Pelosi keeps removal options alive in Capitol attack fallout

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi kept the removal fight alive on January 8, 2021, as the fallout from the Capitol attack continued to spread through Washington. By then, Pelosi had already gone public the day before with a blunt call for President Donald Trump’s removal under the 25th Amendment, and on January 8 she continued to frame the House’s response around that demand and the possibility of impeachment. The point was no longer whether the attack had changed the political equation. It had. Pelosi’s January 7 press conference was the clearest marker. Asked about Trump’s role in the assault, she said she supported invoking the 25th Amendment and urged Vice President Mike Pence to act. The next day, the speaker’s office reinforced that stance in writing, saying the president’s actions required immediate removal from office and that the House would keep its options open. That left removal and impeachment as live tracks, not abstract threats. The timing matters because the chronology is doing the work here. January 8 was not the first public push for Trump’s ouster. It was the day that push remained in motion while the House and the rest of the government were still dealing with the breach, the lockdown, and the disruption of the election certification. Pelosi was not introducing a new idea on Friday. She was keeping the one she had already made explicit on Thursday in play. That made the speaker’s position more than a condemnation. It was an institutional signal that the House was prepared to treat Trump’s conduct as grounds for removal, with impeachment still available if the 25th Amendment did not move. In the hours after the attack, Pelosi made plain that the response would not stop at outrage. It would continue through the tools the Constitution gives Congress.