Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back On C-Span

Holy cow. I thought that the Intel Committee hearings were laughable: "fact" witnesses who weren't a party to the "facts" about which they testified (except for one, whose testimony reluctantly sealed the case against impeachment), witness-leading, and a committee chairman hell-bent on showing only one side of the story.

The biggest difference between those hearings and today's puzzling proceeding is that Jerry Nadler is not nearly as masterful as Adam Schiff in orchestrating and controlling a biased attack effort.

There were, again, no fact witnesses. The Dems called three liberal law school profs who bill themselves as Constitutional law experts to testify that the Schiff report provides grounds for impeachment under the Constitution. There are two problems with this:

1. That assumes that the Schiff report is factual and based on credible testimony from knowledgeable fact witnesses, with the defense permitted to cross-examine and call its own witnesses. That was not the case. It's a good thing those three law school profs are in academia, because if that's the extent of their knowledge of the law, they wouldn't last a day before or behind the bench. (It also illustrates their lack of understanding of the Constitution, which provides protections for the rights of the accused. On second thought, maybe it's a bad thing that they're profs, as they're influencing the minds of a generation of attorneys and potential jurists.)

2. All three of those professors have a history of anti-Trump comments and behavior, and campaign contributions to Democrat political candidates including Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren. One of them even dragged the President's 13-year-old son into her attack on Trump (can you imagine the outrage on the left if that had happened with Chelsea during Bill Clinton's impeachment proceedings?). And note that the question from a Democrat on the committee that led to that tasteless comment was very much a leading one. At least the Republicans on the committee handed her her arse for it.

The GOP called one witness to the Dems' three (that's okay, though; the three were largely interchangeable as none of them offered one iota of originality, so it was really one-to-one). So who did they call - a Scalia-esque staunch conservative originalist who strongly supports Donald Trump?

No. They called a registered Democrat, who admitted on the stand that he voted against Donald Trump (and the wording is key: not "I didn't vote for Donald Trump," but "I voted against Donald Trump" - active vs. passive in his non-support). And that witness, rather than devolving into anti-Trump emotion, as did the other three, remained focused on the impeachment process as envisioned by the framers. He rightly noted that his feelings about Trump were irrelevant to the impeachment question, and that impeachment on this basis would not only be un-Constitutional, but would set a dangerous precedent in which impeachment is used as a political targeting tool.

Make no mistake: if, at this point, you believe Trump should be impeached, you do not understand the Constitution. You do not understand the law. And, most important, you believed he should be impeached long before the Mueller report was released. You wanted him impeached because he is President, and he is Donald Trump. I'm sorry, but that's not an impeachable offense. (And note that this comes from someone who voted against Trump - also, not "not for him," but "against him.")

At the end of today's ... whatever you want to call it, Ranking Member Doug Collins called out Nadler to provide some inkling of what his plan is regarding furthering this process in the Judiciary Committee. Nadler had no answer.

And that, perhaps, is the most telling fact of all. The Democrats have no articulated plan toward anything other than damaging Trump.

In light of that, one final consideration: given all of these shenanigans, and given that the accusation being leveled is that President Trump abused his office to gain political advantage over an opponent in the 2020 election ...

How is the behavior of House Democrats any different? They are abusing their offices, and their majority, to damage Donald Trump in advance of the 2020 election, because they know that the field of candidates they've assembled to challenge him have virtually no chance of defeating him in a free and fair election. And they know that they can't possibly win the case for his removal in the Senate. So to what end their efforts, other than to damage his chances in an election. This effort began when it became apparent that the Democrat primary field was critically flawed.

We don't need Russia or Ukraine as an enemy hell-bent on influencing our elections. We have our own partisan system, and the complicit media, to do that for us.