On Sunday, an LGBT activist insisted that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) could become president as early as next year. Ironically, this may prove a rather effective argument against voting Democratic in the November 2018 elections.
“Here’s how we could have a Democratic President as early as 2019. Imagine, President Nancy Pelosi,” openly gay self-identified “LGBT equality activist” Terrance Heath wrote in a Sunday column on LGBTQ Nation. Heath acknowledged this would not be easy — “This outcome will require an awful lot of things falling into place almost perfectly.”
Even so, Heath argued that “some of the pieces are already in place.”
“The first thing that has to happen is the Democrats have to take back the House,” the LGBT activist explained. “That’s something Democrats are already working on, by taking advantage of Donald Trump’s disapproval ratings and running strong candidates in vulnerable Republican districts.” He lamented that the 2018 version of 2006 Democratic strategy could result in Democrat members of Congress with no “progressive values in their hearts.”
“But assuming Democrats pull it off, and retake the House, one of their first acts will very likely be to re-elect Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House. There just aren’t as many other candidates as qualified as she is,” Heath noted.
Step three? Impeachment. “Finally, House Democrats will be positioned to bring impeachment charges against Donald Trump and Mike Pence. If his recent television interviews are any indication, Trump will probably give them all the ammunition they’ll need to take him down,” the LGBT activist wrote.
Then Heath engaged in some armchair psychology. “If Donald Trump responds to impeachment as he does to most setbacks, he’ll follow the pattern most of his business partners recognize by now. He’ll declare success, abandon the mess, taking his brand and his profits with him and leaving his business partners — in this case, the GOP — holding the bag,” the activist wrote.
In Heath’s rosy prediction, Trump would resign before Democrats can impeach him, and he would “probably take an equally disgraced Mike Pence down with him or Democrats can continue impeachment proceedings against Pence alone for his role in the administration’s ties to Russia.”
Then, presto! “All that’s left then is to install the next person in line — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — as president, and listen to the sounds of conservative heads exploding,” Heath concluded.
None of this is all that likely, however.
While Pelosi raised $16 million for the November elections in the first quarter of 2018, many Democrats have decided to distance themselves from her.
Last June, Republican Karen Handel defeated Democrat golden boy Jon Ossoff, despite millions spent to prop him up. Ossoff came remarkably close to taking a very red district, but Republicans cannily tied Ossoff to Pelosi.
“Every morning I wake up and I take a moment to be thankful that the Republican Party still has Nancy Pelosi because Nancy Pelosi is absolutely toxic,” Corry Bliss, the executive director of the Congressional Leadership Fund, which spent $6.2 million for Handel, told The Washington Times.
“This race is a referendum on Nancy Pelosi and her liberal policy agenda, which is just fundamentally out of touch with a vast majority of Americans,” Bliss declared. Indeed, a June Poll of Georgia 6 voters found that nearly six in ten had a negative view of Pelosi. Pelosi could not have been the issue that sank Ossoff, but these ads likely contributed to his defeat.
Pelosi’s unpopularity may not stop Democrats from picking up seats in the House of Representatives in November, but that does not mean they will take a majority in the House. While the impeachment of a U.S. president only requires a simple majority in the House, it requires a two-thirds supermajority in the U.S. Senate.
The Senate map for November 2018 is stacked against Democrats, with many Democrats defending seats in deep-red states that voted for Trump in 2016. Even in the rosiest of predictions, Democrats could only win the Senate by a vote or two, nowhere near the requisite majority to remove a sitting president.
Furthermore, Pelosi herself has refrained for advocating impeachment, and has faced harsh criticism for this restraint. In fact, the House Democratic leader has admitted that President Donald Trump would deserve the Nobel Peace Prize if North Korea denuclearizes.
Finally, even if Democrats somehow won a House majority and somehow cajoled Senate Republicans to help remove Trump (another Herculean task), it is far from certain that Trump would resign first, or that Pence would be vulnerable to impeachment charges due to alleged Russian collusion.
President Pelosi in 2019? Don’t count on it. On the other hand, Republicans should point out that the deeply unpopular Pelosi would be third in line for the presidency if Democrats take the House of Representatives. Perhaps this will help motivate Republicans to turn up at the polls this November.
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