The Patriot Post® · Impeachment: Delusional Dems Don't Have a Case

By Brian Mark Weber ·
https://patriotpost.us/articles/49185-impeachment-delusional-dems-dont-have-a-case-2017-05-19

If you’re like most Americans who work hard all day, raise your children, pay your taxes, and follow the law, you’re probably troubled by the evening news reports of a constitutional crisis over something President Donald Trump told former FBI Director James Comey. Sounds pretty ominous, doesn’t it? Let’s back up a little bit here and put this in perspective.

The Constitution stipulates that a president can be removed from office for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Our Founding Fathers knew that politics is a complex and nasty affair, but they entrusted future elected leaders to bring about such charges only in the most serious of situations.

Impeachment was never designed to be used as a political weapon, or to bring down an opposing president simply because there’s a mechanism to do so. Thankfully, the impeachment process isn’t easy. Nonetheless, just about every modern president has been threatened with impeachment.

Philip Wegmann writes in the Washington Examiner, “The last five presidents have been threatened with impeachment, and four of them actually had impeachment resolutions drawn up against them. In every instance but one, the talk was idle and the resolutions equally meaningless.”

In most cases, there’s no evidence to back up the accusations. Even when the process actually results in impeachment, as in the case of Bill Clinton, conviction (and thus removal from office) is far from imminent. In fact, no president has been removed. Andrew Johnson was the only other to be impeached, but he was acquitted, and Richard Nixon resigned before he could be impeached.

Overall, it seems that the threshold for drawing up charges is lowered significantly when Republicans are in office. As Rush Limbaugh often says, when it comes to Republicans in the White House, it’s the “seriousness of the charge,” not the actual evidence, that gets Democrats banging the drums of impeachment.

Such is the case with Donald Trump. As liberal law professor Jonathan Turley opines in The Hill, “Some commentators seem to be alleging criminal conduct in office or calling for impeachment before Trump completed the words of his inaugural oath of office. Not surprising, within minutes of the New York Times report [on James Comey and Michael Flynn], the response was a chorus of breathless ‘gotcha’ announcements. But this memo is neither the Pentagon Papers nor the Watergate tapes. Indeed, it raises as many questions for Comey as it does Trump in terms of the alleged underlying conduct.”

For Democrats, the shock to their system has been threefold: Donald Trump won the election, Hillary Clinton somehow lost it, and the legacy of Barack Obama is in tatters. Since the moment Trump was sworn in as president — no, since the moment Hillary reluctantly conceded the election; scratch that, since he won the GOP nomination — the number one objective of Democrats and their Leftmedia allies has been to destroy him.

To Trump’s opponents, the beauty is that no evidence is needed. When there is collusion between the press and the political class, any number of high crimes and misdemeanors can be dredged up. Since Watergate, every journalism student in America has dreamt of being the next Carl Bernstein or Bob Woodward, and the media in general yearn for another opportunity to bring down a Republican president.

Think about it. How many times did we read or hear journalists and reporters bringing up Watergate during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush? Too many to recall. But when Barack Obama surreptitiously shipped a plane load of ransom cash to the Iranians, used the Department of Justice to spy on reporters and their families, or paved the way for the IRS to trample the First Amendment rights of conservatives, it was considered business as usual. No questions asked.

So given the politics of all this talk of removing the president from office, and given that modern-day Republican presidents are routinely threatened with impeachment, the chances of the Republican House voting to do so are ridiculously small based on the evidence we have at the moment. Which is to say, none.

Still, Democrats know full well it’s not evidence they need to bring down Trump’s presidency. All they need is to get the American public to believe something sordid has happened, and then weak-kneed Republicans on Capitol Hill will fall all over themselves to appear forthright and cooperative.

Don’t believe it? Democrats are poised to poll Americans to see if they’re falling for the impeachment scam. And we’re already hearing the name Joe Lieberman being mentioned as a serious candidate to replace Comey at the FBI.

All Trump’s opponents have is an anonymous source claiming that the president asked Comey to stop investigating Michael Flynn — the day after Flynn was fired, by the way. That might be a serious charge, except Comey himself testified under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 3 that no one in the administration ever pressured him to end an investigation.

It doesn’t take a constitutional scholar to see there’s no obstruction of justice here. There’s no treason, no bribery, no high crimes and no misdemeanors. Those all did indeed occur during the Obama years, except Republicans were too worried about being called racists to protect the Constitution they swore an oath to defend.

Remember Bush Derangement Syndrome? What we have here is a full-on case of psychosis. And that’s just among the mainstream media.

So when you’re watching the news and you hear about Donald Trump’s latest threat to our constitutional republic, take a deep breath and wait for the evidence. And wait. And wait. Democrats want you to think there’s an impeachable crime so they won’t have to honor the results of a legitimate election. But in order to overturn that election, they need to convince enough of us that the president is a criminal. Now that’s a high crime.