Pelosi can commit political suicide or help heal partisan rift

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has acted wisely in not immediately transmitting the Trump articles of impeachment to the Senate to jump start the President's trial.

Her stated reasons at her weekly press conference however are certain to only produce more confrontation between Democrats and Republicans:

I – just to get this off the table right away, if we impeach the President immediately, everybody moves on to the next thing. The next thing for us will be when we see the process that is set forth in the Senate, then we'll know the number of managers that we may have to go forward, and who we would choose. That's what I said last night. That's what I'm saying now.

Pelosi will be waiting a long time. She is in no position to dictate how the Senate conducts the trial.

The Senate will not do anything until the impeachment articles are delivered to the Senate.

Pelosi was doing nothing to end the widening Democrat-Republican rift with this terse answer to a reporter:

I heard some of what Mitch McConnell said today, and it reminded me that our Founders, when they wrote the Constitution, they suspected that there could be a rogue President. I don't think they suspected that we could have a rogue President and a rogue Leader in the Senate at the same time.

On the other hand she could - on further sober reflection - well decide to call it a day – because the condition of bipartisanship laid down by herself for impeaching Trump has not been met.

Pelosi would then remain true to her principles.

Pelosi warned against continuing highly partisan impeachment proceedings last March:

Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there's something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don't think we should go down that path, because it divides the country...

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler expressed the identical position on 10 December 1998: