Impeachment theater

image credit: the superfins.com

Some pundits see this feeding frenzy over the House’s plan to Impeach President Trump as a deliberate attempt to distract from anticipated indictments and now the Biden Ukraine/China scandal.  Neither Adam Schiff nor Nancy Pelosi is specifying what might be presented formally as Articles of Impeachment, which is why Andy McCarthy calls the whole thing an “impeachment show for television.”  David Catron at the Spectator has another take:

It should by now be obvious to the meanest intelligence that the Democrats are determined to impeach President Trump with or without credible evidence that he has committed any act resembling “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The “whistleblower complaint” that Nancy Pelosi used as the pretext for launching her ersatz impeachment inquiry contains little but hearsay and fabrication, while her claim that it proves Trump has “violated the Constitution” fails the laugh test. In the end, however, impeachment is less about offenses committed by the president than the desire of the Washington establishment to put down what they see as a peasants’ revolt.

Impeachment is, in other words, an attempt to restore the old order that the voters overturned in 2016. It seeks to annul that election and return us to the nascent totalitarianism of the Obama era, an incipient autocracy the Democrats expected to be nurtured during the presidency of Hillary Clinton. Thus, when the hoi polloi got above themselves and put Donald Trump in the White House, his removal from office became the primary objective of Washington’s self-appointed Optimates. They began planning Trump’s impeachment before he was inaugurated because he is the leader of the insurrection, and they know full well that it can’t be put down until he is gone.

House Democrats must impeach the president despite the near impossibility of securing a conviction in the Senate. Indeed, their need to do so is more urgent now than ever because of the booming Trump economy and the weakness of their Democratic presidential candidates. As Rep. Al Green (D-Texas), who has introduced several abortive impeachment resolutions, put it in May, “I’m concerned that if we don’t impeach this president, he will get re-elected.”

Mr. Catron's full article is here.

# # #