The Crowhill Journal

During my early years as a Christian, I attended an Evangelical church that knew little and cared less about denominational distinctions. When I started to get more serious about theology, and first became acquainted with the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, I learned a little about the history of Presbyterians in America. It’s not a thrilling story.

The Presbyterian church split north – south over slavery. Years later, during the fundamentalist / modernist controversy, both the northern and southern churches split conservative / liberal. The two liberal branches then reunited, while the two conservative branches remained apart.

This is, of course, a simplification of the history of the “split Ps” in America. Presbyterians have divided into lots of different denominations. There’s even a funny song about it, which I wasn’t able to find on YouTube.

I was reminded of all that when William sent me this article. United Methodist Church Announces Proposal to Split Over Gay Marriage.

The “United” Methodists are going to split into conservative and liberal branches.

We’re often told that there was a time in America when mainline, Protestant Christianity informed the moral conscience of the nation. Whether that was ever true or not, it seems there’s another side to the story. The moral conscience of the nation likes to rip up and reorganize churches.

Today it seems the moral suasion is going mostly from the culture to the church, rather than the reverse.

The Senate is supposed to vote soon on whether to call additional witnesses in the impeachment trial. Some Republicans might join the Democrats in calling for witnesses, which creates the possibility of a tie vote.

It’s not clear that Roberts should have the tie-breaking vote. While it’s true that the Vice President usually presides over the Senate and breaks ties, and the chief justice presides over the Senate in this case, it’s not an exact parallel, and legal scholars differ on whether Roberts has the authority to cast a tie-breaking vote.

I predict that if it comes to that, Roberts will assert that he does have the authority, and he will vote to call more witnesses.

IMO, he doesn’t have much of a choice. If he votes to call witnesses, that doesn’t prejudge the outcome, it simply prolongs the trial. If he votes not to call witnesses, that ends things, and would be seen as partisan, which is apparently the monster that lives under John Roberts’ bed. He’s deathly afraid of seeming partisan.

On another impeachment matter, let’s say Democrats somehow get the votes to removed Trump from office. Does that prevent him from running again and getting elected to a second term?

That would be high theater.

I’ve asked Ted Cruz, who’s doing a very interesting podcast on the impeachment saga, but I doubt he’ll answer me.

I heard a great quote this evening.

“We’re not against elites, we just want better elites.”

P&C review Sam Smith’s Strawberry fruit ale, which is wonderfully full of strawberry flavor, and quite delightful.

Then the boys think about some of the odd ideas people have that they don’t seem to have thought through all the way.

They discuss proposals to …

• end red flag laws
• have a nation without borders
• create a non-binary, genderless world
• legalize drugs
• have less policing
• take away guns from law-abiding citizens
• eliminate drive-thrus to stop global warming, and
• stop the use of fossil fuels

… and wonder if these people spent any time thinking through their ideas.

Give a listen here: Have you thought this through?

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.