On October 31, the House voted to begin public impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump. But did he even commit a crime? At this point, that isn’t clear.
According to the guidelines set down by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, the president can only be impeached if he or she commits “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” These guidelines were designed to prevent a corrupt president from leading the country, but it seems like impeachment has now become a political weapon that can be wielded by the minority party in order to damage the reputation of the current president.
When Donald Trump became president-elect in 2016, there were elements in the media and in the Left that were doing everything they could to remove him from office. From the disastrous Mueller investigation, which found no Russian collusion and wasted millions of taxpayer dollars, to calls that Trump should be declared mentally incompetent and removed under the 25th Amendment, these attempts all failed to secure impeachment proceedings. The latest argument is that Trump threatened national security and was using a foreign government, Ukraine, to investigate a political opponent, Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
The president’s conversation with the president of Ukraine is questionable, but it’s likely not an impeachable or criminal offense. To me, it sounds like normal geopolitics.
But the point of this article isn’t to determine whether or not Trump committed a crime, that’s up to the House to decide. The problem with these impeachment proceeding is that we already know the outcome. The House will impeach, but not because the president committed a crime, but because Trump’s the president.
It’s no surprise that the vast majority of the media and Leftists in the government hate Trump. From CNN’s story that former presidential advisor Anthony Scaramucci was under investigation for his alleged ties to a Russian Investment fund (he wasn’t) to The New York Times planting a false story for the FBI about the origins of the agency’s investigation into Trump’s campaign in order to hide the origins of the Steele dossier, there have been numerous times where the press has pushed “fake news” to serve its own liberal agenda.
When it comes to politicians, they’re not much better. Before she started her first term, Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) told a crowd that the incoming freshman class of House Representatives would “impeach the m—–f—–.” In fact, many of the Democratic representatives elected in 2018 took office with the promise that they would impeach Trump.
But for what? The president had committed no crime during the lead up to the 2018 election.
Regardless of his culpability during this Ukraine call, if there was any at all, the media and radical Left’s desperate attempt to remove him from office is a sign that impeachment is no longer a tool to remove a president that threatens the stability and autonomy of this country, but a political weapon used to damage a leader that the rival party doesn’t like. That’s not what the Founding Father’s intended, and it threatens the ability of future presidents to lead this country.
It’s also a sign the election process is no longer valued by some in the media and politics unless it benefits them. Although Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, Trump won the electoral college, a critical system that our founders set up to ensure that a popular leader wouldn’t rise and lead a “democratic mob.” In reaction, there is a growing movement to remove the electoral college.
Since the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, the foundations of our republic that the Founding Fathers worked so hard to create are crumbling under corrupt politicians and the news media. Impeachment should only be used against a president who has committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” not because he talks like a New Yorker and occasionally offends people. That’s not a crime.
But being Trump has now become the crime, and leftist politicians will never stop investigating until he leaves office. There is no evidence at this point that the call with Ukraine was criminal in any way, but people opposed to Trump are looking for anything to use against him. Those aren’t grounds for an impeachment, but a punishment in search of a crime. That’s not how democracy, nor the criminal justice system, works.
Benjamin Franklin once described the future U.S. government as “A republic, if you can keep it.” As the Trump Administration moves through this impeachment process, it is questionable if we’ll be able to keep our democracy in the long run. It seems more and more that things are being led by the “democratic mob” that the founders sought so hard to avoid.
