On Thursday night, the day the House passed an impeachment resolution (232-196, along party lines) to probe President Trump’s alleged quid pro quo in pushing Ukraine to investigate his political rivals, Stephen Colbert welcomed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on The Late Show for an exclusive sit-down interview.
“I want to thank you for your patriotism,” Pelosi told Colbert. “This is a sad thing for our country. We do this prayerfully, and with great seriousness. Nobody goes to Congress to impeach a president. And you’ve had your fun with the policy and the personality and the rest, and that’s about the election. The patriotism, the Constitution, is really what impeachment is about.”
Speaker Pelosi said the impeachment resolution was merely a “continuation” of the inquiry the House has been conducting and was done to “set for the rules of procedure,” including “spelling out the president’s rights—due process for him—[and] how a majority and a minority will have equal time to question witnesses and the rest.”
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She added, “The most important thing for the American people to realize is: Nobody is above the law.”
Later on, Colbert asked Pelosi what her “first reaction” was when she heard what Trump said in the infamous phone call to the president of Ukraine, which was brought to the attention of the American people via a whistleblower.
“I prayed for the United States of America, really, because it’s very sad. We don’t want to impeach a president. We don’t want the reality that a president has done something that is in violation of the Constitution,” offered Pelosi. “I had not been, shall we say, enthusiastic about the divisiveness that would occur from an impeachment… I had said then, he’s not worth impeaching because it’s even going to divide this country further… but this was something that you could not ignore. In one conversation, he undermined our national security by withholding military assistance to a country that had been voted on by the Congress of the United States—to the benefit of the Russians. At the same time, he jeopardized the integrity of our elections, the heart of our democracy, and in doing so, he possibly violated his oath of office to preserve the Constitution of the United States.”
