Impeach Biden?

Does President Biden deserve to be impeached?  Yes.  Should Congress impeach him?  No.  With the current makeup of the House and Senate, an impeachment will go nowhere.  Looking at the case of Adam Schiff's censure, not a single Democrat voted in favor.  It was a partisan vote despite the undeniable fact that Schiff lied repeatedly and publicly about evidence of Russian collusion.  Though the House could muster the votes for impeachment, the Democrat-dominated Senate will not vote to convict.  Like both of Trump's impeachments, it will come to nothing other than a waste of time and money.

Instead, how about a censure?  Andrew Jackson was censured for defunding the Bank of the United States.  Censure Biden for weaponizing the Department of Justice, Ukraine kickbacks, failure to maintain the US border, or raising Hunter.  The possibilities are endless.  Of course, whatever is chosen, it will be a case of style over substance.  The president and the press will decry Congress for partisanship, but when the firestorm of words subside, nothing will change.  If anything, Biden will come out stronger.  Why?  It must be remembered that the media is overwhelmingly Democratic and/or left-leaning.  It is virtually impossible in that arena for Republicans to win a PR battle.

How about using the power of the purse to defund the FBI, CIA, DOJ, and the like?  Per the Constitution, all spending must originate in the House of Representatives.  Cut funding and hold the line.  I've been suggesting that course of action for more than a decade, but Congress has yet to do it.  This path would have substance.  Congress is detailed in Article 1 of the Constitution because the founders viewed it as the most important branch of government.  We the People are most reflected in the House of Representatives.  Take that seriously, Speaker McCarthy.

FBI Raid vs. Phone Call

Not so long ago, President Trump called the president of Ukraine.  During that call, Trump wanted the president to investigate claims regarding Hunter Biden, Burisma, and Vice President Joe Biden calling for the firing of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.  Shokin had been investigating Burisma for corruption.  The phone call was leaked and accusations of quid pro quo and efforts to undermine a potential political opponent were raised.  Soon, an impeachment followed.  Of course, the video of Joe Biden demanding that Victor Shokin get fired or $1 billion in funding would be canceled was somehow not viewed as a quid pro quo.  In any case, the precedent is clear: if you investigate a potential political rival, you deserve impeachment.

On Monday, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago.  More than a year and a half after he left office and strangely close to the midterm elections, the Biden Administration didn't merely ask the local authorities to maybe look into misappropriated documents.  No, they dispatched the FBI in force.  Is Trump a potential political rival to President Biden?  Indeed, he is. Looking at the recently established precedent, it seems that an impeachment is in order.  Right?

Luckily for President Biden, Republicans are spineless.  If they do reclaim the House and/or Senate, they will do nothing.  They may hold some pointless hearings, but they won't defund the FBI or the DOJ.  They certainly won't try an impeachment.  If they did impeach, the very media that was cheerleading the Trump impeachments will decry how this one is a threat to our democracy.  The media are mostly organs of the Democratic Party, just as is the bureaucratic state.  If the Republicans had a spine, they would use the power of the purse to starve the bureaucratic state that hates them.  Washington DC votes over 90% Democrat and yet the Republicans keep funding their enemies.

Acquitted Again

As should be a surprise to no one at all, Trump has again been acquitted.  It was a foregone conclusion.  At least the Senate only wasted a week on this folly.  The evidence did not matter.  The Constitution did not matter.  If these people really believe that Trump incited an insurrection, they should report him to the DC District Attorney to bring charges.  You know, just like with the people who broke into the Capitol.  He broke a law, right?  He's out of office and can be prosecuted, right?  Do it.  If the evidence was enough for impeachment, surely it must be enough for law enforcement.  Right?

<sound of crickets>

Yeah, that's what I thought.  Just another show trial.

Political Show Trial

It is a given that Trump cannot be convicted.  In any normal proceeding, the prosecutor would drop the case rather than have the jury acquit.  It is a waste of time and money to pursue a case that cannot be won.  So what is the point?

First, it is a political show trial.  The winning party wants to march the losing party around and throw rotten fruit.  Yeah, this is just the thing to promote 'unity' in the wake of a disputed election.  Brilliant.

Second, it is a distraction.  During the Obama Administration, there was always the latest scandal - at least on Fox News - that was overshadowed by the next one before the last one played out.  It turned out that the press, and the public, have a short attention span.  Obama would do something - say, the Iran Deal or drone strike an American in the Middle East, or say you could keep your doctor, etc - and the press would jump on it.  Before the story could really rise to the level of a national scandal, he'd rollout something else that would be the new feeding frenzy, the last one forgotten.  It was a surprisingly effective tactic.  In fact, because none of the stories was ever pursued in depth, he left office with a supposedly scandal-free administration.  Trump did something very similar.  He would diminish a war hero, imply a rival's father was involved in the Kennedy Assassination, spout demeaning nicknames, attack the press as fake news, and so forth.  While the media frothed on about his bad manners, he would advance his agenda out of sight.  While a pointless impeachment unfolds, all eyes will be on it.  What is going on where it matters?

Third, demonstrate the uselessness of the government.  Congress doesn't really do anything.  Despite being the first branch of government, it has voluntarily reduced itself to the third.  Each party plays defense for their guy in the White House and mostly follows the president's lead.  Rather than risk angering the voters by making any real decisions, they delegate all the tough decisions to the courts - who can't be voted out - or various bureaucrats - who also can't be voted out.

Forced to choose, I would select "all of the above."

Impeachment Folly

Rand Paul (R - KY) raised a point of order in the Senate: he stated that it was unconstitutional to have an impeachment trial against a private citizen.  The vote was 55 to 45 against him.  However, in order to convict, it is necessary to have two thirds (67) of the senators vote to convict.  It has just been demonstrated that acquittal (34) is a forgone conclusion.  Furthermore, Chief Justice Roberts has declined to preside.  With conviction impossible, this becomes a pointless waste of time.

Alan Dershowitz, who agrees that it is unconstitutional, says Trump should ignore the proceedings.  It is invalid and doesn't deserve any recognition.  But what if Trump attends?  The Democrats and the media, who have so effectively silenced him by banning him from social media, will be handing him a national stage.  Confident in acquittal, why not take the opportunity to rant about whatever he wants.

One thing an impeachment trial is certain not to be is unifying.  Trump and the Republicans did not pursue Hillary after the 2016 election despite the 'lock her up' chants.  The Democrats would be best served by ignoring Trump rather than bringing him back as a punching bag.  Right now, if he complains, it will look petty and sore loser.  If the Democrats drag him to a trial, the optics change.

Misunderstanding Impeachment

Impeach: transitive verb

1 : to charge with a crime or misdemeanor.  specifically: to charge (a public official) before a competent tribunal with misconduct in office.

It is all well and good that Trump was impeached while he was president but to have a trial now that he is a private citizen is a tremendously bad idea.  The primary point of impeachment is to remove an official from office.  Trump is already out of office.  If the precedent is set that Congress may impeach & try former officials, what's to stop them from impeaching Mike Pence or George W Bush?  At this point, criminal courts are the appropriate venue.

Consider: the point of impeachment and Senate trial is to have a means whereby the Legislative branch can remove the Executive.  The executive is the chief law enforcement officer and is unlikely to prosecute himself.  Once out of office, the new executive could prosecute.  That is where we are.  To have a Democratic House impeach and a Democratic Senate try a former Republican president is hardly going to be a 'fair' trial.  The goal is to disqualify Trump from future office.  Hmm.

Last year, during Trump's first impeachment, it was said that he was trying to undermine a future rival for the presidency by twisting the arm of Ukraine.  It was an abuse of power.  On that very basis, how is this effort to disqualify a political opponent not also an abuse of power?  Again, if the evidence warrants charges, have a trial in a regular court with a jury and make the case.  That that route is not being pursued is telling.  This is about politics, not the rule of law.

Rush to Impeachment

Do the Democrats know how this works?  The House plays prosecutor and the Senate plays judge and jury.  The prosecutor is supposed to investigate all the fact before the case is ever brought to court.  What prosecutor would schedule a court date and arrived to announce that the case needed more evidence?  The vote to impeach in the House was supposed to be the completion of the investigation.  By voting to impeach, the House declared that sufficient evidence and testimony had been uncovered to merit the removal of the president.  However, now in the Senate, there are calls to examine witnesses who did not appear in the House.  That would be a continuation of the investigation rather than a trying of the case.  Why didn't the House simply investigate longer?  The entire foundation of the obstruction of Congress charge is based on the House not pursuing remedies in the courts.  The President can't have executive privilege during impeachment hearings?  If so, executive privilege would always be nixed by the House declaring all hearings to be for impeachment.

 

The House had hearings and heard testimony.  That is what should be presented and nothing else.  That is the case they voted out of the House.  If it isn't enough, tough.  Be more thorough next time, which may very well happen before the election.  Trump may be the first president with multiple impeachments.

IRS Emails Found!

"The IRS’s inspector general confirmed Thursday it is conducting a criminal investigation into how Lois G. Lerner’s emails disappeared, saying it took only two weeks for investigators to find hundreds of tapes the agency’s chief had told Congress were irretrievably destroyed."

Washington Times

Look, they found all those missing IRS emails.  Despite the multiple crashed and trashed hard drives, the emails are still there.  Wow!  I don't work at the IRS and I knew the emails were still available.  Somehow, the head of the IRS reported to Congress that the emails were lost.  He claimed to have made much effort into retrieving the emails.  Either he is abysmally ignorant of how email works or he was lying to Congress.  The lowliest of lowly IT personnel at the IRS could have explained to Commissioner Koskinen that the emails were recoverable from offsite backups.  Obviously, he didn't ask.  Or, if he did, then he was clearly lying to Congress.

So why would he lie?  If, as some have told me, the IRS was equally harsh against both conservative Tea Party groups and liberal groups, why try to cover up the evidence that must surely show exactly that?  Obviously, it doesn't show that.  It almost certainly shows that the IRS under the Obama Administration was used to harass enemies.  If this same thing happened in a Republican administration, there would be demands to track this to its source.  In fact, it would be assumed that the source was the Republican president and the media and the Democrats would be calling for impeachment.

Link to the story:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/feb/26/irs-watchdog-reveals-lois-lerner-missing-emails-no/?page=2

Impeachment Folly

Again there are calls to impeach the president and I can only shake my head.  Short of Obama gunning down a citizen on camera (who is not a Republican), the Democratically-controlled Senate will not convict.  Therefore, impeachment can only end in failure.  Might the process moderate President Obama's lawlessness?  Doubtful.  No, it will most likely just irritate the voters and boost Democrat turnout.  It is a terrible idea with no path to success.

Does Obama merit impeachment?  Certainly.  It may be recalled that I considered bailing out the car companies as impeachable and no one even considers that today.  He has rewritten immigration law, enforcing the Dreamer Law that Congress declined to pass.  He has rewritten the Affordable Care Act, also without Congressional involvement.  He went to war in Lybia without Congressional authorization; Bush got authorization for both Afghanistan and Iraq.  But, as with criminal courts, the District Attorney should not take a case to trial that it is certain he will lose.  It is a waste of time and money.

What of this lawsuit that the Speaker of the House is pushing?  It is only necessary because the Republicans have proven again and again to be spineless.  The House has the power of the purse.  Nothing can be funded unless a majority of the House votes for it.  Once the Republicans took the House, Obamacare was dead.  Well, it was dead if they had spines.  No, they folded again and again.  The Republicans voted to fund Obamacare because they couldn't make the case that the Democratic Senate was shutting down the government.  Having surrendered the power of the purse, the House Republicans are now going to beg the courts to force the president to enforce the laws that the Congress did pass, not the ones he wished had passed.  Weakness.