It has been an appalling spectacle to see rabidly partisan Democrats on Capitol Hill run a sham “impeachment” inquiry for the last few weeks. Day after day I heard them repeat their somber concerns about offenses never actually committed by the president. We have to protect our democracy, they intoned. We have to be sure that no one is above the law. We have to make sure that public officials who enrich themselves at public expense are held to account and punished. We had no choice, they whined, but to impeach the president for what he did.
Pelosi was smiling her schiff-eating grin, and giving cute little endearing glances and coy winks to her thug supporters
In the course of their one-sided hearings only one point of fact witness spoke, and in doing so conclusively cleared the president of any wrongdoing. There were lots of opinions given by people who hate the president, and there were lots of “news” segments in which media types gushed their approval of the president’s critics and added their own dislikes to the list.
Through it all, we waited patiently, believing that the process would work itself through. In our private moments we cursed the partisanship that drove this circus, and cursed the pathetic individual members of congress who daily reassured us that they were searching for the truth and would find something that the president did wrong. At the end of it all, they had absolutely nothing to back up any of the charges they had tossed about so cavalierly, and nothing legitimate to even accuse the president of doing. Then came the vote. Along strictly partisan lines, the House Democrats voted to pass two vague and meaningless articles of impeachment against the president. Not a single Republican voted for either. With barely suppressed shouts of glee, the Democrats accomplished what they had been working toward since the president had taken the oath of office. They impeached him.
They took the victory laps and patted each other on the back, and giggled, and gave each other high fives, and then came the surprise. The very next day the Speaker announced that they were not going to send the articles to the Senate for trial, and they weren’t going to appoint impeachment managers from the house to present the case. . . Huh? After all the posturing and all the tears of concern for the Republic and all the bullying of the House minority on every occasion, and in spite of demanding that the charges be brought and heard, and after near endless debate and a final historic vote, they decided not to transmit the impeachment articles to the Senate on some pretense of “fairness,” something that had been of no apparent concern during all of the hearings? I was furious. I was enraged. I was spitting foam. I was ready to bite nails. All the while the Speaker was smiling her schiff-eating grin, and giving cute little endearing glances and coy winks to her thug supporters. As I began to calm down after a day or two, I began to try to understand it all. I had practically blown a gasket when I first heard the articles would not be sent to the Senate. But why? I did some thinking, then it dawned on me.
They’ve declared that they won’t play by the rules. And we thought Hillary was a sore loser!
Everyone was operating on the assumption that the Democrats would follow the Constitution because they actually believed that some wrongdoing had been done. Now, they might have a different way of defining that wrongdoing, but they were allowed that, after all. Although I suspected that it was all for show, at least the show would play out, and the impeachment process would play out, and they would all see that there is a very good reason why no president has ever been removed from office after being impeached, even those who deserved to be. That reason is that it’s nearly impossible to get two-thirds of the US Senate to agree on anything, no matter which party controls the chamber. The Democrats had been saying all the right things for public consumption for three years. It’s legitimate, they assured us. There are bad things we have to uncover. So they impeached him, and within 12 hours after their triumph, they announced that they would just hold the impeachment articles in the house for now. That was the fatal mistake that revealed what was actually happening.
When Nancy Pelosi announced they would hold on to the articles, she revealed the true mission behind impeachment, and that mission was, and still remains, subversion of the Constitutional order. They want to overturn the 2016 election. Nothing could be plainer. If they accepted the traditions and outcomes that accompany impeachment efforts, they can say anything they want, then submit to the process that makes it nearly impossible to actually remove a sitting president from office. Pelosi said that they aren’t going to follow the rules and the traditions, they’re just going to pull down the Constitutional structure and wreck the Constitutional traditions. They’ve declared that they won’t play by the rules. And we thought Hillary was a sore loser!
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She’s thrown away the rules to deliberately injure a competitor in the hopes of forcing him to quit the race
When the Speaker announced that she would withhold the articles, she moved from barely legitimate posturing to outright subversion. She has nothing but contempt for the Constitution. Like a rogue ball player, she is now willing to do anything to win, and anybody who stands in her way had better watch out. It was her switch to subversion against the political order that had so infuriated me at an instinctual level.
A couple of analogies come to mind. The first is from baseball. Everybody plays by the rules in baseball, and the game goes on. But when a player decides that he has better eyes than the umpire, or he feels slighted by another player so much that he decides to use the ball or a bat or a fist as a weapon to get his way, then the fundamental order is threatened. When I see a pitcher deliberately hit a batter with a fastball, my usual response is total outrage. A player can feel wronged, but it is never justifiable to deliberately injure another player in the normal course of the game.
The other analogy is from racing. Some fans may disagree with me on this, but unless it’s a demolition derby, I say that when a driver deliberately uses a car to cause another driver to crash and leave the race so the aggressor may have a better chance of winning, that must not be tolerated. Allowing such a thing would turn every race into a demolition derby. Nancy Pelosi is using her power (the car, the bat, the ball) to wreck the chances of winning for another player. She’s thrown away the rules to deliberately injure a competitor in the hopes of forcing him to quit the race. That is wrong, and there is no excuse for that kind of political behavior. The competitor is playing by the rules, but the Speaker is not.
The Speaker will learn, at least eventually one hopes, that she’s playing at a very dangerous game. Institutions have memories, and so do the people who send representatives to serve in those institutions. And believe me, payback on this one is going to be brutal. Payback is always brutal in wartime.
Dr. Bruce Smith (Inkwell, Hearth and Plow) is a retired professor of history and a lifelong observer of politics and world events. He holds degrees from Indiana University and the University of Notre Dame. In addition to writing, he works as a caretaker and handyman. His non-fiction book The War Comes to Plum Street, about daily life in the 1930s and during World War II, may be ordered from Indiana University Press.
It has been an appalling spectacle to see rabidly partisan Democrats on Capitol Hill run a sham “impeachment” inquiry for the last few weeks. Day after day I heard them repeat their somber concerns about offenses never actually committed by the president. We have to protect our democracy, they intoned. We have to be sure that no one is above the law. We have to make sure that public officials who enrich themselves at public expense are held to account and punished. We had no choice, they whined, but to impeach the president for what he did. 
