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Andrew McCarthy

Andrew McCarthy: On Trump impeachment, consider these fantasy thought experiments

Thought experiment No. 1: Suppose Bob Mueller’s probe actually proved that Donald Trump is under Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s thumb.

Fill in the rest of the blanks with your favorite corruption fantasy: The Kremlin has video of the mogul-turned-president debauching himself in a Moscow hotel; the Kremlin has a bulging file of real-estate transfers through which Trump laundered racketeering proceeds for Putin’s favored mobsters and oligarchs; or Trump is recorded cutting a deal to drop Obama-era sanctions against Putin’s regime if Russian spies hack Democratic accounts.

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Thought experiment No. 2: Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is not a demagogue. (Remember, this is fantasy.)

REPS. JORDAN, MEADOWS, BIGGS AND HOUSE FREEDOM CAUCUS BOARD: IMPEACHMENT — A CLOSING ARGUMENT

At the very first televised hearing, when he alleged that President Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, “I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent … lots of it,” Schiff was not defrauding the public.

Instead, impeachment’s Inspector Clouseau can actually prove that Trump was asking a foreign government to manufacture out of whole cloth evidence that former Vice President Joe Biden and his son were cashing in on the former’s political influence (as opposed to asking that Ukraine look into an arrangement so objectively sleazy that the Obama administration itself agitated over what to do about it).

What do these two scenarios have in common, besides being fictional? Answer: If either of them were real, we’d already be talking about President Pence’s upcoming State of the Union address.

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This is the point that gets lost in all the endless chatter over impeachment strategy and procedure. Everything that is happening owes to the fact that we do not have an offense sufficiently grave for invocation of the Constitution’s nuclear option. If we had one, the machinations and the posturing would be unnecessary — even ridiculous.

Why are we talking about how Chairman Schiff, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and House Democrats rushed through the impeachment inquiry without making a real effort to interview key witnesses?

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Andrew McCarthy: Obstruction of Congress impeachment article is absolutely frivolous

Honor a congressional subpoena to appear at President Trump’s (presumably eventual) Senate impeachment trial? Joe Biden, still the odds-on favorite to be the Democrats’ standard-bearer in the 2020 election, scoffed at the very idea: No way!

The former vice president’s knee-jerk obstinacy illuminates — we should say, provides even more illumination of — the patent farce that is the second article of impeachment passed by the House on a strict party-line vote: the accusation that the president has obstructed Congress. As we saw in a committee hearing, featuring the spectacle of staffers questioning staffers with no actual fact witnesses in sight, Democrats have no problem when Democrats blow off congressional demands for information. “Obstruction” is a one-way street.

Trump regards the impeachment inquiry as a partisan witch hunt, just the latest phase of the Democrats’ project to remove him, which began even before his term started. He certainly has a point, although that is not a good reason to give his opponents fuel for the project, as he did by pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden. That is the allegation in the first article of impeachment. Under the circumstances, I believe it falls well short of the egregious misconduct for which impeachment should be reserved; it was, nevertheless, a foolish thing for the president to do.

GREGG JARRETT: IN ORDERING SOLEIMANI KILLING, TRUMP ACTING CORRECTLY, DECISIVELY AND CONSTITUTIONALLY

Let’s focus, though, on the second impeachment article, obstruction of Congress.

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The president directed his underlings and executive branch components not to comply with congressional demands for information. To be clear, Congress has undeniable constitutional authority, broad in scope, to conduct oversight of the executive branch.

The president, with all the authority of a peer branch of government, has extensive privileges of confidentiality, rooted in Article II, particularly when it comes to communications with his staff and high executive officials. Congress, however, is empowered to probe, especially when its concern is presidential malfeasance, or the activities of executive branch agencies Congress has created — such agencies, after all, are led by officers subject to Senate confirmation, and Congress both underwrites them with taxpayer funds and limits their operations by statute.

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Andrew McCarthy: The costs of trivializing impeachment

Resorting to a vague “abuse of power” theory, the House Judiciary Committee Friday morning referred two articles of impeachment to the full House on the inevitable party-line vote.

The full House will impeach the president this week, perhaps Wednesday, also on the inevitable party-line vote. The scarlet “I” will be affixed to Donald Trump in the history books. He will not be removed from power by the Senate, however, and he has a fairly good chance of being reelected by the voters.

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In sum, then, we are exactly where the Framers hoped we would never be when they added the impeachment clauses to the Constitution: in a governing system in which impeachment has been trivialized into a partisan weapon for straitjacketing the incumbent administration, rather than being reserved as a nuclear option for misconduct so egregious that Congress must act, transcending partisan, factional, or ideological considerations.

What will be the cost of trivializing impeachment this way?

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I do not think that question will be answered in the Senate. It will be answered in the election next November. I fear that the answer will be banana republic-style dysfunction in government and a chasm of divisiveness in the body politic that may not be bridgeable.

That is because I believe the voters may enable Democrats to retain control of the House. In the absence of public objection to the politicization of impeachment, it is apt to become the new normal.

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Andrew McCarthy: House Dems know impeachment power can be abused, too. Who do they think they’re fooling?

It is not a good look for Democrats, in purporting to respond to the president’s abuse of his constitutional power over foreign relations, to abuse the House’s power over impeachment. That, however, is exactly what they are doing in their unseemly zeal to impeach President Trump on a blatantly political deadline.

Democrats say Trump exploited his constitutional power for political purposes, but how is that different from what they are doing now?

ANDREW MCCARTHY: DID TRUMP COMMIT IMPEACHABLE BRIBERY?

It is not a good look for Democrats, in purporting to respond to the president’s abuse of his constitutional power over foreign relations, to abuse the House’s power over impeachment. That, however, is exactly what they are doing in their unseemly zeal to impeach President Trump on a blatantly political deadline.

In a December 1 letter, White House counsel Pat Cipollone notified House Judiciary chairman Jerrold Nadler (D., N.Y.) that the president will not participate in the committee’s first open hearing on Wednesday, December 4. Ordinarily — not that there’s anything “ordinary” about the potential impeachment of an American president — I’d be inclined to assess this as poor judgment.

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Abstaining now could also be problematic down the road. Eventually, there will be a Senate impeachment trial. Because the House is now giving the president an opportunity to examine witnesses, Senate Democrats will have a good argument that transcripts from Nadler’s hearings should be admitted as trial evidence — i.e., the president should not be heard to complain since he will have passed up his chance to confront his accusers.

Continue reading Andrew McCarthy’s column in the National Review.

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