Impeach Trump Or Go Home, Democrats
By David Harsanyi
An impeachment proceeding would be far preferable to Democrats’ endless series of manufactured ‘constitutional crises.’
When House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler and Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed that the United States had been plunged into a “constitutional crisis” this week, a large swath of the media took to plying this fantasy for them.
“Ever wonder what a constitutional crisis looks like? Well, open your eyes,” CNN’s Don Lemon explained to his viewers. “The president of the United States is just blowing right through our system of checks and balances, the very thing that is supposed to keep our Congress, the judiciary, and the executive branch working, which means our country working. He is engaging in an ongoing cover-up by defying at every turn the representatives of you, the American people, the very people who are supposed to be investigating fact-finding on our behalf.”
None of this is remotely true. Our checks and balances are working exactly as they should. Congress is free to make perpetual demands for information and testimony, and threaten the White House with contempt charges and impeachment when it doesn’t get its way. The White House, in turn, is free to assert executive privilege and decline to hand over that information or give testimony.
Both the legislature and the executive branches have the option of asking the judiciary to weigh in on the matter. It’s not as if Donald Trump is blatantly ignoring the courts, as his predecessor often did. If voters disagree, they have the option of punishing elected officials by voting against them. If the legislature disagrees, it has an even more forceful solution available, and that’s impeachment.
History didn’t begin in 2016. Every modern president has asserted executive privilege. Attorneys general have been cited for contempt on much firmer grounds. Former attorney general Janet Reno was found in contempt in 1998 for refusing to turn over memos about Bill Clinton’s campaign finances.
In 2012, Eric Holder became the first U.S. attorney general in history to be held in both criminal and civil contempt after refusing to hand over memos detailing his knowledge about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’s disastrous and bloody gunrunning scheme. Nadler knows this, because he joined a Democratic Party walkout protesting the Holder vote.
Yet no Obama administration official was arrested. There were no impeachments. TV anchors didn’t unsheathe melodramatic monologues about the corrosion of law and the end of democracy.
Moreover, contra Lemon, there’s no cover-up. After accurately describing the bottom line of the Mueller report, Barr released it, and now every American can read the results of a two-year, open-ended, independent investigation that, despite its best efforts, eviscerated the panic-stricken Russia collusion conspiracies of the left and political media.
full story at https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/09/impeach-trump-home-democrats/