My general reaction to the impeachment is that Democrats were planning to impeach him before he even took office, and there was enormous pressure from their base to find some way to impeach him. So they did.
There are a lot of disturbing aspects to this story, and one that is very encouraging.
On the disturbing side, I’d list these.
Even though there’s some requirement that the U.S. investigate corruption in the Ukraine, and even though it would be reasonable to withhold aid pending action on that front, the fact that Biden was a potential opponent of Trump in an election makes Trump’s actions troubling. That’s the sort of conflict of interest that you recuse yourself from.
However, if something like that is impeachable, I suspect every president would have been impeached.
Also, I believe Obama (mis)used the power of the presidency to investigate and obstruct Trump, and not enough attention has been paid to that. We’ve been distracted with this Russia nonsense.
The abuse of the FISA court was outrageous, and both that court and the FBI came out of this looking very bad.
It’s disturbing the way Schiff and the Democrats have been getting away with so many bald-faced lies (e.g., misquoting the phone transcript), which brings up the one encouraging thing about this whole fiasco.
The bias of the left-wing media is so transparently obvious now that to doubt or deny it is about on par with doubting the moon landing.
(I realize there isn’t a lot of direct evidence against Obama, but it smells very bad. We know the media covers for him. It’s a pretty solid bed the intelligence agencies were on his side — as is/was much of official Washington. And it’s taken way too long to make public some of the corruption that we pretty much knew about two years ago. Add it all up, and I think it points to Obama. But … I admit my bias. I don’t like or trust the guy.)
Please feel free to share your impeachment-related thoughts in the comments.
BTW, The Verdict with Ted Cruz (podcast) is worth listening to if you want a quick summary of the day’s impeachment news.
Our institution of impeachment recalls the prosecution of dissidents in the old Soviet Union: First, the Communist Party would determine the sentence, the verdict and the charges. Once those details were ironed out, they would stage a trial – a courtesy accorded only to a privileged few. During the trial the accused would be subjected to public humiliation and, if possible, a confession would be extracted – technically unnecessary, but it added a nice dramatic touch. Finally came the act of sentencing, and the ‘criminal’ would be whisked away never to be seen again.
Were they trying to whisk away Bill Clinton? Or are such comparisons made only when they suit one’s particular ideological orientation?
We live in a democracy. It is not a perfect system – no system is – but there are checks and balances … and the same double-standard of justice applies to everyone, whether his name be Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton or Donald Trump.
Impeachment was obviously formulated as a process to hold in check the power of the executive branch of government. And of course it is not perfect because the players are all grotesquely partisan – on both “sides.”