An Impeachment That Will Last Forever Requires The Targeting Of Every Congressional Democrat Forever

17 01 2020

The Democratic Party and America’s far-Left must be decimated, never to rise again. And yes, lots of us began as Democrats, but will never vote for one again.

Jennie Taer has written at saraacarter.com:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is moving forward with the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump[,] announcing Wednesday the House managers who will transmit the articles to the Senate in what she called “an impeachment that will last forever.”

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA), House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), House Administration Committee Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Rep. Val Demings (D-FL), Jason Crow (D-CO), Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX) will assume the managerial roles.

“The emphasis is on litigators, the emphasis is on comfort level in the court room, the emphasis is on making the strongest possible case to protect and defend our constitution, to seek the truth for the American people,” Pelosi said.

“I’m very proud and honored that these seven members, distinguished members, have accepted this serious responsibility, again, to protect and defend for the people defending our Democracy.

The House is also set to hold a vote later Wednesday on finalizing the transmission of the articles to the Senate for a full trial.

In anticipation of Pelosi’s move today, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters Tuesday that the trial will likely begin next Tuesday in the Senate.

“The House is likely to finally send the articles over to us tomorrow and we’ll be able to . . . in all likelihood go through some preliminary steps here this week which could well include the chief justice coming over and swearing in members of the Senate and some other kind of housekeeping measures,” Sen. McConnell said.

“We hope to be able to achieve that by consent which would set us up to begin the actual trial next Tuesday.”[2]

This coup has been in the works for at least three years.[3]

Every one of the House managers must wear a target on his or her back. It must be “open season” with respect to each of them, as well as all Democrats in the Congress who are pursuing the farce of President Donald Trump’s impeachment. After all, he was cleared by former FBI Director Robert Mueller and his staff of zealous, Leftist, senior prosecutors. However, it is the goal of the thoroughly-evil Democrats now to reverse the election results of 2016. This is treason, punishable by death.

Indeed, the un-American racist and anti-Semite Barack Obama and his fellow co-conspirators sought to destroy the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump from Day One, and they continue to do so. In the history of our great nation, it is doubtful that there have been any acts that rose to this level of sedition and treason except during our Civil War, when many or most of the traitors paid with their lives. The same thing must happen now, beginning with Barack Obama.[4] Nothing less will suffice.

[1] Timothy D. Naegele was counsel to the United States Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and chief of staff to Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal recipient and former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass). He and his firm, Timothy D. Naegele & Associates, specialize in Banking and Financial Institutions Law, Internet Law, Litigation and other matters (see www.naegele.com and https://naegeleblog.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/timothy-d.-naegele-resume-20-1-1.pdf). He has an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as two law degrees from the School of Law (Boalt Hall), University of California, Berkeley, and from Georgetown University. He served as a Captain in the U.S. Army, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, where he received the Joint Service Commendation Medal (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commendation_Medal#Joint_Service). Mr. Naegele is an Independent politically; and he is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Law, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business. He has written extensively over the years (see, e.g., www.naegele.com/whats_new.html#articles), and can be contacted directly at tdnaegele.associates@gmail.com

[2] See https://saraacarter.com/an-impeachment-that-will-last-forever-pelosi-announces-impeachment-managers/ (“‘An Impeachment That Will Last Forever’: Pelosi Announces Impeachment Managers”); see also https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7895585/Donald-Trumps-trial-begins-Articles-impeachment-read-Senate.html (“Donald Trump’s trial begins: Senate hears impeachment articles”) and https://buchanan.org/blog/a-malicious-indictment-mitch-should-toss-out-138043 (“A Malicious Indictment Mitch Should Toss Out”—“The impeachment of Donald Trump is the fruit of a malicious prosecution whose roots go back to the 2016 election, in the aftermath of which stunned liberals and Democrats began to plot the removal of the new president. This coup has been in the works for three years. . . . [T]he articles of impeachment on which the Judiciary Committee and the House voted do not contain a single crime required by the Constitution for impeachment and removal. There is no charge of treason, no charge of bribery or ‘other high crimes and misdemeanors.’ . . . [T]here is no debate on how the Senate Democrats intend to vote — 100% for removal of a president they fear they may not be able to defeat. . . . [T]he forum to be entrusted with the decision of ‘should Trump go?’ is not a deeply polarized Senate, but with those the Founding Fathers entrusted with such decisions — the American people. . . . Mitch McConnell should let the House managers make their case, and then call for a vote to dismiss, and treat this indictment with the contempt it so richly deserves”) and https://www.newsmax.com/politics/lindsey-graham-senate-trial/2020/01/16/id/950054/ (“Lindsey Graham Predicts ‘Bipartisan Acquittal’ in Impeachment Trial”)

[3] See supra n.2.

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Date : January 17, 2020
Tags: banking, Banking Committee, Barack Hussein Obama, black racist Barack Obama, Committee on Banking, Congress, coup, Democrat, Democratic Party, Democrats, Democrats are evil, far-Left, impeachment, President Barack Obama, Senate Banking, Senate Banking Committee, Senate Committee on Banking, Tim Naegele, Timothy D. Naegele, Timothy Naegele, Trump impeachment, U.S. Committee on Banking, U.S. Senate Banking Committee, United States Senate Committee on Banking Housing and Urban Affairs
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6 responses

17 01 2020: Ron (06:43:56) :

Great to hear from you, Tim! Your piece is perfect. The only question is, how?

Best,

Ron

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17 01 2020: Timothy D. Naegele (07:00:49) :

Thanks so much, Ron; and how nice to hear from you.

I assume the “how” question relates to how “[e]very Congressional Democrat [can be targeted f]orever.”

It remains to be seen, but two issues may converge and produce that result or something approximating it. First, the Dems don’t have a viable candidate for the presidency. Both Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are too old, and “over the hill.” The others are pygmies, misfits and/or damaged goods.

Second, Americans were fed up with the Clinton impeachment. I doubt there will be much traction or receptivity regarding this one, especially after Robert Mueller and his crew of Democratic partisans came up empty handed. If any wrongdoing had existed, they would have trumpeted it to the world.

Third, if Trump wins reelection handily, the Democratic Party may be in disarray and engage in the blame game; and yes, some will be targeted for defeat.

Thus, my guess is that Americans, by and large, will view the latest impeachment efforts as political theater at best, and merely part of the 2020 campaign.

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17 01 2020: H. Craig Bradley (11:10:18) :

Barack Obama’s Mansion in Chicago is unapproachable to the general public. Nobody can get to him and he has plenty of security, as well. Nothing more can happen.

I am not quite sure what the response of the voter’s will be regarding this sham Impeachment. I suspect head inquisitioner, Rep. Adam Schiff, will be challenged by a Republican, but in Glendale, few if any Republicans or conservatives have much of a chance at winning any public office (Ditto with Calif.)

Politics follows economics. So, let me make a bold prediction:

A Republican might be elected as Gov. in California, but only after the next bear market and recession destroys the State’s budgets, taxes are significantly raised on the Middle Classes, and CALPERS goes under ( unable to continue to pay promised benefits without a Federal Bailout). After the next financial or economic crisis, no Democrat will be electable for many years. Until then, its corruption and incompetence on steroids.

Upcoming new tax proposals for Californians Ballot Measures for Nov.):

– Repeal of Prop. 13 on Commercial Properties, including those in trusts or in a Corporate structure.
-New California Inheritance Tax of 40% on Assets above $5 Million Dollars
-Possibly a New “Wealth Tax” or “Exit Tax”, as New Jersey currently has ( 3% Exit Tax levied upon the sale of real estate where the owner moves to Florida or another State)

Yep, Democrats in Congress and State Governments will be around until the next financial crisis. Then they give the mess they made to a Republican and cynically say: “Try to Fix This”.

REF:

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/taxes/tax-proposals-rising-in-california-again/

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17 01 2020: Timothy D. Naegele (11:32:54) :

Thank you, Craig, for your comments.

First, Barack and Moochie live in Washington, D.C., and have done so since his presidency ended. Their daughters went to school there.

See, e.g., Kalorama (Washington, D.C.) – Wikipedia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalorama_(Washington,_D.C.)

Second, they have been purchasing a property on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, where they have vacationed for many years.

Third, you may be correct about what it will take to “dislodge” the Democrats politically in California.

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18 01 2020: Timothy D. Naegele (03:22:31) :

The Democratic House, Not President Trump, Will Be Permanently Scarred by Impeachment [UPDATED]

This is the conclusion reached by former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Newt Gingrich:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi seemed giddy as she announced the impeachment managers who would go to the Senate and attempt to prosecute a case against President Donald Trump.

She said “He’s been impeached forever. They can never erase that.”

However, Pelosi has it exactly backward. The Senate is going to refuse to convict President Trump. He will be exonerated, and she and the Democrats will be condemned by history.

The wide repudiation of the House Democratic betrayal of the Constitution is already beginning. As a historian myself, I think it’s important to document these reactions.

Consider historian Victor Davis Hanson’s analysis for the National Review, which was subtitled: “The new normal: Impeachment as a routine partisan tool, endless investigations, lying under oath with impunity, surveillance of political enemies, zero accountability.”

This is hardly an endorsement of Pelosi’s trivialization of the Constitution.

Abraham Lincoln scholar and highly respected historian Allen Guelzo asserted in The Wall Street Journal:

“[Charles] Pinckney and [Rufus] King might have been right in 1787. Americans prefer to choose their presidents with elections, and whenever impeachment is used in an attempt to nullify those choices, the results aren’t happy for anyone. That was true in 1868, and as both Andrew Johnson and his accusers might warn us, it remains true after a century and a half.”

Clearly, Pelosi did not know enough history to understand the warnings of Pinckney and King – or the sad end of the impeachment process against President Johnson.

When Interviewed by Arun Rath, Harvard law professor and ACLU liberal Alan Dershowitz commented:

“[Alexander] Hamilton said that the greatest danger would be an impeachment that was based on who had the most votes in the House or removal based on who had the most votes in the Senate. And that’s precisely what we’re seeing happen, and the reason we’re seeing it is because of the use of open-ended criteria. Every controversial president since John Adams has been accused of abuse of power. And obstruction of Congress? That’s part of our system of checks and balances. Right now, it seems like Nancy Pelosi is trying to obstruct the Senate by delaying furthering the articles of impeachment. . . . So I think the House of Representatives violated the Constitution when they impeached him on these two grounds.”

When interviewed by Congress, Law Professor Jonathan Turley warned:

“One can oppose President Trump’s policies or actions but still conclude that the current legal case for impeachment is not just woefully inadequate, but in some respects, dangerous, as the basis for the impeachment of an American president.”

So, from these perspectives, it is Pelosi – not Trump – who threatens to undermine the Constitution.

As former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy pointed out on Fox News, the Pelosi strategy is simply to “bruise President Trump with an unending stream of new impeachment allegations” in order to hurt his chances at re-election. McCarthy added, “[a]fter over 230 years, we have entered the era of partisan impeachment that the Framers feared. This is what it looks like.”

So, McCarthy sees Pelosi behaving in exactly the unconstitutional and narrowly partisan manner the writers of the Constitution hoped to avoid. Again, it is Pelosi – not Trump – who is undermining the Constitution.

In addition, The New York Post’s editorial board noted that “Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff has been lying to the world for years in his nonstop campaign to smear President Trump.” Their judgement is that it is Schiff – and not Trump – who has been a continuous serial liar.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board summarized the disaster of Pelosi’s bid to delay sending the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate, saying her move “further exposes how Democrats have defined impeachment down. The House hearings blocked GOP witnesses and limited cross-examination. Despite selective leaks and a pro-impeachment media, they failed to move public opinion or persuade Republicans that Mr. Trump committed impeachable offenses.”

The WSJ editorial board went on to call Democrats’ actions “an abuse of the impeachment power” and reiterated that the things alleged in the Articles of Impeachment “aren’t close to impeachable.”

Madison Gesiotto in the Hill called this “the flimsiest and most partisan impeachment in history.”

In fact, as Pelosi played games with appointing managers, even senior Democrats began to lose patience. “The longer it goes on the less urgent it becomes,” Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein told reporters. “If it is serious and urgent, send them over. If it is not, do not send it over.”

Republican Senator Susan Collins suggested that the delays were wrong. As she put it, “[d]oesn’t that suggest that the House did an incomplete job, then?”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell neatly summarized the Democrat House-created calamity in his floor statement on Thursday, saying “[i]t was a transparently partisan performance from beginning to end.”

McConnell went on to remind the country of the Founding Fathers’ fears of exactly the kind of narrow bitter partisanship Pelosi has been displaying. Paraphrasing Hamilton, McConnell warned that “blinded by factionalism, the House of Representatives would abuse the power of impeachment to serve nakedly partisan goals rather than the long-term interests of the American people and their Republic.”

Finally, it’s clear the House Democrats have failed utterly to live up to the standard of prosecution set out by former Associate Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (who served as chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials). Jackson cautioned the Conference of United States Attorneys on April 1, 1940:

“With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm-in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.”

So, no, Nancy. President Trump does not have to fear the judgement of history on this impeachment effort.

The judgement of history is going to be that a group of scoundrels in control of the US House of Representatives placed partisan interests above the country, undermined the Constitution, weakened America in the world, and lied about the duly elected President of the United States.

This will become Pelosi’s moment of shame, and Trump’s moment of redemption.

See https://www.gingrich360.com/2020/01/the-democratic-house-not-president-trump-will-be-permanently-scarred-by-impeachment/ (emphasis added); see also https://www.nysun.com/editorials/impeachment-101-the-clinton-precedent/90977/ (“Impeachment 101: The Clinton Precedent“)

Historian—and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the author of The Case for Trump—Victor Davis Hanson’s analysis for the National Review to which Gingrich referred states:

The Left sees Donald Trump’s comportment, rallies, and tweets as a new low in presidential behavior that justifies extraordinary countermeasures. But Trump’s personal characteristics are idiosyncratic and may or may not become institutionalized by subsequent presidents. And it is not as if liberal icons such as FDR, LBJ, JFK, and Bill Clinton suddenly became saintly in office.

What is far scarier is the reaction to Trump, in both the constitutional and political sense. What follows are likely the new norms for the next generation of presidents, and they will probably be equally applied to Democrats who implemented them in the Trump era.

1) Private presidential phone calls with foreign leaders will be leaked and printed in the major media. The point will be not so much to air breaking news as to embarrass the president or to use such disclosures to stymie his foreign policy. Those who leak such information will be canonized as part of a “resistance.” Prominent officials in government will publish anonymous op-eds in the New York Times bragging about how they are daily undermining a new president’s administration.

2) Impeachment is now a casual affair. It requires no report of illegal or unethical behavior by a special counsel or special prosecutor. It will not be bipartisan but solely the action of the opposition party in the House when it is in the majority.

Public support will not matter. Much less will it be needed. Impeachment will be applied equally to a first- or second-term presidency. And it will become useful in a reelection year to help drive down an incumbent’s popularity.

Even when there is no chance of conviction in the Senate — as when the impeachment indictment is weak and the president’s own party controls the upper House — impeachment will nonetheless proceed, because it is now seen as a banal, politicized vote of no confidence and thus an occasionally useful political tool.

There will be no time limit on or shelf life of a successful impeachment. Once a president is impeached, the writ may simply sit until the House majority feels that the climate or polls are ripe to refer the articles to the Senate for trial, whether in days, weeks, months, or years. The writ’s clauses entailing supposed wrongdoing may post facto grow or shrink as news headlines and presidential popularity gyrate. Impeachment will begin not with a Judiciary Committee but with a House Intelligence Committee, whose chair will decide rules of cross-examination and witness appearances in secret in the basement of the House. Information will be selectively released to the media by the chair of the House Intelligence Committee alone to massage impeachment momentum.

3) There will be no need to specify “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” in any impeachment writ against a president. “Obstruction” and the “abuse of power” will do well enough. Either can be defined largely in terms of ongoing policy differences with the opposition party. Obstructing the opposition’s effort to impeach a president and abort his agenda is now an abuse of power.

4) Special counsels and special prosecutors are now irrelevant. Their appointment will be seen as patently political if not redundant. If such ossified appointees find no evidence of presidential wrongdoing, it will not matter, because their appointments were always designed foremost to embarrass and weaken a president and detract from his role as chief executive rather than find concrete evidence of wrongdoing. Whatever data they find can be used for political advantage, even if it is contradicted by the special counsels’ own eventual conclusions. The key for a special prosecutor will be to draw out the investigation — in terms of time, money, and resources — and serve, in the manner of the new definition of impeachment, as a sword of Damocles over the president’s head.

5) The Washington top echelon of the CIA, FBI, and NSA will be largely immune from oversight. If they wish to spy on a presidential candidate or curtail the options of a sitting president, they will easily use their powers of surveillance, leaking, and spying for political purposes — purposes mostly defined as protecting the status quo of the permanent government. Upon retirement, such intelligence heads will retain their security clearances and use this inside access to obtain lucrative analyst billets on cable news channels deemed hostile to the incumbent administration. No one will care much when an FBI or CIA director lies under oath to Congress. There will be no indictments when high intelligence officials deliberately mislead federal courts, lie to federal investigators and the public, and conspire to derail political campaigns.

6) Reverse targeting of political opponents will be the normal behavior of intelligence agencies working closely with an incumbent lame-duck administration. Political rivals and opponents can be surveilled by warrants that are aimed nominally at third-party targets. The names of surveilled political opponents then can be unmasked when presidential appointees request it — the more unmaskings, and the more extraneous they are, the better. And the ensuing information will be leaked to the popular press with impunity.

7) The media, like academia and Hollywood, are now an extension of the progressive party. The recalibrated education and entertainment industries are expected, as part of their job security, to aid liberal agendas, with no need to worry that they’ll lose their reputations as disinterested and unbiased institutions. There is no longer any such thing as being unbiased. The new mantra is that everyone and all outlets have points of view, so we might as well recognize that there is nothing wrong in expressing and promoting them for political and ideological advantage.

8) Presidential candidates can hire foreign nationals to aid their campaign by collecting embarrassing innuendo and rumor — almost always false — and then use both high government officials and members of the Washington and New York media to disseminate and publicize damaging rumors about a political rival. This gambit will work especially during the latter months of an election campaign, during a presidential transition, and in the early months of a nascent presidency when it is not fully adjusted to Washington protocol and therefore deemed especially vulnerable. The protocol will be to create three or four firewalls between the hit team and the candidate, feed the “research” to the DOJ, FBI, and CIA, and seed it in the media — in essence using foreign sources to smear a rival campaign while accusing one’s opponent of doing exactly that.

9) FISA courts will favor status quo government narratives, especially in matters of controversial candidates and political races. We should assume that the federal courts will believe almost anything the FBI and DOJ present as evidence in their bid to obtain permission from the court to spy on political candidates and presidents. Such surveillance will become commonplace, and the court will think there is nothing particularly wrong with filing incomplete, misleading, or untrue documents in support of surveillance requests, given the general consensus that unorthodox presidential candidates and presidents must be stymied.

10) Whistleblowers never need to be identified. They need not have any firsthand knowledge of any wrongdoing. They need not contact the relevant inspector general to first file their grievance. Rather, they will work with the opposition party in Congress to help craft complaints and forge strategies that might lead to impeachment inquiries.

This is the new political climate. It is obvious that both George W. Bush and Barack Obama could easily have been impeached under such protocols after they lost their party’s majority in the House of Representative. From now on, their successors will likely enjoy no such exemptions.

We are now on new anti-constitutional grounds, and the United States will probably never return to the constitutional customs and traditions of its first 233 years. The architects of this revolution were not arrayed in sunglasses and epaulets, or in business suits and wing tips, with briefcases. They were hip, cool, and progressive, and they boasted that they did all of this for us, the proverbial people, to cheers from cultural icons, media heavyweights, and those with advanced degrees.

The United States, at least as we knew it, came to an end, not with a loud right-wing bang, but with an insidious progressive whimper.

See https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/new-post-trump-constitution-partisan-impeachment-endless-investigations/ (“The New Post-Trump Constitution“) (emphasis added)

As I have written previously, the Democrats are “evil” but smart, while the Republicans are “Neanderthals” and dumb. This is the conclusion that I reached when I left the U.S. Senate, and it rings true to this day.

Legalese aside, will the Democrats end up effectively rewriting the Constitution de facto, and destroying the Trump presidency? Will things get out of hand, and will the Democrats and their far-Left cohorts in the media prevail? Will they outsmart the Republicans?

It did not happen in the case of Robert Mueller. Will it happen here though? Or will the President be damaged politically to such an extent that he is not reelected? Or if he is, will the Democrats continue their “crusade” to destroy his presidency, just as they did with Richard Nixon?

I have highlighted what Hanson has written because it rings true to me. Gingrich is “old school,” and may not grasp fully the new “reality” in American politics. It is vicious, and it is evil. How did it happen? Because neither the Clintons nor Barack Obama have been held accountable for their criminality. And the same thing is true of their treasonous co-conspirators, like Brennan and Clapper.

If Hanson is correct, there may be blood in the streets of America, as our second Civil War erupts—which may be what Gingrich was saying implicitly when he wrote that the Democrats “will be permanently scarred.” Will the Trump faithful go silently like sheep, having witnessed firsthand the destruction of the presidency that they elected?

Time will tell. History is being written, about the future of the United States and of the West. Russia’s killer Putin is writing his own history, as these events unfold in Washington. But as I have written before, Putinism dies with Putin.

See, e.g., https://www.rt.com/russia/478340-government-resigns-russia-putin-medvedev/ (“Russian government resigns after President Putin’s state-of-the-nation address proposes changes to the constitution“) and https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7890489/Russian-prime-minister-Dmitry-Medvedev-resigns.html (“Putin’s power grab: Russian President sets himself up to rule for LIFE by announcing reforms“) and https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2015/11/29/the-death-of-putin-and-russia-the-final-chapter-of-the-cold-war/ (“The Death Of Putin And Russia: The Final Chapter Of The Cold War“)

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23 01 2020: Timothy D. Naegele (02:42:06) :

End Impeachment’s Government Shutdown

This is the title of an article by Mark Penn—who served as pollster and adviser to former President Bill Clinton from 1995 to 2000, including during Clinton’s impeachment:

We are facing an impeachment shutdown — the road-blocking of all our government’s institutions for an impeachment that is going nowhere. It will inflame passions, divide our country further and accomplish nothing of any significance.

The cast is now complete with shady characters, wronged bureaucrats and impeachment prosecutors preening for their close-ups on national TV.

As in 1998 and 1999, there is going to be a reckoning when this is all over. I helped to defend President Clinton when the country wasted time then on another impeachment that went nowhere. The president certainly was not innocent of all of the accusations, and he lost his law license and paid significant fines for his actions, but impeachment was rejected and his hold on the presidency affirmed. His ratings soared.

Like them or not, presidents uniquely represent the elected will of the people. As such, their removal is not just about the removal of a person but the overturning of that elected will. For that reason, there are few offenses that will be so grievous as to cause the party in power to give up their party’s leader and convict a president; most charges, even if true, won’t reach that high bar for removal. Clearly, the accusations in 1998 and 1999 did not meet that threshold, and neither do the charges today.

The first count of the two articles of impeachment against President Trump accuses the president of abuse of power by withholding aid in an attempt to force Ukraine to look into possible corruption on the part of Joe and Hunter Biden. He is called corrupt in motive for asking for an investigation of potential corruption over questions that had been raised in the New York Times, Politico, The New Yorker and other media outlets.

Bringing this up on a call to the president of Ukraine was probably a boneheaded thing to do, but not an impeachable one. Aid was not actually held up. No investigation was ordered. The president of Ukraine and other Ukrainian officials deny that any pressure was applied to them. Trump’s overall policy was, in fact, far more helpful to the Ukrainians than President Obama’s policies that denied them much aid for weapons. There was and is no urgent threat to the national security of the United States.

There is definitely something about all this that the American public doesn’t like, that reasonable people can judge as wrong, but that is quite different than removing a president from office through a process designed to use impeachment as a political vehicle. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) was not a truth-seeker — he is on tape soliciting naked pictures of Trump, and he repeatedly exaggerated evidence against Trump over the last three years. He was simply a weapon jamming through impeachment and ignoring fair procedure or legal process.

The last few days in the media have underscored this bias with the release of material from Lev Parnas, who — like Christopher Steele and his dossier before him, or like Michael Avenatti, now out on bail — is a questionable character with obviously wild claims for which he has no proof, including claims against Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr, whom Parnas has never met. It was a political dirty trick to release his information and him on the eve of the Senate impeachment trial, and this act alone would have gotten any real prosecutor’s case thrown out.

The second article of impeachment — obstruction of the House by the assertion of executive privilege — is, in my view, wholly without merit. Despite endless allegations of lawlessness, this administration has implemented every court ruling it has lost without exception. Asserting executive privilege is not the same as paying hush money or suborning perjury, as was alleged in the Clinton and Nixon impeachment efforts. President Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, frequently asserted privilege in response to investigations and Holder was even held in contempt of Congress, a resolution he promptly ignored.

This article should be immediately dismissed, as there is really no factual basis for it at all, especially since the House deliberately avoided allowing the president to adjudicate the claims in court by failing to subpoena witnesses or withdrawing subpoenas from witnesses who challenged them in court.

We live in a country in which people have the rosiest view of their own personal lives that I have ever recorded while, at the same time, they have the dimmest view of their political figures and institutions. Congress has a 23 percent approval rating, and majorities dislike the Democrats, the Republicans and the president. They are now tearing each other apart in a process that will have no tangible benefit for the voters, and our parties and our democracy will all look worse when this thing is over.

Yes, there will be a reckoning for the unsuccessful litigant here, although the Democrats have been brilliant in elevating this matter, bringing together their caucus, dominating the news media and engineering parliamentary maneuvers to their advantage. Imagine if all of this energy had been put into fixing health care or immigration; they would be light years ahead of the Republicans, rather than facing a possible electoral boomerang when all this fails.

But impeachments have hidden costs, which is a strong reason I have consistently opposed them. In 1998 I received a 2 a.m. call from President Clinton, asking me if he should send some missiles to “get a really bad dude” or would it seem like he was doing it to divert attention from impeachment; he fired the missiles, but they missed Osama bin Laden. Perhaps if he had gotten bin Laden, there might not have been a 9/11. In contrast, the successful attack on Iranian general Qassem Solemaini, who was declared a terrorist by the Obama administration, during the Trump impeachment battle has been met with exactly the kind of skepticism that Clinton feared in 1998 and, as a country, we showed division rather than unity against our No. 1 foe, Iran.

History, it seems, does repeat itself. George Washington’s farewell address about the excesses of partisanship was never truer than today. As America’s only truly independent president, Washington predicted that the growth of factionalism would undermine the execution of our laws and that the “alternate domination” of one party over another would lead to efforts to “exact revenge” and “raise false alarms.”

Let us not forget that the Trump administration suffered through a two-year special counsel investigation based almost entirely on opposition research from the other party, and that this imbroglio stems from the other party believing it had now in turn found information that would turn the political tables. It is all exactly as George Washington foretold.

We need to end this quickly, get back to the business of the country, and then have an election.

See https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/479109-end-the-impeachment-shutdown (emphasis added)

It is time to bury the Congressional Democrats, so they never rise again, just like the forces arrayed against the Union were buried quite literally by Abraham Lincoln and Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman.

See, e.g., https://naegeleblog.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/ulysses-s-grant-an-american-hero/ (“Ulysses S. Grant: An American Hero“)

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