Impeachment has been the subject of “national conversation” for three years now. It isn’t going away. There is no escaping the impeachment talk. It probably won’t go away even after Trump gets reelected. For the next six years, it is our destiny to live in a permanent hell of impeachment headlines, all because we share our national home with addicts who refuse all help.
Of course it’s an addiction. Democrats desperately want to impeach, preferably President Trump, but impeaching anyone would also be good, although not as cathartic. Impeaching Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh would be wonderful. Impeaching Justice Clarence Thomas and Attorney General Bill Barr would also work. Impeaching Trump and Mike Pence in a single package would send Democrats into ecstasy.
Symptoms include not only the over whelming desire to impeach somebody, anybody, but an increased tolerance for convoluted impeachment theories, failure to fulfill obligations to family members who don’t share the addiction, failure to fulfill work obligations, difficulty reducing one’s obsession with impeachment news, and withdrawal symptoms when impeachment related news takes a rare breather. Withdrawal comes with its own danger such as sleeping disorders and depression.
Serious talk of impeaching Trump began seven months before his election—no, that’s not a typo. According to a Politico in April 201, “impeachment’ was already on the lips of pundits, newspaper editorials, constitutional scholars, and even a few members of Congress.” From the right, Washington attorney Bruce Fein puts the odds at 50/50 that Trump would commit an impeachable offense as president.”
That Trump literally hadn’t done anything at that point didn’t matter to anyone. Addiction is not about reason. The Washington Post, where democracy died in darkness, was even more emphatic. On November 11, 2016, it quoted a “prediction professor” who (surprise!) predicted Trump’s impending impeachment. Allan Lichtman claimed that “if elected, Trump would eventually be impeached by a Republican Congress that would prefer a President Mike Pence, someone whom establishment Republicans know and trust.”
If Lichtman ever made a public mea culpa about being spectacularly wrong, I have not found it. Instead, Lichtman is now peddling books about impeaching Trump. That same day, David Brooks at The New York Times, now known for anti-Semitism and “reporters” who exchange bodily fluids for information, proclaimed that Trump’s impeachment was not only forthcoming, but inevitable.
Like a junkie who started with an occasional hit and kept telling himself he could quit anytime he wanted, Democrats started “building the case” for impeachment. What did Trump actually do to deserve impeachment months before inauguration? Emoluments! Few Americans have ever heard of the Emoluments Clause, an obscure provision in the Constitution, before Trump was elected. Yet a chorus of voices from the left, many legal experts, began debating about whether the wording in the clause could render Trump impeachable, more or less from the moment he was sworn in.
Emoluments weren’t explicitly mentioned in a Vanity Fair impeachment story five days earlier, but “five Democratic senators announced a bill they plan to release next month that would require Trump to divest assets …. The legislation would symbolically make violations of federal conflict-of-interest rules “a high crime or misdemeanor under the impeachment clause of the U.S. Constitution.”
Of course everyone is now familiar with the Christopher Steele dossier and how that turned out after wasting millions of taxpayer dollars on an investigation into a “crime” they already knew was false. If this dossier did nothing else, it brought to light the corruption at the FBI and the CIA along with the news that it was paid for by Hillary Clinton.
But we soon found out that addiction is, indeed, difficult to break. The Mueller report was like a bucket of cold water poured onto a twitching addict, but only for a moment. If Trump can’t be impeached for collusion, why not impeach him for obstruction? Or “attempted obstruction”!
Many Americans have difficulty wrapping their heads around the notion of “obstructing an investigation” into a crime that never happened, and which wasn’t actually obstructed in any way, but not Democrats. In their less lucid moments, they even admit that they want to impeach Trump solely for the sake of impeachment.
The ever-quotable Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had so many reasons to impeach Trump, she couldn’t even remember them all. For her, it was all about the emoluments. In AOC’s confused mind, Russian election meddling was about emoluments as well. Emoluments, shmemoluments, who cares? Let’s just impeach Trump!
One-time Labor Secretary Robert Reich even admitted it would be an utterly pointless exercise, but paradoxically demanded that it be done anyway. A heroin addict never says “no” to more H. An impeachment addict never refuses more impeachment. So if Democrats can’t impeach Trump, then, how about impeaching Barr!
This nutty idea bubbled up and out of the addiction abyss as soon as the Mueller report became public. Leading journalistic lights of the left, like Jonathan Chait. who was seriously peddling theories of Trump having been a Russian agent since 1987, were begging congressional Democrats to impeach Barr in April 2019. Pelosi may not be quite on board with this, but it’s a close call. Impeaching Trump is still the subject of daily media speculation.
You can read: Impeachment Is For Democrats What Heroin Is For Addicts By George S. Bardmesser, The Federalist, in full at the link provided
