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The House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) presiding, has inched another inch toward treating the Executive Branch with something resembling the contempt in which the Executive Branch obviously holds the Congress. Unless Attorney General William Barr coughs up the unredacted Mueller report by Wednesday, the committee will hold the attorney general formally in contempt of Congress which, given Barr's appearance in front of the committee last week, seems sadly redundant but there we are anyway. In short, the committee gave him two days to comply, at which point the committee promises to recommend that the full House do likewise. And if the mills of the gods grind slowly, the mills of Congress grind not at all because all the mill jobs went to Mexico years ago.

Anyway, over the weekend, in an interview with The New York Times, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivered herself of some curious thoughts regarding the current state of things, remarks that indicate that at least part of the Speaker's brain gets it and that another part does not, and that, somewhere in between, something has to be done.



“If we win by four seats, by a thousand votes each, he’s not going to respect the election,” said Ms. Pelosi, recalling her thinking in the run-up to the 2018 elections. “He would poison the public mind. He would challenge each of the races; he would say you can’t seat these people,” she added. “We had to win. Imagine if we hadn’t won — oh, don’t even imagine. So, as we go forward, we have to have the same approach.”



Put aside the absolute certainty that, if Whoever J. Democrat wins in 2020 like LBJ in 1964, El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago and his 40 percenters would react in exactly the same way. Look just at what Pelosi said. If she's right, and I think she is, then we are in a deadly constitutional crisis right freaking now because a dangerous authoritarian yahoo is in the White House, and because there is nobody in his own party who's willing to do anything about it. Which makes something else Pelosi said even stranger.



Sitting in her office with its panoramic view of the National Mall, Ms. Pelosi — the de facto head of the Democratic Party until a presidential nominee is selected in 2020 — offered Democrats her “coldblooded” plan for decisively ridding themselves of Mr. Trump: Do not get dragged into a protracted impeachment bid that will ultimately get crushed in the Republican-controlled Senate, and do not risk alienating the moderate voters who flocked to the party in 2018 by drifting too far to the left. “Own the center left, own the mainstream,” Ms. Pelosi, 79, said.

It seems to me that if Pelosi believes that the president* is venal and power-mad enough to discredit, if not defy, the results of a national election, she must realize that the crisis already is upon us. (And, no, this isn't like the wingnut horror stories about how Barack Obama was going to cancel the elections because Jade Helm!, False Flag!, Seth Rich! For one thing, neither Obama nor his allies personally played into those crackpot scenarios.) If that is the case, waiting for 2020 and hoping that cooler heads prevail at the ballot box strikes me as negligent at best.

The crisis is here and now. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI Getty Images

History tells us that the president* will attempt to delegitimize any unflattering poll results, discredit any unflattering news coverage, and do everything he can to make sure that his 40-Percenters stay ginned up and delusional. History also tells us that the Republican Party will follow right along, not just because he's Trump, but because voter suppression and delegitimizing inconvenient election results has been the party's M.O. at least since the Watergate midterms of 1974. They successfully delegitimized hand recounts and the clear provisions of Florida law in 2000, and the Supreme Court chimed in to help them. The architecture for this president* to discredit the 2020 numbers already is in place. It's part and parcel of three decades of Republican conservatives and their attempt to delegitimize the franchise of people who don't vote for them because their policies are perceived to be cruel and stupid.

I honestly don't get the people who can't see that the crisis is an immediate one. Congress has its procedures, and I respect that, and the committee vote is a small move forward, for sure. After all, the House and a dwindling number of federal courts are the only avenues of traditional checks and balances still functional against a robotic Republican power elite. But essentially to argue that impeachment should be off the boards not only in the House, but also on the campaign trail, is to rely on guard rails that aren't there any more, and that had been rotting away for years, anyway.

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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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