Wait, Nancy Pelosi Just Said WHAT?

What's it mean when an impeachment-happy former House Speaker suddenly announces that impeachment is off the table?

Less than you might think. But with a twist. 

"You're confident Democrats will regain the House," USA TODAY Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page asked former two-time House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in a weekend interview, "Should Democrats think about impeaching President Trump if they do?"

Pelosi — who sounded more sober but perhaps less coherent than usual — gave a rambling response before getting a firm redirect from Page. "Just to make sure I understand you, [impeachment] should not be the agenda of Democrats for this last two years?"

What Page got was another semi-coherent answer that nevertheless shut the door on another impeachment, at least for now.

"No, I mean unless he — if he crosses the border again," Pelosi said. "But that’s not an incidental thing you say — ‘We’re going to do that.’ No, there has to be cause. There has to be reason."

Here's where I like to remind readers that despite what virtually every media outlet says, Trump was never impeached a second time.

It's true. Or at least there's a strong argument to be made that it's true. 

"When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside," is what the Constitution says about the matter. Not "may preside" or "ought to preside" but shall. But Chief Justice John Roberts declined to preside over Trump's second impeachment. 

Instead, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who served at the time as the president pro tempore of the Senate, presided. Leahy explained that the president pro tempore "has historically presided over Senate impeachment trials of non-presidents." And since Trump was out of office by the time of his second "impeachment," there was no need to involve the Chief Justice, and that a partisan Democrat elected official would do.

"The Constitution calls for the chief justice to preside over an impeachment trial," DePaul law professor Gregory Mark complained at the time. "By stepping aside, Roberts not only is failing to meet his duty, but his actions bring an air of illegitimacy to the trial."

You don't say.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) called Pelosi's exercise "a fake, partisan impeachment," and claimed that Roberts privately told him that "he’s not supposed to come unless it’s an impeachment of the president," as the Constitution says. Rand also explained that "The Constitution says two things about impeachment — it is a tool to remove the officeholder, and it must be presided over by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court."

So setting aside the post-hoc "disqualification" theory, what was the point, other than political theater, of the antics we witnessed on the House side, or Leahy's sham trial on the Senate side?

If you forgot just what a sham Pelosi's second impeachment vote was, Jeffrey J. Poelvoorde and Bradford P. Wilson covered it for Newsweek in 2021. "Some commentators," they wrote, "have attacked this second impeachment of Donald Trump as unconstitutional because it departs from our time-honored values of due process, having been undertaken with no hearings, no witnesses, no testimony and all within the space of a couple of hours on the floor of the House."

Then it went to the Senate for trial... where the only punishment that could be dished out was the removal from office of a man who left it on January 20, 2021, as required by the Constitution. 

So I hold (and as you see, I'm hardly alone in this) that whatever it was that Pelosi and Leahy did, it wasn't an impeachment.

The point of this digression is that Pelosi picks up and discards her political tools according to exactly one measure: political expedience.

When it was expedient to impeach Trump by constitutional methods, she did so. When it was expedient to hold a sham impeachment headed up by her old friend Pat Leahy, she did that, too. When she says now that it isn't expedient to impeach Trump, believe her.

But only until it becomes expedient once more.

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