Phony Impeachment 2.0
January 13, 2021 10:22pm
Well, today we saw the Democrats take a big step toward uniting this country as they impeached President Trump a second time. I'm joking, obviously. Unity? Can you think of anything those Democrat enemies of our Republic could have done to be more divisive than they already are?
With less than a week left in office - because it happened after noon, the House voted 232-197 to impeach President Trump. Every Democrat and ten disgusting Republicans went along with the hateful and vindictive scheme to tarnish Donald Trump's historical legacy as the only president to be impeached twice. And that's all it was. It served no purpose other than to try to embarrass the President and to throw red meat at the Leftist haters who want blood. The Left in this country will not be satisfied until Donald Trump is dead. And they want that death to happen soon. They are that hateful and despicable.
The Senate won't even hold a trial on it while Trump is in office. And the House knew that when they impeached him. So despite all the dishonest, holier-than-thou rhetoric they spat during the impeachment hearing, the only goal was to further entrench their hatred of the man.
That's the REAL reason. But what was the STATED reason? There was only one Article of Impeachment. It stated the reason as "Incitement of Insurrection." It went on to claim that "Donald John Trump engaged in high Crimes and Misdemeanors by inciting violence against the Government of the United States" and specifically alleging that "He also 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.' Thus incited by President Trump, members of the crowd he had addressed unlawfully breached and vandalized the Capitol, injured and killed law enforcement personnel, menaced Members of Congress, the Vice President, and Congressional personnel, and engaged in other violent, deadly, destructive, and seditious acts." It also claimed that on a January 2nd phone call, President Trump "urged the Secretary of State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, to 'find' enough votes to overturn the Georgia Presidential election results and threatened Secretary Raffensperger if he failed to do so." Gee, hyperbole much? Actually, that's not hyperbole. Those are outright lies. NONE OF THAT IS TRUE. So what did the President REALLY say?
Donald Trump never told his supporters to go break into the Capitol Building and stop the tabulation of the Electoral College votes. He never even hinted that they should. But violence did occur and the Democrats jumped at the chance to falsely blame the President and impeach him for it.
The House of Representatives impeached the President of the United States for only the fourth time in history. Donald Trump got half of those. In the first impeachment, Andrew Johnson committed no crime, and he was acquitted. In the second impeachment, Bill Clinton did commit a crime - felony perjury - but he was acquitted. Donald Trump committed no crime for his first impeachment and was acquitted. And today, Trump's second impeachment, our nation's fourth, Donald Trump again committed no crime. But all the treacherous Democrats and ten traitorous Republicans impeached him anyway. And just like Trump's first impeachment, it was motivated by vindictive politics. So what happens next?
There is no chance whatsoever that the Senate will remove him from office. Even if an impeachment trial were to begin under the Republican majority - remember, Mike Pence's vote means the Republicans control the Senate until noon on the 20th when Kamala Harris replaces him as the tie-breaking vote - there is no chance such a trial would end before noon on the 20th when Trump's term ends anyway.
But don't be surprised if Chuck Schumer decides to go ahead with an after-the-fact impeachment trial because he likes the optics. And if two-thirds of the Senate did vote to convict, it would trigger a second vote. And that second vote is on whether or not to disqualify Donald Trump from ever holding any federal office again, meaning he would not be eligible run again in 2024 - which I don't think he'll run then anyway. But an impeachment conviction by the Senate could disqualify him.
So what evidence would be presented at a Senate trial? The prosecution's "Exhibit A" will be a video and transcript of Donald Trump's January 6th speech. But do you know what will be "Exhibit A" for the defense? A video and transcript of Donald Trump's January 6th speech! Because that speech PROVES Donald Trump didn't say what the Democrats claim he said.
President Trump asked his supporters to "cheer on our brave Senators and Congressmen" not to "attack the Senators and Congressmen." He also said to "peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard" not "violently and illegally break into the Capitol to disrupt the proceedings."
These are the relevant excerpts:
1) "Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. After this, we're going to walk down and I'll be there with you. We're going to walk down. We're going to walk down any one you want, but I think right here. We're going walk down to the Capitol, and we're going to cheer on our brave senators, and congressmen and women. We're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard. Today we will see whether Republicans stand strong for integrity of our elections."
2) "So we're going to, we're going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we're going to the Capitol and we're going to try and give... The Democrats are hopeless. They're never voting for anything, not even one vote. But we're going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don't need any of our help, we're going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. So let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I want to thank you all. God bless you and God bless America. Thank you all for being here, this is incredible. Thank you very much. Thank you."
NOTHING in his speech was incitement. NOTHING is his speech called for violence. NOTHING in his speech asked that crowd to do anything illegal. But the fake news told you he said to violently breach the Capitol building. The fake news told you he said to vandalize Nancy Pelosi's office. The fake news told you he said to force lawmakers to seek shelter in the basement. The fake news told you he said to kill police officers. But he said none of that. He didn't even say anything close to it. He said just the opposite. He said to "peacefully and patriotically" make their voices heard. But the fake news told you he incited the mob and told them to mount a coup to overthrow the government. Why did the fake news say that? They said that because the fake news is well, fake. Today's so-called "news" media is the enemy of the truth. And that makes them the enemy of the people.
Now in that speech, Trump did falsely say that Vice President Mike Pence had the authority - on his own - to reject certified electors. I don't know who told Trump that, but it is absolutely untrue. And he was wrong about how his big leads on election night being whittled away is proof of fraud. It was expected that Trump's percentage of the vote would peak on election night and then decline as vote-by-mail ballots were counted in the days after. I wrote about that too. Everyone paying attention knew the election night peak would happen. We didn't know it would be a lead. And we didn't know it would then be less than Biden's percentage. But we knew election night would be Trump's peak. So I don't know why the President keeps citing that as evidence of fraud. And frankly, as I've been saying all along, the stronger argument is not that there was fraud because there can be a rebuttal to the fraud allegations. I'm not saying fraud didn't happen. I'm saying the claim that it did can be rebutted. A counterargument can be made that it didn't happen.
That is why the focus should have been on the constitutionality of the election processes instead. Because those processes are not disputed. Those processes are established facts that everyone knows happened, so there is no rebuttal. The only argument in response is that "yes, those processes happened, but they were not unconstitutional." But nobody can say they didn't happen. Last week, I spent the first half of the show explaining those processes that I believe were unconstitutional.
But the President's claim that his election night lead going away proves fraud is nonsense. And I wish he'd quit making it because it weakens his credibility and detracts from the real arguments that should be made. In his January 6th speech he did cite the unconstitutional manner that many states conducted their elections. But he should have been making those constitutional arguments since election day.
So if Democrats think Donald Trump's words asked for violence, do they think the following words asked for violence?
“You can’t be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for and what you care for." - Hillary Clinton
“Michelle (Obama) always says, ‘When they go low, we go high.' No. No. When they go low, we kick 'em. That's what this new Democratic Party is about." - Attorney General Eric Holder
"You have to be ready to take a punch. You got to be ready to take a punch. And therefore you have to be ready to throw a punch." - Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
"I don’t think, even in states where Donald Trump won big, that it does you any good running away from Donald Trump. I think you need to go back and punch him in the face. I mean the truth is this guy is bad for this country." - Senator Jon Tester (D-MT)
"We will challenge him in every way that we can. We'll challenge him here in Congress. We'll challenge him in the courts. We'll challenge him on the streets and protests. We'll do everything that we can to push back on what the President does." - Congressman Joaquin Castro (D-TX)
"Let’s stay the course. Let's make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd, and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” - Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA)
"That's my call to action here. Please don't just come here today and then go home. Go to the Hill today. Get up and - please! Get up in the face of some Congresspeople." - Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ)
"I just don’t even know why there aren’t uprisings all over the country, and maybe there will be when people realize that this is a policy that they defend” - Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
Now, if you go fact check those quotes, the so-called "fact-checkers" in Big Media, who have so much advocacy bias that they misrepresent real facts in such a manner as to claim they're false, will tell you all those quotes were taken out of context. Or they'll tell you the Democrats were speaking figuratively not literally. And that much is true - at least for some of them. But Maxine Waters was instructing her sycophantic supporters to LITERALLY harass Republicans. Corey Booker was telling the protesters to LITERALLY "Get up in the face of some Congresspeople." But when Donald Trump says the word "fight," as in "if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore," the lying Democrats in Congress and in the press say that Trump meant to literally "fight" as in "go to war with machine guns and kill everyone on the other side."
If it was just inflammatory rhetoric by the Democrats, we could dismiss it as typical Democrat dishonesty amplified by their allies in the propaganda press. The President used the word "fight" in the exact same way other politicians ask their supporters to fight for the cause. He in no way asked for violence. In fact, he asked for exactly the opposite when he asked the crowd to march "over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."
But they impeached the President over it! And the narrative going forward for at least the next decade, and probably longer, will be that the Republican Party is the party of armed insurrection that tried to overthrow the government of the United States, so don't vote for any of 'em. They're traitors. They're the party of sedition, of violence, of rioters, of Nazi soldiers following illegal orders from party leaders.
The Democrats and the media will misrepresent and weaponize those words for the next generation. And because Republicans are weak and cowardly, they won't push back on that false narrative. Instead, they'll cower in the corner and push each other under the bus saying THAT Republican is a seditious traitor but not me! Please reelect me. Please. Please. Pretty please. And it won't work. The damage to the Republican Party that that breach of The Capitol and the gross misrepresentation of its cause is immense. And because the party failed to push back on the lies that were told about the riot and reasons for it, the damage to the party will be severe and perhaps irreparable.
And it is all based upon lies. Democrats lied about what Donald Trump said. And they lied about what Republican lawmakers did. When Republicans objected to accepting some Electoral College votes, Democrats accused them of sedition and called them traitors. But when Democrats did THE EXACT SAME THING and objected to Ohio's Electoral College votes in 2005, it was "saving our democracy!"
Democrat hypocrisy and double standards are nothing new. If it wasn't for double standards, Democrats would have no standards at all; not just in what they say, but also in what they do.
Democrats are dangerous enemies of our Republic.
ADDENDUM ADDED January 20, 2021 6:13pm:
Now that Donald Trump is a former president, the House should not transmit the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate. But if they do, the Senate should dismiss them.
Impeachment is a process to remove officials from office. If they are no longer in office, they are private citizens who are not subject to impeachment.
In 1876, the House impeached President Grant's Secretary of War William Belknap after he left office. The Senate acquitted him. But had Belknap sued, the Court would almost certainly have invalidated the impeachment as unconstitutional.