Tuesday night’s Democrat presidential debate in Westerville, Ohio, featured 12 candidates. That’s the most crowded debate stage in presidential primary history, but one designed to complete their collective constituency voter strategy in the general campaign. The three-hour spectacle was full of lies, divisive politics, and unconstitutional proposals. As is our custom, we’ll digest a few of the lowlights.

(Full transcript here.)

Attacking the new frontrunner

Elizabeth Warren has steadily rallied support in the polls, even overtaking Joe Biden in several of late. That means she was finally attacked by almost every other candidate. The most effective attacks were over her incessant refusal to admit that middle-class taxes will go up to fund her version of Bernie Sanders’s $32 trillion Medicare for All.

“Costs will go up for the wealthy and for big corporations,” Warren repeated, while “for hard-working middle-class families, costs will go down.”

South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg jabbed, “Your signature, senator, is to have a plan for everything, except this.” Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar was even harsher: “At least Bernie’s being honest here and saying how he’s going to pay for this and that taxes are going to go up. And I’m sorry, Elizabeth, but you have not said that, and I think we owe it to the American people to tell them where we’re going to send the invoice.” Former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke said Warren was “more focused on being punitive or pitting one part of the country against the other.”

Yes, that is what Democrats do. Indeed, Warren has no plan to pay for this multitrillion-dollar scheme (which has numbers that don’t add up anyway) beyond an unconstitutional “wealth tax” on the hated rich. On that note, she had a Barack “You Didn’t Build That” Obama moment: “Look, I don’t have a beef with billionaires,” she said. “My problem is you made a fortune in America, you had a great idea, you got out there and worked for it. Good for you. But you built that fortune in America. I guarantee you built it in part using workers all of us help pay to educate. You built it in part getting your goods to market on roads and bridges all of us helped pay for.”

Debt

There have been more than 300 questions in the Democrat debates so far. Zero have asked about our national debt, which is at more than $22 trillion and rising rapidly. The only five mentions of the word “debt” in last night’s debate were about student-loan debt, which most Democrats on stage want to raise the federal debt to pay for. That’s true of all their other vote-buying schemes, too. So the reason they’re not asked about how to handle the debt we already have is that they’re too busy proposing ways to rack up new debt.

Gun confiscation

The September debate featured O'Rourke’s outrageous call for gun confiscation. Last night’s follow-up showed him backing off just a tad. If a law-abiding citizen refuses to turn in his semiautomatic rifle, or, he said, “brings it out in public and brandishes it in an attempt to intimidate — as we saw when we were at Kent State recently — then that weapon will be taken from them.”

Memo to Beto: It wasn’t citizens with guns doing the shooting at Kent State.

“If they persist,” he continued, “there will be other consequences from law enforcement,” though he claimed he expects Americans will “do the right thing” and that “we don’t go door-to-door for any other laws in this country; we’re not doing it here.” Unconstitutional laws like gun confiscation should hold no sway over Americans in any case. But Beto also said if a citizen didn’t submit to a “buyback,” “there would be a visit by law enforcement to recover that firearm.” Uh, there are 16 million such rifles in the nation, so good luck with that.

Other candidates disagreed with O'Rourke only because his proposal is politically bad. According to Buttigieg, “We are this close to an assault-weapons ban,” and O'Rourke shouldn’t mess it up. Klobuchar agreed: “I just keep thinking of how close we are to finally getting something done on this.”

Memo to Demos: We’re not close to another ineffective and unconstitutional ban on the cosmetically different rifles pejoratively and inaccurately known as “assault weapons.”

Impeachment

The Democrats’ impeachment coup attempt is their primary strategy for 2020, so of course it came up last night. Indeed, it was the first topic, and it was also Biden’s roughest moment. (More on that here.)

Warren declared that impeachment “must go forward.” Bernie Sanders, who proved he’s alive and kicking after his recent heart attack, agreed because, he pronounced, “In my judgment, Trump is the most corrupt president in the history of this country.”

Klobuchar added, “We have a constitutional duty to pursue this impeachment.”

Anytime a Democrat mentions the Constitution, you are permitted to laugh. Last night, the only times it came up were during demands for impeachment or with Kamala Harris’s ridiculous assertions about “reproductive rights” being somewhere in the Constitution. Every proposal Democrats made on stage is unconstitutional, and they violate their oaths “to support and defend” the Constitution on a daily basis.

But a couple of Democrats advised caution on impeachment. “First of all, we must be fair,” said Sen. Cory Booker. “We are talking about ongoing proceedings to remove a sitting president for office. This has got to be about patriotism and not partisanship.”

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard concurred, saying, “If impeachment is driven by these hyperpartisan interests, it will only further divide an already terribly divided country.” Moreover, she said, “If the House votes to impeach, the Senate does not vote to remove Donald Trump, [then] he walks out and he feels exonerated, further deepening the divides in this country that we cannot afford.”

As with the Constitution, Democrats are decidedly not driven by any patriotic interest, but rather partisan divisiveness. Impeachment is inherently political, and their attempt is more so than previous ones. But that’s why Booker and Gabbard aren’t the standard bearers for a Democrat Party that is hell-bent on taking out Donald Trump.

(Updated.)