clear evidence that Trump is a crook who has betrayed the country to his business interests in Russia and perhaps elsewhere. You impeach on that.

Two is that the Mueller report delivers exhaustive detail about questionable business dealings by Trump that give Republicans wiggle room and Democrats the opportunity to spend now until the election engaging in public investigations, so long as they manage to advance credible policy along the way.

Three is that Mueller doesn't lay a glove on Trump or his family or his business in which case Democrats say, well, what we wanted to talk about all along was health care and immigration and this man's unworthiness by temperament.

Fourth--and this one intrigues--is that the Mueller Report won't be the story. The real story will come in its own due time from the U.S. attorney in Manhattan.

That agency is not working by special assignment, but by its own independent authority and timetable, and is investigating matters arising from evidence gathered from and about Michael Cohen.

It cannot impeach and it will not presume to indict a sitting president. But it's not out of the question that it could have an indictment ready against Trump as soon as he becomes the former president.

It is the Democrats' job--their requisite service to the country, in fact--to make that date 2021, not 2025. They'll better get that job done and that deadline met by listening to Nancy Pelosi, their new pragmatic center.

The new generational and socialist movement is to be welcomed and respected, but groomed for the future while managed deftly for the imminent job at hand.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 03/13/2019

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