September 20, 2020

Pelosi Refuses to Rule Out Impeachment to Delay Supreme Court Confirmation

“Protecting our democracy requires us to use every arrow in our quiver.”

Tasos Katopodis/Getty

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This weekend, President Donald Trump vowed to fill Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat by nominating a woman as soon as “next week.” But in a Sunday morning appearance on ABC News’ This Week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t rule out any options—including impeachment—to run out the clock on seating Ginsburg’s replacement.   

“We have our options,” Pelosi told George Stephanopoulos when he asked her about speculation that the House could impeach Trump or Attorney General William Barr to delay the Supreme Court confirmation process. “We have arrows in our quiver that I’m not about to discuss right now.”

Pelosi said she was uninterested in using the threat of a government shutdown to stall the confirmation. But everything else, it appears, is on the table: “We take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. We have a responsibility to meet the needs of the American people,” she told Stephanopoulos with a smile. “Protecting our democracy requires us to use every arrow in our quiver.”

Pelosi also did not answer when asked if she would consider expanding the number of justices on the court next term, if Democrats were to win the Senate. “We should be very calm, we should be inspired by Ruth Bader Ginsberg,” she said. “She was brilliant, and she was strategic, and she was successful.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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