The Frightened Left

Weaponizing impeachment is just one of many precedents that Leftists now would not wish to have applied to themselves

  September 11, 2023 By Victor Davis Hanson @ American Greatness

An impeachment inquiry looms and the shrieks of outrage are beginning.  The Left is now suddenly voicing warnings that those who recently undermined the system could be targeted by their own legacies.  So, for example, now we read why impeachment is suddenly a dangerous gambit.

True, the Founders did not envision impeaching a first-term president the moment he lost his House majority. Nor did they imagine impeaching a president twice. And they certainly did not anticipate trying an ex-president in the Senate as a private citizen.

In modern times, the nation has not rushed to impeach a president without a special counsel investigation to determine whether the chief executive was guilty of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

But thanks to the Democrats, recent impeachments now have destroyed all those guardrails. After all, Trump was impeached the first time on the fumes of an exhaustive but fruitless 22-month, $40 million special counsel investigation—one designed to find him guilty of Russian “collusion” and thus to be removed from office but found no actionable offenses at all.

Instead, dejected Democrats moved immediately for a second try. In September 2019 a few weeks after Trump had announced his 2020 reelection bid, the Democratic House began to impeach the president on the new grounds that he had talked to the President Zelensky of Ukraine and said he might delay offensive arms shipments—unless the Ukrainians could demonstrate that they had ended corruption and, in particular, were no longer influenced by the Biden family quid pro quo shakedowns.

Trump was proven right: the Biden family is not just corrupt, but, in particular, Joe Biden as head of the family and Vice President had intervened in the internal politics of an aid recipient, by threatening not to delay but rather to cancel outright all U.S. aid to Ukraine—unless it fired Viktor Shokin, a Ukrainian prosecutor.

Shokin was then looking into the misadventures of Biden’s son Hunter, and why the Vice President’s imbecilic son was receiving lucrative compensation on the boards of a Ukrainian energy company Burisma, yet without any demonstrable expertise or education in matters of energy policy.

Since Trump was impeached, we now know that Joe Biden did lie that he had no connection with or even knowledge of his son’s business. And we know that the fired prosecutor believed the Bidens were recipients of bribes. We know that contrary to Biden’s assertions, he was not following State Department policy.

In contrast, the U.S. had, in fact, lauded Shokin’s efforts to repress corruption. In sum, Biden was undermining the stated policy of the U.S. government to protect his son’s—and his own—efforts to leverage money from Kyiv by monetizing the influence of his own Vice Presidency. In some sense, Biden was guilty of the very “treason” charge—altering U.S. foreign policy for personal benefit—by which Rep. Adam Schiff had earlier falsely accused Trump.

Given that reality, it is easy to argue that the House impeached Donald Trump in 2019 for crimes that he did not commit, but which the current president Joe Biden most certainly had during his Vice Presidency.

But weaponizing impeachment is just one baleful legacy of the Left. There are plenty more of their own precedents that Leftists now would not wish to have applied to themselves:

• Will the next president have the FBI pay social media censors to suppress the dissemination of any news it feels is unhelpful to the reelection of a Republican president?
• Is it OK now for the next Vice President to invite his son onto Air Force Two to cement multimillion dollars deals that benefit both, with Chinese, Russian, and Ukrainian oligarchs who enjoy government ties?
• Should a conservative billionaire stealthily insert $419 million late in the 2024 campaign to absorb the work of registrars in key voting precincts?
• If a Democratic president wins the 2024 election should conservative groups riot at the Capitol on Inauguration Day? Should a conservative celebrity yell out to the assembled crowd of protestors that she dreams of blowing up the White House? And if a Republican wins, should he prosecute any Democratic rioters who once again swarm Washington on Inauguration Day and charge them with “insurrection,” meting out long prisons sentences to the convicted?
• Is Joe Biden now vulnerable to being impeached for systematic family corruption, or using the Department of Justice to obstruct the prosecution of his son in his last days in office, and then being tried in the Senate as a private citizen?
• If the Republicans gain the Senate, will they move to end the filibuster in agreement with Democratic assertions that it is “racist” and a “Jim Crow relic”?
• If the midwestern Electoral College “Blue Wall” seems to reappear, or if Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada recreate new blue walls, will there be a conservative effort to end the constitutionally mandated Electoral College?
• If in 2024 there is a narrow Democratic win in the Electoral College, should conservative celebrities conspire to run ads urging the electors to reject their constitutional duties and not vote in accordance with their state’s popular vote that went Democratic? Should a Republican third-party candidate sue to stop a state’s selection of its electors on grounds the voting machines were rigged?
• If Supreme Court decisions begin to appear to favor the left, will Republicans talk of packing the court, or have the DOJ turn a blind eye when mobs began to swarm the homes of liberal justices? Should the conservative media go after liberal judges with serial accusations of corruption? Should the Republican Senate leader assemble a mob of pro-life protestors at the doors of the court and call out Justices Sotomayor or Jackson by name, with threats that they will soon reap the whirlwind they have sowed, given they have no idea of what is about to “hit” them? Should conservative legal scholars urge the country to ignore Supreme Court decisions deemed liberal?
• Will local prosecutors in red jurisdictions begin filing criminal charges against leading Democratic candidates on various charges, among them accusations of old inflated real estate assessments, campaign finance laws, questioning ballot results, or taking classified documents home? If Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton were to run in 2024, will their past illicit behavior gain the attention of a city or state attorney in Utah, West Virginia, or Wyoming?
• If Joe Biden continues to decline at his present rate, will Republicans demand he be given the Montreal Cognitive Assessment? Will they subpoena Ivy League psychiatrists to testify that an intervention is needed to remove him from office? And will an FBI director and a deputy Attorney General plan to wear wires, and record Biden in his private moments of senility, as a way of convincing the cabinet or Congress that he is demonstrably mentally unfit for office?
• In the 2024 election, should the Republican nominee hire a foreign ex-spy to compile falsehoods about the Democratic opponent and then seed them among the media, and Department of Justice? Should the FBI hire such a Republican contractor and likewise use him to gather dirt on the Democratic nominee?
• If there appears incriminating evidence concerning a Republican nominee, should the FBI retrieve such evidence, keep it under wraps, lie about its veracity, and instead go along with media and ex-intelligence officers assertions that it is a fraudulent production of Russian intelligence?
• Will conservative CIA and FBI directors, and the Director of National Intelligence be given exemptions from prosecutions for systematically lying while under oath in Congress or to federal investigators?
• Will conservative celebrities ritually on social media, without fear of censorship, brag about ways of decapitating, shooting, stabbing, burning, or blowing up the Democratic nominee?
• Since in many states the statues of limitations have not yet expired for arson, murder, assault, looting, and attacks on 1,500 police officers during the summer 2020 riots, will state prosecutors now begin identifying those 14,000 once arrested and mostly released, and begin refiling charges of conspiracy, racketeering—and “insurrection”?
• Will they also file insurrection charges against those who torched a federal courthouse, a police precinct, and a historic Washington DC church, or conspired to riot and swarm the White House grounds in an effort to attack the President of the United States?
• Will they file charges against Vice President Kamala Harris for “inciting” ongoing violent demonstrations with monotonous, emphatic, and repetitive threats in the weeks before her nomination? Contrary to liberal “fact checkers” at time of nationwide violence, Harris certainly did not distinguish violent from non-violent protests, but in fact implied that they were intimately tied to the upcoming election and beyond. So given the hundreds of police officers injured, the hundreds of millions in property damage, and the dozens killed, what exactly did Harris mean by tying that ongoing summer of often violent protests to Election Day?:

“But they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop, and this is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop, and everyone beware, because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not gonna stop after Election Day. Everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up — and they should not. And we should not.”

Was the above more or less inflammatory than Trump’s January 6 remarks for which in part he is under indictment: “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore…I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”?

In sum, the Democratic leadership along with the media long ago deemed that Donald Trump posed such an existential threat to democracy that they were entitled to destroy democratic norms to destroy him.

Their actions were predicated on three assumptions: 

• one, they had that right because they were more sophisticated, morally superior, and smarter than the rest of America and thus deserved the exemption to blow up customs and norms to achieve the “correct” ends; 
• two, whatever damage they did to long-standing protocols of equal justice under the law paled in comparison to the damage that Trump supposedly would or did do; and 
• three, their conservative opposition either lacked the wherewithal, the brains, or the audacity to emulate such behavior and thus there was no worry anyone would dare do to them what they did to others.

And now? For the first time, given recent polls, the Left is scared that a Republican House and perhaps soon a Republican Senate and White House might follow its own precedents, and use new leftwing guidelines to enact conservative agendas.

 

Impeachment: ‘A Mansion in Hell’

Editorial of The New York Sun January 23, 2021

Could the fate of the Senators who vote to convict President Trump be a “mansion in Hell”? Well, read on, bearing in mind that impeachment is the easy route to blocking Mr. Trump’s ability to make a comeback. Now that he’s out of office, after all, he could be put in the dock in ordinary criminal court for incitement of insurrection, same as the impeachment charge. An ordinary court would get the same result but is just harder.

The Democrats’ aim in impeachment is to disqualify Mr. Trump from further office. The Senate, according to the Constitution, can do that by a simple majority vote if it convicts him. Plus, too, conviction in the Senate requires only a two-thirds majority. The United States code — Title 18, section 2823 — is crystal clear that incitement of insurrection is a statutory crime and disqualification is part of the statutory punishments.

Here’s the language that a regular federal prosecutor could cite from the U.S. code: “Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”

Our guess is that a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict Mr. Trump on an incitement of insurrection charge faster than you could say “ham sandwich.” Convicting him, though, could be more difficult than in the Senate. For in court the jury has to be unanimous and the burden of proof — “beyond a reasonable doubt” — is much higher than the burden that the prosecution would have to meet in the Senate.............To Read More....

My Take - The fact is this is blatantly unconstitutional.  the Congress has no authority to prosecute criminal activity, that's the responsibility of the Executive branch.  If Trump committed a crime, then the executive branch should go after him, but as the article states, it would be hard to prove he committed any crime let alone incitement to riot, especially since so much is coming forward that radical leftists were behind the capitol riot. 

An impeachment process in the Constitution is for one purpose and one purpose only:  To remove a sitting government official, in this case the President of the United States.  But he's been voted out of office, he can't be removed via impeachment because he's not there.  The actions of the Democrat Congress is despicable and a disgrace, and nothing short of political persecution. 

What's behind the Dem desperation to punish and remove President Trump?

By Mark Angelides January 12, 2021Articles, Politics, Social Issues @ Liberty Nation

The push for President Donald Trump’s immediate removal from office is not quite what it claims to be. It is not an attempt by senior Democrat leaders to punish the president, nor is it an effort to stop a last-minute nuclear war, as indicated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). In fact, the whole theatrical maneuver appears geared toward one outcome: stop President Trump from getting back into office.

On Jan. 11, Democrats failed to get unanimous Senate consent to proceed with the immediate removal of the president, but this is just a bump in the road. Not to be dissuaded, Pelosi said that she would move immediately to another avenue of impeachment and removal.

 

Despite four years of media carnage and almost two impeachments, the president remains a political force who could severely damage Democrats in 2022 and 2024. Job approval polling since the Nov. 3 election for Trump has not remained steady — it has increased!

According to Rasmussen Reports, in the weeks before and after Christmas, the president’s approval hovered around 46%; it is now at 48%. On top of this, his total disapproval rate has dropped by three points since New Year’s Eve. Naturally, the majority of this support comes from Republicans, of whom 79% were in favor of supporting Trump during the Electoral College certification.

An Election Machine

Many Republican lawmakers may not see Trump as their party’s future, but they didn’t in 2016, either. After failing to make much of a dent in the early primaries and despite a studied lack of enthusiasm from the GOP, the New York businessman went on to claim a roaring victory. And he could do it again.

There is little doubt that he would have the automatic backing of at least some of the primary voting pool; with his extraordinary ability to fundraise, much of the early field would be whittled away in short order. Assuming the GOP would allow him in their sandpit, polling suggests 2024 could be an easy nomination for Trump.

Polarizing Numbers

It is not, however, all sunshine and rainbows for the president. According to Scott Rasmussen, a sizable number of voters believe Trump should be behind bars. He writes:

“But the deep and growing divide in our nation today was highlighted by a polling question I never expected to ask: Forty-three percent of voters believe that President Donald Trump should be arrested after he leaves office. A nearly identical number — 44% — disagree. Thirteen percent (13%) are not sure.”

In fact, polling results do show a fractured nation, but more importantly fractured parties. Over 70% of Republican likely voters feel that Joe Biden did not win the election fairly, which is not a major surprise, but 14% of Democrat voters agree with this sentiment.

Nowhere to Run to, Baby

Trump’s political opponents will likely launch lawsuits aplenty with the hopes of either putting him away or moving him off. Because it is not that the Democratic Party needs to avoid mere failure during the next Congress, it needs to show success.

Having the trifecta of House, Senate, and White House may be a dream come true for a newly inaugurated president, but it comes with a caveat: Everything that goes wrong will be the Democrats’ fault.

Should the Constitution take a beating during the first two years of the Biden presidency, it seems almost a certainty that the Democrats’ favorite bogeyman will be on hand not only to point out the flaws in their governance but also to make political hay.

Read more from Mark Angelides.

 

Impeachment? Pelosi's Gotta be Nuts!

"If there is one thing that is bipartisan in Washington, it is brazen hypocrisy".  Thomas Sowell 

By Rich Kozlovich

As insane as I think Pelosi and her mob are, I didn't think they were this nuts, or this vicious. I should have known better.  Attempting to impeach a sitting President with days left in office?  Really?  How nuts is that?   But can it happen?

"Alan Dershowitz said Democrats have virtually no chance of successfully impeaching and removing President Donald Trump before Inauguration Day on Jan. 20. “The case cannot come to trial in the Senate. Because the Senate has rules, and the rules would not allow the case to come to trial until, according to the majority leader, until 1 p.m. on January 20th, an hour after President Trump leaves office,”

Then there's even more insane talk about impeaching him after he leaves office.  Dershowitz goes on to say:

“And the Constitution specifically says, ‘The President shall be removed from office upon impeachment.’ It doesn’t say the former president. Congress has no power to impeach or try a private citizen, whether it be a private citizen named Donald Trump or named Barack Obama or anyone else,

Does Pelosi and her mob know that?  Of course, which is probably why they're demanding V.P. Pence invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him (more here).  And then there's this stunt with Pelosi calling the military expressing concern Trump has the nuclear football, which allows the President to launch a nuclear strike.  Clearly a stunt to imply he's nuts, and dangerous, and can't be trusted to finish out his days in office without some insane action.  

Pelosi is totally contemptible!  However, I guess we can be grateful she's praying for him all the time!  Right?  Nah, that's rank lying hypocrisy coming from a

.

This is just another round of Pelosi stunts for publicity, and an effort to humiliate a President that overcame everything they threw at him for four years.  A President who was an amazing success domestically and internationally, clearly deserving a Nobel Peace Prize, for accomplishing in a few years what previous Presidents couldn't accomplish in decades.   All that in spite of the fact his administration was filled with Never-Trump deep staters.   

The massive levels of and corruption of the courts and lack of courage of the state legislatures certifying that fraud was the only thing thrown at him he couldn't overcome.  

The consequences?   The nation is going to install two incredibly incompetent, corrupt left wing lunatics, who will fill their administration with equally insane, if not more insane leftist lunatics.  And the Senate will not be able to stop it.  Be very afraid!

Update:  Is Nancy and her mob nuts?  Of course, everything they're doing is antithetical to the continuation of the United States as a sovereign nation, working to destroy the American culture, the American identity, the American economy and overthrow the Constitution.  How can that be anything but nuts?  But it's a Machiavellian kind of nuts.  What she and the Democrat party are really up to with this effort to humiliate and destroy Trump is based on fear.  That's right, fear! 

Here's a piece that appeared in the New York Sun, also on the 11th saying:

The idea that the Senate can wait until after President Trump leaves office to try him on any articles of impeachment from the House is the latest gambit of the Democrats. We understand that scholars differ on whether that would be constitutionally kosher. Count us as among those who see it as an unconstitutional and thuggish strategy calculated to prevent Mr. Trump from challenging the Democrats in 2024.

It’s not our purpose here to suggest that Mr. Trump should run in 2024 or could win. He’s hinted, though, that he might try, and it’s easy to see why, given that 74 million voters cast ballots for him in November. The only candidate who’s ever bested that number is President-elect Biden, who may not seek a second term. So the Democrats are desperate to find a way to bar Mr. Trump from making another attempt at the presidency.

It's all about 2022, and then 2024, not about Trump being too dangerous to continue in office for a few more days. Fear he could run again and actually be re-elected, and if that were to happen he wouldn't be going in without a following as he did this time.  His administration was filled with deep staters and Never-Trumpers, including holdovers from the Obama administration, and he would definitely get a real Attorney General that knows how to go after high level criminals in government.  

Only Trial Witnesses Can Expose the Evil Anti-Trump Coup

January 22, 2020 By Joy Overbeck

Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, and their jackal pack are already howling that a Senate trial dismissal vote or a trial without witnesses amounts to a "cover-up." We don't care what they think. But we must care very seriously about what Americans think, and Americans have not heard the president's defense against the bogus charges because the House Democrats forbade this basic fairness. The Senate trial is his perfect chance to destroy the Democrats' sham impeachment.

If most Americans knew about the vicious covert war waged by anti-Trump officials at the highest levels of our revered security agencies to usurp the presidency, they would be outraged. Poll numbers would reflect their overwhelming disgust with the powerful weasels at the DOJ, CIA, FBI, maybe even the FISA court, working hard undercover to undo an election that Trump won overwhelmingly.

But most Americans have busy lives, and when they do tune in, they mostly hear the leftstream media's Trump-hating desk-pounders who deliberately ignore the Deep State conspiracy to annihilate the president. And the usurpers' tangled web is so wicked complicated that following it requires a flow chart that would cover several walls........To Read More....

Jerry Nadler’s fatal mistake on impeachment

January 22, 2020 By John Leonard

Congressman (and impeachment manager) Jerry Nadler made a fatal mistake by running his mouth only two days before President Trump’s absurd trial was scheduled to begin. He just couldn’t keep quiet for two more days. Now the entire country can be very confident that this impeachment trial is nothing but a sham and a political hatchet job.
How so? While arguing against calling Hunter Biden as a witness by the president’s defense team during a Sunday appearance on Face the Nation, Nadler foolishly said: “Did the president…as the evidence shows that he did, betray his country by conspiring with a foreign country to try to rig the election?”

See the problem? Congressman Nadler just claimed on national television in front of millions of viewers that evidence shows President Trump committed the worst possible crime against our nation, which is treason. However, the two articles of impeachment are only about obstruction of Congress and abuse of power, neither of which are criminal acts as codified by law..........Nadler also accused Trump of extortion. If the evidence really shows that President Trump betrayed the United States and conspired with a foreign country (when he wasn’t busy extorting political favors from them,) why isn’t that listed as the very first article of impeachment?..........To Read More....