A first-term impeachment by a Democrat House of Representatives ought to be a job requirement for any non-Democrat president seeking re-election.
It hasn’t always been this way, but we’re just about all the way there now.
Today, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Gerald Nadler and Adam Schiff enjoy the power in the House, and as Representatives of California and New York, they show how political power will stack in the future, particularly if the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact passes — you know, that compact to eliminate the Electoral College Governor Polis signed us all up for last spring?
Of course, if the compact ever turns into law, Democrats will have chipped away at the likelihood a non-Democrat President would ever get elected.
But in the odd event one did slip by, a Democrat-controlled House would quickly follow the precedent laid down by this 116th House and start conjuring up impeachment articles even before the polls close.
Why?
Partly because an Alinsky-esque contempt for rules is a hallmark of the modern coastal Democrat, to whom rule following is for people who use a restroom, or worse, those who would honor the gender sign on the door. For them, when it comes to getting rid of a goofy chimp, depraved orangutan, or whatever other kind of small-handed non-Democrat gets elected, rules, especially those Constitutionally prescribed, don’t help.
Accounting for the possibility, however remote, of even more regular non-Democrat presidents simply means that the only thing more common than impeachment articles would be elections themselves.
Even such an absurdly hypothetical scenario would pose no problem, however, for Democrats have now demonstrated they can fashion impeachment articles out of almost anything.
Take Article I of last month’s impeachment: abuse of power. This article charges President Trump for doing something President Obama did.
Last summer, President Trump withheld lethal weaponry from Ukraine. In 2015, President Obama did the same thing. Yet, as House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff put it, “I hope to hell I’d vote to impeach Obama if he did what Trump has done.”
What was the difference?
Maybe President Obama observed un-codified Congressional protocol, which is to say he gun-controlled the potential for military conflict out of existence, or something like that. Whatever it was that he did enjoyed tacit Congressional approval.
President Trump, on the other hand, withheld military aid to get Ukraine’s President to help expose Joe and Hunter Biden’s political baksheesh.
Ordinarily, an effort to uncover and deal with corruption in your own house is as good as a good idea gets. Yet ask the average voter to name the least-worst thing about President Trump and you won’t hear, “he asked Ukraine to help expose US government corruption.”
Trouble is, if you’re not a Democrat president, and the corruption arises from a D.C. insider who is a former Democrat senator and vice president, the excrement’s going to get real.
Through all the spin you’ll no doubt hear as this dumpster fire burns, impeachment’s strictly political. Not one Republican voted for impeachment, and not one Democrat voted against it, and this house-divided extends to the American people.
For some of us, this impeachment is all about icky comb-overs, orange tans, quid pro quos, unapologetic hearsay, and whatever else sticks to the wall. For others, it’s a posse of party partisans circling wagons around one of their own.
However you’ve come to think about it, this impeachment is about rooting out government corruption, and no matter how you define that corruption, nothing any political figure could do today — perhaps least of all a Senate trial — could unify the country.
Fear not, however, for this refactored impeachment process, along with the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, will eventually bring about a homogenized government controlled by Democrats and unelected administrative minions.
Until that day, impeachment articles brought by any Democratic House of Representatives should be a first-term job requirement for any non-Democrat President.
Mitch Mulhall is a husband, father and longtime Roaring Fork Valley resident. His column appears monthly in the Post Independent and at postindependent.com
