Has Nancy Pelosi punked her own impeachment? If Congress never sends the articles to Senate, then Trump was never actually impeached

It’s starting to look as if the House vote to impeach President Trump is the impeachment that wasn’t.

That’s the word from a lot of legal scholars, including Noah Feldman, who was one of the three leftist professors who spoke before the House Judiciary Committee, arguing for impeaching Trump shortly before the Democrats’ deed was done.

In a Bloomberg column, Feldman wrote:

Impeachment as contemplated by the Constitution does not consist merely of the vote by the House, but of the process of sending the articles to the Senate for trial. Both parts are necessary to make an impeachment under the Constitution: The House must actually send the articles and send managers to the Senate to prosecute the impeachment. And the Senate must actually hold a trial.

…and…

But if the House never sends the articles, then Trump could say with strong justification that he was never actually impeached. And that’s probably not the message Congressional Democrats are hoping to send.

Feldman’s a bigwig in his own Harvard Law circles, and Democrats certainly take his word for it on the importance of impeaching Trump.  But he’s far from the only one reading the law to say that as it’s being executed now, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declaring she might not send the articles of impeachment for the Senate to vote on until she can dictate terms, she’s invalidating her own impeachment.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, a conservative, pretty much says the same thing.  In a National Review column, he wrote:

Pelosi and Democratic leadership have convinced themselves there may be advantage in delaying the formal, ministerial delivery of the impeachment articles — as if McConnell were in as much a hurry to receive them as Democrats were to conjure them up.