House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy believes that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has withheld from the Senate the articles of impeachment to delay the start of the Senate trial. A late start will keep candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders in the Senate chamber rather than on the campaign in Iowa.
Is this a coincidence?
Pelosi delays to harm Sanders and help Biden
McCarthy suggested that Pelosi has delayed sending the impeachment articles to the Senate to ensure that Bernie Sanders will be sitting at his desk in the Senate instead of campaigning to win the February 3rd Iowa caucuses.
Once Pelosi sends the articles of impeachment to the Senate, the trial will begin. Once the trial begins, no other business will be conducted by the Senate, and the senators will be at their desks six days a week until the trial is over.
Even if Pelosi sends the articles to the Senate later this week, McCarthy does not think the trial could start until the next week. Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial took five weeks. During the trial, Senators must work six days a week until the trial is completed. The Iowa Democratic Caucus is on February 3rd. On this timetable, four of the Democrat candidates will be sitting in the Senate that day: Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. This gives a big advantage to Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden.
Why doesn’t the Democrat leadership want Bernie?
Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emmanuel, and others in Democrat leadership are afraid that Sanders will not be able to win the presidency because he is openly socialist, which may play well with the base, but won’t win votes in the campaign against President Trump. His plan to replace private health care insurance with Medicare for all would not do well in swing states.
Emmanuel pointed out that a Sanders candidacy would make it hard to win over the battleground states. “You need a candidate with a message that can help us win swing voters in battleground states. The degree of difficulty dramatically increases under a Bernie Sanders’s candidacy. It just gets a lot harder.”
But Sanders is now polling in first place in Iowa, replacing Pete Buttigieg who has fallen behind Sanders and Warren but remains ahead of Joe Biden.
If Sanders is stuck in the Senate for weeks, it is likely to hurt his campaign with just over 3 weeks until the Iowa caucuses.
The Democrats rigged the nomination against Sanders in 2016
Would it be out of character for the Democrats to try to harm Sanders’ campaign? Oh wait, there is precedent for that from the Democrat party in 2016!
Bernie Sanders accused the DNC of rigging the nomination process to favor Hillary Clinton back in 2016. Donna Brazile and Elizabeth Warren said the same thing.
WATCH:
This is not about fairness or love for the Constitution, If Nancy Pelosi’s delay to deliver the articles of impeachment has been about harming Bernie Sanders, she is showing herself to be a cynical political hack that puts party and power before country. But we already knew that.