It certainly looked like Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the voice sounded like hers. But her announcement of a formal impeachment process was so contrary to her earlier statements one could only conclude her words were from someone else.
Just a few months ago, Pelosi said “I’m not for impeachment. Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country.”
But Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the democratic socialist wing of the Democratic Party have been pressuring her all year to begin impeachment proceedings. We now know who really runs the U.S. House of Representatives, and it isn’t Speaker-In-Name-Only Pelosi.
There is no “bipartisan” support in Congress and virtually none in the nation for impeachment. This is the most brutally partisan of battles and it was instigated by a Democratic Party that has been screaming “impeachment” since President Donald Trump was elected in 2016, even before he was inaugurated.
For the past three years, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, yelled “Russian collusion! Russian collusion! Russian collusion!” And who can forget his somber declarations that clear evidence proving that collusion had been uncovered in his committee and would soon be revealed? It never was. And the vaunted Mueller report that was going to knock Trump out of the presidency landed with a big inconsequential thud.
Democrats even desperately and unsuccessfully searched for the right political slogan for impeachment. They initially were enthralled with “quid pro quo” before commissioning focus groups to come up with “bribery” as their choreographed charge.
President Trump is certainly not the most sympathetic of figures in this mess, even for many Republicans like me. He should never have made that phone call to the president of Ukraine, and he should not have suggested a Ukrainian investigation into alleged corruption by former Vice President Joe Biden who could be his Democratic opponent in 2020.
The call by the president was not only inappropriate, it was politically stupid because he had largely gotten through the failed “Russian collusion” smear by Schiff.
Now House Democrats have rolled out their two articles of impeachment charging obstruction of Congress and abuse of power.
So where is the crime?
President Richard Nixon was directly involved in the cover-up of the Watergate scandal. President Bill Clinton lied under oath about exploiting an intern for sex in the White House.
Meanwhile, the hapless son of former Vice President Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, gets a free pass from congressional Democrats and the national news media after getting more than $50,000 a month as an unqualified member of the board of directors of a corrupt Ukrainian energy company while his father was serving as vice president. Joe Biden says his son has done nothing wrong.vBut Biden says his son will not engage in foreign business if he is elected president. If there is nothing wrong with Hunter Biden being on the board, why should he stop?
National columnist David Harsanyi, a former opinion columnist for The Denver Post, raised a valid point after listening to the constitutional scholars who testified before the House Judiciary Committee. University of North Carolina professor of constitutional law Michael Gerhardt said that Trump’s conduct is “worse than the misconduct of any prior president.”
Really?
Harsanyi reminds us that President Franklin Roosevelt “signed an executive order that allowed him to unilaterally intern around 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent” during World War II. President Woodrow Wilson re-segregated the federal civil service. President Lyndon Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin which escalated the Vietnam War. We could go on.
You would have thought that congressional Democrats would remember how things turned out for the Republican House majority in 1998 after they impeached President Bill Clinton. Democrats picked up five seats in the U.S. House, which was the first time since 1934 that the president’s party picked up seats in the House during a mid-term election.
President Trump’s approval numbers are ticking up in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona, and he now leads his prospective Democratic opponents in those battleground states that will likely help determine the 2020 presidential election.
There are 31 House Democrats who represent districts carried by President Trump in 2016. There is no doubt Speaker Pelosi will get the majority she needs to approve impeachment, but how many of those vulnerable Democrats want to walk that plank for their Democratic Socialist colleagues?
How surreal it was to watch House Democrats roll out their articles of impeachment on the same day they agreed to President Trump’s trade agreement with Mexico and Canada to replace NAFTA. They clearly were sensitive to the charge that since taking the House in 2018 they have been obsessed with impeachment at the expense of other important issues.
Beyond this Democratic impeachment charade, President Trump goes into the 2020 election year with record low unemployment, a rising stock market and the bipartisan NAFTA trade deal. Ultimately, the Democrats are playing into Trump’s political hands.
Dick Wadhams is a Republican political consultant and a former Colorado Republican state chairman.
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