Pelosi Hammers Cowardly GOP In New Post-Acquittal Op-Ed

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This past week, the vast majority of Senate Republicans solidified their commitment to President Donald Trump’s repeated political rampages with their votes to acquit him of the charges in House Democrats’ impeachment case. (Only Utah’s Mitt Romney voted to convict Trump of abuse of power.) In an opinion piece published this Friday at The Washington Post, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) hammered Congressional Republicans as accomplices to the president’s wrongdoing, which this time around, includes a plot to bribe Ukraine into investigating his opponents. That plot endangered national security and the security of U.S. elections, among other dangers.

No matter these potentially majorly destabilizing ramifications of Trump’s free-for-all power grab, Congressional Republicans have by and large refused to act. Before their votes to acquit the president, the vast majority of Senate Republicans voted to even exclude any and all witness testimony and additional evidence from Trump’s Senate trial. They apparently wanted to simply speed through an acquittal for the president, regardless of the facts.

Noting that even the president’s own lawyers essentially admit to the facts of the president’s scheme but even that wasn’t enough to sway Senate Republicans, Pelosi writes, following the acquittal vote:

‘Tragically, the American people have watched President Trump and Republicans in Congress dismantle the Constitution that we cherish… With their vote, Senate Republicans embraced this darkest vision of power: that if the president believes his re-election is good for the country, he can then use any means necessary to win, with no accountability or consequences.’

That’s the gist of an argument that the already controversial Trump defender Alan Dershowitz offered on the Senate floor during the trial. He claimed, essentially, that the president’s behavior pre-supposes lawfulness. As he put it:

‘If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.’

Senate Republicans evidently took that argument to heart.

In her opinion piece, Pelosi continued:

‘In declaring their loyalty to the president over our Constitution, Republicans have made a farce of the old boast that the U.S. Senate is the greatest deliberative body in the world. And they have joined the president in normalizing lawlessness and rejecting the checks and balances of our Constitution… Our Founders… never imagined that they would at the same time have a rogue leader in the Senate who would cowardly abandon his duty to uphold the Constitution. Sadly, because of the Republican Senate’s betrayal of the Constitution, the president remains an ongoing threat to American democracy.’

In other words — she seems pretty sick of Mitch McConnell’s grandstanding in deference to Trump, who Pelosi noted is “impeached forever, disgraced in history for his abuse of power and contempt for our Constitution.”

McConnell may prefer to shout from high heaven about the supposed divisiveness of the Democrats, but that ignorantly fails to capture the obsessive division enacted by his very own Dear Leader, Donald Trump. And with his unwavering support for the president throughout the impeachment proceedings, he has essentially forever tied himself to this president, chaos and all.