OPINION:
It wasn’t but a few days ago House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went on “Face the Nation” on CBS News and told the impeachment-hungry hounds in the anti-President Donald Trump press and public that thanks to Adam Schiff’s circus-masked-as-serious-inquiry, “the American people have had a good week … patriotism has had a good week … the Constitution has had a good week.”
Then polls said otherwise. Then some Democrats starting saying otherwise. And now? Now we’re on the cusp of a real constitutional crisis that’s pitting the vicious left against a nation of outraged citizens who know full well the partisans in the Democratic Party are only in it to win it, rather than in it to humbly serve.
“I will tell you, sitting here knowing how divided this country is, I don’t see the value of taking [Trump] out of office,” said Michigan Democrat Rep. Brenda Lawrence on the “No BS News Hour” podcast after the impeachment hearings wrapped on Capitol Hill. “But I do see the value of putting down a marker saying his behavior is not acceptable. … I want him censured.”
Censured, but not impeached.
It’s not as if Lawrence, who once supported the idea of impeachment, serves a district that leans heavy into the red. She serves the 14th District, an area that’s safely Democrat, 57% black, roughly 5% Hispanic, about 34% white — an area that she most recently won with an estimated 81% of the vote versus her Republican challenger Marc Herschfus’s 17%.
In other words: It’s not like Lawrence has to worry about Trump supporters in her district frowning on impeachment.
So her distancing from the charade means something. It’s meaningful. It’s not without importance. It says, in essence, that the impeachment march has no legs.
And that’s pretty much what independent voters in recent polling have said, as well.
A couple of others Democrats in the House have taken a more level-headed approach to all this impeachment nonsense, too, and in recent weeks shied from supporting the Schiff sham. Reps. Collin Peterson of Minnesota and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey both voted “no” on the October resolution pushing forward an inquiry into the impeachment of Trump — the former, calling the process “hopelessly partisan;” the latter, divisive and ultimately, because of Republican domination in the Senate, a waste of time.
No doubt, there are other Democrats who see impeachment of this president as more personal vendetta — The Squad hates Trump; Schiff hates Trump; Maxine Waters hates Trump; etc. — than fact-based possibility. Call them the quietly sane. They’re the ones who have kept their mouths shut out of fear of bucking Nancy Pelosi, but who otherwise know the impeachment process is all smoke, all wish, all political hype and hyper-hate, beginning to end.
And yet: Schiff is pushing forward with the process.
He’s calling his loser of an inquiry a win.
He’s pretending that his hearsay witnesses mattered and that his disgruntled diplomats spoke truths to impeachment powers, and he’s bull-headedly sending a summary report of the hearings to the Judiciary Committee. Happy Thanksgiving.
So we can all look forward to Rep. Jerry Nadler, another Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer, picking up the bucket and carrying Schiff’s water into the immediate future. Merry Christmas.
“The evidence of wrongdoing and misconduct by the president that we have gathered to date is clear and hardly in dispute,” Schiff wrote in a letter of summary from his Intelligence Committee’s hearings.
It’s not; it’s neither. There is neither evidence of wrongdoing nor clear and indisputable proof of misconduct. But to Schiff, to Democrats, to Democrats who are either biased Trump haters or cowed and silenced political tools — to a party that’s been overrun by socialist interests and socialist nuttiness — truth is only something to twist.
Truth is whatever they make it to be. Truth is however the party leaders want it.
But their tortured truths expose much.
They show how Democrats, as a party, are not for the American people, the Constitution, the country, or even for any higher concept of justice or fair play or morality and virtue. They’re simply for themselves.
If three years of impeachment lusts have shown anything, it’s that Democrats are only in politics, holding public office, in order to advance their own petty, selfish self-interested selves.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter @ckchumley.
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