The New York Post slammed Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in its Thursday cover and an op-ed published from columnist Michael Goodwin over the Democrats’ purely partisan impeachment of President Donald Trump.
The cover features a picture of Pelosi dressed in black for impeachment and states: “IT’S YOUR FUNERAL: Swamp mistress Pelosi dresses in black for historic vote.”
“Swamp Mistress”: Today’s @nypost cover pic.twitter.com/XwRSVxiqnU
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) December 19, 2019
The Post’s cover and the op-ed from Goodwin come in response to Democrats, for the first time in U.S. history, impeaching a president along strictly partisan lines, as only Democrats voted for the impeachment and all Republicans voted against it, with a multiple Democrats siding with the Republicans. One independent member sided with the Democrats.
The Post noted that Pelosi had publicly and privately fought off impeachment for months as the far-left faction of her party, led by socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), aggressively demanded impeachment.
Pelosi told The Washington Post in March, “Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path.”
Pelosi told CNN in June, “I don’t think there’s anything more divisive we can do than to impeach a president of the United States, and so you have to handle it with great care. It has to be about the truth and the facts to take you to whatever decision has to be there. It should by no means be done politically.”
Goodwin wrote in his op-ed:
[B]y last Sept. 24, with the 2020 election fast approaching and her icy relationship with Trump now a bonfire, Pelosi suddenly flip-flopped on impeachment. Her ostensible reason centered on the unverified claims of an anonymous whistleblower regarding Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine. The call, she was assured by the media and Rep. Adam Schiff, would amount to a smoking gun. …
… Twenty-four hours later, Trump released the transcript of the Ukraine call and it was benign in comparison to her inflammatory accusation. If only Pelosi had waited another day.
But it was too late. Confident that she had the votes now that most if not all the 2018 winners would be with her, she erased her previous red lines about bipartisanship, took the plunge — and plunged America into a nightmare that continues.
Goodwin went on to write that “the damage” from Pelos’s actions to America “is real.”
Goodwin was not alone in his analysis as others, including The New York Post’s editorial board, who noted what Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 65. Hamilton wrote:
A well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments is an object not more to be desired than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective. The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself. The prosecution of them, for this reason, will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused. In many cases it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions, and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side or on the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.