Visiting Column #24 -- Nancy Gone Fishin'

One endearing quality of the left is that it's all about the "now", and all about the power.  If something they do today has effects that will be a problem five years from now, well, as long as they can get or hold power now, that's fine.  The press won't hold them accountable, nor air contradictory past statements, as we know.

Nancy Pelosi, of course, is well aware that she can do whatever she wants and darn the consequences, as long as it helps her hold on to her speakership.

How else do we explain the otherwise bizarre "inquiry" going on at her instigation in the United States House of Representatives, all dressed up as an "impeachment inquiry" but not really one, given that the only allowed participants are Democrats.  I understand that impeachment is a political and not a legal activity, but still ...

Here is what a rational, otherwise-disinterested passer-by would look at what is going on and think.

President Trump had a phone call with the president of Ukraine a couple months back.  There is not a specific recording of the call, but there are transcriptions of it, released readily by President Trump.  Notwithstanding long pauses for translation (the president of Ukraine is not a native English speaker, of course), the translation was produced by the intelligence folks who were listening in.

Now, there were a fair number of topics discussed between the two leaders, and during the call the issue of corruption was raised, specifically corruption in Ukraine by the new president's predecessor and a prosecutor or two.  The president had been elected on a promise to eliminate such corruption, and President Trump had supported that effort.

In the course of it, Trump asked the new president to "do us a favor" and take a look at a specific area of corruption involving a Ukrainian energy company that had put then-VP Joe Biden's son on its board despite lacking knowledge of Ukraine or energy, and paid him a spitload of money.  So something was corrupt, either inside Ukraine, where the energy company could wave the younger Biden's name to suggest it had influence with the USA, or inside the USA, where the aforementioned spitload of money could be interpreted as a purchase of influence for ... who knows what.

Nowhere in the call was there any suggestion that in return, the USA or the Trump Administration would do anything, or not do anything, to or for Ukraine if they were to do this favor for "us."  As if to bear that out, we now have a fairly contemporaneous text from the American ambassador to the European Union to another American diplomat, chiding him for suggesting there was such a return favor, and stating that President Trump had specifically ordered that there be no such "quid pro quo."  Noteworthy is that this text was prior to the current foofaraw.

Having failed to come up with anything in the vast wasteland of the Mueller investigation that even the most Trump-deranged Democrats in the House could use, apparently Mrs. Pelosi has decided that their method of reversing the 2016 election they hated would be to "go fishing."

Think about it.  The Constitution describes the grounds for impeachment as being "high crimes and misdemeanors", which sort of suggests that at a minimum, a violation of Federal law be demonstrated before any honorable congressman would be persuaded to vote for impeachment.  I'd like to think that we would be actually defining what law is suspected of having been broken, right?

Well, no.

As we speak, there is an unvoted-upon, unauthorized "impeachment inquiry" going on, involving only Democrats in the House, and there is no crime upon which the "inquiry" is based.  Literally, this is pure Trotsky -- show me the person and I'll find a crime.

Talking to the Ukrainian president is not a crime.  Asking him to investigate a very warranted suspicion of corruption, even if it involves a person who is, at the time, running for his party's nomination for president, is not a crime, certainly less so than Mr. Trump's predecessor deploying the FBI to create the appearance of some kind of dealings with Russians.

So the rational, otherwise-disinterested party looks at what is going on, and says something like "It appears to me that if you want to impeach a president, and your party has the House majority, all you have to do is get access to a transcription of a conversation that president has had, and call some part of it a "high crime" or "high misdemeanor", even if it is not illegal according to the United States Code.  The press won't point that out."

Right?  I've read the transcript of the call, and there is not the hint of an actual crime involved.  Mrs. Pelosi is calling it a crime, and using that to hold an inquiry, but only inviting Democrats to participate.  Rather than fishing continually for something actually criminal, which would be bad enough, she is fishing in the first spot that she got to, even though it is devoid of fish.

And now the main point.

Donald Trump may well be impeached by the House, but he sure is not going to be removed from office by the Senate, which has to find him guilty of whatever high crimes and misdemeanors the Pelosi types come up with in their bill of impeachment.  He will continue to be president, and will likely leverage the injustice of the Democrats' kangaroo court straight into another four years in office.

But there will have been, etched in our history, the experience of a sitting, duly elected president being impeached without the commission of a crime, on the basis of a politically biased House extracting criminality from the transcript of a conversation where no law was broken.

With that precedent, will the Democrats simply do that again, the next time the nation offends them by actually rejecting them and electing a Republican president?  Get someone in the White House to record calls and then claim that some interpretation of the content constitutes an impeachable offense?

What is going on now, and has been going on since the day after Mr. Trump was elected (borne out by published media), is a long, drawn-out coup attempt.  If it is allowed to proceed (i.e., if no one metaphorically slaps Nancy Pelosi in the face to wake her up to what she is doing), it will have long and unpleasant repercussions as an example to the future of what appears to be "normal practice" in American government.

Foreign leaders will be reluctant ever to speak with our leaders.  And good Republicans (and less-extreme Democrats) will be deterred from interest in running for president.

We are better than that.  Apparently Nancy Pelosi is not.

Copyright 2019 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around.  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton