Nancy Pelosi: An Extremely Stable Genius
When asked if it was possible that impeachment might backfire, the Speaker of the House insisted that politics has nothing to do with it. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “He has given us no choice.”
Before we begin to grapple with the gravity of the impeachment inquiry that is now upon us, can we acknowledge yet again the extreme weirdness of our times? If, through the distorting mists of time, the heroes and antiheroes of the Watergate saga seem positively Shakespearean in their stature—Nixon raging on the heath, his cunning satraps devising their poisoned betrayals—what to make of today’s dramatis personae of Kiev and Washington, Presidents Zelensky and Trump, one a comic actor turned fledgling statesman, the other a real-estate grifter turned . . . political grifter? Scholars of the Volodymyr Zelensky filmography will recall his appearances in “Love in the Big City 2” and “Rzhevsky Versus Napoleon.” And they will credit his work in the television show “Servant of the People,” in which he played the President of Ukraine, a role that set him on the path to being the actual President of Ukraine. Zelensky is an expressive comic artist. And so it is not hard to imagine his mask of terrorized bewilderment as he held a telephone to his ear in July and listened to the ex-star of “The Apprentice” deliver an implicit threat to deprive his country of military aid and diplomatic standing if he failed to interfere in the 2020 U.S. Presidential election on Trump’s behalf. This is our reality.
Into this reality has stepped, if belatedly, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, Speaker of the House.
From the start, Pelosi has confronted Trump with a wry fearlessness. When, in a moment of rare self-aggrandizement, Trump referred to himself as an “extremely stable genius,” she replied, “When the ‘extremely stable genius’ starts acting more Presidential, I’ll be happy to work with him on infrastructure, trade, and other issues.” In an Oval Office confrontation last year, she brooked no disrespect from Trump and asked that he please not underestimate “the strength that I bring to this meeting as the leader of the House Democrats.” When, on another occasion, Trump referred to Pelosi as a “mess,” the Speaker thoughtfully suggested that the President might benefit from an “intervention for the good of the country.”
“Remember this,” Pelosi told me, in an interview on Thursday afternoon, as she recalled the Watergate era. “I saw, as a young person, that the Republicans didn’t come around until the tapes. It wasn’t like they were saying, ‘This behavior is not acceptable to us.’ The tapes were dispositive of the issue. There was no vote to impeach, because it was so clear that he had to go. But even Nixon knew of his responsibility to the country. I’m not sure this person does.”For months, however, Pelosi avoided the ultimate intervention. She frustrated many members of the Democratic caucus who believed—for myriad reasons, some contained in the Mueller report, some not—that they should pursue an impeachment inquiry against the President. Pelosi was reluctant, worried that there was not enough evidence to prevent a backfire scenario, in which Trump would emerge from impeachment still safely in office, emboldened, unchallenged by his own party, a martyr with an enhanced prospect at reëlection.
For months, Pelosi dismissed impeachment as a bad political idea. As the leader of the Democratic caucus in the House, she deals with a fairly broad ideological range of members, from the Progressives to the Blue Dogs. She prides herself on her ability to listen, to negotiate, to cajole, to unite. In countless attack ads, Republicans have painted her as a dread San Francisco lefty, and they also point out her considerable wealth—the big house in Pacific Heights, the Napa Valley vineyard. And yet she got her political education, her capacity for infighting and vote-counting, not in Pacific Heights but by watching her father on the stump. Pelosi is the daughter of an old-school pol, Tom D’Alesandro, Jr., a onetime congressman and mayor of Baltimore.
Even though many Democratic House members admire Pelosi’s skills, particularly the way she spearheaded the intricate legislative battle for the Affordable Care Act, in 2009, some thought that she was too cautious about impeachment. She was, in fact, wary of the polls, which were telling her that only a minority of the electorate favored impeachment; she had a clear memory of Bill Clinton emerging from his impeachment drama with soaring approval numbers. Pelosi and other centrist Democrats were convinced that winning in 2020 was the highest priority. She routinely pointed out that the Democratic win in the 2018 midterms leaned heavily on the electoral battle in the suburbs of such states as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The same strategy, she maintained, would lead to a victory in 2020.
Her antagonists on the issue of impeachment argued that Trump was beyond salvation and that their job was to lead, not follow, the public. They insisted that the Clinton episode was not an apt comparison for Trump. Not only were Trump’s sins vastly worse; Clinton always had higher poll numbers than Trump, whose base has always been at around forty per cent. The debate among Democrats over impeachment grew increasingly fractious and public. “In terms of subpoena power, you have to handle it with care,” she told the Times, last year. “Yes, on the left there is a Pound of Flesh Club, and they just want to do to them what they did to us. . . . I have those who want to be for impeachment and for abolishing ice. Two really winning issues for us, right? In the districts we have to win? I don’t even think they’re the right things to do. If the evidence from Mueller is compelling, it should be compelling for Republicans as well, and that may be a moment of truth. But that’s not where we are.”
Now Pelosi, with the Ukrainian issue out in the open, has changed course. It is not clear that she had a choice. She has endorsed a full-scale impeachment inquiry because of the news that Trump pressured Zelensky to investigate one of his political rivals, former Vice-President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden, as a “favor” to Trump. A still unnamed whistle-blower in the intelligence community drafted a sophisticated, detailed letter saying that White House officials had witnessed the President abusing his office “for personal gain” and then had tried to “lock down” evidence of his conversation with Zelensky. Trump, according to a memorandum describing the call, pressed Zelensky to dig up dirt on the Biden family and made it evident that American military aid and high-level diplomatic relations might depend on that coöperation. Trump also asked Zelensky and his aides to deal with his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and with Attorney General William Barr, who, he suggested, might help in such an investigation.
After learning, over the weekend, about Trump’s fevered communications with the Ukrainian leadership, Pelosi, who was in New York, called her deputy, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, to say that she had decided to back an impeachment inquiry. As she was flying back to Washington, she read an op-ed in the Washington Post in which seven centrist Democrats who had resisted an impeachment effort said that they had now changed their minds. Even if she’d wanted to, it undoubtedly would have been near-impossible to resist her caucus now. Pelosi started drafting a speech, but accidentally left her notes on the plane. Nevertheless, in a brief statement announcing the new course, on Tuesday, she found her voice. Trump’s unvarnished message to Zelensky, she said, represented a “betrayal of his oath of office.”
“Just impeaching Trump for his bad behavior isn’t worth it,” Pelosi told me. “But, if he challenges our system of checks and balances as he is doing, if he undermines our democracy, our electoral system, as he is doing, if he undermines his own oath of office as he is doing, it is a challenge to our Constitution.”
A Reuters/Ipsos poll this week revealed that thirty-seven per cent of Americans think Trump should be impeached, which is four per cent less than in early September. Pelosi is betting that those numbers will rise as the Ukraine story is absorbed more fully by the public. But how long will that take? The Mueller report, after all, provided ten potential examples of obstruction of justice, and yet, perhaps because of Mueller’s highly formal, reticent testimony before Congress, the report never seemed to have a decisive public impact. “You have to be very clear and very focussed on what would be an impeachable offense,” Pelosi said. “People say, ‘You changed your mind.’ I didn’t change my mind. The facts changed the situation. Last week, on Constitution Day, of all days, the news broke of the President’s total betrayal of the Constitution—and this takes us into a whole new realm. Use any analogy, anything you want: ‘A new day has dawned’; ‘We’ve crossed the Rubicon.’ Everything is different now, because of that phone call.” She went on, “That the Administration thought it was exculpatory is so ridiculous, because it was, in fact, incriminating.”
Earlier this week, Pelosi said, she took a call from Trump, who started out talking about guns. “The President, as you know, is big on what he claims is the charm offensive,” she said. “And some of his charm offensive is very offensive. He was calling me ostensibly to talk about guns, and I have to take him seriously if that is the purpose of the call. I welcome any overture to talk about gun safety. He was telling me progress was being made with his work with Democrats and Republicans. My point was ‘I don’t know what Democrats you were talking to. We sent you a bipartisan bill over two hundred days ago, and that’s the way to save the most lives.’ ”
That was the first part of the conversation. “Then he somehow segued into what was happening now—that this phone call [with Zelensky] was ‘perfect.’ ‘When you hear this phone call, it was perfect.’ And I said, ‘No, it was wrong. . . . You understand your words weigh a ton. The words of the President of the United States weigh a ton.’ ” Pelosi told me that she doesn’t normally talk about calls with a President—“It’s a historic thing, a call between the President and the Speaker of the House”—but this was different.
When I asked Pelosi if she thought Trump knows, in this instance or any other, the difference between right and wrong, she replied, “He knows the difference between right and wrong, but I don’t know that he really cares. I do think his categorical imperative is what’s good is what is right for him. In the campaign, he told us who he was. He said that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and nobody would care, that his supporters wouldn’t care. Well, he could violate our Constitution, the integrity of our elections, and dishonor his oath of office, as he did in this call, and think that nobody cares.”
A range of committees in the House will now carry out an impeachment inquiry, but Pelosi did not seem to relish the prospect. “Impeachment is very divisive for our country—it’s not something that you jump to,” she said. “You have to have your facts.” Even with the whistle-blower’s testimony, she said, hers was not an easy decision. And yet she felt, in the end, that she had no other options. Constitutional values preceded political calculation. “I believe that this President and his betrayal of our Constitution is a luxury our country can no longer afford,” she said.
I asked Pelosi if she knew of any other instances in which the President might have tried to exert such pressure on foreign leaders. Was there any evidence, for instance, that he approached Xi Jinping, of China, to look into Hunter Biden’s business activities there?
“Of course there are rumors about that, but this isn’t about rumor, hearsay, suspicion, or likely behavior,” Pelosi said. “This is about the facts and the Constitution.” Trump, she went on, “doesn’t care about any of that. This is a strain of cat that I don’t have the medical credentials to analyze nor the religious credentials to judge.”
Could impeachment still backfire? I asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We handled this with such care. It isn’t like we ran into this. He has taken us to this place. He has given us no choice. Politics has nothing to do with impeachment, in my view.”
Pelosi was the most prominent Democratic politician to oppose the George W. Bush Administration on the invasion of Iraq, in 2003. And yet, she said, she battled Bush and other Republican Presidents nearly always with a sense that their debate was over questions about the role and scale of government. “This President does not believe in governance,” she said. “He does not believe in science. That is not the Republican Party. . . . The country needs a strong Republican Party, but this party has strayed so far from the party of Lincoln that it needs to be rescued from the hijacking that has happened.”
In the spring of 1974, during the Watergate saga, the House Judiciary Committee demanded more than forty tapes from the White House. Nixon tried to dodge that subpoena by delivering a stack of edited transcripts. The Supreme Court voted 8–0 that Nixon had to turn over the tapes themselves. The “smoking gun” tape, as it was dubbed by the Republican congressman Barber Conable, was a recording of a conversation between Nixon and his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, on June 23, 1972, in which they talked about getting the C.I.A. director, Richard Helms, to press L. Patrick Gray, the acting director of the F.B.I., to back off from investigating the Watergate break-in. Not only did the special prosecutor see this conversation as proof of a conspiracy to obstruct justice, the Republican congressional leadership made it abundantly clear that it could no longer support the President. Nixon, for all his ethical failings, could always count votes. He recognized that he was finished. On August 8, 1974, just three days after the contents of the tape were made public, he resigned.
The question that the various House committees will now grapple with is whether the information we have about Trump’s thuggish communications with the Ukrainian leadership are as consequential as Nixon’s smoking gun. Trump, of course, shows no sign of contrition or self-doubt. He never does. “How can you ignore the behavior of a President who says that Article Two [of the Constitution] says, ‘I can do whatever I want’?” Pelosi told me. “If he is going to betray the Constitution, then he is a luxury we can no longer afford.”
No comments:
Post a Comment