So now we’re presented with an impeachment that isn’t really an impeachment until the Empress of America declares it to be, by presenting it to the Senate, which she shan’t do until the Senate establishes rules to her liking, Constitution be damned. I probably should gloat a little bit, since this brings us back to my original prediction that there would be no impeachment — after all, their own “legal scholar” said it isn’t an impeachment until it is transmitted to the Senate.
I notice, however, that the coverage of the question has swung quickly to how Trump’s lawyers are interested in that bit of legal theory.
In any case, I’m not going to bother to gloat, because Nancy Pelosi’s wind may at any moment turn back north-north-west, and it will turn back into an impeachment again.
The Democrats now have a real dilemma: should they risk going to a Senate trial, or hope they can still make political hay out of a pseudo-impeachment they’re afraid to prosecute?
I don’t think this, any of this, is the result of any Hilbert-space-chess infinite-dimensional strategery. It’s primarily driven by the fact that the Democrats have, from the moment they realized Grandma lost, been driven by two primary impulses: revenge and fear. Revenge because they clearly are offended that someone like Trump might have actually won the election, and must be punished for the effrontery. (I suspect that’s a major motivation for some of the hard-core NeverTrump as well.) Fear because it’s becoming more and more clear the Obama Administration was using the FBI, the Intelligence Community, and illicit outsiders like Perkins Coie and Fusion GPS to accumulate and even manufacture opposition research that was then fed into the Intelligence Community to justify more intrusive spying.