{"id":1317615,"date":"2020-01-09T23:08:00","date_gmt":"2020-01-10T06:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/mulhall-column-a-new-congressional-catechism\/"},"modified":"2020-01-10T15:37:44","modified_gmt":"2020-01-10T22:37:44","slug":"mulhall-column-a-new-congressional-catechism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/mulhall-column-a-new-congressional-catechism\/","title":{"rendered":"Mulhall column: A new Congressional catechism"},"content":{"rendered":"<div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.postindependent.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2019\/03\/facebook-thumbnail-1200.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\"><\/div>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText DropCap\">A first-term impeachment by a Democrat House of Representatives ought to be a job requirement for any non-Democrat president seeking re-election.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">It hasn\u2019t always been this way, but we\u2019re just about all the way there now.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">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 \u2014 you know, that compact to eliminate the Electoral College Governor Polis signed us all up for last spring?<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">Why?<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">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\u2019t help.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">Take Article I of last month\u2019s impeachment: abuse of power. This article charges President Trump for doing something President Obama did.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">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, \u201cI hope to hell I\u2019d vote to impeach Obama if he did what Trump has done.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">What was the difference?<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">President Trump, on the other hand, withheld military aid to get Ukraine\u2019s President to help expose Joe and Hunter Biden\u2019s political baksheesh.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">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\u2019t hear, \u201che asked Ukraine to help expose US government corruption.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">Trouble is, if you\u2019re not a Democrat president, and the corruption arises from a D.C. insider who is a former Democrat senator and vice president, the excrement\u2019s going to get real.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">Through all the spin you\u2019ll no doubt hear as this dumpster fire burns, impeachment\u2019s strictly political. Not one Republican voted for impeachment, and not one Democrat voted against it, and this house-divided extends to the American people.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">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\u2019s a posse of party partisans circling wagons around one of their own.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">However you\u2019ve 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 \u2014 perhaps least of all a Senate trial \u2014 could unify the country.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">Until that day, impeachment articles brought by any Democratic House of Representatives should be a first-term job requirement for any non-Democrat President.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText Tagline\">Mitch Mulhall is a husband, father and longtime Roaring Fork Valley resident. His column appears monthly in the Post Independent and at postindependent.com<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/opinion\/columns\/mulhall-column-a-new-congressional-catechism\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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\u2019t always been this way, but we\u2019re 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1317615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-09-06 05:54:25","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1317615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1317615"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1317615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1317625,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1317615\/revisions\/1317625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1317615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1317615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1317615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}