The Week in Washington: “Don’t Mess With Me!”
“Don’t mess with me,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi admonished a smarmy reporter on Thursday, when he suggested that Pelosi wanted to impeach President Trump simply because she hates the guy. “This is about the Constitution of the United States and the facts that lead to the president’s violation of his oath of office,” she schooled him. “As a Catholic, I resent your using the word ‘hate’ in a sentence that addresses me. I don’t hate anyone.”
Nancy, may I beg to differ? I actually hate any number of Republicans in Congress—at this point, pretty much every single one of them—who refuse to acknowledge the facts, examine the overwhelming evidence, and at least consider impeachment. On Wednesday, four constitutional lawyers testified before Congress, with three arguing in favor of impeachment, and the fourth, invited by the Republicans, coming up with only a weak defense that can be summed up as slow down, where’s the fire? “If you rush this impeachment, you are going to leave half the country behind,” this attorney warned. But the president himself disagrees, tweeting on Thursday, “If you are going to impeach me, do it now, fast, so we can have a fair trial in the Senate, and so that our Country can get back to business.”
In fact, things are proceeding swiftly. Tomorrow, the House Judiciary Committee holds another hearing, with lawyers on hand to formally present the case for impeachment. Before the end of next week, the committee seems likely to vote on articles of impeachment, and the full House will probably vote on impeachment before Christmas. If all goes as expected, in January—usually the dullest, grayest month on the calendar, but not in 2020!—impeachment proceedings in the Senate will begin.
Could all this bad news be responsible for Trump’s especially cray-cray behavior last week? At the NATO summit in London, he held a series of pressers, with hapless world leaders looking like hostages, sitting in silence by his side. In the course of rambling remarks, he likened impeachment to “somebody pick[ing] an orange out of the refrigerator”; asked rhetorically, “You know what a fix is?”; wondered aloud, “Where’s Hunter?”; and said he thinks “Adam Schiff is a deranged human being. I think he grew up with a complex.” He also offered some thoughts on the Kentucky election (his candidate lost), which we are pretty sure was not exactly uppermost in the minds of the other NATO attendees.
It was hilarious in a terrifying sort of way, and apparently other world leaders felt the same way. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada was caught on a hot mic discussing the commander in chief with President Emmanuel Macron of France, Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands, British prime minister Boris Johnson, and Princess Anne. This clearly hurt the president’s feelings—he called Trudeau two-faced, canceled yet another press conference, and hightailed it back to D.C., where he continued to seem unusually perturbed. On Friday, for no readily apparent reason, he offered some presidential thoughts on problematic toilets: “People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once,” he mused to a captive audience in the Roosevelt Room.
In other news, guess where Rudy Giuliani was flushing toilets last week? Ukraine! Brazenly acting as if he isn’t the subject of intense investigations regarding dirty tricks in that country, he swanned around, meeting some of the same corrupt characters he has hung with before and claiming that he is working on a documentary for OAN, the One America News Network, a channel even more right wing than the Fox that Trump loves. (“Watch top Ukrainian officials testify under oath the side of the story Schiff doesn’t want you to hear,” proclaims the YouTube promo for this broadcast.)
And guess who else might be in a lot of trouble? House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes, one of the president’s biggest defenders, whose name has surfaced in White House call logs linking him to Rudy’s nefarious Ukraine-dealing pals. House Democrats are livid that Nunes did not disclose these ties, and experts say he should have recused himself from the impeachment investigation. (Rudy is on a ton of these phone logs too, taking calls from a mysterious number that comes up on records as “–1” and is thought to belong to the president.)
Lastly, let us give a shout-out to Kamala Harris, who didn’t have the greatest week. She may have suspended her presidential campaign on Tuesday, but she has hardly been silenced. When the president tweeted, “Too bad. We will miss you Kamala!” Senator Harris snapped back: “Don’t worry, Mr. President. I’ll see you at your trial.”
Originally Appeared on Vogue
