The House of Representatives has voted to launch a formal impeachment inquiry. In doing so, they gave Representative Schiff and other Democratic House members a massive amount of power to launch a political attack on President Trump.
At the same time, many of the closed-door briefings and interviews will eventually make their way to the public and are required to be presented to the entire Senate. Senators will be required to sit through a trial hearing of the evidence that has been gathered, and they have the responsibility to decide whether President Trump deserves to be removed from office.
This process is extremely time consuming and will cause major hardships not only for the President’s administration but also for the five Senators who will be removed from the campaign trail for nearly two months. Depending on the timing of the start of the Senate trial, the presidential campaigns of Warren, Sanders, Booker, Harris, Klobuchar, and Bennet could all be destroyed.
Currently, the only facts that Democrats have presented in the case against the President are not even facts. The media has hyperventilated and freaked out while reporting leaked information from Representative Schiff’s depositions. Some of the headlines seem damning, “Eu Ambassador To Testify He Believed Meeting With Trump Conditioned On Investigation Announcement,” “National Security Official To Testify He Heard Trump’s Ukraine Call, Told Superiors Of His Concerns,” “White House Staffer Twice Raised Concerns After Listening To Trump’s Ukraine Call,” and finally “Former White House Aide Testifies Of Ukraine Call Concerns.” Still, when you look at what the headlines actually say, the outrage is based on an individual’s own opinions and concerns.
If we are going to set the standard of starting an impeachment inquiry off of opinions and concerns, then we will see every president face an impeachment inquiry. President Obama would have faced inquiries over the concerns of his connections to admitted terrorist William Ayers, his administration awarding the Obamacare website creation to a classmate of First Lady Michelle Obama, his history of attending the Church of Reverend Wright, the IRS targeting scandal, Operation Fast and Furious, him telling President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia in 2012 he would have “more flexibility” to negotiate with Putin after the election, and finally his administration giving the Iranian government $1.7 billion.
All of these stories raised concerns for millions of people. Yet rightfully, no impeachment probe was ever launched. The same could be said to the administrations of President George W. Bush, William Jefferson Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and every president before them. All presidents have made executive decisions that have raised the concerns of both private and public citizens, and none of those presidents faced impeachment over those concerns. (President Andrew Johnson faced impeachment due to his firing of the secretary of war during the critical period of Reconstruction without the Senate’s permission, President William Jefferson Clinton faced impeachment over his acts of perjury in a civil case against him.)
The fact that none of the individuals seeking the impeachment of President Trump can cite the law that he broke that warrants his impeachment should shock the citizenry of the United States. Although impeachment in the House of Representatives is purely a political process, the Founders would consider the impeachment of a president over “beliefs” and “concerns” a mockery, and completely inexcusable.
