Impeachment

Since Trump’s election, the dream uniting all Democrats is to impeach the president.  Having won the House and with a mere majority necessary to initiate Articles of Impeachment, that dream will finally come true – never mind that chances of conviction in the Senate are near nil, with 67 votes required to sustain and Republicans still in the majority.  They will impeach because, as with the scorpion, it’s their nature.

It doesn’t matter that after more than two years of investigation, President Trump has not been found to have committed any crime.  Impeachment is not a criminal proceeding; it is a political proceeding, and in the “People’s House,” the majority decides what constitutes “High Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Articles of Impeachment will soon pass in the House because Democrats will want the Senate trial to play out during the 2020 presidential election.

Democrats are prone to overreach.  When Obama was elected with a majority in the House and a filibuster-proof Senate, they ran amok.  Convinced they would never lose again, their rule was uncompromising.

Forgetting that nothing lasts forever, and the aphorism stating that if something can’t go on forever, it will eventually end, Obamacare was rammed through Congress using legislative trickery and claims of saving money and keeping doctors and health plans.

Democrats also passed Dodd-Frank financial legislation, which eliminated low-interest credit cards and prevented people and small businesses from getting loans and mortgages.

Obama and the Democrats spent eight years throttling industry and the economy with regulatory zeal.  Obama’s reliance on executive orders to control all aspects of citizens’ business and personal lives and the weaponization of federal law enforcement; intelligence agencies; and administrative agencies such as the FBI, DOJ, EPA, and IRS to pursue political opponents and extra-legislatively enact law slowly turned the voters against the Democrats.

Their overreach cost Obama and Democrats the House and their super-majority in the Senate.

In 2013, Senate majority leader Harry Reid triggered the “nuclear option” killing the filibuster (or cloture) rule, whereby three-fifths of the Senate or 60 members were necessary to advance judicial nominees – he made an exception for Supreme Court nominations, which retained the 60-vote threshold.

Reid did this because he could.  He was confident that with demographic changes, Democrats would never again be in the minority.  Therefore, his rule changes would never come back to haunt him or his party.

Reid was wrong.  Democrats lost the Senate in 2014, ushering in the Mitch McConnell era.

Reid’s implementation of the “nuclear option,” more than anything else, allowed the “radical transformation” of the Supreme Court.  When Justice Antonin Scalia died, Obama nominated Merrick Garland to replace him.  But with Republicans controlling the Senate and the rules, his nomination was ignored.  When Trump became president, he instead nominated Neil Gorsuch, and, with Reid’s precedent, McConnell dropped the hammer, dispensing with the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations as well.

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