Impeachment, Really?

Yesterday I noticed that for a few moments there was a story lead on Yahoo News about some "Republican strategist" who was saying that impeachment of President was "closer than it may appear."  The article linked was from The Hill, for what it's worth, but at least to provide proper attribution.

I never heard of the "strategist" personally, not that it matters, nor whether I know for whom a Republican strategist (or Democrat, for that matter), works and gets paid.  It's not a profession I suspect provides consistent employment, even if the election season does indeed seem to go on 12 months a year.  But it is indeed the title given to a lot of the guests on the TV news these days.

But I digress.

The article was interesting in that it simply dealt with the notion of whether articles of impeachment could even be voted out of the House, and mainly whether it was possible based on the political climate associated with the ongoing Mueller investigation.  I should point out that as I write this, after many months of investigation, that investigation has generated exactly zero evidence for its intended purpose, i.e., that the Trump campaign colluded with Russians to throw the 2016 election.

But it's still going on, with no end predicted.  Go figure.  They have determined that retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn lied as to whether he had done this or that, all of which was done after the election, meaning that it had nothing to do with the election itself.  The "this or that", about which it is unclear why he felt the need to lie, had to do (I think) with approaches to foreign governments, including Russia, about policy issues.  These were issues where the Trump people differed markedly with the kicked-out Obama people, and therefore needed to ask certain foreign leaders, after the election, to keep their powder dry as far as retaliation, until inauguration.

Now those approaches -- themselves -- are not only legal, but they are encouraged (and maybe mandated) by congressional-passed law covering transitions of new administrations.  So it was certainly foolish of Flynn to have lied about things that were not illegal in the first place.  Of course that means that the "crime" on his part was, in effect, created by the investigation but exacerbated by his own suspicions of the questioners.

That said, Flynn can't be impeached, since he doesn't hold office.  The left is not targeting Flynn as a main point of attack but as a means to an end, the end being to try to bring down the Trump presidency.  Since that is their goal, and not "justice" or "truth" or even "accuracy", the only means to do so is the political one.  Since they can't be bothered to wait for an election (the actual political mechanism), they want to impeach President Trump, and do so now.  Perhaps that is why the Hill article nowhere mentioned anything done by the president that actually warranted impeachment.

So I struggle as to whether I want them to do so or not.  I think there is a reasonable argument for my wanting them to go ahead and pose articles in the House, and for Speaker Ryan to go ahead and let them go to the floor.

I'm thinking ahead here.  There is not a snowball's chance on my stove top that articles of impeachment would be voted out of the House.  First and foremost, there is no crime.  It would seem to be a prerequisite for an impeachment hearing that a crime would have been committed by the subject, right?  So I'm not sure what the leftists' bill of particulars would even be.

Robert Mueller and his legions of Hillary Clinton donors have come up with exactly zero indication of an actual criminal action on the part of the President after months of diligent and highly-biased research.  It ought to occur to Mueller that he has made a sacrificial lamb out of Gen. Flynn, that it's all there is, and wrap up the investigation this week, rather than blowing through more millions in taxpayer dollars.  A decent fellow would do that, leaving Flynn as the Scooter Libby of this non-scandal.

More to the point, with no crime uncovered, nothing even remotely untoward in the campaign, and no collusion (which is also not a crime, but apparently didn't happen anyway), how would an impeachment effort go?  And that is the key.  If the Democrats were to make an actual effort to put a bill of impeachment forward, they would look so stupid, so empty, so senseless that it would put their party at grave risk of being embarrassed to the point of having no chance in the next elections.

I'd be thrilled, of course.  The more the Speaker let the Democrats dig a hole for themselves, the worse the left would look, as if they had no actual ideas to put forth (duh).  They would be the party that tried to overthrow a president with no crime having been committed, and using the act of impeachment politically to do so, something which wasn't exactly helpful to the Republicans even when Bill Clinton was impeached for actually committing perjury.

Oh, it would be nice for the USA to turn on the Democrats for that.

But there's also this.  You know and I know that an impeachment effort would go exactly nowhere, probably not even getting voted out of committee to the floor (unless some chipmunky Republican committee members read my last few paragraphs), and certainly not passing the House.  The effort would surely poison the Democrats for a long while.

However, to let it go that far would create an unholy precedent.  Even though impeachment is a political process, that doesn't mean it should be used for political purposes.  In other words, if the "crime" for which the articles are put forth is not a crime at all, but a political disagreement with the president acting in accordance with his Constitutional duties, that means that it can be done again later on, by the other party when in power.

I don't know if we want to see that.  Donald Trump has not committed an impeachable offense while president, in any stretch of the word.  If we were to let articles go forward for a vote, then there is nothing to stop House Democrats from trying again a month later on no better grounds.  And there is nothing to stop Republican congressmen in the future from proposing impeachment without criminal act for a Democrat president, even one who did nothing more than tell the Russian representative to "tell Vladimir I'll be more free after the election."  Whatever that meant.

This is America.  Our Constitution is a really precious document, preserving as it does the nature of a free nation, and protecting us from a rapacious government.  The Constitution does not have impeachment of a Federal official in there so that we can execute the removal of a political opponent, but to prevent corruption by those officials.  If we redefine grounds so that it is allowed, even once, to vote articles that are completely political, we open a Pandora's Box that can never be closed.

As much as I like seeing Democrats act stupid -- and there is massive precedent for that every day -- the precedent of a crimeless impeachment proceeding is a Constitutionally threatening case that's just not worth the humor in seeing Democrats flail.

We need to let them fail on their own merit, repeatedly and completely.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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