What a Waste
Everyone knew acquittal was inevitable
AFTER months of hype and pseudo-drama ginned up by the left, public and secret testimony and breathless “smoking-gun” headlines, it’s taking the Senate just two weeks to bring an end, finally, to the impeachment circus. And it is ending with the always-inevitable acquittal of President Trump.
What a tragic, monumental waste of time it has been. After all, anyone capable of rudimentary arithmetic could have seen this foreordained outcome coming from Day One.
Indeed, it’s not entirely clear why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the rest of the leading luminaries of the Democratic Party even decided to embark upon this national exercise in political self-flagellation. Math is a stubborn thing, and Democrats constitute a Senate minority — a far cry from the two-thirds supermajority required for conviction under Article I of the Constitution.
It is true, of course, that many on the left have been juiced up by an all-encompassing impeachment fervor since the day President Trump was inaugurated. Who can forget the infamous Washington Post headline from Inauguration Day 2017: “The campaign to impeach President Trump has begun.”
But impeach him for this? Really?
Democrats clearly resorted to this tepid, half-hearted effort after special counsel Robert Mueller failed to deliver the goods on Russiagate. No rational observer can earnestly believe that a sober reading of the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky — the allegedly nefarious transcript that takes up all of a whopping five pages — actually amounts to an impeachable offense.
Hook up Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler to a polygraph and they may well admit as much. But after Mueller struck out, Pelosi needed some sort of grist to appease Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the crazy farleft caucus.
Alas, to call it a mere waste of time is likely far too charitable. The Democrats took stock of the decrepit state of our national politics, the bitterly fractious nature of our partisan tribalism, the pathetic regard the American people have for their Congress and took a sledgehammer to it all. The most immediate tangible result of this failed gambit will be to only further coarsen and debase our politics.
The trials and tribulations of Hunter Biden will now become an even more regular fixture of the Democratic presidential primary commentariat. And if Uncle Joe is the nominee, we won’t stop hearing about Hunter Biden throughout the general election, either. It’s tough to see how anyone could see that as healthy for the republic.
Whatever political damage Democrats think they have done to the president, furthermore, it is more than countered by the way this stunt has galvanized the president’s core supporters to rally to his side. There is no reliable polling showing that impeachment is a net political winner for Democrats.
At best for the Dems, we are right back to where we started. At worst for them, while national polling is more divided, there is a surplus of polling across key Rust Belt swing states to suggest that impeachment will likely redound to Republicans’ electoral interests in November.
Most damaging of all, the Democrats’ pursuit of the draconian remedy of impeachment based on their claims of Trump’s corrupt subjective intentions on a diplomatic phone call has set a truly reckless precedent for the future. The general conduct of foreign policy is a core Article II function constitutionally vested in the president, and soliciting a “quid pro quo” while acting lawfully amounts to constitutionally protected free speech.
For Democrats to argue that Trump’s purportedly corrupt motive somehow transmogrifies such constitutionally protected conduct into an impeachable offense is nothing short of astonishing. Their zeal to impeach for what amounts to a policy disagreement over a diplomatic phone call reeks of the “maladministration” impeachment standard the Framers deliberated and then conscientiously rejected at the 1787 constitutional convention.
Democrats have now undermined the solemnity of the impeachment process and laid the foundation for future debilitating impeachments whenever different political parties control the House and the presidency.
Lackluster television ratings indicate that the vast majority of Americans tuned out much of the Pelosi-Schumer impeachment show. Good for them. But it is now time to move past this unfortunate affair and limit the fallout as much as possible.