No longer an impeachment. Now, it’s a railroading By Monica Showalter
Under pressure to make their Soviet-style impeachment to overturn the results of the 2016 election “fairer,” Trump-maddened Democrats have put on an “impeachment resolution” public relations show in a bid to legitimize their secret basement hearings.
According to CNN (transcript of resolution here):
The resolution provides the procedural details for how the House will move its impeachment inquiry into its next phase, and it also represents the first time that the full chamber will take a vote related to impeaching the President. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has argued that the vote is not being taken to formally authorize the impeachment inquiry, as Republicans have demanded, but will help “to eliminate any doubt as to whether the Trump administration may withhold documents, prevent witness testimony, disregard duly authorized subpoenas, or continue obstructing the House of Representatives.”
Just one problem: They made it even less fair.
Here’s how bad it is:
The resolution now involves shutting some of the sharpest Republicans out of the hearings, such as Rep. Jim Jordan who’s on the House Oversight Committee as well as all the Republicans (and Democrats) on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. We all know that they don’t like Jordan, a kick-ass interrogator, in the impeachment room asking uncomfortable questions of their handpicked Deep-State witnesses and blowing apart their “narratives.” It’s also worth noting that shutting out the Oversight and Foreign Affairs Committees keeps a lot of vulnerable Democrats in swing districts (or being primaried by the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “Justice” Democrats, who are committed to ousting moderate Democrats in blue districts and replacing them with extremists), uninvolved in the kangaroo-court spectacle. House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Eliot Engels is one of these, so the political convenience is obvious.
The shammy resolution, expected to be rammed through Thursday in that desperate Democrat bid to get this whole thing over before the end of the year, does keep the House Intelligence Committee under Rep. Schiff in the catbird seat, leading the impeachment as he has so far in his basement, but now it effectively shuts Republicans out of the process. It requires Republican House ranking Intelligence Committee member Rep. Devin Nunes to get permission first from Schiff before he can call any witnesses or issue any subpoenas. If Adam Schiff doesn’t want them, they won’t be heard from.
The resolution keeps all of the previous Soviet-style basement hearing testimony still secret and non-transparent, with no new questions permitted from Republicans. Anyone who wants to ask former National Security Council aide/Brookings Institute think-tanker Fiona Hill just why she had Joe Biden write the first blurb to her 2012 book on Putin is out of luck. Anyone who wants to ask former Ukraine ambassador Bill Taylor about his own connections to George Soros front groups as well as Burisma itself and how much he raked in from it can forget about that one, too.
And of course, this being Schiff and Co., it prohibits any due process for President Trump, who’s now the accused. Past impeachments permitted White House Counsel in on all proceedings. This one apparently doesn’t. Trump can forget about any opportunity to know the evidence against him, let alone defend himself.
Sound like a fair impeachment? Not on your life. Leave it up to Trump-crazed Democrats to cook up something this unfair, unfairer than even their previous basement maneuvers. Soviet-style? They’ve ramped up the Soviet style.
No wonder public support in swing states for impeachment is fading in three polls, here and here.
This isn’t an impeachment. This is a railroading. And boy does it stink.
Here are some choice tweets by Republican Congressmembers with a stake in this and who read the legislative document closely:
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