Schumer and impeachment, now and then
One of the drawbacks of serving for a long time in public life is that we have the ability to compare a politician’s previous statements to his/her present ones. Sometimes it goes like this, if your name is Chuck Schumer, and you once were speaking of the Senate impeachment trial of Democrat Bill Clinton, and now you’re talking about the Senate impeachment trial of Republican Donald Trump:
McConnell had a reply:
“The Senate is meant to act as judge and jury, to hear a trial, not to re-run the entire fact-finding investigation because angry partisans rushed sloppily through it,” he said on the Senate floor.
Ouch.
The odious Nadler can be found on video from 21 years ago (when he was not so svelte and trim as today) claiming that a partisan impeachment would lack legitimacy, would produce divisiveness and bitterness, and would call into question the legitimacy of our political institutions.
McConnell is doing a great job with the appointments to the bench, now he is being stalwart on this impeachment charade. Go Mitch.
When the law serves their agenda, they support it, when it hinders that agenda they oppose the law.
For such as they… it’s never been about principle, only about power and control.
They are Americans in name only.
They seek a level of power and control which will completely eviscerate the Constitution and utterly destroy “government of the people, by the people and for the people”.
The tragic irony, literally Biblical in degree, is that the liberal useful idiots actually buy the lie that the Left is for the people.
While the obscenity is that most leftists tell themselves that if they only had enough power and control… they could create a better world for the people. Telling themselves that even if they have to shove their ideology down people’s throats… it’s for their own good.
Rejecting reality requires self-delusion.
Geoffrey B.: “While the obscenity is that most leftists tell themselves that if they only had enough power and control… they could create a better world for the people.”
Yep! Like those wonderful places they now control – Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Detroit, and many more. Addiction, poverty, homelessness, crime, public sanitation crises, economic failure – all results of progressive policies. Yet, they don’t see it. Blinded by the ideology of failure.
The House Democrats are using the Lionel Hutz reasoning for impeachment, “We’ve had plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are kinds of evidence.”
Schumer sees it and wants to further investigate instead of being the role of a jury to cover for the paucity of real evidence and the lack of a true House investigation to show real cause for impeachment.
At least McConnell is showing real backbone in defining the Senate’s role correctly. Though the partisans will only see it as more obstruction to their kangaroo court actions.
So Trump actually wrote a letter to Pelosi about the Impeachment. And although the MSM is dismissing it as the ravings of an angry man, personally, I find it lucid, coherent, and (dare I say it?), in Trump’s own pugnacious style, elegant. Check it out…
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6581906-President-Trump-Letter.html
Geoffrey Britain,
Very well said…
The House Democrats are using the Lionel Hutz reasoning for impeachment, “We’ve had plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are kinds of evidence.”
eeyore: Great line! Is that actually from “The Simpsons” or merely your felicitous turn of phrase in the manner of?
Byron York today suggests what the Democrat agenda is in trying to bluster McConnell into doing the investigation that they themselves refused to do (just a bit of sloppiness, I’m sure).
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/impeachment-moves-to-senate-get-ready-for-a-scramble-and-a-january-surprise
by Byron York | December 16, 2019 07:25 PM
I think that’s a very real possibility, and obviously so does McConnell, with his (paraphrasing) “the House had its chance to do any kind of investigation you wanted; that’s not the Senate’s job” response.
That’s a real line that Lionel Hutz gave in the Simpsons episode “The Day the Violence Died.”
Fantasy future quote from McConnell:
‘The partisan and incompetent US House of Representatives has conducted a sloppy, tho rapid, fishing inquiry to justify calling for impeachment. They were able to call any witness they desired, but not it seems some of the Keystone Cops, er, Congress want to call even more witnesses. It’s clear to me, and I guess it’s clear to them, that their partisan sham inquiry shows no high crime nor misdemeanor by President Trump. So they want to waste more time with more partisans who have no first hand evidence of any crimes by the President. More witnesses AFTER submitting articles of impeachment, even tho they had the solemn responsibility to call all the witnesses before submitting the articles.
The rules say the House should investigate, and the Senate should try the case. The Senate is ready to try the case, and vote on it, based on all the evidence presented by the House. The Senate is not ready to investigate it again.
… already too long.
The obvious political issue is “what are the Republicans hiding?” The fact is that the Dems are obfuscating the real crimes in the FBI, and the DOJ; who were hiding crimes of Sec. Clinton, as well as bribery and extortion from VP Biden.
I actually don’t know why Barr isn’t prosecuting Biden for bribery and extortion right now; I think he should. And any Dems who complain about Trump but fail to condemn Biden are clearly acting in a partisan way.
And any Dems who complain about Trump but fail to condemn Biden are clearly acting in a partisan way.
Tom Grey: Turns out Politico has a Pepsi Challenge for you! Just switch things around with Hillary in the White House and Republicans playing the impeachment card.
On this day of righteous fury — the nation’s second presidential impeachment in 21 years — I have a special request.
I want to hear from someone, anyone, who meets two standards. One, this person is a supporter of Donald Trump and his Republican backers in Congress who believes the impeachment proceeding is illegitimate and unfair. Two, this person is ready in good faith to convince me that he or she would also oppose impeachment and believe the whole matter to be terribly unfair if the facts in the Ukraine matter were exactly the same in every respect but these: That Hillary Clinton was in the White House and she had asked a foreign leader to investigate her potential GOP opponent in the 2020 reelection.
Does such a person exist? I have my doubts, but my standards for the search are lenient. You do not need to convince me of the merits of your position as a matter of politics or law or constitutional theory. You only need to convince me that you genuinely believe what you are saying and can credibly defend it. It will help, for instance, if you can point to previous examples when you took positions on matters of principle that happened to conflict with your own partisan preferences.
If so, send an email to an account, explain@politico.com…
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2019/12/18/impeachment-and-the-crack-up-of-the-conservative-mind-086888
Speaking for myself, I might be annoyed by a Hillary Ukraine call (though even less so if there were real previous Republican QPQ going on, an aspect the author omits) but calling for impeachment? Nah.