Nancy Pelosi savages Lindsey Graham’s impeachment threats as “waste of time”
As the impeachment trial of former chief antagonist prepares to get underway next week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is losing her patience with the folks representing the minority party in both her chamber and now, with the new administration, in the Senate and the White House as well.
Her diminishing tolerance was also reflected in her answer to a reporter at her press conference today who asked the House Democratic leader about a seeming threat thrown her way by one of the leading senators in the GOP “Sedition Caucus” who voted to ignore the will of over seven million voters and reject the results of the electoral college vote tally.
The reporter asked Pelosi her reaction to Senator Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) statement that if Democrats defy his wishes and decide to call witnesses at the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump as they have indicated they will by requesting the disgraced ex-president to take the stand on his own behalf, he will call in the FBI to “tell us about the people who planned this attack and what happened with the security footprint at the Capitol.”
Speaker Pelosi’s quick and dismissive response tells you all you need to know about whether the Democrats will let themselves be steamrollered by Republicans in the Senate now that they no longer control the agenda.
REPORTER: Sen. Graham said that if the Democrats call any witness [during impeachment]…the Republicans will…call in the FBI and "tell us about…what happened with the security footprint at the Capitol." What's your response to that?
PELOSI: Your question is a waste of time. pic.twitter.com/rj6strT2HP
— JM Rieger (@RiegerReport) February 4, 2021
During the rest of her press conference, Pelosi found plenty of things to say that she didn’t consider a waste of her time, as she defended the decision of the Democrats to hold the seditious ex-president accountable for his many crimes.
“Peace is not just the absence of dissension; it is the presence of justice,” Pelosi said. “So we will honor the Constitution by establishing justice.”
If Democrats didn’t hold an impeachment trial, “we might as well remove any penalty from the Constitution of impeachment; just take it out.”
The House speaker went on to point out the two things that our nation’s founding fathers were most frightened of — “a demagogue and a mob” — and reminded the reporters that that’s “exactly what descended” on the Capitol Building complex on January 6th.
She expressed confidence in the impeachment managers whom she appointed to present the case against the disgraced former president, slipping in a sharp barb at Trump’s defense team and their mangled spelling as she described her own team as “silent, hard-working, brilliant in terms of what we saw in the brief, not only wise but — you might appreciate, well-written — and no spelling mistakes of ‘the United States.’”
Speaking in advance o the House debate over the removal of the GOP’s Q-Anon sweetheart, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments, Speaker Pelosi also had some less than complimentary words to say about the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives.
“It’s just so unfortunate,” Pelosi said. “You would think that the Republican leadership in the Congress would have some sense of responsibility to this institution, as they did when they did not seat Representative King of Iowa two years ago. For some reason, they have chosen not to go down that path, even though we gave — Mr. Hoyer gave Leader McCarthy sufficient notice that this was a path that we would follow.”
The public at large will find out how successful Democratic efforts to strip Rep. Greene of her committee assignments will be when the House takes its expected vote on the matter later today.
Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter.
Original reporting by Felicia Sonmez at The Washington Post.
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