As he stood on the Senate floor at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Rep. Jerry Nadler declared that he and his colleagues “will now attempt to tell you the story” behind their impeachment charges. Immediately, hearts sank and televisions went dark across America.
It was only Day Two of the Senate trial and already Democrats were repeating themselves. In fact, they were repeating their repetitions. What’s left to say?
Not much, but that won’t stop them from saying it. Again and again and again.
Nadler’s turn to put his audience to sleep followed three painful hours of listening to Rep. Adam Schiff
plowing the same ground repeatedly, which followed more than six hours of similar arguments Tuesday. And under Senate rules, they still had 21 hours to go!
Their overkill oughta be an impeachable offense. And isn’t torture prohibited by the Geneva Convention?
Allow me to outline the Dems’ dilemma. I’ll be brief.
They don’t have much to work with. That’s their entire problem right there.
Anybody who cares to know what all the Washington fuss is about has known for months the outlines of their charge that President Trump did something very, very bad in his dealings with Ukraine.
If the particulars of the case escape you, that’s because they’re so small.
But to admit as much would mean Dems have no case at all.
And without a case, they have no election campaign, no donors, no hope of beating Trump and taking the Senate.
Then the crazy wing of the party — which is now pretty much the whole party — would dump them for 200 clones of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Their key strategy is a version of the Big Whopper. If something is false, saying it over and over can make it sound true to some. Because the nation is so evenly polarized, they don’t have to fool all the people, just enough to swing the election.
The other sneaky feature of their case is language inflation. Obviously aware that the two articles they filed are weak, do not allege actual crimes and are headed to certain failure, Schiff and Nadler are raising the ante with sheer exaggeration.
Schiff foolishly claimed, for example, that the brief hold on arms for Ukraine last summer “sacrificed the security not only of our European allies but also our nation’s core national security interests.”
You would think even a shred of honesty would compel him to admit that Barack Obama never gave Ukraine the lethal arms that Trump has — but you would be overestimating Schiff.
“If this conduct is not impeachable, nothing is,” Schiff said, a strange claim since he didn’t actually accuse Trump of committing the Constitution’s defining words of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
Their inflation also included the destructive insistence that Trump must be removed now because he will cheat in the November election. In fact, both Schiff and Nadler seem to have just recently concluded that what they call the “entire scheme” was part of a plan to cheat by damaging Joe Biden.
That logic led Schiff to say that the election cannot be allowed to decide Trump’s fate because “we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won.”
Thus, the party that has spent three years insisting the 2016 election was illegitimate has now served warning that it will make the same charge about November if Trump wins again.
Also, impeachment trials are fair only when Dems get their way, despite being the Senate’s minority party. Their appeal to the GOP majority is simple: Let in all the witnesses and documents we want, or we will accuse you of a corrupt cover-up.
Any Republicans hoping to meet them halfway are deluding themselves. Today’s Democrats don’t believe in compromise or even honest disagreement.
No comments:
Post a Comment