Thanks in large part to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s blessing in late September, Washington, D.C. and the political media has been consumed with the effort to impeach President Donald Trump ever since.
On Thursday, Pelosi kicked it up another notch and gave the go-ahead to draft articles of impeachment. But don’t ask her to talk about it. Pelosi tried to shut down questions about impeachment during a CNN town hall event later on Thursday evening, the Epoch Times reported.
No more questions, please
After host Jake Tapper asked whether she would consider testifying about impeachment as part of a deal to compel testimony from certain White House officials — which had been half-jokingly raised by some Republicans — Pelosi balked and said, “It has nothing to do — They should be testifying because they have been asked to testify by Congress. It isn’t a deal. It’s about a system of checks and balances.”
Then, with some frustration, she asked, “Can we not have any more questions about impeachment?”
After mentioning other policy issues she’d prefer to talk about, such as climate change, the Speaker added, “I don’t mind questions, but to ask me questions through the prism of the White House is like, what?”
Despite Pelosi’s plea, she ultimately fielded quite a few impeachment-related questions from Tapper and the audience, Business Insider reported.
As she has done previously, the Speaker attempted to portray impeachment as a reluctant and somber event that no Democrat derived joy from — an assertion at odds with reality: various members of her party have been gleefully chomping at the bit for a chance to oust Trump from office for a long time.
Pelosi repeatedly insisted that Congress’ hand had been forced on the issue by the president’s actions and made several references to the Constitution’s Framers and our nation’s Founders to justify the “historic” effort.
“If we were not to proceed, it would say to any president, any future president, whoever she or he may be, Democratic or Republican, that our democracy is gone, the President is king, he can do whatever he wants in violation of the law, ignoring the acts of Congress, undermining our system of checks and balances,” Pelosi said.
Voters don’t care
Numerous recent polls have shown that impeachment is not particularly popular with the American people, and voters weren’t won over as Democrats made their case in public hearings.
That unpopularity appears to have transitioned ratings-wise to Pelosi’s town hall event on CNN. The Hill reported that it came in as a distant third — with only an average of 1.6 million viewers — behind the network’s cable news competitors Fox News and MSNBC, which averaged 3.8 million and 2.63 million viewers for the same hour, respectively.
Pelosi can lament the “divisiveness” of impeachment and attempt to avoid questions about it all she wants, but when it ultimately ends with a seemingly inevitable acquittal in the Republican-controlled Senate, Pelosi will have nobody to blame but herself.
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