I am really concerned about the precedent this impeachment is setting.
It is along strict party lines. Very weak charges. No high crimes or misdemeanors.
To me it is not a legitimate impeachment but a Democrat Dirty Tricks Operation.
Is this going to be the precedent every time one party is in control of the House and another Party holds the Presidency?
Democrats should be just as concerned as Republicans because it could happen to them next. For instance, the Republican Congress could have impeached Obama over him abusing his power by using the IRS to disenfranchise his political rivals.
Is this really the way we want to run this country?
They have no statutory crimes at all. Trump will be fully exonerated proving that the House was wrong when they claimed they had charges worthy of removal. These folks are much more self-righteous than bright.
IMPEACHMENT:
Sad!
The left, being not terribly imaginative, always accuse you of what they’re doing themselves. So, in this case, President Trump is charged with interfering with the 2020 election by men who have been interfering with the 2016 and 2020 elections for over three-and-a-half years now. Which is why we have the preposterous spectacle of four Democrat presidential candidates preparing to vote to remove from office the guy they’re running against.
The laughably named “Government Accountability Office” released its supposedly entirely separate conclusion that Trump had acted “illegally”. Aside from the fact that that “finding” is flat out wrong, I wonder whether the permanent bureaucracy ever thinks, “Gee, maybe we should be a little more subtle about putting our Deep State thumbs on the scale.”
Excellent points.
The real foreign interference in the 2016 elect was Obama allowing millions of illegals to flood into this country and some of the commie states having almost non existent voter ID requirements. That resulted in Crooked Hillary getting 3-5 million votes from foreign nationals.
The Drunkard Crooked Hillary stole the meaningless popular vote!
Dems Must End This Sham Impeachment, Says … Former Clinton Adviser?
Fat Jerry and Bug-eyed Schiff
Count Mark Penn among those unimpressed by the Crazed House Democrats’ impeachment of Beloved Donald Trump. Penn, who worked as BJ Clinton’s pollster during the 1998-9 impeachment and later on Crooked Hillary Clinton’s Senate and 2008 presidential campaigns, blasts Bug-eyed Schiff as a political hitman for Crazed Democrats angry over Beloved Donald Trump’s win in 2016. Penn argues that it doesn’t come close to a reason to reverse an election and remove a president.
In an essay for The Hill, Penn argues that Crazed Democrats may pay a steep price for their abuse of the system, but that the institutional credibility of Congress will take even more damage:
There is definitely something about all this that the American public doesn’t like, that reasonable people can judge as wrong, but that is quite different than removing a president from office through a process designed to use impeachment as a political vehicle. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) was not a truth-seeker — he is on tape soliciting naked pictures of Trump, and he repeatedly exaggerated evidence against Trump over the last three years. He was simply a weapon jamming through impeachment and ignoring fair procedure or legal process.
The last few days in the media have underscored this bias with the release of material from Lev Parnas, who — like Christopher Steele and his dossier before him, or like Michael Avenatti, now out on bail — is a questionable character with obviously wild claims for which he has no proof, including claims against Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr, whom Parnas has never met. It was a political dirty trick to release his information and him on the eve of the Senate impeachment trial, and this act alone would have gotten any real prosecutor’s case thrown out.
The second article of impeachment — obstruction of the House by the assertion of executive privilege — is, in my view, wholly without merit. Despite endless allegations of lawlessness, this administration has implemented every court ruling it has lost without exception. Asserting executive privilege is not the same as paying hush money or suborning perjury, as was alleged in the Clinton and Nixon impeachment efforts. President Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, frequently asserted privilege in response to investigations and Holder was even held in contempt of Congress, a resolution he promptly ignored.
Both Bug-eyed Schiff and Fat Jerry Nadler
defended the refusal of Obama and Holder to comply with subpoenas from the House at that time, and called the investigation into Operation Fast and Furious nothing more than a politically motivated witch hunt. That issue had a body count to go along with it, too, and clear violations of federal gun laws to boot.
Penn warns that we are about to see George Washington’s worst nightmare come true:
George Washington’s farewell address about the excesses of partisanship was never truer than today. As America’s only truly independent president, Washington predicted that the growth of factionalism would undermine the execution of our laws and that the “alternate domination” of one party over another would lead to efforts to “exact revenge” and “raise false alarms.”
Washington is particularly prescient about this moment in history.
His farewell address warning is all too accurate:
I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state... Let me now take a more comprehensive view and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.
This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.
Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight) the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and the duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.
We’re at the debacle Washington predicts here:
The impeachment trial outcome is all but certain. Of more concern, however, should be the damage done to the legislative branch. This poisonous atmosphere has transformed Congress from a co-equal branch to either the wingman or the executioner of the president. With this partisan war as context, succeeding House majorities will feel freer to impeach any president of the opposing party on any pretext, especially by launching constant investigations that encroach on the executive’s co-equal status and automatically considering any objection to be obstructive. We will either have parliamentary systems with the executive under the thumb of the House, or presidencies entirely unencumbered by an independent legislature.
We need leadership on Capitol Hill that restores its own prerogatives while respecting the prerogatives of the executive. This would benefit both parties in the long run, and it would return the federal government to actual representative democracy. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any leaders emerging of that quality — nor a lot of demand from anyone else to produce them.
Penn insists that Democrats need to come to their senses and immediately withdraw their ridiculous articles of impeachment. Let the voters decide whether Trump’s behavior disqualifies him from another term, as setting this precedent would be far more damaging than anything alleged in the impeachment. This is nothing more than brute-force majoritarianism.