Nancy Pelosi is Donald Trump’s No. 1 Enabler

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Posted By: James Rowles September 18, 2019

No person has done more to enable Donald Trump’s undermining of the Constitution and the Rule of Law than U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

By her obstinate refusal to allow the Democratic Majority in the House to vigorously exercise its presidential oversight responsibilities, she has acted to ensure that no House Impeachment Inquiry takes place, to educate the American people, in time to have an impact on the 2020 election.

By slow-walking House reactions to Trump’s flagrant abuse of power in keeping Executive Branch officials from testifying before House Committees, she has enabled the President’s defiance of the Constitution.

When Attorney General William Barr first defied a House subpoena to turn over the unredacted Mueller Report, the House should have immediately found him in Contempt of Congress. The Democrats had the votes. But Pelosi came up with a delaying tactic, saying the House should hold off until it had a group of contempt citations to process all at once. That would be more efficient, it was argued. Time passed. Nothing happened. Barr was never held in contempt.

Seeing that there were no consequences for defying House subpoenas, Trump adopted a blanket policy of defying all House subpoenas, while advancing totally spurious Executive Privilege and other legal justifications for not submitting to oversight proceedings.

As a result of Pelosi’s blocking actions, the House Democrats failed utterly to educate the American people about Trump’s crimes and misdemeanors, the only stratagem that might have helped puncture Trump’s bubble of lies and distortions which continue to envelop half of those who are likely voters in 2020.

The Rasmussen Daily Tracking Poll tells the story. It is the only daily tracking poll of Likely Voters. On September 18, 20129, 51% of Likely Voters approved of President Trump, whereas 49% disapproved.

The Democrats have wasted the summer and what was probably their last chance to educate the American people by setting forth the details of Trump’s misdeeds as established in the Mueller Report and by other evidence, in televised hearings.

Pelosi appears to believe that Trump can be beaten by talking about bread and butter issues, and ignoring his massive assault on the the concept of Truth,  the Constitution and the Rule of Law. She seems to think that the Democratic majority in the House can be preserved though this approach, thereby assuring her own personal hold on power.

She is wrong.

It may be too late for the Democrats in the House to reverse course, but they should try. A strategy based on fear of Trump and his supporters is bound to fail.

So long as the Democrats fail to reshape the playing field. as they have done to date, their chances of defeating Trump and the Republicans in 2020 remain highly dubious.

Their pursuit of further evidence of Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors is like that of a detective who insists on investigating whether a murder suspect has committed another robbery, when the murder victim, the murder suspect, the gun, and video evidence of the suspect shooting it at the murder victim, backed by fingerprints and DNA evidence, are already lying on the evidence table.

Ironically, by her obstinate blocking of vigorous and effective action by the House, with a view to educating the American people, Nancy Pelosi turns out to be Trump’s greatest enabler.

If he wins the 2020 election and the country moves further down the road to authoritarianism, as surely it will if he is reelected, she will bear a great part of the blame.

Many Democrats are absolutely disgusted with her Leadership, and the cowardice of the House Democrats.  There are few if any examples of successful resistance to authoritarian leaders in other countries through acquiescence.

John F. Kennedy’s Democratic Party of Profiles in Courage has become, under her leadership, the party of Profiles in Cowardice.

 

The Trenchant Observer

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About the Author

James Rowles
"The Trenchant Observer" is edited and published by James Rowles (aka "The Observer"), an author and international lawyer who has taught International Law, Human Rights, and Comparative Law at major U.S. universities, including Harvard, Brandeis, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Kansas. Dr. Rowles is a former staff attorney at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States OAS), in Wasington, D.C., , where he was in charge of Brazil, Haiti, Mexico and the United States, and also worked on complaints from and reports on other countries including Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. As an international development expert, he has worked on Rule of Law, Human Rights, and Judicial Reform in a number of countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and the Russian Federation. In the private sector, Dr. Rowles has worked as an international attorney for a leading national law firm and major global companies, on joint ventures and other matters in a number of countries in Europe (including Russia and the Ukraine), throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, and in Australia, Indonesia, Vietnam, China and Japan. The Trenchant Observer blog provides an unfiltered international perspective for news and opinion on current events, in their historical context, drawing on a daily review of leading German, French, Spanish and English newspapers as well as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and other American newspapers, and on sources in other countries relevant to issues being analyzed. Dr. Rowles speaks fluent English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish, and also knows other languages. He holds an S.J.D. or Doctor of Juridical Science in International Law from Harvard University, and a Doctor of Law (J.D.) and a Master of the Science of Law (J.S.M.=LL.M.), from Stanford University. As an undergraduate, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree, also from Stanford, where he graduated “With Great Distinction” (summa cum laude) and received the James Birdsall Weter Prize for the best Senior Honors Thesis in History. In addition to having taught as a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, Dr. Rowles has been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs (CFIA). His fellowships include a Stanford Postdoctoral Fellowship in Law and Development, the Rómulo Gallegos Fellowship in International Human Rights awarded by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and a Harvard MacArthur Fellowship in International Peace and Security. Beyond his articles in The Trenchant Observer, he is the author of two books and numerous scholarly articles on subjects of international and comparative law. Currently he is working on a manuscript drawing on some the best articles that have appeared in the blog.

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