The irony here is that those who say they are conservative but hate Trump and want him impeached because he's destroying our constitution don't seem to be equally upset about the democrats weaponizing impeachment and undermining the constitution. Right after Trump won in 2016 there was a growing chorus of democrats who vowed to impeach Trump simply because they were angry he won, didn't like what he stood for or said, etc. and so impeachment began to be viewed as a way to overturn the will of the people. Then came a number of claims and investigations over the years from the Russian investigation to this recent one and other issues along the way. This should be concerning for every American especially regarding the integrity of our constitution and election process. To weaponize the impeachment process is incredibly dangerous. What is there to prevent this from becoming a recurring theme in the future now where one side tries to oust the elected president by searching for any form of misconduct they can deem worthy of an impeachment investigation?
Schiff recently stated "
The President's misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box. For we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won."
When Trump was sworn in on January 20, 2017, the Washington Post ran this headline
“The campaign to impeach President Trump has begun.”
Interestingly enough during the Clinton impeachment, Jerry Nadler warned against weaponizing impeachment and said the following:
"
There must never be a narrowly voted impeachment or an impeachment substantially supported by one of our major political parties and largely opposed by the other. Such an impeachment would lack legitimacy, would produce divisiveness and bitterness in our politics for years to come. And will call into question the very legitimacy of our political institutions.
The American people have heard all the allegations against the president, and they overwhelmingly oppose impeaching him. The people elected the president, they still support him. We have no right to overturn the considered judgment of the American people.
There are clearly some members of the Republican majority who have never accepted the results of the 1992 or 1996 elections and who apparently have chosen to ignore the message of last month's election. But in a democracy, it is the people who rule, not political elites, and certainly not those members of political elites who will not be here in the next election and the next Congress having been repudiated at the polls."
Here's an opinion piece from the LA times by Jonathan Turley about the rushed, sloppy nature of how the Democrats conducted their impeachment proceedings in the House. "This would be the first presidential impeachment to go forward with no credible (or at least uncontested) crime at its heart. That does not mean that the Democrats’ case is necessarily invalid.
The problem is that this is the thinnest record of any modern impeachment as well as arguably the shortest impeachment investigation in history (Johnson was impeached after three prior attempts and the House had been working on creating the grounds for impeachment for a year).
This would not matter if the non-criminal acts were clear and uncontested. They are not. The most serious impeachable act raised by the Democrats is abuse of power, a legitimate basis for impeachment as I stated in both the Clinton and Trump impeachment hearings.
But in inexplicably rushing to an impeachment vote, the House is foregoing the subpoenaing of key witnesses who could shed light on potential abuse of power, including former national security advisor John Bolton and acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney. Instead, the
Democrats insisted we should go forward on “inferences” or interpretations rather than delay further.
Another complication is that Zelensky himself has said that he did not discuss any quid pro quo with Trump. Moreover, the funds were released on Sept. 11 without apparent action on Ukraine’s part to do the president his requested favor.
One can certainly claim that this happened only because Trump got caught. The problem is that such a claim is based on presumption rather than proof. It is guaranteed to fail on that basis in the Senate."
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While people go on complaining about how Trump is supposedly shredding our constitution they are silent about the politicization of the impeachment process. One article cites this quite well below:
"For the first 187 years of American history, exactly one president, Andrew Johnson in the 1860s, faced impeachment. In the last 45 years, three presidents have: Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and now Donald Trump.
Put another way, only one of the first 36 presidents had impeachment brought against him, but three of the last nine have. What has traditionally been an extreme and extremely rare tool for emergencies has turned into a process one out of every three chief executives has faced.
There is no reason to anticipate that this recent spate of impeachments will tail off anytime soon. This is true because not only has the frequency of impeachment quickened, the standard for impeachment has been eroded. This arguably began with the Clinton impeachment, which although it was somewhat bipartisan and there was an actual crime of perjury, was rooted in a private sex act that few thought warranted the overturning of an election result.
In the Trump impeachment, the bar got even lower: Not only was the vote to impeach entirely partisan, even after Democrats said that would not be legitimate, it also did not claim any specific crime, instead choosing vague charges of abuse of power and obstruction.
This leaves the door wide open for a future House of Representatives controlled by the opposite party to the president to pursue impeachment for almost anything.
The normalization of impeachment is corroding not only how we govern ourselves, but how we treat those with whom we disagree politically. It is no longer sufficient to lose an election and work with the other side while trying to wrest back power. Now we must call the other side illegitimate, now we reach for what was once the rarest remedy in the toolkit as if it is an Allen wrench and the government a cheap piece of Ikea furniture.
Are we to become a nation that chooses its leaders through partisan trials instead of elections? It is hard to imagine a future that takes us farther away from the goals of the founders."
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Also it's worth mentioning that the viewership for impeachment has been underwhelming thus far.
www.realclearpolitics.com
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