Pelosi Steps Out

It turns out that while I quoted Speaker Emerita Pelosi's apocalyptic remarks on Trump yesterday, they were from a piece in New York Magazine, How Nancy Pelosi’s Long Game Led to Trump’s Indictment, and I actually missed much more important content that bears on what I've been writing about for the past several days.

(While various accounts of her retirement have referred to her as "emeritus", a term I've been using, it turns out from the piece that she is actually styled "Speaker Emerita", though I would think the politically correct usage would be "Emeritx".)

In the interview at the link, Pelosi takes credit for Trump's indictment, and indeed by implication almost everything that's happened since January 6 -- although she avoids taking credit for the Capitol incursion itself.

It was the then-Speaker of the House who insisted that there be a congressional inquiry following January 6. And it was the work of the select committee she fashioned that finally appears to have spurred a reluctant Justice Department to action, setting in motion a more intense phase of criminal scrutiny focused on Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The resulting indictment closely tracks the select committee’s work and findings, presenting a factual narrative that traces — almost identically — the evidence presented by the committee of a sophisticated, multipronged effort by Trump to remain in power that culminated in the mayhem at the U.S. Capitol.

What's been puzzling me is how little has been said of Trump's actual plan, or maybe more accurately, the plan of some of his congressional supporters.

Long before January 6 itself, Pelosi had been preparing for Trump to try to disrupt the transfer of power. “During the election, I thought, ‘He’s going to try to pull a stunt and we have to try to have as many states in the Democratic column as possible,’” she told me, contemplating the possibility that Biden’s victory might not be certified and that the House would have to move to an obscure procedure in which each state’s congressional delegation would cast a single vote to determine the next president.

As I've outlined here, the specific plan was to use the Twelfth Amendment of the US Constitution, which reads in part:

The person having the greatest number of [electoral] votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote. . .

That procedure, outlined in the Constitution, is hardly "obscure". What is possibly more obscure is the means by which a majority of the electoral votes can be challenged, which is outlined in the Electoral Count Act of 1887 that provides for objections to the electoral count on the day of certification. The best account I've seen of what appears to have happened on January 6 is at the Wikipedia link:

Following on attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election leading up to congressional certification, Representative Paul Gosar and Senator Ted Cruz filed an objection to the certification of the electoral votes of Arizona. The two houses withdrew and debated the objection, but were evacuated during an attack on the Capitol by pro-Trump protesters. After the crowd was expelled and the Capitol secured, the question was taken up again and the Senate rejected it 6–93 and the House rejected it 121–303. Representative Scott Perry and Senator Josh Hawley later filed an objection to the electoral votes of Pennsylvania with the result that the objection was rejected 7–92 in the Senate and 138–282 in the House.

It is probably correct to say that it wasn't in Trump's interest for supporters to storm the Capitol, but it's also clear that neither house of congress was willing to support any electoral challenge under the 1887 act. The best that can be said is that Trump's congressional supporters had an extreme uphill battle, and they certainly didn't have their ducks in a row going into the process. In addition, it doesn't seem that much effort was made to bring Vice President Pence on board, and his subsequent remarks suggest he never had a clear idea of what was intended.

However, every indication is that the attempt to throw the election into the House was based on the US Constitution and existing law, but as such, it failed under existing procedure. There were no tanks in the streets, it was never any sort of unlawful insurrection or coup attempt.

Speaker Pelosi at the time apparently did have a much clearer idea of what some of the Republicans intended than most of the Republicans themselves. On the other hand, especially given the way the New York Magazine piece praises her savvy, she likely also knew perfectly well what the outcome would be of any debate in the House or Senate following such a challenge, namely, that it would fail massively. So what was her object? The New York Magazine link says,

Republicans in Congress . . . could have exiled Trump from political life and perhaps spared him more intense legal scrutiny if they had voted to convict him in the impeachment trial over his role in the siege of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

In other words, her object was to drive a stake through Trump's heart. Her continuing problem is that this hasn't happened, and the point of the story seems to be that she's acutely aware of it -- and a major cause, in her pretty clearly expressed view, has been the dithering of Biden and his appointees over doing what must be done:

Meanwhile, there were questions about what the Justice Department was doing to address the potential criminal culpability of Trump and those in his orbit. The committee’s members and staff were uncovering — and presenting to the public — damaging evidence that they had obtained from Trump administration officials, but the DOJ was not pursuing those same threads — despite public frustration among some observers — seemingly content with focusing on the people who had stormed the Capitol or who played a role in organizing the violence that day.

In effect, Pelosi in this interview is saying she engineered Trump's impeachments and laid out a strategy for ending Trump's career after January 6, but Biden and Garland have waited too long to make their move and botched the job. There may be some truth to this, and it probably unintentionally shows what she thinks of Biden, but it also underestimates Trump. Still, it sets up a narrative by which the Democrat establishment can back off a 2024 debacle by blaming Biden, and that might be the real takeaway from the New York Magazine piece: Pelosi senses a disaster on the horizon and is going to blame Biden.