The bare-knuckle Congressional fight over Donald Trump and his presidency isn’t over.
A new round has already begun.
With Trump now just the third president in history to be impeached, House Democrats are considering ways to avoid seeing the Republican-controlled Senate hold a fast, perfunctory trial with a predetermined acquittal.
And Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has just the tool to leverage something fairer: do nothing.
That is, don’t make things easy for the Republicans by sending the impeachment articles to the Senate right away.
Instead, the Democrats could hang on to them for a while, pushing back the announced plan of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to quickly clear Trump of wrongdoing in early January.
It would be easy to do, thanks to the way the Constitution lays out the impeachment process.
“Though the House adopted two articles of impeachment charging Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of congressional investigations,” reports Politico, “it must pass a second resolution formally naming impeachment managers to present the case in the Senate. That second vehicle triggers the official transmission of articles to the Senate.”
But will Pelosi adopt that plan, and witthold the articles, perhaps indefinitely? Maybe not.
On Thursday Pelosi suggested to reporters at her weekly news conference that any delay won’t last long.
She said she “plans to name House managers for President Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate after that chamber’s leaders set the parameters for what the trial will look like, suggesting that the newly-passed articles of impeachment will be transmitted to the Senate soon after,” Axios reports.
Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the Senate Minority Leader, were expected to meet on Thursday to discuss their next steps.
Meanwhile, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) told reporters he has discussed the idea of delay with other top Democrats, and pointed to an op-ed article by constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe.
In that opinion piece, published Monday by the Washington Post, Tribe says withholding the impeachment articles for a time “could have both tactical and substantive benefits” for the Democrats.
He offered this legal analogy:
“Consider the case of a prosecutor armed with a grand jury indictment who learns that the fix is in and that the jury poised to consider the case is about to violate its oath to do impartial justice. In that situation, the prosecutor is under no affirmative legal obligation to go forward until the problem is cured and a fair trial possible.”
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday night, Pelosi said Democrats would “like to see a trial where it’s up to the senators to make their own decisions and working together, hopefully, in recognition of witnesses that the president withheld from us, the documents that president withheld from us.”
The Democrats want to call witnesses in the Senate trial, including acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton. McConnell has rejected that idea; he wants to move quickly, putting the impeachment episode behind him — and the president.
“Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CN) said the Senate trial should also include sensitive documents that the White House blocked House investigators from obtaining,” says The Hill.