This, I don't get at all.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi held an all-hands meeting of her caucus on Thursday, during which she said the following. From the Washington Post:

Pelosi’s heightened rhetoric was on display at a morning news conference, at which she accused Barr of committing a crime by lying to Congress. But hours before, in a closed-door meeting of lawmakers, the California Democrat was even more explicit, calling Barr an “enabler” and saying Trump had engaged in the type of behavior that prompted the move to impeach Nixon in 1974. “Ignoring subpoenas of Congress, not honoring subpoenas of Congress — that was Article 3 of the Nixon impeachment,” she said, according to notes taken by a person present for the remarks. “This person has not only ignored subpoenas, he has said he’s not going to honor any subpoenas. What more do we want?”

And then, later, she said the following at a press conference:

Still — both publicly and privately — Pelosi stopped short of supporting impeachment for Trump, maintaining a position she has kept for months as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III finished his work, as the Justice Department prepared his report for public release and as the aftermath of that release has played out. She has been wary of starting a polarizing and distracting proceeding as long as Republicans remain squarely behind Trump. “We are in a very, very, very challenging place, because we have a Republican Party that is complicit in the special-interest agenda . . . so they are not going to say anything,” she said at the news conference. “Impeachment is the easy way out for some of these people because they know it will end at the Senate’s edge.”

I truly am not following the eleventy-dimensional chess here. She tells her caucus that the president* is behaving in exactly the way that Nixon behaved that brought articles of impeachment down on his sinful head. Then she tells the country, fck it. Those soulless robots in the Senate won't convict him anyway. The problem is that she and her Democratic majority in the House, the place where the Founders lodged the impeachment power, are running out of options.

And I would point out that Nixon's conviction in the Senate was not a sure thing when the articles of impeachment were voted out of Peter Rodino's House Judiciary Committee. That only happened when the Supreme Court forced the release of the "smoking gun" tape of June 23, 1972. Watch the committee vote from 1974. All of them, especially the several Republicans who voted "aye," do not act as though they're betting on a sure thing, because there isn't any such thing at this level of crisis.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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