Charles P. Pierce: Turns Out Mitch McConnell Might Have More Soft Spots in His Caucus Than Nancy Pe

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a30286805/nancy-pelosi-impeachment-send-senate-mitch-mcconnell/


Turns Out Mitch McConnell Might Have More Soft Spots in His Caucus Than Nancy Pelosi Does
The dynamics of the impeachment fight are changing, even if it remains unlikely the president* will be removed by the Senate.
By Charles P. Pierce
Dec 19, 2019


It hardly bears repeating any more, but Speaker Nancy (Don’t Make Me Turn This Car Around) Pelosi doesn’t make many bad moves. (These Politico quotes from Tim Ryan, who challenged her for Speaker and who subsequently got whipped like a red-headed mule, are nothing if not an important validation of this.) She is playing the current moment like a master, and I say this as someone who had doubts all along about holding back the articles of impeachments from the Senate.

Mitch McConnell’s speech to the Senate on Thursday proved me wrong about it. He really had nothing, mainly channelling Louie Gohmert outtakes and, with every one of those he spun out, he handed Pelosi more leverage. His partisans claim that, sooner or later, he’s simply going to call the question. Some Democrats seem nervous about this, too. I don’t think he’d dare. For the first time, I think, several worms have turned.

Bear in mind, thanks to the intervention of an automobile into my daily affairs, this is all speculation based on information gleaned from only those sources available to the rest of y’all. But I think McConnell made a huge mistake earlier when he pretty much announced that the oath he’ll have to take as a juror in a Senate trial isn’t worth the powder to blow it to hell. (Lindsey Graham is in a similar box.) It’s hard to make the case that the House process was slipshod when you’ve pretty much admitted the Senate process is a sham. That gifted Pelosi and her team with leverage that they didn’t previously have.

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And that’s something else that’s changed in the last week. Outside of Jeff Van Drew, Collin Peterson, and half of some guy from Maine, the Democratic members of the House who were supposed to be timorous about the whole impeachment business have proven themselves to be winter soldiers of the first rank—especially Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Joe Cunningham of South Carolina. Meanwhile, there are somewhere between four and eight Republican incumbents in the Senate who have to be casting phasers-on-stun side-eye down Pennsylvania Avenue in the general direction of Camp Runamuck. McConnell has more potential mushiness in his caucus than Pelosi turned out to have in hers, and Pelosi doesn’t have a half-maniacal president* in her ear, either.

All of this doesn’t make conviction and removal of the president* any more likely than it was before Wednesday’s vote, but it’s not something you can hand-wave away, either. The cliches that sustained the impeachment narrative are no longer operative. Worms are turning.