Nancy Pelosi has something up her sleeve

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced today that he’s supporting a proposed rules change that would allow the Senate to hold the impeachment trial without even having the articles of impeachment. Nevermind that McConnell isn’t close to having the supermajority of votes required to change the rules. He’s just following his usual strategy of announcing something impossible as if it were definitely going to happen, and hoping it causes the Resistance to lose faith and stop resisting.

If nothing else, Mitch McConnell is revealing that he has nothing up his sleeve when it comes to the impeachment trial. If he had anything better than “throw nonsense at the wall and hope it sticks,” we’d be seeing it by now. McConnell is just hoping he can get through this trial without doing too much damage to his party’s odds of keeping the Senate in 2020. It’s Pelosi who has something up her sleeve.

How do I know? There’s no way she would have decided to indefinitely hang onto the articles of impeachment, unless she knew going into it that it would end up working out in her favor. We’ve seen time and again that she doesn’t make a move unless she’s already holding the winning hand. We saw that when she held off on impeaching Trump at all, until he got caught up in the kind of scandal that was going to result in most Americans agreeing with impeachment. If she’s that cautious, does anyone really think she’d be standing out on a ledge with the articles of impeachment right now, unless she knew something we don’t?

The big question is what precisely is up her sleeve. Does she know about an upcoming witness that we don’t? Is she expecting to imminently win a court battle over evidence? Is she planning to bring more articles? No one knows except her – but that’s more or less the point. Mitch McConnell is over there bluffing his pants off, because it’s driving him crazy that he doesn’t know what’s going to happen next.

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