Malevolent as ever, House speaker Nancy Pelosi told 60 Minutes she's still all in for getting President Trump, either through the 25th Amendment or else through impeachment.

Speaking to CBS's 60 Minutes' Lesley Stahl (who claimed earlier that Hunter Biden's emails describing his pay-to-play activities were "not really stories"), Pelosi, 80, laid it out for Stahl, 79, and her marshmallow questions. 

According to the Daily Mail:

While some Democrats are pushing for the impeachment route, the House Speaker told '60 Minutes' in an interview that will air Sunday night that she prefers invoking the 25th Amendment because it gets Trump out of office immediately.

'There is a possibility that after all of this, there's no punishment, no consequence, and he could run again for president,' CBS' Lesley Stahl said to Pelosi in a clip released ahead of airing the full interview.

'And that's one of the motivations that people have for advocating for impeachment,' Pelosi explained.

This is unlikely, according to this BBC analysis, as well as this op-ed that ran in The Hill by legal expert Jonathan Turley.

To paraphrase Pelosi, voters are free to elect whom they elect.  It was the same deal with President Obama, even as activists tried to present evidence that his birth certificate was supposedly fake.  It was a dead-end campaign, given that the majority of voters wanted to elect him.

But it does reveal a lot about what's going through Pelosi's mind and the weak hand of cards she holds.

First, notice her first preference: she wants Mike Pence to do her dirty work for her and invoke the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump from office.  Let him do it for her.  That certainly spares her a lot of effort and headache.  It also sounds lazy, yes, but more likely, it sounds like someone who's got some problems and wants to get other people to fix them for her. 

Problem One: Impeachment won't work. 

First, it looks vindictive, and Democrat already shot their bolt once.  As the Wall Street Journal wrote in its Jan. 7 editorial calling on President Trump to resign (I don't agree with it, but it's a good read anyway):

Democrats would have more impeachment credibility now if they hadn’t abused the process in 2019. A parade of impeachers that includes Russian-collusion promoters Reps. Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler would repel more Americans than it would persuade. The mission would look like political revenge, not constitutional enforcement — and Mr. Trump would play it as such until his last breath. Mr. Biden could gain much goodwill if he called off the impeachers in the name of stepping back from annihilationist politics.

That won't win them any polling points with voters.

Second, there are less than ten days left of President Trump's term, and while the House can act today and rush through another kangaroo court vote as they did last time, with no serious evidence presented, the timing of the Senate isn't so optimal.

The soonest the Senate can look at this is Jan. 19, with a transition to the Democratic Party leadership on Jan. 20.  That's zero time for anything to happen before Trump is out of office.

All Pelosi can do is muscle through a House impeachment resolution less than a year from her last one, and then a long delay in the Senate.  Why, again, is she rushing this, then?  Why not have the House wait, same as the Senate?  The rush to impeach is actually a signal of her party's desperation.  She knows she isn't going to get Trump out. 

Adding fat to the fire, she also knows that Trump's approval numbers soared during the Democrats' last impeachment fiasco a year ago, once the bogus caper fell through.  That left the Democrats' move a waste of time, just a self-stroking virtue-signal. 

Now she's trying to save face by saying the timeline has moved: the House will bolt to impeach, even faster than they did last time, while the Senate will take...100 days to even start.  She'd probably been hearing from Biden, who did have a meeting with her, and learned from him that he didn't want to have the first days of his term all focused news-wise on Trump.  Biden wanted the headlines to be focused on himself as president, with the Congress operating in concord.

So now her Democrats are leaking out this:

But senior House Democrats say that the party may not send any articles of impeachment to the Senate until after Mr Biden's first 100 days in office.

That would allow Mr Biden to confirm his new cabinet and kick-start key policies including tackling coronavirus — something that would have to wait if the Senate had already received the impeachment articles.

Constitutional experts are split on whether impeachment can proceed to a Senate trial after a president has left office.

But 100 days is a long time in politics.

The public mood may be very different after Democrats approve tax hikes, see the economy tank, dole out reparations, see the border surge come, hand out free health care to illegals, enact regulations, target energy production, see Iran rampage, and other unpopular events that will happen as Democrats begin implementing their agenda.

But kicking the can to Day 100, for a pointless impeachment on a man out of power that probably can't even be legally done, can only signal vengeful vindictiveness to voters.  It's bound to be unpopular, if not illegal, and the aim of halting Trump from running from office is what third-world dictatorships do to dissidents.  Just ask Nicolás Maduro.  The Venezuelan Marxist dictator does that so much that it's his modus operandi.

An act like that can't redound well to Pelosi. 

Pelosi, though, is generally indifferent to what voters think, even if it hurts her own moderate Democrats.  She's riding a tiger with barking jackals such as Reps. Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez baying for Trump blood all around her.  She can't afford to displease them, so off she goes with another hopeless impeachment that is virtually certain not to take Trump from power.

It's an impeachment she can't win.  An ouster that won't happen.  A litany of scraps for the jackals 100 days down the road, with no one sure what the public mood will be.  This one will fall apart, too, and take Democrats down with it.  With just days left in office, President Trump can only gain from another failed impeachment, making Democrats look like two-time losers in the eyes of voters. 

This isn't strength.  Pelosi implicitly admitted how bad her position is, poised to become a two-time loser on impeachment in her 60 Minutes interview.  It's pathetic.

Image credit: CBS 60 Minutes via shareableYouTube video, screen shot.