Nancy Pelosi Isn’t Handing Those Impeachment Articles to the Senate Right Away Because Mitch McConnell Can’t Be Trusted

After voting to impeach Donald Trump last night, the next step in this process is for the House of Representatives to turn over the articles of impeachment to the Senate, where they’ll conduct their own trial and then vote on whether or not Donald Trump will be removed from office. Or, at least, that’s what’s supposed to happen.

Following Wednesday’s vote, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she would not be transferring the articles immediately. First, she said, they’ll have to make sure that the Senate has a fair process planned. Because so far, the Republican-led Senate has not shown that they plan to have a fair process. In fact, some Republicans, like Lindsey Graham and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have outright bragged about how unfair they plan to be.

Pelosi hasn’t named the impeachment managers yet–those are House members who lay out the case against Trump and essentially serve as prosecutors in the Senate trial–and says she can’t “until we see what the process is on the Senate side, and I would hope that it will be soon.”

“So far, we haven’t seen anything that looks fair to us, so hopefully it will be fair,” she added, “and when we see what that is, we’ll send our managers.”

Pelosi wouldn’t comment on a timeline, whether it could be days or weeks or longer, though she did later clarify that she “never raised the prospect” that she wouldn’t send the articles at all.

As you might imagine, many Republicans are feigning outrage over this move.

Of course, if Pelsoi had handed over the articles of impeachment right away, Republicans probably would have accused her of rushing through the process or some such nonsense. That’s been their go-to tactic all along: Just attack whatever the Democrats do as being the wrong thing, even if it’s the thing you were previously demanding.

(image: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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