No to impeachment editorial

While I’m tempted to refer to the July 26th Hearst Connecticut Editorial Board’s latest work as a bird cage liner, two things give me pause. One is that I’m not fond of keeping birds in cages. Secondly, I don’t want to be seen as facilitating any cases of avian constipation.

That piece (“House members must demand impeachment”) more or less read like a press release from Rep. Humpty Dumpty Jerry Nadler’s office. Hearst Connecticut and their fellow travelers in the orthodox media have been sifting through the ashes of the Mueller Investigation looking for whatever shiny object they can unearth.

Let’s examine the real takeaways from that debacle.

For starters: Robert Mueller showed himself to be alarmingly detached from the investigation he was charged with managing. Lifelong Republican Mueller larded his staff with attorneys who were Clinton 2016 donors and attendees at her now famous election night party. Mueller admitted that the attorney in charge of “day to day oversight” of the investigation was a onetime attorney for a former Hillary Clinton aide. That same attorney destroyed evidence in the email scandal investigation by smashing Mrs. Clinton’s BlackBerry device.

Does this sort of supervision burnish Mr. Mueller’s reputation of being “widely praised for his integrity?”

During my nearly 10 years as a smalltown elected land use commissioner, we actually underwent training to learn how to avoid stepping into such a mess.

Impeachment is supposed to the be the response to “high crimes and misdemeanors” by the President.

Mr. Mueller began his testimony with the following: “Before we go to questions I want to add one correction to my testimony this morning, I want to go back to one thing that was said this morning by Mr. Lieu who said ‘You didn’t charge the president because of the OLC opinion.’ That is not the correct way to say it. As we say in the report, and as I said at the opening, ‘we did not reach a determination as to whether the president committed a crime.’”

No remedy was offered because no crime was found after 22 months of digging and $32 million spent.

Some of the real value of the hearings was provided by former federal prosecutor Rep. John Ratcliffe, RTexas, with the following excerpt being an example.

“Volume II of this (Mueller) report was not authorized under the law to be written. It was written to a legal standard that does not exist at the Justice Department and it was written in violation of every DOJ principle about extraprosecutorial commentary. I agree with the chairman this morning when he said Donald Trump is not above the law. He’s not. But he damn sure shouldn’t be below the law, which is where Volume II of this report put him.”

The report was larded with gossip and innuendo and no recommendations for legal remedies. This is because it was a political document and not a proper legal document. However, the Hearst Connecticut Editorial Board is championing this Banana Republic politicking because they don’t like the person being targeted. Pathetic.

As to our flaccid Congressional delegation, Rep. Jim Himes is catering to the Champagne Socialists in his district, getting drunk on the publicity he’s getting from the CNN, MSDNC and the other media jackals.

Reps. John Larson, Joe Courtney and Rosa DeLauro are likely smart enough not to step into that trap as Republicans did with the Lewinski fiasco. Rep. Jahana Hayes is sitting on her pile of campaign cash awaiting her close up without making any sort of declarative statement that hasn’t been focus grouped 12 ways from Sunday.

The sort of handwringing nonsense readers were presented with on July 26th — and multiple times since then — are missives from the leftwing bubble that encompasses much of our media, academia and entertainment industry. They don’t represent an increasing segment of the American populace but, more importantly, don’t respect the legal foundations of our republic.

The late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the following about abortion. “It thus appears that the mansion of constitutionalized abortion law, constructed overnight in Roe v. Wade, must be disassembled doorjamb by doorjamb, and never entirely brought down, no matter how wrong it may be.”

I think the same sentiment can be applied to our partisan media.