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 Mitch McConnell were in as much a hurry to receive them as Democrats were to conjure them up. The thought is that this latest strategic petulance might pressure Senator McConnell into promising a full-blown trial, including summoning as witnesses top aides of the president whom the House didn't bother to summon because tangling over privilege issues would have slowed up the works.

So it's not a joke, but I still have to laugh. When I was a prosecutor negotiating plea deals, I always found the most pathetic defense lawyers were the ones who acted like they were playing with the House money when, in stark reality, it was they who needed something from me. Now here's Pelosi trying to play hard to get with McConnell who, I imagine, couldn't care less how long Democrats want to dither.

...and...

In the law, there are many situations in which an outcome is known, but it is not a formal outcome until some ministerial act is taken. A grand jury can vote an indictment, for example, but the defendant is not considered indicted until the charges are filed with the clerk of the court. A defendant can be found guilty by a jury, but there is technically no conviction until the judgment is "entered" by the trial court, usually months later when sentence is imposed.

No one, of course, has to explain this to McConnell.

As Joel B. Pollak notes in a Breitbart column: "You're in Cocaine Mitch's court, now."

He also throws in this: "They forget that a 'fair trial' applies to the accused, not the accuser, and has since 1215."

He also notes that even if Pelosi doesn't ship the thing over the Senate can vote to acquit if it wants, so it's a lose-lose all around for her.

So all that hullabaloo that came out of her as the rushed impeachment vote came about might just have been for nothing.  The funereal back suit, the hushed intonations about prayers for the country, the declarations that democracy is at stake, the appeal to "history," the invocations from the Founding Fathers, the orders to Democrats to quit giggling and popping champagne corks and pretend for a few minutes that the whole thing was solemn, humorless affair...was for nothing.

Joke's on Nancy, because if she refuses to ship the thing to the Senate, then the whole impeachment was a joke.  And now it looks as though she's boxed herself into a corner.  Either she sends that thing to the Senate on Mitch McConnell's terms or...there was no impeachment.  Talk about hoist with her own petard...

This should make President Trump, who's still fuming about the whole thing, a very happy man, indeed.  By all means, Nance, keep our president happy and refuse to ship that thing that is in any case going to go down like the Hindenburg, to the Senate.  Makes no difference to us, you clowns — we're still planning on voting for him, but if it makes him happy, we're happy.

Comeuppance happens, every time the left overreaches.

Image credit: PBS, via shareable YouTube screen shot.