The 2016 election was hard for many Democrats to accept, especially for the professional Democratic Party campaigners, officials, and the hard Left.
And so rather than plow ahead and defeat President Trump in 2020, which polls suggest they should be able to do without too much difficulty, they are giving in to partisan temptations. Democrats want to impeach him, right here and right now, and nothing is going to stop them.
Impeachment is a political process, and so the Democrats have that right. Any House majority can impeach any president for any reason, no matter how flimsy or partisan, so long as the votes are there. But if Democrats insist on going through this exercise in reinforcing their own self-esteem, they owe it to the electors, the voters, and the taxpayers to do it right.
First, this means immediately holding a vote either to impeach, as Congress did immediately when impeaching Andrew Johnson, or voting on the floor to open an impeachment inquiry, as they did against Richard Nixon and later Bill Clinton. Such a vote lends seriousness to the inquiry that currently does not exist. By taking responsibility for impeaching an elected president, members of Congress lend to the process a seriousness that the current process does not have.
Second, it means holding hearings in public, with minimal redactions and as little action behind closed doors as is necessary for national security. It is rather ridiculous that, so far, most of what we know about the charges against Trump come from the White House, not from the investigation.
The idea that Congress can consider and weigh impeachment in secretive, closed-door hearings is, frankly, ridiculous. House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff has claimed that there is some legal purpose to this, that the idea is to “not give the president or his legal minions the opportunity to tailor their testimony.” This is not even slightly credible. The evidence in the impeachment process cannot be hidden permanently. Nor should it be — the taxpayers and voters deserve to see everything. They are the ones who will judge the seriousness of this inquiry next November.
Up to this point, the true reason for secrecy in this not-really-impeachment process is clear. Democrats have used it to selectively leak derogatory information while withholding anything that makes the impeachment charges seem less credible or serious. They have also attempted to hide the weaknesses in their case and the overall weakness of the case for impeachment at this point.
This has prompted the White House to stop cooperating in the inquiry, which is also a bad thing. If Democrats aren’t holding a real impeachment process, they can at least claim to be conducting oversight, the right of every Congress, in which executive participation is mandatory. Yet real oversight takes place in broad daylight except where national security is at stake. Again, this points to a less-than-serious effort by Democrats.
If House Democrats are really considering overturning the last election, they need to show some good faith by taking responsibility for their inquiry and making it public.
