The year 2020: Looking ahead
As of this writing, House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, is saying she will not send Articles of Impeachment over to the U.S. Senate for trial until she is assured the trial will be "fair." Speaker Pelosi is not a lawyer so, in "fairness," we probably should cut Speaker Pelosi some slack.
Speaker Pelosi’s conception of "fairness" conflicts with two fundamental principles of American jurisprudence: 1. The trial procedure must be "fair" to the accused. There is no requirement that the trial be "fair" to the prosecutors from the House of Representatives. 2. The jurors (the Senators) must assume the accused (President Trump) is innocent until proven guilty.
While we await whatever Speaker Pelosi decides to do, it cannot be said that Speaker Pelosi, Chairmen Schiff, Nadler, and the AOC/Mod Squad Wing of the Democrat Party have not gotten anything done. In fact, they have done what the experts said could never be done:
1. They united all the GOP members of House of Representatives behind President Trump. 2. They made a sympathetic character out of the sometimes less-than-unlikeable President Trump. 3. They made President Trump a victim. 4.They caused a Democrat House member to switch to the GOP. 5. They caused two Democrats to vote against Impeachment. 6. They caused a Democrat presidential candidate to vote "present" instead of "for." 7. They helped President Trump’s supporters raise millions of additional dollars. 8. They shored up President Trump’s political base. 9. They awakened millions of independent voters to the unfairness of the Democrat’s one-sided Impeachment procedure. 10. Their hearings and their 12-hour debate -- done at taxpayer expense -- made the largest in-kind contribution to a political campaign in American history. 11. They placed 31 Democrat House members from Trump-won districts at risk of being turned out of office in 2020. 12. They may present a case to the U.S. Senate that is so weak that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell might simply dismiss it out-of-hand. 13. And, for even the least interested observer to see, they exposed the hypocrisy of the anti-Trump media.
For anyone who has not been paying attention to politics over the last three years, The American Spectator summarized what has happened in one long sentence: "We are where we are because Hillary Clinton, whose campaign created this entire environment by weaponizing opposition research through drumming up the Fusion GPS–Steele dossier and feeding it through the corrupt Obama Justice Department, refused to accept rejection by the American people in the 2016 election, and Clinton’s partisans on the Hard Left have demanded that the Democrats sabotage and resist the Trump administration in every way possible, up to, and even occasionally including, mild violence."
Memo to all U.S. Senators who will sit as jurors in a Senate trial: Stop making statements as to the outcome of the trial. Be quiet and listen to whatever is presented. When both sides have been heard, then vote.
Prediction for 2020: At the Democratic National Convention, if the first ballot is not decisive, the state delegations are free to vote as they please. Watch for someone favored by the Super Delegates to win the nomination. The name will be familiar. We report. You speculate.
©2019. William Hamilton.
William Hamilton, a former intelligence officer, is a laureate of the Oklahoma Military Hall of Fame, the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame, the Nebraska Aviation Hall of Fame, the Colorado Aviation Hall of Fame, and the Oklahoma University Army ROTC Wall of Fame. Dr. Hamilton’s Formula for Failure in Vietnam: The Folly of Limited Warfare was published on November 20, 2019. To order, call toll free: (800) 253-2187 Or, go to Amazon.com.
|
