Impeachment

The most important thing to know about Democrats’ impeachment inquiry is this: it is not about removing President Trump now; it is about damaging him now so he can be defeated next year. Impeachment normally seeks to remove the president (or a federal judge) from office. A successful House vote is only the first step. The Senate needs strong evidence to convict, and House leaders try to provide it with their investigation and public hearings. That’s what we learned in seventh-grade civics. But Nancy Pelosi is not in middle school. She is teaching postgraduate courses, and she knows a Republican Senate is very unlikely to convict Donald Trump without a lot more evidence than has been brought to light along with a groundswell of public support.

She’s back. Hillary Clinton, who lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump, lashes into him in a CBS News interview that was released on Thursday, declaring that he’s an 'illegitimate president'. She also laced into him on Thursday night in an appearance before the National Abortion Rights Action League, not to mention an appearance on Friday at Georgetown University, where she said that Trump has transformed American foreign policy into 'an extortion racket' and 'stabbed in the back' career foreign service officers. Them’s fightin’ words! The ostensible purpose of her CBS interview was to promote her new tome, The Book of Gutsy Women, co-written with her daughter Chelsea.

We’re told over and over by fair-weather constitutional scholars that impeachment is a 'political process.' Which is to say: it’s not strictly to do with statutes being violated or any narrow legalistic calculation, but rather a wholesale consideration of the power dynamics within the American system of government. Let’s therefore examine one of the central political arguments presented by advocates of impeachment, namely Nancy Pelosi, whose about-face on the issue this week has ensured several months of all-consuming national melodrama. Announcing that a formal impeachment inquiry has been initiated, Pelosi declared that Donald Trump had 'betrayed' the country.

Poor Joseph Maguire. The acting head of the intelligence agencies sure was in an awful predicament as he testified before the House Intelligence Committee. The former Navy SEAL was thrashing about to avoid becoming entangled in the net of the Democratic inquiry, swimming in murkier waters than he had ever encountered before. Indeed, at one point he confessed that he never would have accepted his post had he been aware of the whistleblower report that sounded an alarm about what Adam Schiff deemed the ‘nefarious’ activities about President Trump and his top aides.How different from Corey Lewandowski, who appears to be headed to the White House to help lead the defense of Trump!

I am not thinking of that scene at the beginning of Dickens’s novel where Mr Blotton says he regards Mr Pickwick as a 'humbug'. That was nice, especially when Mr Pickwick angrily demands to know whether the Rt. Honorable gentleman called him a humbug in its ordinary or 'common sense'. No, no responded Mr Blotton, he had 'merely considered him a humbug in a Pickwickian point of view'. Well, that’s all right then, rejoined Mr Pickwick, and peace and amity reigned once more among the members of the Pickwick Club. There is a lesson in there somewhere for the Democrats, but when it comes to their virulent case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, more pertinent is the episode describing the case of Bardell v. Pickwick.

Is Donald Trump going to be impeached? Nancy Pelosi is not giving herself much room to maneuver: once a Democratic-led committee of inquiry is assembled, its results are a foregone conclusion. It will recommend impeachment — to fail to do so would only strengthen the president and make Democrats look stupid on the eve of an election. As things are, Pelosi evidently found the pressure from within her party already too great to withstand: her sense of the political risks of impeachment was outweighed by her sense of the danger to her own position from continuing to resist it. So the die is cast. Perhaps this tells us, too, that Joe Biden’s support for the Democratic nomination is dwindling behind the scenes.

It looks more and more like a foregone conclusion that impeachment proceedings will be initiated against Donald Trump in the near future. Bernie Sanders became the latest Democratic presidential candidate to call for this on Thursday, joining a cast of characters that includes Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Seth Moulton, and Wayne Messam. Bernie’s quandary is a particularly fraught one. He had equivocated for months on impeachment, lagging behind his chief ‘progressive’ competitor Warren, who was first to call for proceedings after the Mueller report’s release. You may not agree with Warren’s analysis, but at least she read the report and formed an independent conclusion.

Inquiring minds want to know, what will Justin Amash — wait, who? JUSTIN AMASH, you know, he’s the US Representative from Michigan’s 3rd Congressional District. He’s a bona-fide Trump-hating Republican. Waaaay back in 2016, he joined the lemming list of Republicans who opposed the nomination of Donald Trump. Some individuals who had signed onto that list — Sen. Lindsey Graham, for example — have had second thoughts and now support the President. But not Justin Amash. No siree Bob. His motto is ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’ In case you doubt this, consider his recent Twitter emission, which is a series of variations on a theme announced at the beginning of his Twitter thread. 1.

Since the release of the Mueller report, with each passing day comes a new and increasingly strident demand to impeach Donald Trump. The New York Times, Washington Post, and various prestige magazines are cluttered with such demands, casting impeachment as an imperative for the survival of American democracy. Mueller might have affirmatively concluded that no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia ever came close to being established, but that hasn’t stopped Democrats and their journalist allies from barreling full-steam ahead down this rabbit hole.

The freshman class of Democrats arriving to be sworn in on Capitol Hill had always threatened to shake things up from the very start, overturning precedent and doing things their own way. But none managed to make good on their promise quite as quickly as Rashida Tlaib, the newly elected US Representative for Michigan’s 13th Congressional district. She managed to alienate her party leadership at the same time as angering her opponents, ignoring any Democratic talking points about staying away from the ‘I’ word in the sort of language that once came with ‘parental guidance’ stickers. ‘We’re gonna go in there and we’re gonna impeach the motherfucker!

Will the government shutdown end soon with a grand bargain between Democrats and Republicans that trades wall money for the legalization of the Dreamers? Dream on. President Trump sent out an email today in which he called for an ‘agreemnet’ to occur that would ensure the construction of a wall ‘immediatly.’ The typographical errors were no accident but symptomatic of a derelict White House that seeks to substitute showmanship for substance. Yesterday it was the bogus news conference at the White House with various glabrous fellows from immigration and border control services who were trotted out to testify to their fealty to Trump. One after another, they blubbered about how important Trump and his wall were to them.

On Christmas Eve, President Trump spoke to a seven-year-old girl called Collman Lloyd. ‘Are you still a believer in Santa?’ he asked her, ‘coz at seven, it’s marginal, right?’ Perfect. Pure Trump. It was OK, though. Later, little Collman told reporters that she still believed, despite what the leader of the free world had said to her. Trump didn’t manage to shake a seven-year-old’s faith in Santa. But, in another surprise declaration over Christmas, he announced that American troops would be leaving Syria. It happened ‘very fast,’ as Trump likes to say. He took a call from the Turkish leader, President Erdogan.