I will defend Nancy Pelosi until my dying breath. By virtually any objective measure (such as they are), she's the most skillful legislator since the Johnson Administration. In two years of unified government she passed a host of actual progressive legislation, some of which was signed into law and some of which died in the Senate. She took bold action on the environment, the economy, and expanded healthcare to 20 million previously uninsured people. She knocked several items off the Democratic wish list that had been there for a half-century. Every challenge to her leadership has faded with a whimper and the vague promise to address the concerns of a handful of rebels within her caucus. Her leadership as Minority Leader helped save Social Security from privatization and saved the signature legislation of the Obama Administration. She's a savvy political operator who usually knows more than everyone else in the room and leverages that knowledge to accomplish things.
The language in the Constitution is loose - the threshold being "high crimes and misdemeanors." During the Clinton Administration, impeachment was politicized and weaponized almost beyond recognition. No matter what happens, the GOP will accuse Democrats of doing to Trump what they did to Clinton.
All of that said, I disagree with Speaker Pelosi on impeachment. What she appears to be saying in her Washington Post interview is that the politics of impeachment are not in the Democrats' favor. I whole-heartedly agree with this sentiment. Trump ran for office on a platform of victimization - that even those of us with money, with privilege, with all of the historical and institutional power in this country were somehow under attack by liberal elites. This is why we had an intolerable amount of "economic anxiety" takes despite the higher-than-average income of Trump voters in many states. Ultimately what decided the election was tribalism, spite, and anger towards a world changing faster than people's attitudes.
Giving Trump the political gift of impeachment would be incredibly helpful. He would be able to lay all of the coming failures of his administration at the feet of the boogeyman impeachment. He would argue that it's all politically motivated and that Democrats aren't held to the same standards as Republicans. He'd...well, he'd argue all the same tired bullsh*t he's been arguing his entire life, just a little louder with a shred more validity. The politics of impeachment are not good for Democrats.
I'll go a step further: I think Trump and what his politics represent are so utterly repugnant that the best way to excise the cancer that is now the driving force of GOP politics is to utterly and unequivocally defeat him at the ballot box in 2020. Looking to impeachment as a sort of silver bullet is bad. Nobody would argue against that point.
But if we frame impeachment solely in terms of the politics of it, haven't we already lost the bigger battle? Impeachment is - per a 20-year-old DOJ guidance - the only form of accountability for the President to the laws he is sworn to uphold and execute. The language in the Constitution is loose - the threshold being "high crimes and misdemeanors." During the Clinton Administration, impeachment was politicized and weaponized almost beyond recognition. No matter what happens, the GOP will accuse Democrats of doing to Trump what they did to Clinton. But they're already alleging that Michael Cohen worked with Lanny Davis and George Soros to build a fictional case, so worrying about how the GOP will spin this remains low on my list of priorities.
The problem is that if we allow impeachment to become a purely political calculation, then the President's only accountability - for actual criminal conduct - has fallen to a question of politics. Thus, as long as the President is popular enough in 17 states and can hold 34 Senators, he is immune to criminal prosecution for the duration of his Presidency. Whether or not the politics of impeachment are good, the precedent that is being set is basically a capitulation to the GOP's 30-year effort to erode faith in our governmental institutions, to tell them that their use of impeachment as partisan warfare was so successful that we no longer believe impeachment to be a credible way of holding Presidents accountable unless the politics of it are also in our favor.
There are obvious concerns about whether the President has committed "high crimes and misdemeanors" as well as whether impeachment covers actions performed before assuming the office of the Presidency. As to the former...the President has been named in open court in the Southern District of New York as a criminal co-conspirator to violation of campaign finance laws specifically designed to help him win the office he now occupies. This was an allegation by prosecutors with supporting evidence. According to most legal experts, any private citizen so named would have been indicted on criminal charges. Further, the President's former fixer and co-conspirator testified - again, with substantial evidence to support his claims - to Congress that the President entered into a criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people and that the President's attorneys aided Cohen in falsifying testimony to Congress (we haven't yet seen the evidence here, but members of the Congress have). Whether or not the President was directly involved in the latter, his attorneys apparently conspired to commit perjury to the people's representatives in government. He also alleged the President committed massive tax fraud - a claim now being investigated by the NY Tax Office.
While we await the outcome of the Mueller probe, it's worth remembering that the President went on television and said he fired the head of the FBI in order to stonewall an investigation. The amount of information reported publicly points to conspiracy to win the election and conspiracy to cover up how he won the office once he was there. We should wait and see what the Mueller report says, what SDNY finds out about Trump's business, Trump's charity, Trump's inaugural committee, Trump's campaign, etc. But that's no reason to not start impeachment hearings now regarding the crimes of which he's been publicly and substantively accused. Michael Cohen's testimony should be a perfect place to start.
As a partisan, my goal is to remove Trump from office and to use the power of the electoral system to deliver the largest possible rebuke to him and his toxic ideology in 2020. But if we let the political calculation be the only calculation in whether or not to launch impeachment, we're eroding faith in the system and telling people that the best way to not be convicted of a crime is to become President - even if you have to commit a host of crimes to get there. I hope the Speaker is making the right choice here, but I fear that she's helping the GOP further politicize a process that was designed not to override the will of the people but to hold our most powerful executive accountable. If the President can't be impeached because the politics are bad, what's the point of even having him "faithfully execute...and preserve, protect and defend the Constitution" in the first place?