House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at a Dec 5 press conference

At a press conference Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi instructed the House to commence drafting formal articles of impeachment against Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States.

In a response to a reporter’s question, Speaker Pelosi gave a rarely used but quite powerful justification for Trump’s impeachment and that is, from the beginning of his Presidency, Trump has taken actions that directly benefit Putin’s Russia, adding that Ukrainegate was not an isolated incident but rather, yet another favor in a long line of favors Trump appears to be doing for Russia.

Specifically, Speaker Pelosi said, “It’s about Russia. Russia invading eastern Ukraine. Over 10,000 people died, now maybe 13,000 some of them in the absence of our conveying that military assistance that was voted in a bipartisan way by the congress of the United States. So sometimes people say, ‘well I don’t know that much about Ukraine.’ Well, our adversary in this is Russia. All roads lead to Putin. Understand that.”

Speaker Pelosi’s powerful justification for Trump’s impeachment–all about Russia– is rarely used by congressional Democrats and cable tv pundits but is certainly one that needs to be made with more frequency to the American public. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow has repeatedly illustrated on her show how Trump’s presidency has essentially boiled down to a series of favors to Putin’s Russia. On her Thursday night show, Maddow again brilliantly illustrated how Trump keeps doing favors to Putin up to and including Ukrainegate—holding back much needed military aid to Ukraine, which is under attack by Russia.

Maddow went into great detail illustrating how Trump has essentially given Russia, our sworn enemy, everything they’ve asked for and then brilliantly closed the segment with this poignant message tying the current impeachment saga to the troubling Trump-Putin bromance. “We are at this moment now, this historic moment where we’ve got all these arrows all pointing in the same direction consistently and none of them ever pointing in the other direction. All these actions, all pointing in the same direction all pointing towards exonerating Russia, advancing Russian claims, spreading disinformation that is of Russian origin, that is designed to serve the Kremlin’s interests…That is where this impeachment scandal comes from. And even if he is going to get impeached for this stuff, and it looks like he is, kind of makes you wonder if he stays in office, what comes next? This is an escalating pattern…What else might they[Russia] possibly want given everything they’ve gotten thus far? “

In other words, Democrats cannot afford to make Ukrainegate an isolated, out of the blue incident in which Trump somehow got caught up in. Instead, they must adopt the powerful case laid out by Speaker Pelosi and brilliantly illustrated by Maddow that Ukrainegate is just the latest example of what Trump has been doing ever since he became President and that is, consistently making decisions that go against America’s national security interest and seemingly aligned with the Kremlin. Then and only then, can Dems make a forceful case that impeachment is a necessity—that the Russian thing has gone too far if you will.

Bottom line folks, Trump’s strange daliance with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, a murderous dictator hostile to the United States and who meddled in our 2016 elections, is now way beyond the specularory phase. Any reasonable person presented with the fact pattern Rachel Maddow laid out would conclude that Trump has been doing Russia’s bidding all along up to and including Ukrainegate. Therefore tying Trump’s impeachment over Ukrainegate with his other actions vis-a-vis Russia is a brilliant move by Speaker Pelosi which will put the 53 GOP Senators in the very uncomfortable position of publicly defending Trump’s favors towards Putin.

More importantly, it will give Democrats an upper hand in the 2020 U.S. Senate contests because it will hand them the very simple but powerful campaign message, “If you are okay with Putin taking over the U.S., vote for Republican X“–the perfect Xs of course being Maine’s Susan Collins, Colorado’s Gardner and Arizona’s McSally.

For those of you very happy with @Emolclause’s activism don’t shy away from the “tip jar” below on your way out.

You may reach the author via email at author@grassrootsdempolitics.com or author@emolumentsclause.com