Amici,
Finally, it looks as though the Impeachment saga of
President Trump is about to end. Late last night, January 29, after a day of the senators
asking questions via written text read by the Chief Justice, it became apparent
that Mitch McConnell, Senate leader, has whipped up the votes to squash any
request for new witnesses. (The Democrats have had 17 witnesses so far, whose
testimony came from their House hearings, and one witness whose testimony Adam
Schiff has blocked: this 18th witness was the “Intelligence
Community’s Inspector General’s testimony given some months ago in a closed
committee hearing. The Republicans have used only these 17 witnesses’
testimony, and called no new witnesses of their own.) I saw a New York Times
article this morning lamenting this likely vote-down of new witnesses. Clearly,
the Democrats will use this vote – if it occurs Friday evening, the most
likely time for it – as a cudgel to try to maim Republican senators running for
re-election. Of course, some new turn of events might occur today, the second
and last day of senators asking questions. Tomorrow, Friday, they’ll debate
what they’ve been presented with.
After yesterday’s one day of questions, however, it has become
apparent that the Democrat managers from the House both don’t have a case, nor
the ability to defend what they do have under such “cross-examination” the
senators can give. This development was apparent to anyone listing to or
reviewing some of the prosecution team’s opening arguments, and then the White
House’s team’s response. Also, the Democrats, as Trey Goudy has said, had a
stupid way of arguing their case, insulting many senators for hours, and they’re
carrying that over in answering the senators’ questions: Ted Cruz last night
said Adam Schiff twice refused to answer a question presented to him on
Wednesday, and that’s just not going to work.
So, as this apparently winds down, at long last, at least for the
time being, one naturally asks what was all this about. For what it is worth,
I’ve written up a few things that I find worth considering.
Background
Donald Trump is what is known as a “Change Agent”. For
better or worse, such people change the course of the way things had been going
before. Abraham Lincoln was perceived to be a change agent by the Southern
slave-owning class, and thus they started the Civil War to prevent him from
making any changes to their part of the country as it had been. Franklin Delano
Roosevelt was another such agent of change; so were, in different degrees,
Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Ronald Reagan tried to be, and to some
degree was, but the statist, rule-by-bureaucracy that FDR started was not so
easily derailed. Lyndon Johnson was a “change agent” in a terrible way, leaving
the country nearly at war with itself with his Vietnam debacle and his “Great
Society” that parked generations of Black Americans on the “asphalt
plantations” in the huge urban areas the Democrats rule with an iron hand.
Mixed with all of that, there’s the marked, and growing, trend
in academia and in certain political circles toward both Globalism and
Socialism, the latter manifesting as a sort of hodge-podge of true Socialism,
Mercantilism, and “crony Capitalism”. Socialism and “Leftism” in general need a
few words.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the father of Leftism. A reprobate
himself, fathering many bastards, he wrote, “Man is born free, but everywhere
he is in chains.” He meant moral chains, repressing us, keeping us from
fathering bastards and being wastrels, as he was. Jean-Jacques was a sort of
high IQ version of Hunter Biden, in fact. (The comparison is quite striking,
except that J-J didn’t have a father who was Vice President.) “Freedom” for Rousseau
meant fathering bastards and not working at a gainful trade, and you can see
his intellectual progeny in the “Pro-Choice” movement and the hedonistic
culture of today. Jean-Jacques was a non-religious antinomian down to his DNA.
All Leftists, mild or strong, are in some degree antinomian, actually; they believe
mankind is basically good, and held back by old demented types who impose an
impossible morality on everyone: such “repressors” are what the very
Progressive Pope Francis calls “Pharisees” and “Rigorists” in morality, and
what Marx would have called Capitalists or the Owners of the Means of
Production in economics. Either way, the common Joes and Janes of the world are
held back, held down, and taken advantage of. Bernie Sanders says this every
day. If only the Repressors could be overthrown, then everyone would
flourish. Peace, joy, “from each according to his ability, to each according to
his needs,” to quote Marx.
I, myself, am on the Right, not the Left, for religious and
anthropological reasons. I don’t think people are basically good, and they need
strict laws to keep them in line. One doesn’t need to be religious to
appreciate this. James Madison apparently had no religion at all, but famously
wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” God made Mankind
good, and blessed it and all Creation on the first Sabbath Day (Genesis 2), but
Original Sin prevents them from really being very good, certainly not for any
length of time. We can neither achieve Heaven on our own, nor Utopia on Earth. That’s
the Christian religion (can’t say “Judeo-Christian”, because Jews reject the
idea of Original Sin) and that is common-sense everyday experience. G.K.
Chesterton said that Original Sin was the easiest Church doctrine to prove; all
one had to do was to open the daily newspaper. But the Left, you see, is on a
morally iconoclastic crusade, an antinomian jihad. In a tired, materialistic,
ever-pushing and endlessly competitive Consumer Capitalist world, the Left’s
causes can seem like the “tune of a different drummer”, a panacea, an unholy
Grail that one can dedicate one’s life to pursuing.
Donald Trump, a man of many achievements and a complicated
(and not always moral) past, is now on the receiving end of the
Left’s jihad. Trump is a “change agent,” one wrenching the United States away
from what’s called the “Uni-Party” politicians and their Globalist friends. The
“Swamp” or “The Deep State” is their apparatus for control. Opposed to this is
“flyover America”, and in that “great middle” Trump strikes a deep chord in the
American soul; Reagan did that, too. But no American president since Reagan has
really been a “nationalist” in the classic American sense.
Certainly, the
American Left wants Globalism, meaning not merely international trade but
ultimately subjection of established nations to shady foreign bureaucracies. A
central element of all this is relaxed sexual morals and abortion on demand (to
clean up what the lax morals produce). Lax morals produce, you see, a
dissolute, dissipated population naturally unable to manage itself. Thus, you
need an all-powerful bureaucracy. (Rousseau foresaw this, actually, and argued
for a strong central state to manage the hedonistic zombies his system would
create.) Central Globalism is an international trade in which the U.S. becomes
a Mercantilist colony of the Left’s ideal republic, the People’s Republic of
China (even the pope sings China’s praises, something grotesque, abominable,
and Hellish, all in one), and the American military to be the world’s policeman.
Trump is not threatening to upend all that, he’s actually
changing it. His “America First” program is about putting the American people
first, as in the slogan “Mainstreet, not Wallstreet” in economics, and also in
resisting the use of the U.S. military to police the world (a world as
hopelessly vicious, tribal, and self-defeating as it ever was). And quietly,
steadily, his replacement of liberal or Leftist judges with conservatives is
going to change profoundly the homeland’s moral situation, as well.
The Impeachment
So, with this background in mind, how is this Impeachment
Trial playing out? What all is involved?
Here’s a parable. Fred and Barney are sitting in a bar, and
Fred says he’s going duck hunting. Barney says, “Oh, yeah?” and Fred says,
“Yep, I’m going duck hunting in our neighbor’s back yard duck pond! I’m going
to shoot his pet duck!” Barney doesn’t say much of anything to that, though
maybe he shrugs it off as a joke. A week later, the sound of a shotgun echoes
through the neighborhood, and the neighbor runs out his back door and sees his
pet duck has been shot up.
Not long after this, Fred is in court, being charged with
shooting his neighbor’s duck. Barney jumps up in the back of the courtroom and
yells, “Hey, I got some evidence! Fred told me last week he was going to shoot
that duck!”
In such a context, maybe Barney’s unsolicited but timely
testimony might be considered of some value, IF there were witnesses
corroborating what he alleges he heard. However, here’s the kicker: the duck
was never shot. There was no gunfire, and no dead duck. Nope; the duck is
still swimming about in his duck pond. But Fred is in court for shooting that
duck!
This is what President Donald Trump is in an
impeachment trial in the Senate for: shooting a duck that was never shot.
That’s the gist of what Alan Dershowitz was arguing for over an hour for.
Impeachment MUST involve a crime. NO CRIME is alleged, except the very vague
“Abuse of Power” and “Obstructing Congress” – which are not listed in the U.S.
Constitution as constituting crimes a president can be impeached for. Dershowitz
explained that “Abuse of Power” being essentially another version of the
British-derived “Maladministration”, which the Constitutional framers excluded
from the impeachment criteria precisely because they didn’t want the American
president to be in essence a prime minister in a Parliamentary system, and “Obstruction
of Congress” is a non-starter, because presidents are supposed to take
Congressional demands to the courts, the co-equal Third Branch of government,
to adjudicate.
Now, to be sure, the Democrats and the Mainstream Media
(MSM) allege that Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress are indeed crimes.
The New York Times had a piece yesterday making that claim. Either Alan
Dershowitz is an idiot or someone (indeed, many someones) are simply insisting
on something that isn’t so. (It reminds me or Reagan’s famous, “It’s not that
the Democrats don’t know anything; it is just that they know things that aren’t
so” line.)
So Trump is on trial for shooting a duck that wasn’t shot. Honestly,
for a quid pro quo, we need actual evidence. Witnesses, recordings, something. And
now Barney, in the lumpy form of John Bolton, a man who never met a war he
didn’t like, is saying he heard Trump discussing the idea of shooting the duck.
Can he prove that? How? Or is he just selling a book? And even if Trump “kicked
the idea around” with Bolton, it isn’t a crime, even had he actually done it.
It certainly isn’t a crime if he didn’t do it at all! It is absurd, therefore,
a farce, a sort of Masque of the Swamp Creatures; the House should have
never set this precedent, and for its part, the Senate was derelict in its Constitutional
duty by accepting these illegal “articles of impeachment.” (In hindsight, it
was a mistake to impeach Bill Clinton, purely in terms of long-term political
calculation. And the Andrew Johnson Impeachment was a joke, too, on a grand
scale.)
There’s another large maggot in this decomposing carcass, a
wriggling worm that promises to turn into a monstrously omnivorous, insatiable insectoid
monster: the Senate is about to (apparently) vote to call witnesses, witnesses
the House didn’t call in its initial hearings (i.e. Barney, and others). Now,
the way it is supposed to work, how the Constitution has previously been
interpreted, is that the House acts as a District Attorney: it builds a case,
does the investigating, and then presents the result to the Senate to judge the
merits of the evidence. But in this Donald Trump Impeachment Trial, it looks
like 51 Senators are about to vote to call witnesses. This would make the
Senate part of the House investigation. In fact, it would make the Senate the
House’s “gopher/go-for” lackey and errand boy. That’s not what the Senate is
for. If the House didn’t call enough witnesses, or the right witnesses, or whatever
they complain about not having, that’s supposed to be their problem. But if the
Senate votes to call witnesses, all Constitutional precedents –
and all previous interpretations of what the Constitution is saying needs to be
done in an impeachment – are overturned. We’re in new territory.
More than “new territory”, we’re in a revolution.
But then again, that has already happened by the Senate
voting to hear an impeachment in which no crime is alleged in the first place!
Put simply: American Constitutional governance is being wrecked right before
our eyes, as we look at it. It’s a true coup d’état. The U.S. Constitution is being bastardized, trashed out. And
the Republican leadership in the Senate (Mitch McConnell & Co.) are
complicit in that. But then, so are Republicans not in the leadership (Romney,
etc.) and all the Democrats.
Clearly, this all sets very bad precedent. A
Republican-controlled House could impeach any Democrat president –
or a Republican they didn’t like – thus turning impeachment into a “no
confidence” vote such as Parliament has. It destroys the American presidency as
a co-equal branch of government. This is in fact what happened in the 17th
and 18th century Britain. Parliament gained ever more and more governmental
control from the king, the chief executive, until the king became a mee figurehead,
a tourist attraction. (Parliament is also the “highest court in the land” as
well.) More directly, it stuffs into the septic tank the will of the American
people. The U.S. President (and his Vice-President) are the only two people in
the entire Federal system who are directly elected by the nation; this is done via
the Electoral College, a system allowing even small states an important say in
who is elected, and thus creating a truly national presidency, an unique
institution in the world. Removing a president for a
non-crime/maladministration is nothing less than a political defecation on the collective
American voter. (For three years, the Democrats have alleged the Russian
meddled in our election, but if what the Democrats are doing is not meddling,
then nothing is.)
In the months leading up to this moment, I’ve been watching
as the House of Representatives under Nancy Pelosi and the radical wing of the
Democrat Party cleverly laid the groundwork for this fiasco. They would not
call a formal House Impeachment Inquiry vote. Such a vote was done in the past,
and would have empowered the Republican minority to subpoena witnesses as well
as the majority Democrats. By NOT doing it that way, the Republicans could call
no witnesses at all, and even the Democrat majority could not legally
subpoena witnesses in the sense of issuing subpoenas that would hold up in the
Courts. The House Intelligence Committee under the execrable Adam Schift (N.B.
his committee should not have been involved in an impeachment in any case!) had
issued one of their faux-subpoenas to one of Trump’s National Security Agency’s
top people, and he took it to court. At that point, Schift withdrew the
subpoena. It would have been thrown out. Many in the press and online
Commentary see this as a flaw in the House’s Impeachment, but actually it was
done intentionally so, for it allows the Democrats to say, “Boo-hoo, we
couldn’t call important witnesses; now the Senate must.”
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading a lot of
commentary from all angles, and two basic schools of thought seemed to dominate
in pro-Trump commentary: one school said the Senate should immediately dismiss
the illegal Impeachment Articles (impeaching where no crime is committed, as
discussed above), and the other asserting that a full Senate trial, one in
which witnesses were called by all sides, was what was needed. The supporters
of this second position thought that the infamous “Deep State” could thus be
put on trial, and all the maggots exposed. However, as Senator Rand Paul made
plain just before the Senate Impeachment trial began, “the fix was in” to
remove Trump, and that were the Senate to vote for witnesses, the Republicans
would get none. Paul alleged that some of his fellow Republicans were lying in
wait to ambush Trump’s defense, and it seems he was quite right.
So, right now, we teeter on the bring of apocalypse.
Precedent has been well and truly broken, and laws – including the basic law of the
country, the U.S. Constitution – are wrecked. Anything can happen now.
If the Democrats call the war-monger (but never-having-served-in-the-military)
maggot John Bolton, President Trump must assert Executive Privilege,
because no President can have his closest advisors on national security being
dragged before Parliament – er, excuse me, Congress – and made to testify about any
private advice given. One would think – though in these crazy times, one cannot know
– that in this case the Courts would uphold Executive Privilege. Presidents
since Washington have asserted it, after all. Everything else considered,
there’s no alleged crime here to begin with: as Professor Dershowitz argued
before the Senate, presidents have used “quid pro quo” with foreign governments
since the beginning. And need I write here that there’s actually no evidence
that President Trump did any “quid pro quo” in the first place! That’s the duck
that wasn’t shot! Maybe he kicked around the idea with that fool Bolton, and maybe
he didn’t (how can Bolton prove it?); but one must be tried for what one did,
not what one talked about considering doing.
In any case, voting to call witnesses would mean the Impeachment
Trial of Donald John Trump would last in to April or May. That’s because it
would take months to wrangle it all out in the Courts. Would the Senators tie
up the Senate for that long? Would the American people stand for it? President
Trump’s popularity is higher than ever. How high would it be by then?
Perhaps I’m just the pessimist, or maybe I’m an outright,
unmitigated fool, but I am definitely NOT sanguine about what’s happening. I
trust Senator Rand Paul to raise all Hell in the coming days, but we know that
Mitch McConnell has the power to squash Republican Senators from voting for
Bolton to testify. Word is that the Chamber of Commerce is offering big money
and lucrative contracts to any Senators who vote for Bolton’s testimony. The
Chamber of Commerce is a Globalist lobby, soaked in cash and throwing it around
to try to destroy Trump, whose “Main Street, not Wall Street” economic
nationalism is turning out great dividends for actual Americans. Also,
regarding the Globalists, most of whom have sold their soul to China, in
effect, they are in for rough times should somehow this new Coronavirus wreak
even a fragment of the havoc it is suspected of being able to inflict on the
world. The Chinese economy might well collapse; even the evil Barad-dur of the
Chinese Communist Party might lose control. It is all so frustrating. So-called
“conservatives” have gotten themselves so stuck onto the teat of China, that
they’ll catch whatever disease infects that miserable slave state, directly
from their false “mother’s milk.”
Short-sighted bastards, them. Trump, with his new United States,
Mexico, and Canada trade agreement (USMCA), along with his unsung but massive
cutting of the insane “red tape” previous U.S. governments have hampered the
U.S. economy with, has made North America an infinitely better place for
business to invest in than odious Communist China.
And Trump has so far avoided the purely stark-raving mad “Endless
Wars” scenario that we’ve been trapped in for decades. So far, he’s not
gotten American military personnel removed from Afghanistan and so on, not yet,
but he is, as the old saying goes, a damned sight better than what we’ve had
before.
Partly because the Democrats simply have no one remotely
suitable for the office of the president running for that position (although Hilary
Clinton looks like she wants to jump in, which would probably blow up the
Democrats entirely – that’s also certain to happen if the Democrat Party bigshots
squash Bernie Sanders a second time), and partly because Donald Trump is able
to command huge crowds wherever he goes (see the amazing photos of the hordes
who came out for him in New Jersey, of all places!), but mainly because of the
excellent economy, Donald Trump will easily be re-elected president – that is,
unless the Democrats can remove him via the fraudulent impeachment.
That’s the situation we’re in. The ghost of a true Civil War 2.0 seems to haunt us. Perhaps
it is inevitable.
An Préachán
