The impeachment trial of Donald Trump is still in progress, but now its conclusion is officially foregone: he will be acquitted sometime next week. I thought I'd record my observations and feelings about this monumental waste of time and energy before the inevitable conclusion takes place.
And the conclusion was always foregone. The Senate was always going to try the case; the Senate is dominated (slightly) by Republicans; the Senate was always going to acquit Trump if there was any opportunity to do so.
Nevertheless, the press is kicking up a hysterical fuss about how Trump has changed the balance of power between the three branches of government. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Shumer are saying that they won't recognize the impending acquittal, as if they have any choice in the matter--what's their alternative? Armed insurrection?
The Democrats really need to face the facts here: their team fumbled the ball almost from the kick-off. Their hatred of Trump is just too naked. Their lack of objectivity is so apparent that they might as well have "NEVER TRUMP" tattooed to their foreheads.
Now don't get me wrong. I didn't vote for Trump in the last election. I didn't vote for Hillary Clinton, either. I wrote in "Gandalf the Grey." (Gandalf the White is a bit too goody-two-shoes for my taste.) Donald Trump is the political equivalent of the troll that lives under the bridge, at least as far as decorum and modesty are concerned. It's very clear that he did in fact try to get the Ukrainian president to bow to pressure to investigate the Bidens. I don't see how anyone but a Trump fan-boy can dispute that.
In my view, the question isn't whether he did it. He clearly did. It's whether that distasteful, self-serving act rises to the level of an impeachable offense. I don't think it does. It's certainly ample justification for a vote of censure. But the Democrats made a gross tactical error by attempting to elevate it to an impeachable offense. The term "high crimes and misdemeanors" really does imply a requirement for an actual crime. Pushing for a political favor just doesn't qualify. It's business as usual for politicians of all stripes.
If Trump's push for an investigation of the Bidens is criminal, it's hard to see how Clinton's actual payment for the Steele dossier is not also criminal. Sauce for the goose, n'est-ce pas? Except in the Clinton case, it's even worse, because actual money was exchanged, however indirectly, via the good auspices of Fusion GPS. We don't even need to go over the multi-year attempt to find evidence that Trump was a "Russian stooge," in which the same organization was implicated.
The question of "obstruction of Congress" is even more clear-cut. Whether Trump explicitly or implicitly invoked executive privilege to prevent the Executive branch from supplying "Bull" Schiff and his cronies with evidence at subpoena-point is immaterial, because Schiff didn't issue those subpoenas under the force of an impeachment inquiry.
Remember, there wasn't a vote by the House to start an impeachment inquiry until AFTER Schiff completed his secretive, one-sided committee investigation. If the subpoenas had been issued after that authorization, the situation would've been very different.
Furthermore, when it became clear that the White House wasn't going to cooperate, Schiff failed to pursue the subpoenas through judicial review. If he had been seriously committed to getting the evidence he sought, he would've done so. Instead, he deliberately punted on that effort, and is now hiding behind the risible claim that Trump's defiance of the subpoenas shifts the Constitutional balance of powers.
It is to laugh. It is not Trump's fault that Schiff failed to pursue the well-known remedy of judicial intervention. When disputes arise between the Executive and Legislative branches, the courts come into play. This is not news, or shouldn't be to anyone paying the slightest attention.
Schiff's excuse for failing to pursue the subpoenas was the "urgency" of getting Trump out of office, but Nancy Pelosi's inane decision to sit on the articles of impeachment before finally referring them to the Senate for nearly a month takes the wind out of those sails.
Schiff and Shumer and Nadler and the other Democrats have shown an ample willingness to posture and bloviate, but not to actually prosecute the impeachment with real commitment. If they had really applied themselves, they could've gotten the evidence they sought during the House investigation. In the face of incontrovertible first-hand evidence, it would've been infinitely harder for the Republicans to have responded with a party-line vote against them in the Senate.
It is increasingly clear that the impeachment was never really expected to succeed, but only to provide the Democrats with more fodder for the upcoming election campaign. It was a purely political ploy. And I think, a badly mistaken one.
According to polls, independent voters were shifted in Trump's favor by the obvious bias of the House investigation.
Republicans will be bolstered by the President's acquittal and the ever-increasing evidence that Democrats will do anything to try to get Trump removed from office.
I think Democrats will be slightly demoralized by their failure to dislodge the Bridge Troll from the White House. The Mueller investigation was a bust. The Brett Kavanaugh character assassination ploy failed. The impeachment trial is going to be a bust, assuming nothing explosive happens between now and next Wednesday.
Trump will deliver a smarmy State of the Union speech in the face of the seething Democrats next Tuesday, and they won't be able to do anything without looking even more obviously like spoiled children whose toys have been taken away. And on Wednesday, if the current schedule holds, Trump will be acquitted.
The Democrats will then face a quandary. Having exhausted their attempts to get rid of Trump before the election, they face the prospect of Bernie Sanders getting the nomination, which will probably be followed by a lopsided Trump victory at the polls. Bernie may appeal to the morons who think that socialism is a great alternative to the capitalistic success we're currently enjoying, but most independents and probably quite a few moderate Democrats won't vote for him. And if somehow Joe Biden were to secure the nomination, the Burisma / Hunter Biden connection will be center stage in every Republican ad until November 3.
I think the Democrats are well and truly screwed for the next election cycle. Unless Trump does something spectacularly stupid, he's going to be reelected.