Impeachment Mania

Friends, the Democrats will use every trick in the book to try to get their way, but lately they may have gone back to the impeachment well one too many times.  Democrats running for President jumped all over the recent (bogus) New York Times story about yet another unsubstantiated allegation of sexual misconduct against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.  These Dems were happy to throw Kavanaugh under the bus long before all the facts had come in -- they even suggested that he should be impeached for "lying".  (Remember, all Republicans "lie" constantly, according to the Left.  Are you a conservative?  Did you open your mouth today? Then you're a liar!)  My latest article tackles this outrage, and it suggests that misuse of the impeachment process could be more than just a toxic talking point -- it could be a threat to our way of life.

Democrats' Impeachment Obsession is a Danger to Democracy

Sad to say, but Tom Steyer, even though he's an out-of-touch and unlikable billionaire, may be the most representative face of the Democratic Party these days. That's because, almost since the day President Trump won the 2016 election, Steyer has been bawling like a toddler and insisting that Trump's prompt removal from office, via impeachment, is a moral and political imperative. 

Steyer and his “Need to Impeach” movement offer a laundry list of reasons why Trump should be impeached, from alleged obstruction of justice to violations of the emoluments clause, Russian collusion, racism and bigotry, recklessness, “persecution” of political opponents and the free press, mistreatment of “immigrants”, and paying hush money to Stormy Daniels. 

 

Or, to put it another way, Steyer's rationale for impeachment is so diffuse that it's utterly incoherent. Steyer presumably is bargaining that, if he throws everything but the kitchen sink at Trump, one of these charges — it doesn't much matter which one — will stick, and Trump will go down like a ton of bricks.

Tom Steyer, for all his malevolent fury, is just a private citizen, albeit one who has plowed hundreds of millions of dollars of his own money into a campaign to subvert American democracy. What's more worrying is that Steyer's no-stone-left-unturned approach to impeaching President Trump now seems to be the official strategy of the House Judiciary Committee under Chairman Jerrold Nadler. Nadler has made it clear that any anti-Trump narrative, no matter how obscure, laughable, or deficient in terms of evidence, is potentially acceptable as a pretext for impeachment. Again, he doesn't much care why Trump is impeached, just so long as he is.

Now, though, Democrats are taking their impeachment obsession to the next level. Brimming with enthusiasm for the removal of President Trump from office, they are beginning to apply their convoluted impeachment “logic” to other political enemies. Their latest target is Brett Kavanaugh, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

Even before Kavanaugh was confirmed in 2018, there were whispers among Democrats that, if this alleged abuser of women should be added to the nation's highest court, Congress would be entirely justified in impeaching and removing him. Never mind that the charges made against Kavanaugh were unsubstantiated — in fact, they were specifically rejected as untrue by many of the people who were present at the time of the alleged offense. No matter. The new standard of proof — for Republicans and conservatives only — is that, if someone says you did something wrong, you assuredly did. Moreover, if you deny it, or if you defend your honor publicly, you are merely compounding your sins with lies (the definition of “lies” being “that which Democrats and liberals do not wish to hear”).

The suggestion last year that Kavanaugh should be impeached because of Christine Blasey Ford's politically-motivated and uncorroborated accusations was outrageous, given the hallowed principle of American justice that we are all innocent until proven guilty. Now, though, prominent Democrats are doubling down. 

Presidential candidates Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, among others, are calling for Kavanaugh's impeachment anew, because a biased news story appeared in the New York Times alleging another incident in which Kavanaugh is supposed to have mistreated a young woman. The Times neglected to mention that the woman in question has no recollection of her own mistreatment.

The truth or falsehood of the latest accusations against Kavanaugh are, of course, irrelevant to his tormentors. They know only two things about Kavanaugh for certain: that he is a bad man in the eyes of feminists, who have made him a poster boy for sexual assault, despite the fact that he has never been charged with or convicted of any crime, including crimes against women; and that he is a bad Supreme Court Justice in the eyes of progressives, who believe that the real function of the court is to mandate nationwide obedience to the agenda of the Left, whenever that agenda cannot be, for practical reasons, advanced through legislation or executive action instead.

The moral of the story seems to be this: in the banana republic or pseudo-democracy that leftists are trying to create, impeachment, like every other legal and constitutional tradition, exists for one reason only: to help liberals crush their enemies and conquer power. In other words, leftists want to transform impeachment from a tool to punish abuses of power into a tool to facilitate such abuses, and in effect to criminalize dissent.

The miracle, then, is that no one has yet called for the impeachment of Neil Gorsuch, or Mitch McConnell, or hundreds of other Republican and conservative judges and office holders. For they too are guilty of the only real crime that the modern Left recognizes: standing in its way. 

Heck, from the liberal perspective, why stop there? Why not cut to the chase and impeach GOP voters too? After all, are not the 63 million Americans who put Trump in office ultimately responsible for the “high crimes and misdemeanors” that he commits on an hourly basis? Surely therefore the voters should share in his condemnation and his punishment.

Mark my words: it is only a matter of time before the impeachment dragnet is widened. The knives are already out for President Trump and Judge Kavanaugh, but liberals won't be satisfied until all of their enemies have been driven from the halls of power, and ultimately from politics itself.

Then, one assumes, the leftists will turn on each other, at which point some of them will rediscover the beauty of the phrase “innocent until proven guilty”...

Dr. Nicholas L. Waddy is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Alfred and blogs at: www.waddyisright.com. He appears weekly on the Newsmaker Show on WLEA 1480.

And here it is at American Greatness:

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/17/democrats-impeachment-obsession-is-a-danger-to-democracy/ 

But that's not all!  Check out this article, if you have the time.  It discusses the spread of leftist "ethnic studies" classes in American high schools.  Political indoctrination isn't just for higher ed anymore.  Oh no!

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/09/17/woke_history_is_making_big_inroads_in_americas_high_schools_120363.html