Impeachment, but No Government Shutdown, in Pelosi’s Quiver
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Face masks do not, apparently, stop the spread of Trump Derangement Syndrome, which has spread from the Twitter mobs and Marxists rioting in the streets to the top levels of the Democrat Party.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told George Stephanopoulos she thinks she can stop President Trump from replacing deceased Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Ginsburg’s death from pancreatic cancer on Friday occasioned the usual hysteria, with top Democrats such as Pelosi arguing that Trump should not appoint a successor because he might lose on Election Day.

Trump will appoint a successor, he vows, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to confirm the nominee without delay.

Pelosi’s Quiver
Though the U.S. Senate is in sole charge of judicial nominations, Pelosi thinks she has something to say about the replacement for Ginsburg and can stop Trump from doing his constitutional duty because he wants to harm Americans by replacing Ginsburg so quickly.

“The President is rushing to make some kind of a decision because he — November 10 is when the arguments begin on the Affordable Care Act,” she said. “He doesn’t want to crush the virus. He wants to crush the Affordable Care Act.”

In fact, Pelosi said, Ginsburg wouldn’t want her replacement chosen, as she said in her “fervent last wish.”

And so the Democrats must stop the Crusher-in-Chief.

“Those with coronavirus who now have — millions of them now have a pre-existing condition,” she said. “That’s what the President wants to crush when he says he wants to replace the Chief Justice — excuse me the Justice in this short period of time.”

Stephanopoulos, a former legman for President Bill Clinton, then suggested that Pelosi threaten a government shutdown to pressure the president not to proceed.

Replied Pelosi:

None of us has any interest in shutting down government. That has such a harmful and painful impact on so many people in our country, so I would hope that we can just proceed with that. There is some enthusiasm among, some exuberance on the left to say, ‘Let’s use that,’ but we’re not going to be shutting down government.

 

 

After Pelosi delivered another fact-free rant about the Chinese Virus, her Democrat interlocutor asked whether the House would impeach Trump to stop him:

Stephanopoulos: Some have mentioned the possibility if they try to push through a nominee in a lame duck session that you and the House can move to impeach President Trump or Attorney General Barr as a way of stalling and preventing the Senate from acting on this nomination.

Pelosi: Well, we have our options. We have arrows in our quiver that I’m not about to discuss right now….

Stephanopoulos: But to be clear, you’re not taking any arrows out of your quiver? You’re not ruling anything out?

Speaker Pelosi: We have a responsibility to meet the needs of the American people. That is when we weigh the equities of protecting our democracy requires us to use every arrow in our quiver.

Michael Moore: Shut Down the Gov’t
Michael Moore, the morbidly obsese leftist who’s made a career of peddling falsehoods about people he hates, demanded that Pelosi do what she said she would not do, as Breitbart reported: shut down the government.

“You have to do something that the Republicans have been doing for decades,” Moore huffed. “For the first time … you have to block the continuing resolution that funds the government and just let it shut down.”

Democrats are having a tough enough time explaining why they oppose Trump’s second round of Chinese Virus stimulus money without having to explain a government shutdown over a SCOTUS nomination, a political reality apparently lost on Moore.

“Just take the money out of the system that runs the halls of Congress,” Moore raged. “Or, make it contingent on Mitch McConnell signing a pledge, in writing, that he will put no Supreme Court nominee in front of the Senate before inauguration day.”

Unhappily for Moore, that isn’t the way the federal government works.

As law professor Zachary Price explained in Government Executive, “Congress cannot prevent presidential pardons, vetoes or appointments by denying funding for them, because presidents don’t need any resources beyond their own salary to carry out these functions.”

Neither can shutting down the government “prevent representatives and senators from discharging constitutional functions that they can carry out personally, such as considering and voting on legislation. Any other view would yield the absurd result that a shutdown could prevent Congress from voting on legislation to end the shutdown.”

Photo: AP Images

R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.