US President Donald Trump and US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi do not see eye-to-eye on much these days, but in the throes of impeachment, they are in lockstep on the desire to close out the year by checking off items on their to-do lists.
As the uncertain politics of the effort to remove Trump from office collide with critical year-end legislative deadlines, Washington, for the first time in recent memory, appears intent on demonstrating its capacity to multitask. Lawmakers and White House officials are eager to project the image that they have been focused on anything but the polarizing proceedings that are increasingly consuming their days and nights.
Even Trump, no stranger to unpredictability and drama, could only marvel at the week of Washington whiplash.
Photo: AP
“This has been a wild week,” he said on Friday morning as he hosted the president of Paraguay in the Oval Office.
On Friday, as the House Judiciary Committee was passing articles of impeachment against the president, Trump had counter-programming at the ready, announcing new progress on long-delayed negotiations with China to tame an 18-month trade dispute.
“Take note @SpeakerPelosi - this is what real leadership looks like,” tweeted White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham, highlighting the “phase-one” deal.
It was far from the first split-screen moment of the week.
In the span of one hour on Tuesday, Pelosi held a news conference to announce articles of impeachment against the president — then swiftly walked down the hall to announce a bipartisan deal to fulfill the president’s top legislative priority of the year, the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) on trade.
A day later, as the House Judiciary Committee took up the impeachment articles, the full House passed a compromise defense spending bill that would provide federal employees with 12 weeks of paid parental leave, a priority of the president’s daughter. The bill also would bring Trump’s long-promised Space Force to life.
The incongruous moments reflect the unease on all sides in Washington about how the polarizing impeachment process will play out politically and the fact that many voters across the country do not view impeachment as a high priority. So Democrats and the White House are going all-out to show that they can do their day jobs amid the impeachment drama on TV.
Washington is set for more of those moments next week, with the anticipated party-line impeachment vote on Wednesday sandwiched between Tuesday’s expected passage of a budget bill and Thursday’s thumbs-up for the USMCA.
For Pelosi, the decision to give the president those victories appeared aimed at trying to protect her caucus against charges — featured prominently in Republican adverts aimed at vulnerable Democrats — that their focus on impeachment has distracted from the bread-and-butter issues that voters care about. Democrats maintain that the issues they have made progress on are long-held priorities, like the new parental-leave policy for federal employees, and stronger labor and environmental protections in the USMCA.
“It’s not a coincidence that the USMCA agreement was announced the same morning that the articles of impeachment were introduced,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist and partner at Firehouse Strategies, which has been polling how impeachment is playing in crucial battleground states. “I think congressional Democrats in swing districts want to be able to show their constituents that they’ve done more than just impeach the president.”
Conant said he expects to see a concerted effort by moderate Democrats to find areas where they can work with Trump, even while they are impeaching him.
“It’s counterintuitive, but impeachment may actually help the president’s legislative agenda,” he said.
Pelosi tied the flurry of legislative activity amid impeachment to the calendar, telling reporters: “It’s just that as we get to the end of a session, there have to be some decisions made. The timetable for impeachment is the timetable of the committees and that came to an end with a hearing yesterday.”
The spurt of bipartisan legislating has not necessarily led to any cooling of political tempers.
At the White House, Trump aides highlighted what they called a “week of action,” aiming to use it as a cudgel against Democrats whom they have accused of doing nothing besides impeachment. Trump’s campaign is already planning to include the developments in new ads promoting the president making good on his 2016 campaign promises while Democrats seek his removal.
“One can make the argument that President Trump has had the best seven-day run of his presidency despite having two articles of impeachment dropped on him, and that is nothing short of remarkable,” said Jason Miller, who served as communications director of Trump’s 2016 campaign.
“As we have said since the do-nothing Democrats started this kangaroo court, President Donald J. Trump remains focused on the work of the American people, and this week’s unprecedented accomplishments prove that,” White House spokesman Judd Deere said.
Conant said the White House was intent on making the argument that “you shouldn’t impeach a president who is doing a good job.”
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
ISSUE: Some foreigners seek women to give birth to their children in Cambodia, and the 13 women were charged with contravening a law banning commercial surrogacy Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday thanked Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni for granting a royal pardon last year to 13 Filipino women who were convicted of illegally serving as surrogate mothers in the Southeast Asian kingdom. Marcos expressed his gratitude in a meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, who was visiting Manila for talks on expanding trade, agricultural, tourism, cultural and security relations. The Philippines and Cambodia belong to the 10-nation ASEAN, a regional bloc that promotes economic integration but is divided on other issues, including countries whose security alignments is with the US or China. Marcos has strengthened