The Democrats’ second impeachment trial of Donald Trump kicks off in the Senate today. It can be rightly described as a politically orchestrated sham, as there is little constitutional support for what the Democrats are doing.

Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley recently condemned the Democrats’ impeachment gambit as gutting both “the impeachment standard but also free speech.” He further notes, “Congress is now seeking an impeachment for remarks covered by the First Amendment. It would create precedent for the impeachment of any president blamed for violent acts of others after using reckless language. What is worse are those few cases that would support this type of action. … Democrats are pushing this dangerously vague standard while objecting to their own remarks given new meaning from critics.”

However, Turley’s biggest criticism of the impeachment charade is the massive damage it does to America’s standard for jurisprudence. “In this new system, guilt is not doubted and innocence is not deliberated. This would do to the Constitution what the violent rioters did to the Capitol and leave it in tatters.”

Democrats are essentially insisting on applying a new standard for judging the actions and words of others — namely that they and they alone have the authority to interpret Trump’s intent and thereby declare him guilty. Yet they disregard his words in the same speech that would at the very least show the opposite to be the case.

Hypocritical Democrats continually and consistently conflate their own political narrative surrounding both the election and the Capitol riot with “objective truth.” Trump’s first and primary offense was his refusal to accept the Left’s election narrative. Therefore Democrats contend that he’s responsible for the Capitol riot irrespective of the words he actually spoke at the rally, because he led people to doubt the Left’s narrative. That’s apparently tantamount to “threatening American democracy.”

This rationale is clearly displayed in the impeachment allegation that Trump “willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged — and foreseeably resulted in — lawless action at the Capitol, such as: ‘if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.’”

As far as how this second impeachment show trial of Trump proceeds, it appears that it will only last a few days. For one thing, this time around Democrats do not plan to call any witnesses. Why not? As Politico reports, “Now, [Democrats] say their experience as witnesses to the Jan. 6 insurrection is enough.”

Yeah, ask Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She was (not) there.

By making themselves the witnesses, Democrats intend to put not only Trump on trial but more importantly their GOP colleagues for daring to show any support for “Trump the insurrectionist.” Any failure to hold to the Left’s preferred election narrative will be used to smear Republicans as enabling kooky conspiracy theorists and “white supremacists.” With this smear, Democrats aim to divide Republicans by suggesting that any defense of Trump equates to an endorsement of the Capitol riot — an argument they hope to use against Republicans in the 2022 elections.

So much “unity” we can hardly stand it.

Meanwhile, Republicans will look to use the trial as an opportunity to shine a spotlight on the Democrats’ hypocrisy over their history of inflammatory rhetoric over the last four years. That’s particularly true of last year’s summer of rioting, which Democrats repeatedly refused to condemn, while in some instances outright supporting, the leftist violence as the “language of the unheard.”