Pelosi's Anti-Impeachment Stance Is Reportedly Pissing Off Key Allies

Following Wednesday’s Mueller hearings, the four most important Democrats in the House investigation of President Donald Trump—committee chairs Reps. Jerry Nadler, Adam Schiff, and Elijah Cummings, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—held a press conference with some charts.

While Pelosi stressed that the hearings were “a crossing of a threshold in terms of the public awareness of what happened,” she again refused, as she has always refused, to support the start of an impeachment inquiry. “My position has always been: whatever decision we make in that regard would have to be done with our strongest possible hand, and we still have some outstanding matters in the courts,” Pelosi said.

Last month, a Democrat on the House Judiciary committee told CNN that while Nadler wanted to open an impeachment inquiry, but that he didn’t “want to throw Pelosi under the bus.” At this point, however, it appears that Nadler has just about had it.

Politico reported on Wednesday that Nadler and Pelosi clashed at a closed-door Democratic caucus meeting following the Mueller hearings, with Pelosi opposing Nadler’s push to begin drafting articles of impeachment against Trump. Now, the Daily Beast reports that the in-house fighting is putting Nadler and Pelosi on a “collision course”:

“There is constant battling. The speaker is very much directing the major decisions,” said one Democratic lawmaker. “I think this is a strategy [by Nancy Pelosi] to try and slow-walk this process and shift some of the attention away from her not moving forward. She puts it on the Judiciary Committee, saying, ‘Oh they haven’t yet done all the investigative work yet. They are being meticulous and taking their time.’ It’s a way to slow-walk it.”

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“I don’t think it’s an accident that Pelosi has resisted centralizing all of this under House Judiciary,” said an aide to a Democrat on that committee. “She’s made her position clear, although she’s never said it out loud: that impeachment would be a political loser for Democrats. And so she is very much in control of the caucus.”

While sources close to Nadler told the Daily Beast that the reports of tension between the two is “overblown”—Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island, in a pitch-perfect parody of your average elected Democrat, said that Nadler “has been very meticulous in kind of a chess game strategy”—it’s clear that some House Democrats are beyond frustrated at Pelosi’s constant rebuffing of her caucus on impeachment. When Rep. Al Green forced a third vote on impeachment following Trump’s comments about Ilhan Omar last week, 95 Democrats voted for it, an increase of nearly 40 people since Green’s first attempt in 2017.

Complicating matters for Nadler is that he has a serious primary challenger who’s specifically running against him on his handling of the Trump investigation. Lindsay Boylan, a former aide to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, has already raised over a quarter of a million dollars to prepare for her challenge against Nadler, an eye-popping amount that automatically makes Nadler’s race one of the top primaries to watch next year.

“We didn’t elect the speaker in this district. We elected Jerry Nadler to be our member of Congress,” Boylan told the New York Daily News earlier this month. “It’s a time for moral clarity and courage. We need to act and go beyond empty talk.”