It would be a lot easier to take the merits of the current full-throated impeachment drive by Congressional Democrats more seriously had they not spent the entire 2016 presidential campaign and the last three years trying to delegitimize Trump and the policy changes he made.
It’s plain to see that the current crescendo is more the result of having fortuitously hit upon quid pro quo as something that works for them rather than the product of a dogged pursuit over time of a particular line of related misdeeds. And that suggests to us that impeachment is not the principal focus for the Democrats; rather, derailing Trump’s program – which continues to run counter to much of fundamental Democratic thinking – is.
Congressional Democrats – and even more the courts – have hotly challenged virtually all of Trump’s immigration policies, including barring immigrants from certain countries and deporting illegal entrants to this country. While murmurings of Trump being an unworthy or illegitimate leader who did not share “American values” often accompanied those efforts, the point usually seemed to be that the status quo had to be maintained.
The Democrats also fought Trump’s efforts to blunt the Obama administration’s campaign to reverse legal notions of burdens of proof when it came to allegations of sexual assault on college campuses – from the presumption of innocence to one of guilt.
Democrats have also insisted that in clashes between the claims of anti-birth control religious employers and those of women who want employer-funded contraception services that the religious employers’ concerns be disregarded. The Trump administration disagrees.
Just last week, the Trump administration announced that it is reversing an Obama-era regulation that effectively prohibited certain Christian charitable organizations that adhered to the biblical definition of marriage as between a man and a woman from participating in a federally-funded foster care program.
So the motive behind this impeachment process is highly suspect. On top of that, there are strange inconsistencies with the current frenzied impeachment project itself.
Trump is said to have inappropriately spoken with the Ukrainian president about possible corruption by former Vice President Biden and his son Hunter since a Ukrainian prosecutor had already investigated the corruption charges and dismissed them. So here we have the Democrats relying on the work of a Ukrainian prosecutor who has been criticized for alleged corruption of his own and who reportedly said he was directed by higher-ups in the Ukrainian government to go easy on the investigation. These are the same Democrats who refuse to accept Robert Mueller’s final report.
Meanwhile, Hunter Biden has absolutely no background to explain his huge Ukraine and China energy scores after his father – who was President Obama’s point man on Ukrainian and Chinese energy issues at the time – ferried him to both places in Air Force 2. In addition, the Trump discussions at worst only involved investigations, not prosecutions.
It is not necessary to get into more details to appreciate that the full-court press against Donald Trump from the very get go is decidedly and highly unusual. And that is very disturbing. At the very least, it indicates that the impeachment drive is just another application of the political process of partisans pursuing their policy agendas, albeit in a more shrill form.