Addendum, November 30: Non-evidence of non-criminal non-wrongdoing in a baseless, pointless impeachment
After two months of baseless, pointless impeachment, Trump's worst enemy can't claim that he denied Ukraine its aid or that Ukraine did a thing for him in return, and neither can they claim that Trump ever said or otherwise directed that there should be any such quid pro quo; the case against Trump amounts to one man's baseless presumption and the griping and gossiping of several unelected and unknown, malicious and pretentious bureaucrats on the strength of that baseless presumption; and the only hard evidence in the case is exculpatory, namely Trump's express direction that there was to be no quid pro quo, the innocuous transcripts of every grunt uttered between Trump and the Ukrainian president Zelensky, the testimony of Zelensky and his foreign minister that there was no quid pro quo and more than that, there couldn't have been, inasmuch as no-one let on to them about the imaginary "quid", and the testimony of two U.S. senators who independent of one another spoke to Trump at this time and on this question and swear that Trump's hold on aid to Ukraine of two months had nothing to do with Joe Biden and everything to do with Trump's well-established contempt for the racket whereby America pays the freight and Europe freeloads.
So after two months wherein for the first time an impeachment repudiated the standards of eight centuries of English-speaking justice -- the rights to a public trial, to legal counsel, to confront one's accuser, to cross-examine witnesses and call witnesses, and to present evidence -- the Democrat House advance to their ad-hoc impeachment Phase Three, wherein the Judiciary Committee is meant to put the case that the non-evidence for the non-criminal non-wrongdoing amounts to high crimes demanding the overturning of a national election ten months before the re-election. Then the plan as near as I can tell is to approve articles of impeachment by partisan simple majority over a bipartisan minority before the Christmas recess, and leave the baseless, pointless business to the Republican Senate in the new year. Merry Christmas, America.
Addendum, October 7: The half-assed impeachment
The post below I wrote a day or two before the breaking of the Great Ukraine Nonstory of '19, which a week thereafter would precipitate the Half-Assed Impeachment of '19: for only the fifth time in the history of the Republic, the House of Representatives undertook to overturn a presidential election, and for the first time the House dispensed with its rules on impeachment, the fair hearing and public proceeding wherein the minority and the president may call witnesses and argue the defense, with the object of arriving at something resembling the truth. The premise of my post was that the Democrat House were disposed to impeachment, and thence to disaster; a day or two later they had their pretext, and a week after that they had their impeachment, or rather their semi-quasi-pseudo, half-assed impeachment.
The story these couple weeks has developed practically every few hours so I'll restrict myself here to some bigger and more durable questions, beginning with the beginning. Speaker Pelosi pronounced Trump's guilt and announced his impeachment about 5 PM on September 24, before the transcript of the phonecall at issue was published for the world to judge about 10 AM September 25; i.e., Pelosi consigned her party and House and country to the crisis of impeachment a matter of hours before she and the world saw the evidence for impeachment, and knowing from the lips of the president himself that the transcript was to be published in a matter of hours and that there was nothing impeachable to be found in it. The Mark Levin postulate (modified marginally by me) is that Pelosi had been sold a bill of goods by her Intelligence Committee chairman Schiff, rumors on baseless claims on gossip, and when on the morning after she discovered that the transcript was not as (presumably) Schiff had promised, there was no turning back, and all that was left was to ride the tiger and hope for the best.
And so the Democrat House commenced the search for facts and law to justify their presumption of guilt and declaration of impeachment. But extraordinarily they jettisoned three years of claims against Trump, in favor of their Great Ukrainian Hope, conceding implicitly that those less-novel claims had come to nothing. And assuming as I do that this Ukraine business goes the way of every blessed other Democrat claim against Trump these three years, the Democrats will be hard put to take up again their old hobby-horses: on the morning after, the people will be less than patient for another cry from the Democrats of "What about those tax filings from 1996!"
As to Pelosi's schedule for impeachment-by-Thanksgiving, or two months after the Impeachment Declaration, revised already to impeachment-by-Christmas, I make no claim to see the calendar in my crystal ball but I remember well enough the last big, unwanted thing Pelosi jammed through the House of Representatives: that big, unwanted thing was Obamacare, in 2009-'10, and passage took longer than hoped by maybe half a year; in the event it was enacted only by parliamentary maneuver to circumvent the rules of the Senate, which bears the uncanniest resemblance to impeachment in the House in 2019; and Obamacare was the single-greatest cause for the electoral bloodbath months later in November, wherein Pelosi's supermajority was reduced to powerless minority, the Senate Democrat supermajority was reduced to simple majority, and on the state level Democrats were purged in maybe the greatest partisan turnover in the electoral history of the Republic. And the story is that it was Nancy Pelosi, in that huddle which decided that the polls and elections would be defied and Obamacare would be the law of the land, who made the difference in darning the torpedoes.
I'll supplement this addendum as need be, and meantime the post below from before the Impeachment Declaration stands up well enough.
-----
When in 1998 the Republican House of Representatives approved articles of impeachment against President Clinton, it was on the strength of eleven counts of criminality. The Constitution demands high crimes or high misdemeanors as in treason or bribery, as grounds for impeachment, and the Supreme Court expounded in the 19th Century that a president may not be impeached on charges from that time before he was president. But even the Mueller Report concluded (and I quote from remote memory), "This report does not find that the President committed a crime," even on the nebulous sub-secondary question of "obstructive behavior" short of obstruction of justice, and on the most malicious construction of half the story, the doing of vicious Democrat operators acting in the name of the special counsel Robert Mueller but quite independent of him. So the Democrat House has the will to impeach the president but not the law or the facts.
Then there is the promise implicit in the Democrat campaign of '18 that a Democrat Congress would not pursue impeachment: Democrats standing for Senate as well as House were under orders from the very top that they were not so much as to utter the I-word; when one Democrat Congresswoman did invoke that dread I-word, campaigning in Los Angeles in maybe the safest district for Democrats in these United States, she came in for a spanking by the Democrat leaders of the House and Senate both, rebuked and repudiated for all the world to see, making an example of the Congresswoman and making plain to the country as much as the party that impeachment was not on.
That the Democrats would not chase vendettas into the paralysis and crisis that is impeachment was effectively a condition of their majority in the House, and yet the very month after they claimed that majority they inaugurated their impeachment, scheduled deliberately to dissect Trump's summit with Kim Jong Un for the nuclear pacification of the Korean peninsula; Day 1 of the summit was a great success, then came nine hours of impeachment televised live 'round the world, and on Day 2 Rocket Man let it be known he'd be keeping those rockets of his, and the bomb. And it's worse than a fraudulent campaign and worse even than a House of Representatives burning days and weeks and months on phantoms and fantasies: a House of Congress seized by the impulse to impeachment, chasing a bitter vendetta against a president, can only be disinclined to working constructively with that president, and with three months left of their first year the Democrat House has accomplished a fat lot of nothing.
But all that is preamble, to the true trouble for Democrats in pursuing impeachment: if Trump is re-elected then it's less than likely that those people voting Trump for president will vote Democrat for House much less Senate, inasmuch as the people are indisposed to vote for Congress as a veto of their vote for president, on the same ballot. If on Election Day 2020 the Democrat House has burned two years in the vain pursuit of an impossible impeachment, then it's something less than likely that any American voting Trump for president will return those same Democrats to a majority in the House much less to reward their party with complete control of Congress, so that Congressional Democrats can occupy themselves for the next two years or four in overturning the presidential election. And the numbers are 18 and 31, 31 Democrat Congressmen defending in districts carried by Trump in '16, in a Democrat majority that stands now at 18. So unless the people vote Democrat for president they'll be less than likely to vote Democrat also for Congress, and to lose the presidency for the Democrats will be to lose the works.
Which brings us to the question of the vote for president. I said in 2016 that if Trump is elected then he's re-elected: the threshold for re-electing a president is considerably lower than for his election, for reasons I'll come to just below, and for Trump's election the threshold was never higher, so if they couldn't keep him out then they'll never kick him out. It's the 22nd Amendment codifying the convention observed by every president but Franklin Roosevelt, in limiting a president of the United States to two terms, that assures an incumbent's re-election as much as anything: because every voter appreciates that good or bad this sitting president will walk out of the White House for the last time in just four years, the commitment, the investment and the risk, are manageable; and unless that incumbent has presided over disasters in the economy or foreign affairs or both, or repudiated the campaign promises that were the terms of his election, the people know from experience that he can manage the job of president and that he'll honor his mandate. Hence that tendency of history whereby a president of the United States wins his re-election.
At home Trump has brought a renaissance in the economy and the national power, maybe the greatest boom in the overall for half a century, complete with the first revival of manufacturing since before free trade and the first independence from foreign energy since the '50s. Then on foreign policy Trump has neutered North Korea, in short order he won the war on ISIS in Iraq and decided the war on ISIS in Syria, he has Iran in a desperate way like hasn't been seen since maybe the Iran-Iraq War of the '80s, and he's brought the second power in the world to its knees, choking China's growth for the first time in better than a quarter-century -- all without the bodybags returned to Andrews. And Trump has been practically tedious in the best way possible, in copying-and-pasting verbatim from his campaign promises over to his executive orders and appointments and legislative initiatives; no-one friend or foe could claim Trump hasn't done all in his power to keep his promises and honor his mandate.
Then any full and fair accounting of Trump's prospects must concede that no winning campaign for president in memory overcame hurdles so towering as Make America Great Again did: Trump became the first candidate since the founding of the republic to win the presidency as his first civil or military office; the totality of the press and popular culture save for Fox News and The Wall Street Journal moved heaven and earth day and night to ruin Trump and crown Clinton; the Never Trump faction in Trump's own party which counts the last Republican president and last Republican nominee for president, sabotaged Trump all the way through election day, with the Republican speaker of the House encouraging the disowning of the man at the top of the ticket just weeks before the vote, and third-party conservative-alternative spoiler candidates draining votes from Trump by the millions; even the pope of Rome ordained that thou shalt not vote Trump. And for all that, Trump won going away: he needed 270 electoral votes and he won 306. Who can say what 2020 will bring, but can it be worse for Trump than 2016 when he scooped electoral votes like a steam-shovel?
So without counting any chickens, I can only conclude that Trump is well-placed for a second term. And don't take my world for it: no less a leftist than Michael Moore has concluded Trump is on course for re-election and the two-dozen would-be Democrat nominees for president are losers to a man.
It's my sense that figures like Donald J. Trump come few and far between -- there are all of two presidents in 44 (not 45: it's a long and pedantic story) who offer parallels to Trump, namely Teddy Roosevelt in the 19-aughts and Andrew Jackson in the 1830s -- and that they're genies out of bottles, not easily re-bottled. When a Trump materializes, and manages the impossible, then again he manages the impossible, and still again until the impossible comes to be blase, he's not likely to be turfed out on his ear. A figure like Trump who joins a vision for national renaissance and national greatness, to a drive like a force of nature, is not likely to shrink away in defeat, not in the face of titans much less the class of pygmies that is the 2020 Democrat presidential field. It's my sense that the Age of Trump has only begun, my guess that Trump's lame-duck chapter will be not so lame as is usual, and my expectation that Trump will move mountains in his second term as in his first. And if I were to venture all the way out onto the limb then I'd guess they'll miss him when he's gone, and that Donald J. Trump will lumber around the American psyche for a good while, and around the psyche of the world to the extent it bears on America, like some semi-mythical orange giant with a combover.
After two months of baseless, pointless impeachment, Trump's worst enemy can't claim that he denied Ukraine its aid or that Ukraine did a thing for him in return, and neither can they claim that Trump ever said or otherwise directed that there should be any such quid pro quo; the case against Trump amounts to one man's baseless presumption and the griping and gossiping of several unelected and unknown, malicious and pretentious bureaucrats on the strength of that baseless presumption; and the only hard evidence in the case is exculpatory, namely Trump's express direction that there was to be no quid pro quo, the innocuous transcripts of every grunt uttered between Trump and the Ukrainian president Zelensky, the testimony of Zelensky and his foreign minister that there was no quid pro quo and more than that, there couldn't have been, inasmuch as no-one let on to them about the imaginary "quid", and the testimony of two U.S. senators who independent of one another spoke to Trump at this time and on this question and swear that Trump's hold on aid to Ukraine of two months had nothing to do with Joe Biden and everything to do with Trump's well-established contempt for the racket whereby America pays the freight and Europe freeloads.
So after two months wherein for the first time an impeachment repudiated the standards of eight centuries of English-speaking justice -- the rights to a public trial, to legal counsel, to confront one's accuser, to cross-examine witnesses and call witnesses, and to present evidence -- the Democrat House advance to their ad-hoc impeachment Phase Three, wherein the Judiciary Committee is meant to put the case that the non-evidence for the non-criminal non-wrongdoing amounts to high crimes demanding the overturning of a national election ten months before the re-election. Then the plan as near as I can tell is to approve articles of impeachment by partisan simple majority over a bipartisan minority before the Christmas recess, and leave the baseless, pointless business to the Republican Senate in the new year. Merry Christmas, America.
The post below I wrote a day or two before the breaking of the Great Ukraine Nonstory of '19, which a week thereafter would precipitate the Half-Assed Impeachment of '19: for only the fifth time in the history of the Republic, the House of Representatives undertook to overturn a presidential election, and for the first time the House dispensed with its rules on impeachment, the fair hearing and public proceeding wherein the minority and the president may call witnesses and argue the defense, with the object of arriving at something resembling the truth. The premise of my post was that the Democrat House were disposed to impeachment, and thence to disaster; a day or two later they had their pretext, and a week after that they had their impeachment, or rather their semi-quasi-pseudo, half-assed impeachment.
The story these couple weeks has developed practically every few hours so I'll restrict myself here to some bigger and more durable questions, beginning with the beginning. Speaker Pelosi pronounced Trump's guilt and announced his impeachment about 5 PM on September 24, before the transcript of the phonecall at issue was published for the world to judge about 10 AM September 25; i.e., Pelosi consigned her party and House and country to the crisis of impeachment a matter of hours before she and the world saw the evidence for impeachment, and knowing from the lips of the president himself that the transcript was to be published in a matter of hours and that there was nothing impeachable to be found in it. The Mark Levin postulate (modified marginally by me) is that Pelosi had been sold a bill of goods by her Intelligence Committee chairman Schiff, rumors on baseless claims on gossip, and when on the morning after she discovered that the transcript was not as (presumably) Schiff had promised, there was no turning back, and all that was left was to ride the tiger and hope for the best.
And so the Democrat House commenced the search for facts and law to justify their presumption of guilt and declaration of impeachment. But extraordinarily they jettisoned three years of claims against Trump, in favor of their Great Ukrainian Hope, conceding implicitly that those less-novel claims had come to nothing. And assuming as I do that this Ukraine business goes the way of every blessed other Democrat claim against Trump these three years, the Democrats will be hard put to take up again their old hobby-horses: on the morning after, the people will be less than patient for another cry from the Democrats of "What about those tax filings from 1996!"
As to Pelosi's schedule for impeachment-by-Thanksgiving, or two months after the Impeachment Declaration, revised already to impeachment-by-Christmas, I make no claim to see the calendar in my crystal ball but I remember well enough the last big, unwanted thing Pelosi jammed through the House of Representatives: that big, unwanted thing was Obamacare, in 2009-'10, and passage took longer than hoped by maybe half a year; in the event it was enacted only by parliamentary maneuver to circumvent the rules of the Senate, which bears the uncanniest resemblance to impeachment in the House in 2019; and Obamacare was the single-greatest cause for the electoral bloodbath months later in November, wherein Pelosi's supermajority was reduced to powerless minority, the Senate Democrat supermajority was reduced to simple majority, and on the state level Democrats were purged in maybe the greatest partisan turnover in the electoral history of the Republic. And the story is that it was Nancy Pelosi, in that huddle which decided that the polls and elections would be defied and Obamacare would be the law of the land, who made the difference in darning the torpedoes.
I'll supplement this addendum as need be, and meantime the post below from before the Impeachment Declaration stands up well enough.
-----
When in 1998 the Republican House of Representatives approved articles of impeachment against President Clinton, it was on the strength of eleven counts of criminality. The Constitution demands high crimes or high misdemeanors as in treason or bribery, as grounds for impeachment, and the Supreme Court expounded in the 19th Century that a president may not be impeached on charges from that time before he was president. But even the Mueller Report concluded (and I quote from remote memory), "This report does not find that the President committed a crime," even on the nebulous sub-secondary question of "obstructive behavior" short of obstruction of justice, and on the most malicious construction of half the story, the doing of vicious Democrat operators acting in the name of the special counsel Robert Mueller but quite independent of him. So the Democrat House has the will to impeach the president but not the law or the facts.
Then there is the promise implicit in the Democrat campaign of '18 that a Democrat Congress would not pursue impeachment: Democrats standing for Senate as well as House were under orders from the very top that they were not so much as to utter the I-word; when one Democrat Congresswoman did invoke that dread I-word, campaigning in Los Angeles in maybe the safest district for Democrats in these United States, she came in for a spanking by the Democrat leaders of the House and Senate both, rebuked and repudiated for all the world to see, making an example of the Congresswoman and making plain to the country as much as the party that impeachment was not on.
That the Democrats would not chase vendettas into the paralysis and crisis that is impeachment was effectively a condition of their majority in the House, and yet the very month after they claimed that majority they inaugurated their impeachment, scheduled deliberately to dissect Trump's summit with Kim Jong Un for the nuclear pacification of the Korean peninsula; Day 1 of the summit was a great success, then came nine hours of impeachment televised live 'round the world, and on Day 2 Rocket Man let it be known he'd be keeping those rockets of his, and the bomb. And it's worse than a fraudulent campaign and worse even than a House of Representatives burning days and weeks and months on phantoms and fantasies: a House of Congress seized by the impulse to impeachment, chasing a bitter vendetta against a president, can only be disinclined to working constructively with that president, and with three months left of their first year the Democrat House has accomplished a fat lot of nothing.
But all that is preamble, to the true trouble for Democrats in pursuing impeachment: if Trump is re-elected then it's less than likely that those people voting Trump for president will vote Democrat for House much less Senate, inasmuch as the people are indisposed to vote for Congress as a veto of their vote for president, on the same ballot. If on Election Day 2020 the Democrat House has burned two years in the vain pursuit of an impossible impeachment, then it's something less than likely that any American voting Trump for president will return those same Democrats to a majority in the House much less to reward their party with complete control of Congress, so that Congressional Democrats can occupy themselves for the next two years or four in overturning the presidential election. And the numbers are 18 and 31, 31 Democrat Congressmen defending in districts carried by Trump in '16, in a Democrat majority that stands now at 18. So unless the people vote Democrat for president they'll be less than likely to vote Democrat also for Congress, and to lose the presidency for the Democrats will be to lose the works.
Which brings us to the question of the vote for president. I said in 2016 that if Trump is elected then he's re-elected: the threshold for re-electing a president is considerably lower than for his election, for reasons I'll come to just below, and for Trump's election the threshold was never higher, so if they couldn't keep him out then they'll never kick him out. It's the 22nd Amendment codifying the convention observed by every president but Franklin Roosevelt, in limiting a president of the United States to two terms, that assures an incumbent's re-election as much as anything: because every voter appreciates that good or bad this sitting president will walk out of the White House for the last time in just four years, the commitment, the investment and the risk, are manageable; and unless that incumbent has presided over disasters in the economy or foreign affairs or both, or repudiated the campaign promises that were the terms of his election, the people know from experience that he can manage the job of president and that he'll honor his mandate. Hence that tendency of history whereby a president of the United States wins his re-election.
At home Trump has brought a renaissance in the economy and the national power, maybe the greatest boom in the overall for half a century, complete with the first revival of manufacturing since before free trade and the first independence from foreign energy since the '50s. Then on foreign policy Trump has neutered North Korea, in short order he won the war on ISIS in Iraq and decided the war on ISIS in Syria, he has Iran in a desperate way like hasn't been seen since maybe the Iran-Iraq War of the '80s, and he's brought the second power in the world to its knees, choking China's growth for the first time in better than a quarter-century -- all without the bodybags returned to Andrews. And Trump has been practically tedious in the best way possible, in copying-and-pasting verbatim from his campaign promises over to his executive orders and appointments and legislative initiatives; no-one friend or foe could claim Trump hasn't done all in his power to keep his promises and honor his mandate.
Then any full and fair accounting of Trump's prospects must concede that no winning campaign for president in memory overcame hurdles so towering as Make America Great Again did: Trump became the first candidate since the founding of the republic to win the presidency as his first civil or military office; the totality of the press and popular culture save for Fox News and The Wall Street Journal moved heaven and earth day and night to ruin Trump and crown Clinton; the Never Trump faction in Trump's own party which counts the last Republican president and last Republican nominee for president, sabotaged Trump all the way through election day, with the Republican speaker of the House encouraging the disowning of the man at the top of the ticket just weeks before the vote, and third-party conservative-alternative spoiler candidates draining votes from Trump by the millions; even the pope of Rome ordained that thou shalt not vote Trump. And for all that, Trump won going away: he needed 270 electoral votes and he won 306. Who can say what 2020 will bring, but can it be worse for Trump than 2016 when he scooped electoral votes like a steam-shovel?
So without counting any chickens, I can only conclude that Trump is well-placed for a second term. And don't take my world for it: no less a leftist than Michael Moore has concluded Trump is on course for re-election and the two-dozen would-be Democrat nominees for president are losers to a man.
It's my sense that figures like Donald J. Trump come few and far between -- there are all of two presidents in 44 (not 45: it's a long and pedantic story) who offer parallels to Trump, namely Teddy Roosevelt in the 19-aughts and Andrew Jackson in the 1830s -- and that they're genies out of bottles, not easily re-bottled. When a Trump materializes, and manages the impossible, then again he manages the impossible, and still again until the impossible comes to be blase, he's not likely to be turfed out on his ear. A figure like Trump who joins a vision for national renaissance and national greatness, to a drive like a force of nature, is not likely to shrink away in defeat, not in the face of titans much less the class of pygmies that is the 2020 Democrat presidential field. It's my sense that the Age of Trump has only begun, my guess that Trump's lame-duck chapter will be not so lame as is usual, and my expectation that Trump will move mountains in his second term as in his first. And if I were to venture all the way out onto the limb then I'd guess they'll miss him when he's gone, and that Donald J. Trump will lumber around the American psyche for a good while, and around the psyche of the world to the extent it bears on America, like some semi-mythical orange giant with a combover.
