‘If Trump gets away with his blanket noncompliance, the Constitution’s impeachment provision, as it concerns presidents, will be effectively repealed…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In his column on Monday, Republican defector George Will revealed a full-blown case of Trump Derangement Syndrome—a term popularized by his former Washington Post colleague, the late Charles Krauthammer.
Will cast aside all of the arguments that invalidate House Democrats’ partisan impeachment probe against President Donald Trump.
Rather, the NeverTrumper‘s latest column sought to normalize the ongoing witch hunt, with little evidence, as a constitutionally supported check on the executive branch.
“If Trump gets away with his blanket noncompliance, the Constitution’s impeachment provision, as it concerns presidents, will be effectively repealed,” Will panicked, “and future presidential corruption will be largely immunized against punishment.”
Many have speculated that Will harbors a deep-seated personal grudge against Trump, or else that he is threatened by the president’s disruption of DC’s delicate ecosystem of back-scratching influence-peddlers.
Not only would Trump’s efforts to push back against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff—both California Democrats—be tantamount to shredding the U.S. Constitution, but Will warned it would exact a heavy toll on any GOP congressmen who followed their conscience by refusing to throw Trump under the bus.
“In 13 months all congressional Republicans who have not defended Congress … should be defeated,” Will said.
“If congressional Republicans continue their genuflections at Trump’s altar, the appropriate 2020 outcome will be a Republican thrashing so severe—losing the House, the Senate and the electoral votes of, say, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina and even Texas—that even this party of slow-learning careerists might notice the hazards of tethering their careers to a downward-spiraling scofflaw,” he continued.
Democrats already have been targeting the four vulnerable, once solid-red states, where migration has led to alarming demographic shifts— entirely unrelated to Trump’s conduct.
Will’s column seemed to acknowledge that the only impeachable “offense” that had yet presented itself publicly was the president’s refusal to cooperate.
“This refusal, which is analogous to an invocation of the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, justifies an inference of guilt,” attacked Will, in an unusual twist on the concepts of jurisprudence and due process.
House Democrats thus far have conducted their latest Trump inquiry as a secret tribunal, while selectively cherry-picking snippets of evidence and testimony to leak in support of their claims.
Trump’s attorneys last week outlined the clear reasons for their refusal to support it—including the fact that the House never voted to move forward on an impeachment probe.
Barring a formalization of the impeachment process, under their general oversight duties, House committees must be able to demonstrate a legislative purpose in order for their subpoenas to have the weight of law behind them.
The House followed this process in both of the prior modern-era impeachment investigations, against former presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Like Trump, both were accused of obstructing the investigative efforts.
Despite the weight of ‘smoking gun’ evidence against Nixon and Clinton—the Watergate tapes and Monica Lewinsky’s stained blue dress, respectively—neither was removed from office. Nixon, a Republican, resigned before the House could vote to impeach; Clinton, a Democrat, was impeached but acquitted by a narrow, party-line vote in the Senate.
The latest probe—involving a so-called whistleblower’s complaint over Trump’s July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy—appears increasingly to have been orchestrated by Schiff in coordination with deep-state CIA staffers, who also likely maintained ties with former Vice President Joe Biden and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
The probe was hastily implemented in September after the two-year Mueller investigation and a litany of other House fishing expeditions failed to gain any traction in the Left’s brazenly overt efforts to remove Trump from office, leaving them scrambling for a salient plan of attack with the 2020 election looming.
Some also have speculated that the ploy was intended to be a pre-emptive strike against two pending Justice Department investigations that will outline vast evidence of Democrat collusion centered around the 2016 election and the subsequent Mueller probe.
A lengthy report by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz is expected to be released this Friday, following other IG reports that found unethical—and in some cases, illegal—misconduct among the FBI’s top brass to undermine the president.
If their legal recourse against the White House fails, Will called on Democrats to use any means necessary to punish Trump and his Republican allies for refusing to bend to their demands.
“The canine loyalty of Senate Republicans will keep Trump in office. But until he complies with House committee subpoenas, the House must not limply hope federal judges will enforce their oversight powers,” Will said.
“Instead, the House should wield its fundamental power, that of the purse, to impose excruciating costs on executive branch noncompliance.”
Will did not elaborate on how the House might use its budgetary powers, although a government shutdown crisis like the one initiated last December could prove as costly to House Democrats as their GOP counterparts.