If Nancy Pelosi Wants to Uphold Her Legacy, She Should Impeach Trump
Most of us live in survival mode. We're just trying to get through the day, or the week, or the year. Or exerting superhuman efforts to scrape together that $400 we don't have on hand if an emergency strikes. But very important people spend more time pondering the very long run: their legacies. The important plan to put their names on buildings. Give their wealth to charity. I imagine Nancy Pelosi, the first female Speaker of the House, has started thinking about hers.
Lately, plenty of people have argued that the Democrats' failure to march toward impeachment, despite all of the evidence, is the centerpiece of Pelosi's master plan. She’s playing sixty-eighth dimensional chess by making the president kinda mad on Tuesdays instead of starting impeachment hearings. And we should trust her because she's one of the most effective Speakers in history.
Yet her real place in the canon probably won't be defined by her work to get the votes to pass a 2009 healthcare bill that the Trump administration is systematically dismantling. It's going to be how much of a fight she and her party put up against all the presidentially mandated horrificness that’s happened since the likely criminally-rigged 2016 election: the camps, and the cages, and the Muslim ban, and the not-so-gradual disappearance of many Americans' rights. Maybe people will remember whatever remains of the Affordable Care Act fifty years from now, or maybe they’ll be too busy attending fetus funerals or slapping together a family tree in the back of the bible they just bought to prove they’re actually U.S. citizens and might still get detained by ICE anyway.
Pelosi believes that the best way to hold Trump accountable is to let the voters decide on him in the 2020 election, because voters’ strong opposition to Trump in the 2018 midterms must not count anymore. A key problem with this theory is that it assumes voters won’t have anyone blocking their way to the polls, like the state of Tennessee, where the governor just signed a bill criminalizing voter registration drives, or the state of Texas, where lawmakers are advancing a bill that cracks down on the supreme evil of driving elderly or disabled voters to the polls in groups.
Floridians voted to re-enfranchise 1.4 million former felons who’d paid their debt to society only for Florida’s state government to decide that maybe they should pay any outstanding debts before they’re actually allowed to vote, poll tax style. Georgia’s new abortion restrictions, which are currently scheduled to go into effect in January 2020, potentially turn women into felons. I kinda always hoped if women had to be outlaws, we could do it like Bonnie of Bonnie & Clyde. Driving frantically and romantically across the center of the country. Evading five states’ worth of cops in a badass way. But instead, we get to be outlaws for trying to get essential healthcare without stabbing ourselves in the stomach. And outlaws can’t vote under Georgia law.
Typically, voters tell politicians to think about us. The people. The greater American public, who they’re elected to serve. But I have a radical proposal. I want Nancy Pelosi to think about herself. Her legacy. It's time for her to get selfish. To look in the mirror and decide if she wants to be known for insisting that this American moment can be fixed by suggesting infrastructure plans that aren't going to happen, or if she might feel like doing a little constitutionally mandated somethin’ somethin’, given the Mueller report's conclusion that Trump may have obstructed justice on ten separate occasions, the sort-of bipartisan agreement that Trump deserves to be impeached, and the 900 former federal prosecutors who'd indict him for obstruction of justice in a hot minute.
Yesterday, in a press conference announcing that his office has closed and that he’s stepping down as special counsel, Mueller said, “If we had confidence that the president did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” That statement felt like an invitation to Congress to start impeachment proceedings, in the way that a birthday party invitation usually means you’ve just been invited to a birthday party. C’mon Pelosi. We know you as tough: unafraid of challenge, not particularly into backing down. Are you going to go down as the Speaker who fully investigated a foreign power’s intrusion into our elections, or the Speaker who hoped someone else might eventually get around to it?
Kashana Cauley is a television writer and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and her writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, Esquire, The New Yorker, Pitchfork, and Rolling Stone. You can find her on Twitter @kashanacauley.
Originally Appeared on GQ
