According to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, impeaching Donald Trump simply isn’t worth the effort. Either Pelosi is playing the long game and doesn’t want to show her cards, or she is fundamentally confused about how horrible the President’s actions truly are. There are impeachable offenses already sitting on the table even without the results of the Mueller report. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains why Pelosi may feel this way, and whether or not she’s being intentionally opaque.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Democratic Speaker of the house, Nancy Pelosi said, and they Washington Post interview earlier this week that impeaching Donald Trump is just simply not worth it. That’s what she said, not worth it to impeach Donald Trump. Now she did then add, you know, if there is bipartisan support for it down the road and if we get evidence of major crimes committed by the president, we will address it at that point. But right now, totally not worth it. Let’s move on. Several other Democratic lawmakers came out after this Pelosi quote was made public and they said similar things. Then we’re not going to think about it. Let’s just go on with our lives. Here’s the thing. Either Nancy Pelosi doesn’t quite understand what has happened or she is playing a long game and trying to low Donald Trump into a false sense of security. And I don’t mean that as a way to trick him.
I mean that there is a chance she’s saying these things so that Donald Trump doesn’t get worried about being impeached and do something rash like firing Robert Mueller, you know, firing members of the Justice Department, lashing out, doing something crazy like starting a war to distract the public. So maybe she’s trying to calm the big man baby in the White House while actually working behind the scenes knowing that this is a thing that’s going to happen. Or she could just be so out of touch with both the public and the investigations that have pretty much already given us everything. We need to understand that impeachment is kind of necessary and yes, I understand the fact that you’re not going to get the Republicans in the house to remove him. I know that. Okay, but you can’t tell me that right now. Today, there are not impeachable offenses already on the table.
We know this. Donald Trump has abused the power of the presidency since day one. The emoluments clause, violations alone are worthy of impeachment. The financial schemes that he was engaged in are worthy of impeachment. How that make New York Times story that came out a few months ago that nobody cared about showing how the Trumps had engaged in tax fraud or finance fraud for decades. Probably worth impeachment on that too. That’s verifiable as are these other things I’ve mentioned. So don’t say like maybe once the Mueller report, screw the Mueller report, folks, we have what we would need right now. It doesn’t matter what that Mueller report says, if it’s just a single page, this has Donald Trump got foreign help to win the election and he colluded with everyone. If that’s the entire report, Republicans still wouldn’t go with it. Republicans will never vote for it, so you make them vote against it.
That’s how this has to work. You have to show the American public that you still care about the rule of law, that you care about the fact that we have a president who is violating laws every day and emoluments clauses. He’s using his official Twitter account as president to promote as businesses. This is not legal and this is not okay, and you’re going to sit there and tell us that, hey, it’s not worth it, eh, no, it’s worth it. Even if it’s just a symbolic vote. Kind of like what Republicans did the Bill Clinton in the 90s knowing that they weren’t going to remove him from office, they still did it. He still went down as an impeached president and that will forever be on his record. The only difference is Clinton didn’t have to face reelection after that, and Donald Trump would. So how do you figure an impeached president would fare in a general election? I know his die hard supporters wouldn’t believe it, but to me, for folks that are kind of on the fence, that seems like some pretty good red meat to throw out to them and say, do you really want to vote for a guy who we determined had committed criminal actions? Seems pretty much like a no brainer to me. And I would also consider that very worth. It.
