Realistically, what is the possibility that President Donald
Trump will be impeached and removed from office before the next election?
Impeachment is a two-step process. First there is an
impeachment proceeding in the U.S. House of Representatives, now controlled by
Democrats; then there is a trial in the U.S. Senate, presently controlled by
Republicans. If the bill of impeachment is accepted by the House and the trial
in the Senate is successful, the offender – in this case President Donald Trump
– is removed from office, the only punishment allowed in an impeachment
proceeding. Since the Senate is controlled by Republicans, the possibility that
Trump will be removed from office before the next election is remote, so
improbable that it ought not to be taken seriously. Pelosi’s “impeachment
investigation,” announced before a transcript of a telephone conversation
between Trump and newly elected President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky had
been released to the public, is an effort to resurrect a corpse buried by
Robert Mueller – collusion between Trump and foreign potentates.
Some left wing progressive Democrats want an immediate
impeachment of Trump, others do not. Here in Connecticut, according to a recent media report,
“Members of Connecticut’s congressional delegation are re-evaluating their
positions on impeachment following revelations by President Donald Trump that
he discussed former Vice President Joseph Biden and his son with Ukraine’s
leader.”
Democrat Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had been
resisting calls for impeachment from far leftists in her party. Members of
Connecticut’s all Democrat U.S. Congressional Delegation appeared to have
acceded to her wishes, but in the wake of this disclosure, “Democratic
lawmakers,” according to the report, announced Monday that an impeachment
proceeding might be necessary, given new information about the president’s
conversation with Zelensky. They “include Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris
Murphy and Reps. John Larson, Rosa DeLauro and Joe Courtney.”
The question before the house is: Do Connecticut Democrats
want an impeachment, followed by a removal from office, or do they want a
live-wire campaign issue for the 2020 elections?
In the last off-presidential elections, Connecticut
Democrats effectively used the still pending Muller investigation to damage
Connecticut Republicans. According to
many commentators in Connecticut, the ploy worked, even though Trump did not
appear on Connecticut ballots; very likely it worked especially well because
Trump was not on the ballot and leading Republicans in the state were
characteristically silent in the face of the Democrat accusation that Trump, with
help from Putin, had snatched presidential victory from the mouth of Democrat
presidential nominee Clinton. Asked why Clinton had lost to Trump, Victor Davis
Hanson, a noted war scholar, responded -- because a majority of voters were
inclined to believe Trump when he was lying, a reference to Trump’s sometimes
wild hyperbole, rather than Clinton when she was telling the truth.
Convinced that the Malloy administration’s ruinous policies
would be foremost on the minds of voters, no prominent Republican in the state
answered the anti-Trump accusations bubbling up in media reports, and Democrat
progressives were swept into seats previously held by multi-term Republicans.
All this occurred before the results of the Muller investigation had been made
public. The Muller Report found no collusion between Trump and President of
Russia Vladimir Putin, findings that came very late in the day for Republicans.
The disposition of forces will be very much different in
2020. Trump will be on the ballot in Connecticut, even though some Democrat
leaders in the state have made strenuous efforts to remove the president from Connecticut
ballots.
Things change very quickly in politics. Yesterday we were
told in a CTMirror piece that Trump
and his allies “charge that, as vice president, Biden pushed for the ouster of
a Ukrainian prosecutor whose office was investigating the oligarch who owned
the gas company… But no evidence has surfaced that Biden intentionally tried to
help his son by pressing for the prosecutor’s dismissal, which was sought by a
number of U.S. allies who were dismayed the prosecutor turned a blind eye to
corruption.”
In fact, Biden is himself on record as having boasted that
he forced the resignation of the Ukrainian prosecutor, and although corruption
was rife in Ukraine during the administration of the previous president, who
was under the influence of Russian President Vladimir Putin, it is an open
question whether the prosecutor sacked on Biden’s orders was corrupt. John
Solomon of The Hill has been since July releasing a pile of valuable information taken from real sources,
among them Nazar Kholodnytsky,
Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor. His sources are named and quoted in
his stories, a refreshing but unusual practice in recent American journalism.
Biden is not the only American politician to have pressured
the Ukrainian government. In a recent piece, Solomon writes
of Connecticut U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, who paid a call on Ukraine’s new
president Volodymyr
Zelensky, that Murphy “made clear — by his own account — that Ukraine currently
enjoyed bipartisan support for
its U.S. aid but that could be jeopardized if the new president acquiesced to
requests by President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate past corruption allegations
involving Americans, including former Vice President Joe Biden’s family (links
original).”
As early as January, 2016, Solomon reports, the Obama White
House “unexpectedly invited Ukraine’s top prosecutors to Washington to discuss
fighting corruption in the country. The meeting, promised as training, turned
out to be more of a pretext for the Obama administration to pressure Ukraine’s
prosecutors to drop an investigation into the Burisma Holdings gas company that
employed Hunter Biden and to look for new evidence in a then-dormant criminal
case against eventual Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, a GOP
lobbyist.”
Eventually, the whole business will come out in the wash,
and speculation is rife that some Democrats, Biden among them, will not escape
a cleansing criticism.
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