Who Wants to Blow Up Our Constitution? (Spoiler: It’s Not Trump)

By Charles Lipson for RealClearPolitics

The most profound attacks on Donald Trump are that his presidency is illegitimate and that he wants to destroy our constitutional structure.

The Democrats have leveled those accusations for four years, accompanied by charges he is a wannabe dictator, elected thanks to his good buddy, Vladimir Putin.

These frenzied charges, we now know, were invented and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and then funneled to the U.S. government through the FBI, Department of Justice, and State Department.

Meanwhile, the CIA and then the FBI were busy spying on the Trump campaign (and, later, in the FBI’s case, on the Trump presidency), trying to find “collusion” with Russia.

Their relentless effort led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whose partisan team knew almost immediately there was no proof of these damning allegations.

They should have told the public immediately.

Instead, they spent the next two years trying — and failing — to catch President Trump on a “process” crime of obstructing justice, without any underlying crime to investigate.

RELATED: Secret Report: CIA’s Brennan Overruled Dissenters Who Concluded Russia Favored Hillary

They were pursuing a person, not a crime, violating our most basic idea of legitimate law enforcement.

Trump actually cooperated fully with the collusion investigation, providing millions of otherwise-privileged documents, but he didn’t bite on a personal interview designed to catch him in a purported false statement.

(His promise to cooperate fully with Mueller’s collusion investigation was based on the special counsel’s explicit promise to complete the investigation quickly. Mueller’s team reneged on that assurance after they received all the White House documents and testimony they sought.)

Why bother trying to lure the president into a false-statement trap if you can’t indict him?

Simple: because Mueller’s team, effectively led by his zealous deputy, Andrew Weissmann, wanted to help House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, so she could impeach the president.

That effort failed because the special prosecutor’s office  didn’t come up with convincing evidence. The investigation by Pelosi acolyte Adam Schiff also failed.

As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Schiff had already elicited testimony, under oath, from Obama administration officials, all of whom said there was no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.

He kept that testimony secret for two years so the public would never find out.

With these failures accumulating, Schiff’s team suddenly spied another pot of gold at the end of the rainbow: alleged malfeasance by Trump regarding Ukraine.

RELATED: Investigation: The Senate’s ‘Russian Collusion’ Report Had No Smoking Gun

It was fool’s gold, but it was enough for House Democrats, who voted to impeach the president on a party-line vote. The public wasn’t convinced.

House Democrats never won the broad support they needed to convince senators to remove a duly-elected president. How badly did this impeachment effort fail?

The Democratic National Convention, held just six months later, simply ignored the whole embarrassing episode.

Even the most rabid partisans didn’t care.

These repeated attacks may not have forced Trump out of office, but they succeeded in another way: They hobbled his presidency for four years. Today, the cumulative damage makes his reelection an uphill struggle.

So does the COVID pandemic and Trump’s response to it, which the public considers mediocre (or worse) and confusing.

Trump’s narcissism/constant self-promotion doesn’t help, either. It repels many educated voters, especially with women.

The vitriolic conflicts surrounding Donald Trump have obscured two crucial issues, which voters ought to weigh carefully as they choose the next president.

One is the difference between Trump’s impulsive, divisive personality and the policies he has actually pursued. The other is the Democrats’ threat to significantly change the structure of American government.

The two issues are intertwined since Trump’s policies are, at bottom, an effort to restore America’s traditional federal structure and limit the power of unelected officials in Washington.

His efforts to roll back the regulatory state also curtail the power of lobbyists and their powerful employers, since they hold the greatest influence over detailed rules and regulations, not general laws like tax rates.

Trump’s tweets and rambling public comments project strong, personalized, centralized power. That’s the essence of the “wannabe dictator” charge against him.

In fact, his basic policies are quite different from that self-inflated persona.

For all Trump’s braggadocio, he has tried to move the country away from Washington’s centralized control, away from control by executive branch bureaucracies (though not from the White House itself), and toward federalism and policymaking by the elected officials.

No president in modern times has waged a more sustained battle against powerful entrenched interests and their phalanx of lobbyists, who rotate in and out of government.

Trump’s most important domestic policies are aimed squarely at wresting control from these special interests and their apologists in the mainstream media.

To do so, Trump has tried to return policymaking to elected officials and senior Cabinet appointees and away from the lower-level bureaucrats, whose regulations dominate Americans’ everyday lives.

Likewise, he has tried to wrest control of the federal courts away from judges who act like unelected legislators and return them to judges who see a more modest role for themselves: interpreting laws and the Constitution as written.

Taken together, Trump’s major initiatives are an effort to restore the traditional balance between Washington and the states, between those elected to make laws and those responsible for executing them or adjudicating disputes.

Not surprisingly, these efforts have met ferocious opposition, led by liberals who established the bureaucratic behemoths in the mid-1960s, by progressives who want to expand them still further, and by interest groups that profit from these massive programs.

These disputes, not Trump’s personality, are the heart of America’s modern political divide.

Joe Biden is simply the familiar face of the old guard, repeating hoary nostrums by rote. Their last ideas died decades ago.

Their only answer now is to enlarge the programs and spend more money.

The new ideas come not from this nomenclatura but from the progressive and socialist left, who want to take giant strides toward centralized, regulatory government, paid for with higher taxes and more debt.

They are determined to redistribute wealth on an unprecedented scale and impose vast regulatory schemes, beginning with health care and energy.

RELATED: Joe Biden Vows No New Coal Or Oil Plants In America

They want to “reimagine” policing, jails, and immigration, without so much as deigning to explain why this wouldn’t result in letting violent criminals run loose in our cities and states, while opening the Southern border to an influx of illegal migrants (who would then receive the bounty of larger government welfare programs).

Since these ideas lack broad voter support, Biden is not running on them.

He is running an almost entirely on one idea: Trump is dreadful and needs to be replaced. Biden’s own prospective policies are as well hidden as the Wizard of Oz.

There are three reasons Biden and the Democrats won’t say what they will do. Despite what happened to them in 2016, they believe a purely negative campaign can win the White House.

They are betting that revulsion with Trump is that high. Second, the more Biden and Kamala Harris say, the more likely they are to alienate either progressive activists or center-left independents – and they need both groups to win.

Third, the media doesn’t press them for answers, so why give them? The mainstream media want Democrats to win, and they have behaved more like adjuncts of the Biden campaign than neutral reporters.

RELATED: CNN Reporter Complains About Trump Removing Mask – Video Shows Her Taking Mask Off Inside White House

A negative campaign does not mean the Democrats won’t enact a positive agenda if they are elected.

Senior Democrats on Capitol Hill have already floated ideas that would fundamentally alter both Congress and the courts — that is, Articles I and III of the Constitution.

To do that, they must not only win the presidency and both houses of Congress, they must change the Senate’s long-established rules, which allow a sufficiently large minority to stop radical legislation.

If that minority is 40 votes or more, its members can “filibuster” the bill and prevent its passage.

What Democrats are suggesting is they will abolish the filibuster in order to pass sweeping legislation with just 50 votes and Vice President Kamala Harris to break the tie.

RELATED: Senate Republicans Can Do What They Want, Democrats Already Shot the Hostage

Since the filibuster is a Senate rule, not a constitutional requirement, it can be changed by a simple majority as the first act of the new Senate.

With the minority neutered, a Democratic Senate could move quickly to enact their party’s agenda, just as the House would. The Senate without a filibuster would resemble the House, only with longer terms.

Those who propose these changes are weighing short-term goals: the policies they want to implement.

Whatever you think of those goals, the means they propose would eliminate a vital element of the Founders’ constitutional structure, which set up a Senate to slow (or stop) impetuous action and required large majorities to enact new laws.

Although the Founders wanted a more energetic government than the Articles of Confederation, their new structure included multiple “veto points,” plus the Bill of Rights, all designed to prevent an overly aggressive government from trampling citizens’ liberties.

Changing the Senate rules is not the only major change being floated. Democratic leaders apparently want to add two new states to the union, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia.

The goal, obviously, is to lock in their party’s control of the Senate for years to come. Again, Democrats would need to eliminate the filibuster since all Republicans (and perhaps a few Democrats) would object.

Some Democrats also propose yet another institutional change, this one to the third branch of government.

They want to expand the Supreme Court beyond its current nine members, which it has had since 1869. Thanks to Republican presidents and Republican Senates, the court now has a conservative majority.

RELATED: It’s Starting: Democrats Introduce Bill To Limit Supreme Court Terms

Democrats have suggested packing the court with several new, liberal justices to outvote the conservatives.

Given the scope of these proposed changes, you would think the party floating them would be forced to say whether they were really determined to blow up Articles I and III of the Constitution.

In fact, they won’t say. It would be “a distraction” even to discuss it, declare Biden and Harris. The Democrats’ Senate leader won’t say, either. His coy line is that “everything is on the table.” Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.

What about Democrats running for Senate in hard-fought races in Colorado, Arizona, North Carolina, South Carolina, Michigan, Iowa, and Maine? Have they been pressed to say yea or nay on these issues?

No.

The result is that the biggest issues lay hidden in the shadows as we enter the final stages of the election, the most consequential one of the modern era.

RELATED: Top Dem Senator Is Asked By CNN To Explain How Nomination Of Amy Coney Barrett Is ‘Illegal Or Illegitimate’ – He Can’t Do It

The institutional changes being proposed mean we are not just voting for a president, a senator, and a representative. We could be voting on the basic structure of our central government, the role of the courts, and the relationship between Washington and the states.

Yet the presidential debate said little about it. It was simply a flurry of crude interruptions, mostly by Trump, and mud-slinging by both candidates.

They never engaged each other directly on the fundamental issues. That was a travesty for the country and a missed opportunity for Trump.

We are being kept in the dark as we vote on what could be monumental changes. Let’s debate those changes openly. Turn on the damned lights.

Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.

Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security. He can be reached at charles.lipson@gmail.com.

The post Who Wants to Blow Up Our Constitution? (Spoiler: It’s Not Trump) appeared first on The Political Insider.

Kevin McCarthy: We’ll Oust Nancy Pelosi If She Tries To Impeach Trump Over SCOTUS Pick

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy threatened to oust Nancy Pelosi if she attempts to impeach Trump as a means to stop his Supreme Court nominee.

Pelosi, in an interview earlier this week with ABC News’ “This Week,” refused to rule out impeachment of the President or Attorney General William Barr to halt the nomination.

“We have arrows in our quiver that I’m not about to discuss right now, but the fact is we have a big challenge in our country,” the House Speaker stated.

“Listening to the speaker on television this weekend – if she tries to move for an impeachment based upon the president following the Constitution, I think there will be a move on the floor to no longer have the question of her being Speaker,” McCarthy threatened.

“She may think she has a quiver — we do too,” he told reporters.

RELATED: AOC, Pelosi Hint Impeachment Should Be Considered To Stop Trump Supreme Court Selection

Kevin McCarthy Explains Why He’ll Oust Nancy Pelosi

McCarthy proceeded to explain why Pelosi’s threat to impeach – a process typically reserved for high crimes and misdemeanors – would lead to her being ousted.

“The president is supposed to move forward and they will,” he said noting it is Trump’s Constitutional duty to select a replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the SCOTUS.

“The Senate is supposed to take the action and they will — it’s their constitutional right and they are following through,” he added.

“If Pelosi and House Democrats try to impeach the president, we will take the movement to remove her from speakership,” he reiterated.

RELATED: Tucker Exposes Democrats’ Plan To Stop Trump’s SCOTUS Pick – ‘Burn The Entire F***ing Thing Down’

Pelosi and the Democrats Will Do Anything to Stop Trump From Filling the SCOTUS Vacancy

Impeachment hasn’t been the only arrow in the quiver that Pelosi and the Democrats have threatened to use if they don’t get their way.

Should Trump lose and Democrats regain control of both Houses of Congress, they’ve made it clear they’ll consider packing the Supreme Court with more liberal judges.

New York Rep. Jerry Nadler called on his colleagues to do just that.

Joe Biden said in 2019 that Democrats would “live to rue that day” should they decide to pack the Supreme Court.

More recently, the Democrat nominee has declined to answer the question saying it would distract from the issue at hand.

The late Justice Ginsburg, in an interview with NPR last year, opposed the idea of expanding the court.

“Nine seems to be a good number. It’s been that way for a long time,” she said, adding, “I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court.”

The post Kevin McCarthy: We’ll Oust Nancy Pelosi If She Tries To Impeach Trump Over SCOTUS Pick appeared first on The Political Insider.

Trump must be impeached and removed for commuting Roger Stone’s sentence. Rule of law demands it

It’s very simple: By commuting Roger Stone’s sentence, The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote has sent a clear signal that anyone who does something illegal on his behalf, or who has knowledge of something illegal he has done and lies about it under oath, and/or to investigators, will never be punished. This an act that fatally weakens the constitutionally mandated checks and balances through which our democracy prevents a president from achieving dictatorial power.

Investigations cannot proceed toward any sort of justice if no one is required to tell the truth. That much should be apparent to any reasonable, objective observer, no matter their party. This president has now created a shield around himself so that he can—so long as he simply maintains the loyalty of his minions—do literally anything he wants and remain free of accountability or punishment. That cannot be allowed to stand. Our system offers but one remedy.

Thus far, only a single Republican office-holder of note has spoken out about Trump’s attack on the rule of law. All other Republicans must take a stand—either for the would-be Tyrant from Trump Tower, or for American constitutional democracy. There is no in-between.

Unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president.

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) July 11, 2020

We know the reasons we will hear from those who counsel against impeachment and removal: “but the election…..” You know what? Fuck that. This is about standing up for our Constitution. And not just the Second Amendment.

For far too long, Trump and Republican leaders in Congress, and in the states, have acted in ways that are technically within their rights (does Merrick Garland ring a bell?), but which violate fundamental constitutional norms. Commuting Roger Stone, however, goes far beyond violating norms. Even Richard Nixon didn’t pull anything like this. Trump’s corrupt actions represent a blatant attempt to destroy our democracy, and the only way to stop him is for Congress to take the one power the Constitution provides to rein in such a president.

Congress must impeach and remove Donald Trump. Now.

When it comes to packing the federal courts, McConnell and Trump have no shame—and no principles

Focusing on the long-term—especially about matters of governmental and political process—isn’t exactly the easiest thing to do in the middle of a pandemic. However, Republicans never seem to think it’s the wrong time to push every button made available to them in their quest to gain as much power as possible. No matter what constitutional or historical norms they have to trample on, Donald Trump and his party are determined to create a conservative judiciary at the federal level that will endure for a quarter-century or more.

Let’s start, however, with what’s going on in 2020. Moscow Mitch—Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, that is—has been doing things the Founders likely never envisioned when they wrote our Constitution. He, along with allies, have been making calls to aging conservative jurists on the federal courts, reminding them that the clock is ticking—on Trump’s time in the White House, on the Republicans’ hold on the Senate, and, most appropriately given his embrace of the nickname “Grim Reaper,” on their very lives. McConnell has been urging them to all retire ASAP so that he and The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote can put as many young whipper-snappers as possible into lifetime seats on the federal bench, seats they’ll hold long past a Sasha Obama presidency.

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer recently called McConnell out on this blatant manipulation of the process: “Senator McConnell knows he can’t achieve any of his extreme goals legislatively, so he continues to attempt to pull America to the far right by packing the courts.”

As The New York Times notes, some progressives have made statements urging justices to stay in their positions so that Trump can’t appoint their successors, but McConnell has achieved a new low by targeting individual judges and asking them to retire. This ask is a nasty one, on par with greedy heirs rooting for wealthy relatives to die sometime before 2010 came to an end ... just so they could dodge the temporarily-repealed estate tax.

McConnell here is repeating, in private, sentiments that members of his party such as Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley publicly expressed in the run-up to the 2018 midterms: “If you are thinking about quitting this year, do it yesterday. If we have a Democrat Senate, you’re never going to get the kind of people that are strict constructionists.”

For anyone confused, “strict constructionists”—i.e., conservative judges who claim that all they do is look to the plain text of the Constitution when making their rulings—is really just a fancy term Republicans use in public to give a more objective veneer to their preferred judicial approach, which almost always—coincidentally, of course—comes down on the side of the powerful. In other words, characterizing conservative judges as strict constructionists sounds less political than saying that they are right-wing ideologues who vote just like Rush Limbaugh would—even though the latter is the truth.

Republicans are being quite systematic about this whole affair. Their efforts are supported by a private organization called the Article III Project, named after the part of the Constitution that establishes lifetime tenure for federal judges, subject to impeachment and removal if they fail to live up to the standard of “good behaviour” laid down therein. This group exists to “fight for the confirmation of President Trump’s judicial nominees.”

The helpful folks over at A3P—that’s their clever moniker—want to clear out as many existing judges as possible. They’ve identified 90 who were appointed by a previous Republican president and who, based on their age and how many years they’ve served, either qualify or will qualify by year’s end for something called senior status.

According to the court system’s rules, those who take senior status now rather than outright retire allow Trump to put another, younger conservative in their place just as if they had retired. But judges on senior status get to keep drawing their full salary, hire clerks, and hear a reduced caseload. If this sounds bananas to you, you’re not alone. In fact, it’s the best of both worlds for those senior judges and for Republican leaders who want to increase their imprint on the judiciary. Thanks to A3P’s work, McConnell has a long list of people to target and a very attractive offer to make them.

McConnell and Trump have made a great effort to, in the senator’s words, “leave no vacancy behind.” They have placed 51 judges onto the U.S. Court of Appeals in Trump’s first three years (and 191 federal judges overall, as well as two on the Supreme Court), compared to 55 in Barack Obama’s entire eight years in office, and 62 during George W. Bush’s presidency. Trump has now named more than one-quarter of all sitting U.S. Appeals Court justices.

A good chunk of those new appellate judges—more than one out of three—took a spot previously held by a Democratic-appointed justice, thus shifting the bench hard to the right. Particularly noteworthy is the contrast between the diversity of the judges Obama appointed—only 31% of whom were white men, compared to 67% for Trump. For reference, somewhere around 40-45% of lawyers are white males, and white males constitute around 30% of the overall U.S. population, according to census data.

The New York Times conducted an in-depth analysis earlier this month of these Trump judges and found that they differ “significantly” from those nominated by either Obama or G.W. Bush. Regarding their activities prior to being nominated by Trump, they had been “more openly engaged in causes important to Republicans, such as opposition to gay marriage and to government funding for abortion.” They were also more likely to have been political appointees and made political donations. Even more alarming has been their impact after taking up their new positions:

When ruling on cases, they have been notably more likely than other Republican appointees to disagree with peers selected by Democratic presidents, and more likely to agree with those Republican appointees, suggesting they are more consistently conservative. Among the dozen or so judges that most fit the pattern, The Times found, are three Mr. Trump has signaled were on his Supreme Court shortlist.

While the appellate courts favor consensus and disagreement remains relatively rare — there were 125 instances when a Trump appointee wrote the majority opinion or dissent in a split decision — the new judges have ruled on disputed cases across a range of contentious issues, including abortion, immigration, L.G.B.T. rights and lobbying requirements, the examination shows.

Sen. McConnell has long been clear about the level of importance he places on reshaping the federal judiciary. "There are over 1,200 executive branch appointments that come to us for confirmation, and among the most important—in fact, I would argue, the most important—confirmations we have are lifetime appointments to the judiciary," McConnell told NPR. "Obviously, this is my top priority."

McConnell’s success in placing conservative judges on the federal bench during Trump’s tenure is a direct result of his actions in the final two years of Obama’s presidency. After Republicans took control of the Senate in 2015, they basically just stopped approving his nominees. The Brookings Institution noted the “unprecedentedly miniscule number of confirmations” that were carried out in those two years under McConnell’s leadership. That’s why there were 103 open seats on the federal bench for Trump to fill when he was inaugurated.

Without question, the most important of those openings was on the Supreme Court. McConnell ensured that seat remained open for almost a full year after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia by denying a hearing, let alone a vote, to President Obama’s nominee, U.S. District Court Chief Justice Merrick Garland. Garland was a moderate about whom Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch had said in 2010: “I have no doubts that Garland would get a lot of (Senate) votes. And I will do my best to help him get them.” However, Hatch did not keep his word in 2016. Oh, and during the Supreme Court confirmation process for Brett Kavanaugh, he pretended like the Garland nomination never happened. That’s what you call a double back-flip worth of bullshit.

Additionally, Garland was 63 years old when Obama nominated him, so his age itself served as a kind of compromise when compared to, for example, the nomination of 43-year-old Clarence Thomas by George H.W. Bush to a lifetime seat on the highest court back in 1992.

The way McConnell and Co. abused the established process when they essentially ignored a presidential nomination to the Supreme Court also qualifies as unprecedented, despite widely debunked Republican protestations to the contrary. As The New York Times editorial board wrote shortly after the 2016 election, the seat in which Justice Neil Gorsuch now sits is a “stolen seat.” Encouraging a mass wave of retirements in order to give Trump an even more outsized imprint on the federal judiciary would, if it succeeds, represent another form of theft.

All of this—from the blocking of Garland to the personalized arm-twisting aimed at getting judges to give up their seats in the coming months before it’s too late—reflects a level of cynicism and rejection of principle that has defined the contemporary Republican Party going back to even before Trump took it over. Principles? To Republicans, those are for suckers, i.e. Democrats.

Our Constitution’s authors were, generally speaking, not naive. They didn’t trust easily—they created the Electoral College because they didn’t trust the people to directly elect our president. However, the Framers failed to anticipate how the rules they wrote into the Constitution might be abused. They likely did not imagine that the Senate’s charge to provide “advice and consent,” as laid out in Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the Constitution, would lead to the kind of treatment with which the nomination of Judge Garland was met. The Framers never planned for Mitch McConnell.

Because of what he has done, Democrats are faced with a choice if and when they retake the White House and the Senate. Do they act in kind, and similarly game the system? Or do they take the high road, which would allow Republicans to hold on to their ill-gotten gains in the judicial branch? Keep in minds they all too often use those gains to further tighten their grip on power through judicial rulings on, for example, matters like voting rights or gerrymandering.

There’s only one way out of that dilemma: namely, to fundamentally alter the process so that it could not be gamed so easily. We need to get rid of lifetime tenure for federal judges, from the Supreme Court right on down the line. There are many different proposals out there, most of which focus on term limits for the highest court, but McConnell’s most recent actions make clear that such limits are necessary at lower levels as well. I haven’t seen polling done on term limits for all federal judges, but Supreme Court term limits are quite popular, with Democrats, Republicans, and independents all expressing similar levels of support.

To be sure, it would not be easy to implement such changes, as they would require a constitutional amendment. Nevertheless, such changes are necessary because any process that is based on principles, for example the idea that life tenure for justices is necessary to ensure that they'll be independent and removed from politics, will be abused by Republicans who have no principles at all.

Our democratic system must be governed by processes that prevent abuse by the unprincipled. As I’ve written before, Republicans seem to be taking their cues from young adult fiction of all places, leaning on the values of Harry Potter’s nemesis, Lord Voldemort—derived from Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher who has inspired everyone on the right from Hitler to today’s white nationalists (even if they all get him wrong, but that’s another story): “There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.”

Nancy LeTourneau at Washington Monthly wrote that McConnell’s recent “outreach” to aging Republican judges indicates that he is “running scared” because “he is aware that his party will soon be out of power.” I rarely hope that McConnell is right about anything.

This time, however, Moscow Mitch and I are completely on the same page.

Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)

Nancy Pelosi Questions Whether Trump Is A Person Of Faith

By PoliZette Staff | February 17, 2020

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) hit a new low in her anti-Trump behavior this weekend when she questioned the president’s Christian faith.

During an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Pelosi seemed to suggest that Donald Trump is not actually a man of faith, saying that if he was a real Christian, he would know that people of faith like her pray “even for him.”

After alleging that GOP senators did not have the “courage” to vote guilty on impeachment, Pelosi said, “Except for Mitt Romney. God bless him. And then the president criticized him for using his faith.”

“Look I don’t know if the president is a person of faith. It’s not for me to make that judgment,” Pelosi continued.

“He criticized you about saying you prayed for him as well,” Amanpour countered.

MORE NEWS: Challenger DeAnna Lorraine charging hard against Nancy Pelosi

“He said I didn’t pray for him,” Pelosi said. “I thought if he was a person of faith he would recognize other people of faith. And if he prayed he would recognize that other people do, even for him.”

This comes as Trump and Pelosi have been trading barbs over one another’s faith in recent weeks.

“I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong,” Trump said at the National Prayer Breakfast earlier this month, referring to Romney’s vote to impeach him. “Nor do I like people who say, ‘I pray for you,’ when they know that that’s not so.”

Pelosi has frequently said that she is praying for Trump, and in response to his comments, she accused him of being irreligious.

“I pray hard for him, because he’s so off the track of our Constitution, our values, our country,” she said, calling the presidency a “heavy responsibility.”

“I thought what he said about — what he said about Senator Romney was particularly without class,” Pelosi continued, according to The Washington Examiner. “He’s talking about things that he knows little about: faith and prayer.”

Regardless of Pelosi’s personal feelings on Trump, there is no excuse for her questioning his faith. This is just another example of a powerful Democrat crossing the line when it comes to attack on Trump.

Shame on you, Nancy Pelosi.

This piece originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

Read more at LifeZette:
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