Nancy Pelosi: "I'm Not for Impeachment."

Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave a wide-ranging interview to Joe Heim at the Washington Post yesterday, and there was a lot of good stuff there, but this exchange is obviously very concerning for a whole lot of people, myself included:

There have been increasing calls, including from some of your members, for impeachment of the president.

I'm not for impeachment. This is news. I'm going to give you some news right now because I haven't said this to any press person before. But since you asked, and I've been thinking about this: Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there's something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don't think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he's just not worth it.

So, let me start by saying I will give Pelosi a very little bit of wiggle room here, on the possibility that this is a strategic move.

If, for example, House Democrats have already uncovered something actionable in their investigations that they think is a more solid avenue to disempower Donald Trump than impeachment, or if they have something on Trump and need to save impeachment for Mike Pence, then it makes sense to take impeachment off the table for now — and an argument could be made that doing it publicly is part of that strategy.

But if something along those lines doesn't materialize quickly, then this is some bullshit.

And, to be frank, I frustratingly haven't seen any evidence that House Democrats, since reclaiming the majority, have any interest in investigating Pence. Which I find deeply troubling.

So there's a strong chance this is just a straightforward statement in which the Speaker rejects impeachment as a tool, because it's "divisive."

And, yes, it is. Except the country is already divided — into people who support a vile authoritarian bigot whose agenda is undiluted malice and who is subverting our democracy to turn the country into a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Kremlin, and people who are resisting this relentless nightmare with everything we've got.

Trust that I understand there is little hope of success without bipartisan support. I understand the risk of pursuing impeachment and losing, when you only get one bite at that apple. I understand that a big swing and a miss could leave Trump even more powerful and convinced of his own unrestrainable domination than he is now.

And if I still believed we had free and fair elections the outcomes of which Trump would respect, or unbiased courts through which we could seek legal remedies, then I would be advocating against impeachment for all of those reasons.

But I don't see whence will come relief anymore. The longer we wait, the longer Trump and the Republican Party has to consolidate their power. And they are exploiting every second for maximum gains.

Meanwhile, people are dying — in the United States, along the southern border, in Syria, in Somalia, in Yemen, and elsewhere around the world — because of the Trump Regime. Pelosi may be right that Trump really isn't worth the potential costs of using every tool in the drawer, but they are.

I have trusted Speaker Pelosi to know what she's doing, and she's come through time and again. I sure hope she knows what she's doing this time, because we can't afford for her to be wrong.