The Democrats are going to wish they had listened to Tulsi Gabbard. On the eve of the vote on the two articles of impeachment the Dems had settled on after much (too much) deliberation, Gabbard made one last-ditch effort at selling them on the idea of censure instead. No one even heard her. Late Wednesday, the vote went down the way Democrats had dreamed it would. And now they find them with a hot mess on their hands.
It’s not as though they haven’t bungled impeachment from the get-go, conducting secret hearings, failing to fashion charges that would resonate with the American public, forsaking their oath to abandon the exercise if it were not impartial.
But the real problem for the Democrats — for the Left at large — has been their total disregard for the Constitution, even as they cloaked their hearings in it, speaking lovingly of the founders (ordinarily slave owners who gave lunatics the right to pack heat) and of how the Dems of today are following to the letter the rules they set up.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Only they haven’t been. Early on, they denied the president his due process, as guaranteed by the founders. When he refused to cooperate with their demand that witnesses from his inner circle testify, they jettisoned the remedy afforded by the Constitution, claiming there wasn’t time to seek relief from the courts — that Donald Trump was too grave a threat to our national security to wait for a court ruling or, worse yet, an election. Instead they rushed headlong into the fray.
Now with their vote on Wednesday, the House has carried the ball as far as the Constitution allows them. From here the matter goes over to the Senate, which has the sole power to conduct impeachment trials. The next step in the process is for Speaker Nancy Pelosi to hand over the articles of impeachment.
But she’s reluctant to do that. Democratic Whip James Clyburn was on CNN yesterday morning to explain why. Take a look (a transcript of the key portion of the video follows):
Well, the delay is made necessary because the majority leader of the Senate has made it very clear that he’s not going to be impartial.
He’s not going to be fair. He will collude, if you please, with the White House, at least the White House’s attorneys, to decide how he will go forward.
Why would the Speaker of the House step into that without trying to determine exactly what the majority leader plans to do?
So, I applaud her for this. In fact, I was one of the ones arguing that this ought to be the case. And until we can get some assurances from the Majority Leader that he is going to allow for a fair and impartial trial to take place, we would be crazy to walk in there knowing he set up a kangaroo court.
Never mind Clyburn’s sheer chutzpah in talking about fairness or kangaroo courts. The fact of the matter is the Democrats have produced this lemon, and now they have to live (or die) with it.
It’s not just the Democrats in Congress who are unhappy about the mess they made. The media are also pretty miffed — at the Republicans. Yesterday, the Washington Post (some members of which went out to celebrate Merry Impeahmas) had a one-paragraph piece titled, “To avoid removal, Trump needs senators representing only 7 percent of the country to support him.” The author, veteran columnist Philip Bump wrote:
It is the nature of a representative democracy that people will sometimes be represented by politicians with whom they disagree. Ask a Republican in New York City how they feel about their representatives or ask a Democrat, well, anywhere, how they feel about their president. It’s the trade-off of having elections.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say it sounds as though Bump is making an argument for eliminating the electoral college, another provision found in that document the Democrats love to hate.
