What is Nancy Pelosi thinking?

The House speaker’s perceived delay in referring articles of impeachment against Donald Trump to the Senate for a trial is the gambit that has set a thousand heads scratching.

After obtaining a whistleblower report against Trump in September, Democrats in the House moved with stunning swiftness to investigate, charge and impeach the president in under three months.

Then the process stopped. That was partly owing to the holiday break, which is only now ending.

But as the House opened its first session of the new year on Tuesday afternoon, Pelosi had still not tipped her hand as to when she might take the next step, of passing the two articles of impeachment, for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, on to the Republican-controlled Senate.

The Senate would then hold a trial, with a two-thirds majority needed to convict Trump and remove him from office – a long shot.

Speculation and political parlor-gaming about Pelosi’s strategy have meanwhile filled the informational vacuum.

Does she believe she can extract concessions from Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and majority leader, about whether the Senate trial will include witness testimony or documents? McConnell told colleagues on Tuesday that he had the votes to set the rules unilaterally.

Or is she making a background bet about how bad it might look for Republicans to refuse to negotiate on trial rules? How does the looming Democratic presidential primary season figure into all of this?

Republicans led by McConnell have sought to portray the perceived holdup – “perceived” because there is, after all, no constitutional guidance on the question and little guiding precedent – as a sign of Democratic weakness.

“Every day that House Democrats refuse to stand behind their historically partisan impeachment deepens the embarrassment for the leaders who chose to take our nation down this road,” McConnell said in a floor speech Tuesday.

At a news conference immediately following December’s historic impeachment vote in the House, Pelosi said the process could not be moved forward “until we see what the process is on the Senate side”. In an effort to protect Trump, Republicans have called for no new witnesses or testimony to be entertained.

Pelosi and her lieutenants were scheduled to meet later on Tuesday, and the full Democratic House caucus was scheduled to meet Wednesday morning. Those meetings could produce an agreement about impeachment – and an announcement – soon.

But the palpable Republican frustration at Pelosi’s maneuvering might be a sufficient sign that whatever game she is playing, she is winning – for now.

“I don’t want to turn the Senate over to Nancy Pelosi,” groused the Republican Lindsey Graham, who was among senators calling for a rules change to speed the process.

The longer Pelosi waits to explain her moves and motives, however, the greater the risk, perhaps, that they will come in for question.

“The continued delay in transmission now starts to become a little unusual,” said Frank O Bowman III, a law professor and author of High Crimes and Misdemeanors. In Pelosi’s defense, he said, the entire impeachment has been unique, because the House has had to conduct its own fact-finding, in contrast with prior impeachments, while the president has wholly refused to cooperate.

Unexpected plot twists, such as the announcement by the former national security adviser John Bolton on Monday that he would testify before the Senate if subpoenaed, have further complicated matters.

“One possible response is the House holds on to the articles and then hits Bolton with a subpoena to come to the House,” said Bowman, calling Bolton’s announcement a “curveball”.

Corey Brettschneider, a law professor and author of The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents, noted that before the impeachment trial, senators from both parties must take an oath vowing to sit in impartial judgment on Trump’s actions – when McConnell and others have explicitly vowed not to act as “impartial jurors”.

“To try to get a predetermined outcome is really an outrage,” said Brettschneider of the Republican leadership. “So she [Pelosi] is absolutely right to try to stop that process from happening until there’s a guarantee that there’s some semblance of fairness.”

The leverage Pelosi wields in the matter is uncertain and might be diminishing, however. Only a week into the new year, with Trump threatening war with Iran and the Iowa caucuses less than a month away, the window for impeachment to command public attention could be closing.

For all the fertile grounds for speculation the hold-up has provided, Bowman said, there was a background point that overrode the short-term political handicapping.

“Absent some radical change either within the impeachment universe or outside of it, I think everybody understands that all of this is sort of kabuki theater, because the result is a foregone conclusion,” said Bowman.

“You’re not going to get 20 Republicans to vote to convict this guy. Everybody understands that.”