Posted on 01/19/2020 5:33:24 AM PST by billorites
Thought experiment No. 1: Suppose Bob Mueller’s probe actually proves that Donald Trump is under Vladimir Putin’s thumb. Fill in the rest of the blanks with your favorite corruption fantasy: The Kremlin has video of the mogul-turned-president debauching himself in a Moscow hotel; the Kremlin has a bulging file of real-estate transfers through which Trump laundered racketeering proceeds for Putin’s favored mobsters and oligarchs; or Trump is recorded cutting a deal to drop Obama-era sanctions against Putin’s regime if Russian spies hack Democratic accounts.
Thought experiment No. 2: Adam Schiff is not a demagogue. (Remember, this is fantasy.) At the very first televised hearing, when he alleged that President Trump told Ukrainian president Zelensky, “I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent . . . lots of it,” Schiff was not defrauding the public. Instead, impeachment’s Inspector Clouseau can actually prove that Trump was asking a foreign government to manufacture out of whole cloth evidence that Vice President Biden and his son were cashing in on the former’s political influence (as opposed to asking that Ukraine look into an arrangement so objectively sleazy that the Obama administration itself agitated over what to do about it).
What do these two scenarios have in common, besides being fictional? Answer: If either of them were real, we’d already be talking about President Pence’s upcoming State of the Union address.
This is the point that gets lost in all the endless chatter over impeachment strategy and procedure. Everything that is happening owes to the fact that we do not have an offense sufficiently grave for invocation of the Constitution’s nuclear option. If we had one, the machinations and the posturing would be unnecessary — even ridiculous.
Why are we talking about how Chairman Schiff, Speaker Pelosi, and House Democrats rushed through the impeachment inquiry without making a real effort to interview key witnesses?
Why was the Democrats’ impeachment gambit driven by the election calendar rather than the nature of the president’s offense? Why were the timing of hearings and the unreasonable limits imposed on Republicans’ ability to call witnesses dictated by the frantic rush to get done before Christmas recess — to the point that Democrats cynically vacated a subpoena they’d served on a relevant administration witness, fearing a few weeks of court battles that they might lose?
Why did Democrats grope from week to week in a struggle over what to call the misconduct they accused the president of committing – campaign finance, extortion, quid pro quo, bribery? How did they end up with an amorphous “abuse of power” case? How did they conclude that an administration that goes to court rather than instantly surrendering potentially privileged information commits obstruction?
Why such tedious recriminations over adoption of Senate procedures that were approved by a 100–0 vote the last time there was an impeachment trial? Why all the kvetching over whether witnesses will be called when those procedures provide for the calling of witnesses in the likely event that 51 senators — after hearing nearly two weeks of presentation and argument from both sides — want to hear from one or two of them?
Why, with Election Day only ten months away, would Speaker Pelosi stoke an impeachment vote that could be perilous for many of her members, on the insistence that Trump was such a clear and present danger she could brook no delay, but then . . . sit on the impeachment articles for a month, accomplishing nothing in the interim except to undermine the presidential bids of several Senate Democrats, who will be trapped in Washington when they should be out campaigning with Iowa’s caucuses just two weeks away?
None of this would have happened if there had been a truly impeachable offense.
Adam Schiff is a smart guy. He did not idly dream up a “make up dirt” parody. He framed it because he knows that’s the kind of misconduct you would need to prove to warrant impeachment and removal of a president. In fact, Schiff could never prove that, but he figured parody is good enough for 2020 campaign purposes — and that’s what this exercise is all about.
If collusion with Russia had been fact rather than farce, Trump would never have made it to an impeachment trial. He’d have had to resign, Prior to November 8, 2016, Republicans were not the ones in need of convincing that Russia was a dangerous geopolitical threat. If it had been real collusion that brought Democrats around to that conclusion, the votes to impeach and remove would have been overwhelming.
And the timing would have been irrelevant. If Americans had been seized by a truly impeachable offense, it would not matter whether Election Day was two years, two months, or two weeks away. The public and the political class would not tolerate an agent of the Kremlin in the Oval Office.
If there were such egregious misconduct that the public was convinced of the need to remove Trump, such that two-thirds of the Senate would ignore partisan ties and do just that, there would be no partisan stunts. Democratic leaders would have worked cooperatively with their GOP counterparts, as was done in prior impeachments. They would have told the president: “Sure, you can have your lawyers here, and call whatever witnesses you want.” There would be a bipartisan sense that the president had done profound wrong. There would be a sense of history, not contest. Congressional leaders would want to be remembered as statesmen, not apparatchiks.
If there were a real impeachable offense, there would be no fretting about witnesses at the trial. Senate leaders would be contemplating that, after hearing the case extensively presented by both sides, there might well be enough votes to convict without witnesses. But if there were an appetite for witnesses, witnesses would be called . . . as they were in Watergate. And just as in Watergate, if the president withheld vital evidence of appalling lawlessness, the public would not be broadly indifferent to administration stonewalling.
If there were an obviously impeachable offense, the garrisons of Fort Knox could not have stopped Nancy Pelosi from personally marching impeachment articles into the Senate the second the House had adopted them — in what would have been an overwhelming bipartisan vote (of the kind that Pelosi, not long ago, said would be imperative for a legitimate impeachment effort).
The Framers expected presidents to abuse their powers from time to time. And not just presidents. Our Constitution’s theory of the human condition, and thus of governance, is that power is apt to corrupt anyone. It needs to be divided, and the peer components need to be incentivized to check each other. The operating assumption is that, otherwise, one component would accumulate too much power and inevitably fall prey to the tyrannical temptation. But as Madison observed, men are not angels. Separation of powers arms us against inevitable abuse, it does not prevent abuse from happening. Abuse is a given: Congress uses lawmaking power to encroach on the other branches’ prerogatives; judges legislate from the bench, presidents leverage their awesome powers for political advantage. The expectation is not that government officials will never overreach; it is that when one branch does overreach, the others will bring it into line. 359
That is the norm: corrective action or inaction, political pressure, naming and shaming, power of the purse, and so on. We expect to criticize, inveigh, even censure. We don’t leap from abuse to expulsion. We don’t expect routinely to expel members of Congress or impeach presidents and judges. That is reserved for historically extraordinary wrongs.
On Ukraine, nothing of consequence came of President Trump’s bull-in-a-china-shop excesses. Sure, they ought to be a 2020 campaign issue. Democrats, instead, would have us exaggerate them into historically extraordinary wrongs. For that, you need gamesmanship. If there were real impeachable misconduct, there would be no time or place for games.
Humpty Dumpty says an impeachable offense is whatever I say it is
The ‘Rats announced their intention to impeach back in 2016.
In other words, the ground for impeachment is that a candidate won who is not a Democrat Party choice.
(1) It does not meet the criteria for impeachment cited specifically in the Constitution: treason, bribery, high crimes and misdemeanors; no crime was committed.This precedent could not be more dangerous.(2) For the Supreme Court to fail to declare this "impeachment" unconstitutional will make it legal de facto and de jure, and this will give the Legislative Branch of the Government carte blanche in the future to nullify the election to the Presidency of anyone the Legislative Branch wishes to impeach and for no constitutional reason, in fact for no reason whatsoever.
(3) Furthermore, this precedent establishes the authority of the Legislative Branch to impeach not only the President but also the Vice President, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, the Secretary of State, and so on down the line of succession until the Legislators find a President suitable to them.
(4) Thus this places the Legislative Branch in authority over the Executive Branch, inasmuch as the President et al. will serve at the pleasure of the Legislative Branch.
(5) It also gives the Legislative Branch de facto control of US elections inasmuch as legislators can impeach elected officials in sequence until they reach one they approve and establish him/her as President of the USA. The President will then serve only at the pleasure of the legislators, knowing that he/she can be impeached at any time and a President more favorable to them selected.
(6) It therefore nullifies the separation of powers between the Executive and Legislative Branches of the Government, making the Executive Branch subservient to the Legislative.
The Supreme Court MUST act immediately to establish the constitutionality of the impeachment process and the unconstitutionality of "impeachment" that does not meet the requirements cited in the Constitution.
Giuliani agrees. He must have been lurking here on Free Republic.
Rudy Giuliani: Supreme Court Should Dismiss The Impeachment Trial Against President Trump”Rudy Giuliani argued that the Supreme Court should dismiss the impeachment trial against President Trump. "There's nothing in the Constitution that would allow the Supreme Court" to do that, Giuliani allowed, but "there’s also nothing in the Constitution that allows the Supreme Court to declare a law of Congress unconstitutional. Marshall made it up."
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/01/12/rudy_giuliani_supreme_court_should_dismiss_the_impeachment_trial_against_president_trump.html
> The US Supreme Court should—in fact must—declare this “impeachment” unconstitutional. <
I must respectfully disagree. The Supreme Court must not interfere in any impeachment. The president appoints the Supreme Court members. So it is conceivable that a president would have majority support on the Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court could interfere, then such a president could not be impeached. No matter what the House said, the Court could just say no. Then we’re back to the tyranny the Founders wanted to avoid.
As for the “high crime” requirement, in the language of the day that meant any misbehavior by a high public official. Benjamin Franklin even once remarked that a president could be impeached just for being rude!
You mentioned that impeachment gives the Legislative Branch de facto control of US presidential elections. That is an excellent point. The Founders tried to avoid that problem by requiring the high hurdle of 2/3 needed to convict in the Senate.
But that safeguard is weakened now that we have the direct election of senators.
This whole mess is caused by lack of objective rules of evidence to establish that a crime has been committed and to prove that the president committed one. The result of subjectivity is the actions of a lynch mob.
Democrats themselves have taken Ukraine off the table by trivializing it with impeachment.
They lose the case in the Senate, it also loses value as a political issue against the President.
All because Democrats couldn’t help themselves in their hatred of Trump, Now they’re going to get hoist on their own petard.
Which is exactly why they shouldn’t have impeached him in the first place.
We have to assume that Trump’s lawyers will, early on, ask Schiff to plainly lay out the laws broken and crimes committed by Trump.
Schiff will stand mute.
Early dismissal of impeachment charges.
I think the best thing I have learned in all this is the Framers never intended impeachment be essentially a Parliamentary “Vote of No Confidence” which Pelosi has turned it into.
That's for the fact-finder to say.
Your proposal would repeat the Bush v. Gore disaster, maybe the largest power grab by one branch over another in our history.
If you understand "shall not be infringed" (and I'm sure you do), you have to also understand "shall have the SOLE power to try all impeachments".
SCOTUS cannot try an impeachment. Period.
Trump released the transcript the morning of the Schiff's make up dirt hearing. I read the transcript that morning. Then on the way home mid afternoon I listened to C-Span radio and heard the "parody". I was completely astounded. I actually think what happened is one of Schiff's staffers made up the fake transcript days before the hearing believing the transcript would not be released. At that point Schiff read the fake because that was the plan and he was sticking with it. Then a few days later he relabeled it a parody.
Adam Schiff is not a smart guy.
Not the Legislative branch, but the Praetorian Guard (AKA the Deep State) would control who was President. Just like in Ancient Rome, after the fall of the Republic.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat them. Again and again and ..........
Like so much of the tactics of the America/American-hating Democrat/Left Party, these “charges” have disappeared. In this latest round (Season 4, Episode 2) the Left’s attack has morphed into that the President must be removed because he is an “immediated danger to American sovereignty”. And like so much of the tactics of the America/American-hating Democrat/Left Party, this latest attempt at the Left’s coup d’etat is quite clearly a projection.
Well stated. Both science (ala global warming) and law (endles alas) have lost all pretense of objectivity. So it is all a sickening game of playing to emotions.
After hearing the Schiff parody, my thought was that if you were on some nifty drugs...hearing this from some office co-worker, you might be doped-up enough to play this as some part of reality (when it wasn’t). I think the guy is on some form of medication, and just lost control of his thought process.
Maybe if he gets under some stress there in the senate chamber, you might get the right conditions where he launches into another parody moment, and Justice Roberts asks for a recess while he tries to figure out what to do with a heavily medicated Schiff.
A big hole is no crime was committed.
Only crimes revealed have all been by democrats taking huge bribes.
Trump Legal Team: Impeachment Articles ‘Constitutionally Invalid’
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/01/18/trump-legal-team-impeachment-articles-constitutionally-invalid/
Obstructing Congress is not a crime, it’s the duty of any President worth his salt to obstruct insanity incarnate and Nancy Pelosi’s congress is insanity incarnate. Besides, every President since Washington has obstructed congress.
What I’m wondering is after the impeachment farce collapses of its own weight, will Trump, at some point, yank the Dems’ chain by telling some Putin stooge, loudly and publicly, “Tell Vladamir I’ll have more flexibility after the election.”?
However true the lack of an impeachable offense is, 45 Bolshies will vote for it.
Yeah, but it’s the seriousness of the charges!
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So what if neither of the articles rise to the level.
Obstruction of Congress is moot. Branch vs Branch.
Abuse of Authority has to have at least some evidence of abuse. Even Shiffy could not find any and had to dismiss the whistleblower.
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