RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/i-killed-my-parents-and-now-i-ask-for-mercy-on-the-grounds-that-im-an-orphan/

I killed my parents and now I ask for mercy because I am an orphan….

That’s the canonical definition of chutzpah — shameless effrontery — and it summarizes the Democratic position on the attempted impeachment of President Trump. The Hillary Clinton campaign paid for the Steele dossier, assembled out of bits handed to ex-MI6 spook Christopher Steele from his Russian intelligence sources, and the FBI used this concoction to obtain FISA warrants to bug the Trump presidential campaign. Now, THAT’S foreign interference. And those facts aren’t in dispute. When the Trump administration tries to get the truth out of foreign governments about their involvement in nefarious activities in the U.S., the Democrats scream, “Impeachment!”

The Wall Street Journal editors got this exactly right:

Democrats want to impeach Donald Trump for inviting Ukraine to investigate 2020 election rival Joe Biden. But then why are they opposed to investigating whether Democrats used Russian disinformation to get the FBI to investigate Donald Trump in 2016?

That’s the double standard now on gaudy public display over multiple news reports that U.S. Attorney John Durham’s review of the origins of the Russian fiasco of 2016 has become a criminal probe. Attorney General William Barr this year appointed Mr. Durham, a highly regarded and veteran prosecutor, to examine this part of the Russia tale that special counsel Robert Mueller chose to ignore.

Nothing less than the American republic is at stake here. It’s time for every American patriot to rally around the president. Some of my neo-conservative ex-friends are cheering for the wrong side. Shame on them.

For the record, I don’t care whether there was quid pro quo with Ukraine or not. If President Trump used military aid as a bargaining chip to persuade the government of Ukraine to investigate foreign subversion of our political system, he was doing his job as commander-in-chief to protect this country from its external enemies. The parade of striped-pants cookie-pushers from the State Department feeding information to closed-door Democratic Party kangaroo courts in the House of Representatives is irrelevant. Trump is fighting a mutiny by the U.S. intelligence community. If the mutineers succeed, it will be the end of the republic. If a cabal of bureaucrats nestling in the bowls of our $80 billion a year intelligence bureaucracy can bring down an elected president of the United States, the republic is finished.

The impeachment issue is a load of baloney, period. No less a constitutional scholar than Prof. Alan Dershowitz wrote (on the website of the Gatestone Institute):

So, the question remains: did President Trump commit impeachable offenses when he spoke on the phone to the president of Ukraine and/or when he directed members of the Executive Branch to refuse to cooperate, absent a court order, with congressional Democrats who are seeking his impeachment?

The answers are plainly no and no. There is a constitutionally significant difference between a political “sin,” on the one hand, and a crime or impeachable offenses, on the other.

Even taking the worst-case scenario regarding Ukraine — a quid pro quo exchange of foreign aid for a political favor — that might be a political sin, but not a crime or impeachable offense.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/anatomies-of-the-2020-election/Impeachment, and then what?

I n the 20th century, no Congress brought impeachment proceedings against a first-term president facing a reelection. Both the Nixon and Clinton efforts were aimed at reelected presidents, perhaps on the theory that there was supposedly no other means of bringing them to account once they had been elected twice.

In contrast, Trump faces reelection in about a year. The prevailing mood may soon be just to let the voters adjudicate his purported sins and for a year allow the Congress to get back to — or begin — governing.

The makeup of the Senate matters. Nixon resigned before House impeachment because he feared that, if he were impeached, there might be enough Republican senators to give the Democratic majority a possible two-thirds vote in the Senate to convict him, given that the media hated his guts and the economy was souring and draining public support.

Bill Clinton knew that impeachment, facts aside, did not matter much, because the Republican Senate majority was never going to find the necessary votes to convict him, the media was on his side, and the economy was still robust.

In Trump’s case, there is little likelihood that a Republican Senate majority will lose control of its membership to render a two-thirds majority guilty vote. The economy is strong, and impeachment will become unpopular when the public knows that it will not, and cannot, remove a president. The Democrats are more likely seeking a symbolic 51 percent conviction vote, and a year of “the walls are closing in” anti-Trump chant in the press.

Polls matter. When the media and Democrats started impeachment stories and investigations, Nixon’s favorability was near 70 percent, after his landslide reelection and second inaugural. After twelve months of Watergate, he ended 1973 at about 30 percent approval. When he left office in August 1973 before impeachment, his approval was at about 24 percent.

Clinton, in contrast, enjoyed about 70 percent favorability when impeachment started and he went down only about 10 points — before rebounding and leaving office impeached but quite popular at 65 percent approval. The therapeutic Clinton lived in a pre-Internet age, and “I feel your pain” still resonated.

Three years’ worth of talk of Trump impeachment waxes and wanes. His polls accordingly slide to the low forties when “bombshells” and “turning point” frenzies flood the media, and then they inch back up to the middle forties when the bombast passes.

At this point in his presidency, Bill Clinton was gradually climbing back to near 50 percent approval; Barack Obama was right where Trump is now, at about 42-43 percent. It is hard to know whether impeachment helped or hurt Clinton because the economy was booming, he was seen as bipartisan, and the debt was finally declining. Impeachment was either irrelevant to his status or seen as a threat to it. Either way, Clinton was popular right before and after impeachment.

In Trump’s case, it may be that he ends up at about 44 percent favorability after the impeachment circus either fades or is realized, about where he was when the whistleblower hysteria commenced.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/time-for-the-white-house-and-congressional-republicans-to-get-serious-on-impeachment/

Democrats have tried to defend pursuing their impeachment inquiry behind closed doors by comparing it to a grand-jury inquest. I’ve given a bunch of reasons why this analogy is ill-conceived. There is one way, though, in which it is apt: With the grand jury as with politics, complaints that an investigative process has been flawed virtually always fail.

It is a lesson the White House and congressional Republicans had better internalize quickly.

Prosecutorial misconduct in grand-jury proceedings is almost never a basis to dismiss an indictment or throw out a conviction. The reason is straightforward: Even serious missteps by the investigators do not excuse or erase the serious misconduct that is under investigation. Consequently, if an accused ultimately receives a fair trial with sufficient due-process protections, a court will not throw out the case based on violations at the grand-jury stage.

That doctrine surely applies to impeachment. It is political, not legal, in nature. Unlike a criminal defendant, the president does not have an array of constitutionally mandated due-process protections. Our law vests the House with the whole of impeachment power. No court may tell the House how to conduct impeachment, and the House need only afford the president whatever minimal protections lawmakers think the public wants him to have if the proceedings are to be accepted as legitimate.

Moral of the story: Better get about the business of figuring out the best substantive defense to the charges that House Democrats are preparing to lodge. The president and his allies are not going to win this on process grounds.

On Monday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House would finally hold a vote to endorse the impeachment inquiry that Democrat-controlled committees have been conducting by fiat for the past month. The speaker indicated that the measure will go to the floor this week, probably Thursday. It will outline the impeachment procedures going forward. Presumably, this will include granting the president and the Republican minority rights to cross-examine witnesses and present their own evidence, in hearings that will go public by mid November.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/467858-house-finally-will-vote-on-an-impeachment-inquiry-but-who-will-that-help

Well, it’s about time.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) reluctantly alerted House Democrats on Monday that a resolution authorizing the impeachment inquiry they have been conducting for weeks will be introduced this week. This is a welcome step in terms of legitimacy. 

Before caving, the speaker’s note to her caucus mulishly maintains that the star chamber which Democrats have been running — mainly through Chairman Adam Schiff’s (D-Calif.) Intelligence Committee, with its closed hearings and selective leaking — has been perfectly proper. This throat-clearing is both telling and misleading. 

Pelosi purports to regard as “baseless” the Republican claim “that the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry” has not been authorized by a vote of the House. Ironically, she observes that the “Constitution provides that the House of Representatives ‘shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.” That is the whole point — the Constitution vests the impeachment power in the House as an institution, not in the speaker or the majority party. The House only acts as an institution when it votes — exactly what Pelosi has sedulously avoided. 

The speaker relies on a dubious ruling issued last week by the federal District Court in Washington — specifically, by Chief Judge Beryl Howell, who was appointed to the bench by President Obama after serving for years as a top aide to the hyper-partisan Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.). Chief Judge Howell directed that grand jury materials from the Mueller investigation be made available to Congress despite the fact that the text of the governing rule limits disclosure to investigations attendant to judicial proceedings. The Trump administration is appealing the decision. 

According to Pelosi, in rationalizing her ruling, Howell “confirmed that the House is not required to hold a vote” authorizing an impeachment inquiry. That distorts what the judge said. Howell observed that the historical record on the matter was mixed — there have been inquiries into whether judges should be impeached that have occurred without a floor vote, while impeachment inquiries involving presidents have had them. But the court’s bottom line was that, because the Constitution puts the House fully in charge of impeachment, a court has no authority to tell the House how to proceed. That is not a judicial endorsement of the Democrats’ position; it is an acknowledgment that a judge is powerless in the matter.