JL Johnson, March 15, 2021
At 10:33 a.m. on Tuesday, February 9th, a band of pedestrian road agents hand-delivered their latest impeachment ultimatum to the Senate. (They wanted it to arrive at high noon, but since the fate of the Western world was hanging in the balance, they rushed it over.) Even though the miscreants all wore masks, they were quickly identified as members of Ma Pelosi’s notorious Hole-in-the Head gang, who — dressed all in black from mask to boot — looked more like a convention of Johnny Cash impersonators than a group of high officials carrying out their solemn and narrowly defined duties.
According to the Congressional Research Service’s rules, the House of Representatives has the power to formally charge and impeach a federal officer — which former President Trump was not – but in doing so it must follow a very strict procedure:
(1) Initiation of the impeachment process; (2) Judiciary Committee investigation, hearings, and markup of articles of impeachment; and (3) full House consideration of said articles.
Instead of adhering to the rules, however, the Democrats engaged in a hate-fueled rush to judgment, and, as is their wont, eliminated everything that even resembled due process.
Since it consisted of only one article, impeachment 2.0 was hardly an upgrade — but what it lacked in detail it made up for in applied histrionics, as it accused President Trump of willfully inciting violence against the Government of the United States.
While Congress was gathering to count the Electoral College votes, the President willfully made statements that encouraged — and foreseeably resulted in — imminent lawless action at the Capitol. Incited by President Trump, a mob unlawfully breached the Capitol, injured law enforcement personnel, menaced Members of Congress and the Vice President, interfered with the Joint Session’s solemn constitutional duty to certify the election results, and engaged in violent, deadly, destructive, and seditious acts.
No word yet on whether or not the former President was on the grassy knoll in November of 1963.
And what invectives did the President hurl that led to this conclusion? After speaking for an hour and twelve minutes, and recounting the many election “irregularities” that occurred on November 3rd, President Trump stirred the crowd to action with these hyper inflammatory remarks:
So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to try and give… The Democrats are hopeless. They’re never voting for anything, not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I want to thank you all. God bless you and God bless America. Thank you all for being here, this is incredible. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Finally, the President instructed his followers to, “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”
Hardly the words one would use to rouse a rabble, but for the Democrats, they were close enough. After all, they only needed their actions to have the appearance of legitimacy, a facade that many Republicans gladly provided; but not everyone was willing to participate in this Faustian farce.
Although it remains unclear whether Chief Justice Roberts refused or wasn’t asked to preside over the event, the eminently duplicitous Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, had this to say.
The Constitution says the chief justice presides for a sitting president. So it was up to John Roberts whether he wanted to preside with a president who is no longer sitting, Trump, and he doesn’t want to do it.
So if the Chief Justice wouldn’t be in charge, who would? Why, the Senate’s senior member, and President Pro Tempore, Patrick Leahy of course. The same Patrick “leaky” Leahy who routinely, but “inadvertently,” revealed sensitive information to the press during the 1980s, and was removed as vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1987 for leaking information about the Iran-Contra investigation. But not to worry. The Senator assured everyone that he had changed his perfidious ways.
When I preside over the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, I will not waver from my constitutional and sworn obligations to administer the trial with fairness, in accordance with the Constitution and the laws.
His assurances notwithstanding, putting Leaky Leahy in charge of the impeachment trial was like putting Willie Sutton in charge of the Treasury.
Since 67 senators’ votes were required to convict the ex-President, an acquittal was never in doubt — but then convicting him was never the point. From the moment Donald Trump won the Republican primary, Barack Obama weaponized every asset in his administrative arsenal against him. Then, together with the legacy media — aka the Democrat Ministry of Truth — congress, academia, the big tech monopolies, big corporations, Wall Street and the entertainment industry, conspired to make him an example of what happens to anyone who spoils the establishment’s plans. The message they sent was clear: even if a candidate or incumbent receives more votes than any other Republican in history, and garners a larger percentage of the black vote, the Hispanic vote, the female vote, the independent vote, and the vote of Evangelical Christians, the Democrat machine can still fabricate enough votes to prevail. Furthermore, they can fabricate them in plain sight, and suffer no consequences whatsoever — while making their victim’s life a living hell. So what redress is available to the millions of disenfranchised Republican voters? None, if they depend on their reticent representatives to take up the cause.
Today’s faint-hearted Republicans are strongly reminiscent of the hapless detectives in G. K. Chesterton’s, The Scandal of Father Brown — The Point of a Pin. “It isn’t that they can’t find the solution,” Father Brown said. “It’s that they can’t see the problem.” Like Lady Justice, and Chesterton’s detectives, many Republicans are politically blind, but they’re also deaf, dumb, and can’t smell, as illustrated by the former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s admission following Donald Trump’s presidential victory in 2016,
Donald Trump heard a voice out in this country that no one else heard. He connected – he connected in ways with people no one else did. He turned politics on its head.
The reason Speaker Ryan didn’t hear the voice of, or connect with, the people was because he wasn’t listening, and couldn’t see the problem.
In Ryan’s case, his epiphany lasted all of about thirty seconds, and resulted in no change of heart whatsoever. Even after admitting that he knew what the people wanted, he cast their wishes aside and happily gave Obama everything he wanted — and more. Now, the Republicans seem determined to follow Ryan’s example, and return to their business-as-usual approach of dealing with the Democrats. This time, however, the lucky losers do so at their own peril. Donald Trump has shown the people a better way.
What Ryan and the Republicans didn’t hear prior to the 2016 election, was a small, still voice of alarm that should have awakened at least some of them from their slumber. Now, after a stolen election that the Republicans did nothing to stop, and currently deny even took place, the intensity level of the people’s voice has become a full-blown 194-decible shock wave. Yet, in spite of this outcry, many in the Republican leadership still refuse to listen, even as their party’s foundation turns to quicksand beneath their feet. Instead of responding to the people’s call, they’ve reverted to type, and dusted off that old, familiar, refrain of “we’ll get ‘em in the midterms.”
The 2022 midterms may be a political bloodbath, but if they are, the Republicans will be the ones doing all the bleeding.
After having commandeered the last election, the Democrats will certainly double down on their successful game plan; leaving MAGA voters with no reason to expect different results at the polls — either now or in the future. Nevertheless, even the longest of odds can be overcome, as seen by President Lincoln’s ultimate victory following his painful lament to General Montgomery Meigs on January 10, 1862.
The people are impatient. Chase has no money, and he tells me he can raise no more; the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?
Like Lincoln, for some seventy-five or eighty million American voters the bottom is out of the tub, but not all is yet lost. We can, at the very least, stop funding our own destruction.
If we continue contributing to the RNC, or the Senate Republican Election Committee, instead of to individual candidates, we are funding our own destruction.
If we continue voting for candidates whose conservatism only appears in proximity to the next election, we are funding our own destruction.
If we support Twitter, Facebook, Google, Youtube, Gmail, Amazon, Paypal, the entertainment industry or any other company that caters to leftists and censors MAGA conservatives, we are funding our own destruction.
If we get our news exclusively from left wing media outlets, whether print, web-based or broadcast, we are funding our own destruction; and if we continue to support, in any way, teams of college-level or professional athletes that heap disrespect upon our flag and our country, we are funding our own destruction.
So, unless our laissez-faire approach to combating the present crisis is abandoned — in the words of Enya’s cursum perficio — our journey ends here. The Republic will be lost, the country will fly apart, and we will have only ourselves to blame.
J.L. Johnson is a U.S. Navy veteran who holds a BA (magna cum laude) from Oklahoma Christian College, and an MS in Communication Disorders from the University of Texas at Dallas. Prior to his recent retirement, he worked as a speech-language pathologist. He has written discipline-specific articles for various publications including Touchstone Magazine, and has published articles of a more general nature in The American Thinker and Human Events.
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