NOTE FROM NORM: A Threat to Peace and Prosperity

“I’m not for impeachment. This is news. I’m going to give you some news right now because I haven’t said this to any press person before. But since you asked, and I’ve been thinking about this: Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.”

Washington Post, March 11, 2019

Oh, what a difference a few months make in the life of American politics!

Speaker Nancy Pelosi could not have been clearer about her sentiments when interviewed in March that the process of impeachment would need to be so compelling – overwhelming – and bipartisan – or it would divide the country.

I guess a vote in which not a single Republican voted for impeachment – and three vulnerable Democrats joined them – is bipartisan in the eyes of Speaker Pelosi.

Egged on by the extreme left in her caucus – and let’s be honest, there’s not much left in that caucus but the extreme left, Pelosi moved from her powerfully conclusive statement that “I’m not for impeachment.”

Now that she and the Caucus she leads has impeached the President she is doubling down with her obvious partisan escapades.

She is refusing to send the matter to the United States Senate because of her concern about a fair and impartial trial.

Let that sink in for a minute.

This is the leader of the same Democratic Caucus that prayed Robert Mueller would come up with a compelling case to impeach the President that they held him up as a paragon of legal virtue in a sea of partisan hacks.

When he didn’t produce what they wanted, and needed, to justify his impeachment they were deflated.

Until they heard the President had a phone call with the President of Ukraine and a couple of people who heard the call or heard from those who said they heard the call claimed the President did something completely dastardly!

He asked a foreign leader who was about to receive hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds to investigate corruption.

Of course, Democrats poised to impeach the President didn’t need to wait for the facts.

They pounced.  They made it clear that what he had done was so egregious he must be removed from office.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler barely broke a sweat in pivoting from their failed hope for a Mueller indictment as an excuse to impeach the President to a phone call as being their rationale for impeaching him.

There was no presumption of innocence in their process.  Not a whit.

It takes little effort to google Democrats who have been calling for the President’s removal from office before the body of the 2016 Presidential Election was cold.

It’s been a sustained murmur ever since that has now grown into a partisan roar.

So much so that when Speaker Pelosi suggests that she will not forward the impeachment to the Senate because she wants to know how a trial will be conducted on has to admire her chutzpah.

First and foremost, if the case is as compelling as she and her colleagues claim it is why doesn’t she simply send the records of hearings to the Senate and let them review the details behind the Democrats reasons for voting to impeach the President?

Second, the House of Representatives has completed its constitutionally assigned role in the process.

The Speaker of the House doesn’t get to dictate the terms of how the Senate will proceed with regards to the Articles of Impeachment passed by the House.

I imagine that Pelosi and the hundreds of Democrats who voted for impeachment are seeing that nothing they have attempted to prove since September has justified the enormous amount of taxpayer dollars, they have expended to prove the President guilty of something – anything.

As we prepare to enter the New Year it is important to remember that the United States is at peace with the world.  Our economy is strong and Americans income has grown as our employment base has since 2016.  We are making progress on international trade, focusing on working with our allies and doing all we can diplomatically to reason with our enemies.

Democrats would prefer you follow their logic that the President’s phone call to a foreign leader is the greatest threat to our nation’s peace and prosperity.

For the millions of Americans working – those in the stock market whose retirements have grown – and businesses that are seeing a President fight for balanced trade policies – and the millions more who feel their lives are better off today than they were nearly four years ago – it’s not a phone call that is the greatest threat to our nation’s peace and prosperity.

It’s a flawed and partisan impeachment process.