On the last day of March, don’t look now, but Republicans are dropping the “I” word.
Rather than hold you in suspense, “I” is the first letter in “impeachment”, a term Americans have become abundantly familiar with in recent years. No need to thoroughly rehash here, but former President Donald Trump was formally impeached twice by the Democrats, first in late 2019/early 2020 by the Nancy Pelosi led House, and then last year by Pelosi’s minions -- again -- along with a small outcast band of ten Republican turncoats who decided it would be fashionable and make themselves look good to the media by jumping on the dump Trump bandwagon, even if the man had already consented to go and exited the White House due to the expiration of his constitutional term.
The Trump haters purportedly went ahead with a post-presidency impeachment because they wanted to bar the former president from ever holding federal office again. Chief Justice John Roberts, who wasted dozens of hours of his time the previous year presiding over the first tribunal, skipped the second circus sideshow entirely. Democrats held no hearings and offered no witnesses and based much of their argument for cashiering Trump on the notion that a police officer -- Brian Sicknick -- was killed by Trump supporters on January 6th. A subsequent autopsy report revealed that Sicknick died of natural causes, not blunt force trauma as had been hyped by the inquisitors.
In other words, the entire basis for the Democrat movement was bogus. Big shocker there.
Both impeachment endeavors were little more than Star Chamber-like show trials with the end result not in doubt from the outset each time. The House possesses the power to impeach government officials, but the senate sits as the ultimate judge, jury and sentencing commission. Every single Democrat senator voted to convict Trump both times while Mitt Romney was the only Republican (in name only!) to favor conviction in the first go ‘round.
Seven GOP senators (including Romney again) joined the Democrats last year. Each issued a statement explaining his or her decision to defy common sense. Their respective reasoning isn’t important now. By appearances, the GOPers were playing politics, not acting in some mystical bipartisan feel-good cooperative moment.
At any rate, now that Republicans look to be in great position to retake the House majority after this year’s midterm elections, they could be primed to turn the tables and go after senile president Joe Biden in a similar manner sometime next year. The cards are already on the proverbial table -- will the GOP seek revenge?
“Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee who is poised to control the panel if the GOP takeover next year, said Republicans must consider impeaching President Biden.
“He said the GOP should weigh impeaching Mr. Biden for failures in office, most notably his administration’s inability to stop a massive influx of illegal immigration through the southern border. ‘I think that’s definitely a discussion we have to have,’ Mr. Jordan told The Washington Times at a Republican planning retreat in Florida.
“Mr. Jordan’s committee would lead an impeachment trial. But the lawmaker said the decision to try to remove the president from office would have to be agreed upon by every House Republican. ‘The conference has to decide,’ Mr. Jordan said. ‘You have to have complete buy-in from the entire conference and the leadership of our conference.’”
Well, complete buy-in from the leadership, yes -- but from the entire conference, too? That would be difficult if not impossible to achieve, since RINOs don’t exactly reveal themselves until it’s time to put names on the record. Unanimity is always a lofty goal for the GOP but is rarely realized. They aren’t Democrats, after all, and if the new Speaker is Kevin McCarthy, good luck getting the two-hundred-and-something party members to fall in line behind him.
It's true that Rep. Adam Kinzinger won’t be around anymore and Liz Cheney is almost certainly a goner as well, but it’s hard to believe there won’t still be a handful of wishy-washy “moderates” remaining who care more about polling and focus group results than they do principle and party goals. If the GOP holds a 30-40 seat majority as some anticipate, it wouldn’t make a difference if they “lost” a half dozen defectors on impeachment. Hold a vote and then slow walk the articles over to the senate.
Where they will unceremoniously die just like the Democrats’ official scrolls did, both times. In late 2019, Democrat Adam Schiff became a liberal icon by holding hearings involving a “whistleblower” who claimed that President Trump improperly withheld foreign aid for Ukraine -- yes, there’s that country again -- supposedly by demanding an investigation into the Biden family. Trump did toss out Biden’s name during the conversation with the Ukrainian president, but he didn’t threaten to withhold anything. The whole fiasco was bogus.
Schiff’s witness list read like a who’s who of the foreign policy establishment deep state. The hearings were boring and one-sided, as was the senate trial when the House managers presented the ‘evidence’ to the assembly. I believe several senators nodded off while the Democrats droned on and on. Senator Rand Paul doodled pictures.
Jim Jordan is correct -- Biden has failed to secure the southern border which constitutes a national security threat as well as saddles the country with millions of uninvited newcomers, a clear dereliction of his constitutional duty to protect the nation. While Republicans could very well regain a majority of senate seats in the next Congress, their numbers wouldn’t be high enough to convict senile Joe, even if there were legitimate high crimes and misdemeanors at hand.
Therefore, to impeach Biden would be fruitless from the beginning. The establishment media would take a noticeably different tone with a liberal Democrat on trial, depicting senile Joe as the victim of aggressive partisanship and naked politics. Democrat senators would announce ahead of time that they’re not even listening to the case against Biden. Who knows, maybe Chief Justice Roberts would be “too busy” to preside once again.
Should the Republicans impeach Biden anyway, knowing that it won’t succeed?
I would argue no for several reasons. First, the new Republican congressional majorities will be preoccupied in 2023, hopefully with implementing the agenda that voters sent them to Washington to work on in the first place. After two years of senile Joe and his administration full of crooks, scammers, ideologues and incompetents, there’s bound to be a huge mess that needs cleaning up.
There will be the inevitable fights with the minority Democrats in the senate, who will no doubt filibuster everything that comes out of the House. Lower chamber Republicans should take a page from Nancy Pelosi’s playbook and pass bills that deal with GOP priorities, regardless of whether the legislation would ever actually become law. Voters need to know that possibilities exist to move the country forward if the right political conditions arise.
Some have made the case that Democrats are imploding and on their last leg. The leftwing kook fringe has taken over the party, pushing the “moderates” out of the way. The inner cities will probably always vote Democrat, but the rest of the nation won’t tolerate this leftist drift. The 2024 election beckons, where either Donald Trump or a solid conservative like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will have the chance to try and steer the government back from the brink of bankruptcy and ruin.
The second reason there should be no impeachment is because there are already plenty of investigations to conduct, so there really wouldn’t be a need to single out Biden alone. Conservatives and Republican leaders have recently indicated that Biden’s intentional failures on the border, his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and the federal government’s overreach and massive waste during the COVID-19 pandemic are ripe topics for probes, among others.
Once again, the establishment media will ignore the daily accountability sessions in Congress, but there is bound to be a healthy amount of corruption uncovered and perpetrators exposed. It won’t be something that’s likely to receive much attention on ‘The View’ or on CNN, but this doesn’t mean it’s not worth the effort.
How much did Rep. Devin Nunes discover about the bogus Russia investigation? It was priceless.
Three, impeaching Joe Biden makes it appear as though replacing him with Kamala Harris is an acceptable sequel. Senile Joe is about as bad as they come, but it would be tough to find anyone who would admit that air-brain Harris is an improvement. Can you imagine Kamala delivering a State of the Union Address? Or campaigning as an incumbent president?
The outcomes wouldn’t necessarily be different than under senile Joe, but Harris is more unpredictable than Biden. The current president has dwelled in the swamp for a half century and there’s not much that he does or says that isn’t easily forecastable. Kamala can’t be trusted to dress herself properly in the morning. How could we even fathom her being in control of the nuclear codes?
Lastly, Republicans gain nothing from appearing petty and vindictive. If you don’t believe it, just look at where the Democrats are at in the polls after being in power for only a little over three years (in the House) and having impeached Trump twice. Americans want results, not procedural pissing matches and glory-seekers.
There’s a reason why there were so few presidential impeachments before the Donald Trump era -- they’re time consuming, exclusively partisan… and they don’t work. Republicans can uncover a wealth of information on the sleazy Biden administration without going to the extreme of impeaching him. There’s lots of work to do -- let’s keep focus where it should be.
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