Self-destructive Democrats push forward on impeachment
With American unemployment numbers at a 50-year low, with people working and with money in their pockets, stubborn House Democrats rush forward on their path toward madness.
They insist on impeaching President Donald Trump, though they have no hope of securing a conviction in the Republican-controlled Senate.
Are House Democrats principled patriots fighting for the right against tough odds? Or are they cynics aided by media cheerleaders?
You’re the only ones who can answer that. Because the only answer that counts is the one the American people — Democrats and Republicans and independents — will give on Election Day in November 2020.
Yet even with an election less than a year away, Democrats are in a rush to impeach Trump over his wrongheaded phone call to Ukraine. He linked military assistance and asked for an investigation into what happened there during the Obama administration, when Joe and Hunter Biden employed Chicago Way-style muscle in Ukraine.
Ultimately, Ukraine got the missiles it wanted. Ukraine didn’t give Trump the investigation he sought.
When the Bidens were rolling in Ukraine, Joe was the Obama administration’s point man there. Son Hunter was making $50,000 a month from Ukrainian gas company Burisma, which was being investigated by a Ukrainian prosecutor.
Joe threatened to kill a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee unless the prosecutor was fired. Guess what? The prosecutor was fired. Joe Biden bragged about it all on video.
So, who has clean hands in Ukraine? Trump or the Democrats who defend Biden?
When you deal in Ukraine, just like when you deal in Chicago, you won’t find many angels.
I’ve said Congress should consider censuring the president, but not impeach him. Democrats haven’t proved he violated the law. And foreign aid, like all of politics since the beginning, is all about quid pro quo.
Without offering real proof, and without bothering to wait for a court battle to compel witnesses from the
White House to testify, what is this Democratic rush to impeachment about?
It’s political. It’s about leverage for fundraising. And it is self-destructive.
What’s worse, it lowers the bar for impeaching a president. This precedent virtually assures impeachments of future presidents, if they have the misfortune of facing a House controlled by the other party.
And it is self-destructive for Democrats, because Democrats are helping transform Trump into a victim.
In his zeal, Democratic U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff of California has become the Inspector Javert of Washington. And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, caving to her Democratic Party’s hard left-wing, covers her impeachment push with an absurd theatrical exercise.
Pelosi, the big-government liberal, is now invoking Founding Fathers and the Federalist Papers. She casts herself and her members as American revolutionary patriots fighting the Madness of our modern Orange King George.
But before this drama descends into complete lunacy, I wonder: Would you do us a favor?
Would you please step into the Way-Back machine and go back in time for just a bit?
Not too far back, not to the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln (later treated as a Republican god) abolished habeas corpus and imprisoned whomever he thought needed imprisoning for the good of the Union.
And not to World War II, where, just a few weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt (later treated as a Democratic god) rounded up some 120,000 Japanese Americans — two thirds of them native-born U.S. citizens — and locked them in prison camps.
We don’t have to go back that far. This is a short trip, to just three years ago:
It takes place before the 2016 presidential election, when Democrats and establishment Republicans recoiled in absolute horror to something crazy that then-candidate Trump was saying.
Or rather, what he was not saying. In his last debate with Democrat Hillary Clinton, Trump pointedly refused to say whether he’d graciously accept the results of that election.
“I will look at it at the time,” Trump said — it was a foregone establishment conclusion that Clinton would bury him — “I will keep you in suspense.”
He’d dare ignore the will of the voters in the presidential election?
His refusal to accept defeat that the establishment knew was coming was seen as evidence of madness and a clear threat to the republic that we all hold dear.
Our way of life would collapse. America would be plunged into chaos if Trump refused to concede, or so we were told.
Establishment Republicans were outraged. Democrats were outraged. Once the election was over and Hillary won, resistance wouldn’t only be madness. It would threaten the foundation of the nation.
But then Trump shocked America’s ruling political class and triggered endless tears from the allegedly neutral national media. He defeated Clinton on Election Day.
And what’s happened since? Democrats in defeat acted just as they said Trump would. Rather than concede, Democrats looked for ways to drag Trump from office, even raising the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment.
We’ve seen Democrat after Democrat call for impeachment for a variety of Trumpian sins, and also call for the abolishment of the Electoral College, which would kill the republic, eliminate the need for states, and spark civil war.
The Robert Mueller investigation dragged on and was supposed to prove Trump colluded with Russia. Only, it didn’t prove that at all, did it? And now, where are we? We’re here. With an election less than a year away.
Listen to “The Chicago Way” podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin — at www.wgnradio.com/category/wgnplus/thechicagoway.