Each time a liberal makes the case for impeachment, it’s ever more clear that the intent behind it isn’t earnest. There will be no real effort to remove President Trump from office, just an attempt to signal their disdain and embarrass Republicans.
Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe wrote in the Washington Post on Wednesday that House Democrats might go though an impeachment hearing, vote on a resolution concluding that Trump is guilty (of what, exactly, remains a mystery) and then simply stop short of referring the matter to the Senate for trial.
“The resolution,” wrote Tribe, “expressly and formally proclaiming the president impeachable but declining to play the Senate’s corrupt game, is one that even a president accustomed to treating everything as a victory would be hard-pressed to characterize as a vindication.” He argued that declaring Trump “impeachable” with no Senate referral, would at the least serve as a “deliberately stigmatizing character” that Trump “would have to take with him into his reelection campaign.”
Tribe’s political thoughts, by the way, are almost a parody of what you’d think would come from a top legal mind within the #Resistance. He literally called on the House to begin impeachment before the special counsel report had even been released. Before that, he said then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh should never get a hearing because Trump might get impeached. Oh, and last year, he authored a book on — what else? — impeachment!
Add “impeachment” to the list of words that have lost almost all of their original meaning, right next to “racist,” “Nazi,” and “Bruce Jenner.”
What was once a deadly serious process to remove a sitting president is now a political statement. At least, liberals are giving up their tiresome chant that “no one is above the law.”
The demand for a special counsel to investigate anything and everything about Trump was always political. The demand that the full, unredacted special counsel report be made public, despite that being explicitly illegal, was always political. And now, the demand for impeachment is just as political.
It’s unfortunate for House Democrats that now-former special counsel Robert Mueller never found a conspiracy between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. It’s unfortunate for them that he declined to recommend any charge on obstruction of justice (when there was no initial crime to be brought to justice in the first place). But if the purpose of a whole impeachment charade would be nothing more than to give Trump a black eye by putting a “guilty” on the record next to his presidency, with no trial in the Senate for removal, then why don’t they just read a statement on the House floor, then vote on a resolution condemning the president?
It would lead to precisely the same outcome, though perhaps it wouldn’t be as therapeutic for depressed liberals with a book out about “impeachment” to sell.
Justifying an impeachment proceeding is of less and less of concern for Trump’s hysterical critics. The goal is now impeachment for its own sake.
