House Judiciary begins markup session on articles of impeachment
Fox News contributor Karl Rove and Fox News political analyst Juan Williams weigh in.
The House Judiciary Committee, on which I serve, met Wednesday night to continue work on the baseless articles of impeachment that partisan Democrats are considering against President Trump – despite the obvious absence of any grounds for seeking his removal from office.
No one should be surprised that the Democrats announced two articles of impeachment against the president earlier this week, accusing him of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s professed love for all people notwithstanding, the willingness of Democrats to relentlessly attack President Trump and his supporters has divided this country and done irreparable harm to an institution already viewed with almost universal disapprobation.
IMPEACHMENT MARKUP HEATS UP AS NADLER SAYS 'WE CANNOT RELY ON AN ELECTION' TO OUST TRUMP
From the day he was elected, Democrats have professed a fervent desire to impeach Donald Trump.
In fact, Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, fired the opening salvo in the impeachment drive, followed closely by a Washington Post headline proclaiming that the impeachment campaign was beginning – just minutes after Trump was sworn into office on Jan. 20, 2017.
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Profane Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., said after her election in November 2018 – and before she was even sworn into office – that she was elected to “impeach the” (expletive deleted), referring to the duly elected president of the United States.
And more than two-thirds of the Democrats, including House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., expressed support for impeachment before the telephone call that they now find so problematic, even occurred – supporting different articles of impeachment than these new ones.
It is no surprise that Democrats have introduced this new round of articles of impeachment against the president. It was, after all, their rationale for wanting to gain control of the House of Representatives in 2018.
The Democrats don’t want President Trump to name additional Supreme Court justices, bring order to the border, and continue to boost America’s economy. This, in short, is a power grab by the Democrats.
It was only a week ago that Democrats brought three liberal law professors into the House Judiciary Committee to lecture us on the rationale for impeachment. At that point, they were all in on two claims: bribery and obstruction of justice.
Unfortunately for Democrats, the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller had already defanged the obstruction of justice charge.
The bribery charge collapsed under its own weight when the Democrats couldn’t iterate a violation of the federal bribery statute; began relying on a dictionary that was more than 200 years old (because, as everyone knows, liberal law professors are for the original interpretation of the Constitution); and their star witness took almost five minutes just to explain what the alleged bribery was.
The professors took us on the most circuitous route of pretzel logic, leaving everyone in the room with motion sickness. And, it left the Democrats with no charges.
George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley also provided testimony during the same hearing. He testified that this impeachment has the thinnest pretext in history. I wonder what he thinks now that Democrats have again moved the goalposts.
Turley also said that the Democrats were abusing their power and would leave the concept of impeachment in shambles.
In response to the devastation that remained after the law professors left, Democrats have now come up with the charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, which are deliberately amorphous claims.
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The Democrats’ attorney for the House Judiciary Committee effectively admitted earlier this week that there is no direct evidence of wrongdoing by President Trump.
The attorney recommended that instead of looking at the actual July 25 phone conversation between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky – and the repeated public assertions from Ukraine that there was no pressure or quid pro quo by Trump to take any action – that culpability can still be surmised.
That’s the problem. Without direct evidence and no victim, Democrats want to impeach based on rumors, gossip and innuendo.
The only direct evidence is that President Trump was legitimately concerned about corruption in Ukraine, including attempts to influence our 2016 presidential election.
President Trump didn’t want hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars going to Ukraine and its new president until anti-corruption measures had been put in place. After those two measures were implemented, the aid was released.
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In the meantime, President Zelensky had numerous high-level interactions with American officials. There was a Trump-Zelensky telephone call. And a meeting of the two presidents took place in New York at the United Nations.
In the real world, that would be enough to wipe out the rather ambiguous claims of the Democrats. But in Washington, we live in a fantasy world where Speaker Pelosi says she “loves everyone.” Including the president she is trying to impeach, and the 63 million American voters she is trying to disenfranchise.
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