Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 2021 | Volume 66, Issue 2
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 2021 | Volume 66, Issue 2
Donald Trump was impeached again, a week before leaving office, in one of the great travesties of modern politics.
Here are reasons why the exercise proved a farce.
One, impeachment was never intended by the founders to become a serial effort to weaken a first-term president.
The first Democratic impeachment effort of December 2017 fizzled. The second impeachment of December 2019 succeeded, but predictably failed to obtain a Senate conviction. But this latest try will mark the third failed attempt of Democrats in Congress to remove Trump before his allotted tenure. It will likely not result in a Senate conviction, either.
But from now on, House impeachment will be used by the out-party as a periodic club to wound a first-term president. President-elect Biden should beware.
Two, the country is wracked by a pandemic, recession, a summer of Black Lives Matter and Antifa looting, arson, and violence, and the recent rogue group of Trump supporters storming the Capitol. Washington, D.C. is now militarized in a way not seen since the Civil War. Over 20,000 troops patrol the streets. Thousands are dying from COVID-19. Politics and incompetence at the state level slow down the widespread vaccination of the vulnerable.
“You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price,” said Sen. Schumer to an angry crowd in front of the Supreme Court. “You won’t know what hit you . . .”
So the last thing Americans needed was the distraction of an impeachment of a lame-duck president.
Three, the rushed third impeachment attempt was even sloppier than the first two. There was neither an appointment of a special counsel nor a formal case presented for illegal or improper presidential behavior. Trump’s advocates had no time to present a legal or political refutation of “incitement.”
There was no real debate, just for-show stump speeches in a rushed spasm of hatred — a circus entirely contrary to the Founders’ notion of a solemn and rare procedure.
Four, only those without the prior sin of revving up partisans should cast the first stone. Many of the supporters of this current impeachment would themselves be impeached under their own vague definitions of “incitement” they now apply to Trump.
In March, then-Senate Minority leader Charles Schumer (R-N.Y.) riled up an angry crowd of pro-abortion protestors at the very doors of the Supreme Court — while it was in session. To a wild crowd, he threatened individual Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch by name: “You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you . . .”
In February, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) angrily tore in half the State of Union Address, after, according to custom, it was handed to her by the president on national television.