Impeachment – And Opening Pandora’s Box
Impeachment – And Opening Pandora’s Box
Dems fail again – and build a haunting model for years to come.
By Matthew Vadum
As the overpowering stench of hypocrisy invaded their nostrils, Democrat senators voted for a second time in a year to convict President Donald John Trump, now out of office three weeks, on make-believe charges that sought to criminalize his lawful activities as president.
Now that the show trial is complete, we may soon witness an era of presidential impeachments as a regular occurrence in America.
“We’ve opened Pandora’s box to future presidents,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said, according to The Blaze.
“If you use this model, I don’t know how Kamala Harris doesn’t get impeached if the Republicans take over the House, because she actually bailed out rioters and one of the rioters went back to the streets and broke somebody’s head open,” Graham said, referring to Harris encouraging people to donate to a bail fund for Black Lives Matter-Antifa rioters last summer.
One lawmaker has already filed articles of impeachment against Joe Biden, the nation’s new placeholder president.
Ahead of the curve, freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) filed articles against Biden the day after he was inaugurated. In a press release, her office explained that she was taking action because of Biden’s “corrupt actions involving his quid pro quo in Ukraine and his abuse of power by allowing his son, Hunter Biden, to siphon off cash from America’s greatest enemies Russia and China.”
Democrats lost the latest round in the impeachment wars when they failed to get the two-thirds Senate vote they needed. In the process these desperate radicals cheapened and trivialized the impeachment process, which is supposed to be reserved for actual baddies like current Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.), a Teflon lawmaker who was impeached by the House in 1988 and convicted and removed from a federal judgeship on corruption charges by the Senate in 1989.
As Democrats geared up for a second Trump impeachment trial about nothing, bad omens abounded.
Hours after he was sworn in January 26 as presiding officer for the trial, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) was rushed to the hospital with a mystery illness. The enfeebled 80-year-old Senate president pro tempore, third in the presidential line of succession after Vice President Kamala Harris (who until last month was herself a U.S. senator) and the extensively surgically modified 80-year-old House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), is best known not for any legislative accomplishments, but for his cameo appearances in the Batman movie franchise.
Also on January 26, 45 Republican senators voted in favor of Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) resolution stating the trial was unconstitutional, a test vote in the 50-50 Senate that strongly suggested there was no chance the Democrats would get the 67 votes they needed to convict Trump.
But after this inauspicious beginning, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) still managed on February 13 to flip several GOP senators who went the other way in the first impeachment trial.
This time, 57 senators –including 7 disloyal Republicans— voted to convict Trump while 43 senators voted to acquit. Because a required supermajority of two-thirds, or 67 votes, was not attained, the charges, ridiculous as they were, failed. Even though it was too late to remove Trump from the presidency, Democrats, terrified of facing the most effective GOP president in generations again at the polls after they rigged the recent election in favor of a dementia sufferer, had hoped to bar Trump from running again, something they could only have accomplished in the event of a conviction.
The 7 turncoats whose accommodations in the ninth circle of hell await are: Richard Burr (North Carolina), Bill Cassidy (Louisiana), Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Mitt Romney (Utah), Ben Sasse (Nebraska), and Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania). All were swiftly (and appropriately) condemned by grassroots Republicans in their respective home states.
Speaker Pelosi praised the sanctimonious septet for voting “their conscience and for our country.”
She condemned the principled senators who voted to acquit, smearing them as a “cowardly group of Republicans who apparently have no options because they were afraid to defend their job.”
“Senate Republicans’ refusal to hold Trump accountable for igniting a violent insurrection to cling to power will go down as one of the darkest days and most dishonorable acts in our nation’s history,” she sputtered.
The single article of impeachment, passed by the House of Representatives 232 to 197 (with 10 Republicans in favor) on January 13, alleged that Trump “engaged in high Crimes and Misdemeanors by inciting violence against the Government of the United States” by inciting a crowd on January 6 to “interfere with” a joint session of Congress engaged in its “solemn constitutional duty to certify the results of the 2020 Presidential election[.]”
A minor digression: oddly enough, no one seems interested in explaining why on earth Trump would ever want to disrupt the very congressional proceeding that served as his final shot at retaining the presidency if enough Democrat electoral votes could be rejected. The 45th president is many things but a nihilist is not among them. Frightening lawmakers into abandoning their support for challenging electoral votes isn’t the kind of tactic that would ever find its way into a book like Trump: The Art of the Deal.
Anyway, those 10 representatives, who foolishly put their political futures in jeopardy, are, by the way: Adam Kinzinger (Illinois); Liz Cheney (Wyoming); John Katko (New York); Fred Upton (Michigan); Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse (Washington); Peter Meijer (Michigan); Anthony Gonzalez (Ohio); Tom Rice (South Carolina); and David Valadao (California).
A reliable source advises that they have been waitlisted for the ninth circle, behind the 7 senators who have been given seating priority.
The supposed incitement, which the mainstream media piously insists led to an “insurrection” as opposed to a mere “riot,” took the form of Trump telling audience members at the January rally near the White House that “if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore” after saying “we won this election, and we won it by a landslide.”
Of course, everybody knows that telling supporters to “fight like hell” is a staple of American political rhetoric. If Trump is guilty of incitement then so is every passionate politician in the country.
During the Senate trial, Trump defense lawyer David Schoen played a 9-minute video compilation of Democrats urging supporters to “fight,” “fight back,” “fight hard,” “fight in the streets,” and “fight like hell.”
The Democrats featured in the video using Trump’s exact phrase “fight like hell” were Sens. Jackie Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto (Nevada), along with Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut). Non-senators shown using the phrase include Biden’s new Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough (who was Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff) and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas who ran for the Senate.
“Some of the Democrats shown were senators serving as jurors at the impeachment trial, including New York’s Chuck Schumer, New Jersey’s Cory Booker, Massachusetts’s Elizabeth Warren, Georgia’s Raphael Warnock and New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, among others,” Politico reported.
Even Hillary Clinton herself, old Alinskyite that she is, appeared in the video using the word “fight.” Somehow the reworked version of “Fight Song,” which the Hollywood Reporter described as “the Clinton campaign’s unofficial anthem,” didn’t make the cut.
“Every single one of you and every one of you, that’s okay,” Schoen said, addressing Democrats. “You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s a word people use. But please stop the hypocrisy.”
Democrats were not listening.