America is paying the price for Nancy Pelosi's cowardice

She's setting herself up to be the last speaker of the House in American history

Good news everyone: President Trump is embroiled in yet another inscrutable foreign intelligence scandal, this time involving Ukraine! There had been a lot of reporting and rumors that Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani has been trying to get that country's government to investigate Hunter Biden, so Trump can accuse his father Joe Biden of being corrupt. Thursday night, Giuliani went on Chris Cuomo's CNN show and, after initially denying it, pulled a Colonel Jessup and admitted the whole scheme. "So you did ask Ukraine to look into Joe Biden?" Cuomo asked. "Of course I did," Giuliani snapped.

There are a great many people to blame for the Trump administration's epic binge of lawlessness, above all Trump himself and his Republican enablers. But Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi deserves a great deal of the blame as well, for shutting down or stymieing attempts to meaningfully check Trump's abuses — doubly so because she is supposedly committed to clean, rule-of-law government. So long as nobody even tries to stop him, he will keep pushing the envelope.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.