Tag: National Review

Impeachment Redux

Clowns to the left of me, 

Jokers to the right…

From “Stuck in the Middle With you” written by Gerry Rafferty. 

It seems reasonably clear that Donald J. Trump, who has by now passed Richard M Nixon in the proverbial race to the bottom, has undoubtedly committed an impeachable offense. It is also reasonably clear that the Democratic Party, in its ongoing love affair with incompetence, is regrettably about to go out of its way to make removing him from office nearly impossible.

The single article of impeachment they are poised to pass is going to accuse Trump of inciting an insurrection. The problem is that the wording is an invitation to partisan sniping and the making of legal arguments that conflate Trump’s political offense with the criminal law. Not only is this going to make a conviction impossible, it is entirely unnecessary. 

National Review’s Andrew McCarthy suggests language that avoids these traps and gets to the heart of the matter. He writes: 

“If what the Democrats truly want is bipartisan consensus in the service of national security, rather than political combat, the articles of impeachment they plan to file should charge the president with (a) subversion of the Constitution’s electoral process, particularly the Twelfth Amendment counting of the sovereign states’ electoral votes; (b) recklessly encouraging a raucous political demonstration that foreseeably devolved into a violent storming of the seat of our government; and (c) depraved indifference to the welfare of the vice president, Congress, security personnel, and other Americans who were in and around the Capitol on January 6.”

The charges contained in McCarthy’s language appear to be beyond dispute. Congress could (and should) pass such an article with dispatch and send it along to the Senate. If the Senate wants to pretend it can’t find a way to vote on the article before January 20, or at least vote to censure Trump, so be it. What had heretofore been known as The Party of Lincoln, will have shown itself to be largely populated by cowering fools, utterly unwilling to stand up to mob violence, and incapable of protecting liberty and our institutions. 

Add to that the cynical calculations of the Democrats, some of whom wish to delay an impeachment trial until after Trump has left office, a course of action Jim Clyburn has suggested. The stated reason for this is that Trump could then be barred from office in the future. 

That is nonsense, for two reasons. First, the impeachment power was designed for removal from office, not punishment. After removal, punishment can be meted out the usual way. Second, As Bruce Ackerman points out in the Washington Post, Congress can ban Trump from holding federal office in the future using Section 3 of the 14th amendment. They could do so by finding that he engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the Constitution of the United States. Moreover, such a finding would not require an impeachment conviction. It would require a simple majority in both houses of Congress. That should be doable. 

If Congress decides to wait months to hold an impeachment trial (at which time Chuck Schumer will be majority leader) it will be simply because they wish to use it as a partisan cudgel while they pass the Party’s progressive wish list, including trillions in new “stimulus” that doesn’t stimulate.  All the talk of getting rid of Trump “immediately” will have been shown to be just that. Talk. And it will be politics as usual. 

JFB

Time to Move On

The manual recount in Georgia is over, and Joe Biden won the state by a slim margin of 12,000 votes. In Michigan, the margin was 146,000 votes. The margin of the Biden victory in Arizona was 11,000 votes. In Pennsylvania the margin was about 80,000 votes including provisional ballots. But even if 100% of the provisional ballots cast in favor of Biden (51,889) were tossed aside, it still wouldn’t affect the outcome. 

Biden won and Trump lost, fair and square. But Trump and his team of lawyers refuse to acknowledge the obvious. So perhaps Republicans ought to follow the lead of Senators Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse and push back against the detestable Trumpian effort to snatch the election away from the rightful victor.  Trump’s efforts reflect more than his typical narcissism; they are part and parcel of the ongoing and deliberate sabotage of the public trust in our institutions for purely partisan reasons. 

And before the fingers start pointing, let’s be clear—this is not an entirely new phenomenon. Both Democrats and Republicans have done this. Hillary Clinton and her minions spent the better part of 4 years pretending that they were robbed of a rightful victory in 2016, with no evidence, as CNN likes to say about Trump. The New York Times 1619 project explicitly argued that the foundational purpose of the U.S. was the imposition and maintenance of race-based slavery, the effects of which are with us today in the form of institutionalized oppression and systemic racism. 

It is worth listening to what Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse has said on the subject of the public trust, especially with respect to Trump and his lawyers’ post electoral behavior. (Not that it has varied much from his pre-electoral behavior). 

Here is how Sasse is quoted in Politico.“Wild press conferences erode public trust. So no, obviously Rudy and his buddies should not pressure electors to ignore their certification obligations under the statute. We are a nation of laws, not tweets,” Sasse said.

Benn Sasse

He went on “When Trump campaign lawyers have stood before courts under oath, they have repeatedly refused to actually allege grand fraud — because there are legal consequences for lying to judges,” Sasse said. “President Trump lost Michigan by more than 100,000 votes, and the campaign and its allies have lost in or withdrawn from all five lawsuits in Michigan for being unable to produce any evidence.”

It is absolutely clear to anyone who is rational that Biden won and Trump lost, full stop. The margins of Biden’s victory in the contested states simply overwhelm the possibility of any conceivable attempt to win by fraud. The people who insist that Trump actually won are simply delusional. And that is being kind. 

We should not overlook the fact, and it is a fact, that Trump’s cheerleaders are engaged in a deliberate attack on American institutions that have been the mainstay of our liberties. It is, for instance, hard to believe that the leaders of the effort, people like Rudy Giulliani and Sydney Powell, actually believe the nonsense they have been trying to sell. If they really believed what they claimed about fraud, they presumably would have made the claim in court. But they didn’t. That’s because, as Ben Sasse pointed out, lawyers face consequences for lying to judges. 

But not for lying to the gullible. It’s the old bit—if you don’t know who the mark is in a card game—then you’re the mark. (For a discussion of the particulars, Jim Geraghty has a terrific article in National Review that demolishes the contention that the election was stolen by Biden & Co.)

A backdrop to all this is that Republican officeholders, with a few notable exceptions, are terrified of their voter base. As a result, many have refused to say out loud what they know to be true. In so doing they have created a remarkable profile in cowardice. And if they continue down this road the result may very well be calamitous for the Republican Party. And rightly so. Perhaps we will get an inkling of what the electorate thinks about all this on January 5 in Georgia. 

JFB