You know, I’m not that old. Of course, I’m not that young anymore either, which is hard to grasp at times. What I’m sure of, though, is that I was alive a little over three years ago.
I’m going to assume you were alive as well given you are reading this and likely aren’t a literate two-year-old. So with that settled, it’s safe to say that we witnessed Donald Trump’s first impeachment. Remember? The one with the phone call and Alexander Vindman?
What’s also worth remembering is how Democrats justified that impeachment. Despite there being no clear violation of the law, we were all assured that such a violation was not required. Rep. Jerry Nadler made that explicit when he stated the following.
The Constitution doesn’t specify that a president must technically have broken a law in order to be impeached.
And who can forget the think pieces that inundated the mainstream press during that period? Over and over, explainers were written to assert that Congress could impeach a president for literally anything. The constitutional mention of “high crimes and misdemeanors” was watered down to be nothing more than a broad guideline. All that mattered, according to the press, was that Congress wanted to impeach the president. There were no other stipulations.
Take this line from a Reuters article written at the time.
High crimes and misdemeanors have historically encompassed corruption and abuses of the public trust, as opposed to indictable violations of criminal statutes.
Former President Gerald Ford, while in Congress, famously said: “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”
You see, the founders didn’t really mean “high crimes and misdemeanors.” What they really meant was “corruption” and “abuses of the public trust” even in the absence of any criminal activity. So it was said, and so it was. Democrats in the House impeached Donald Trump for the vague violation of “abuse of power.”
Are you ready for the shocking twist? Fast-forward to the present day and the same people who set that precedent are now looking to erase it from the public consciousness. Suddenly, those who lowered the bar for impeachment to laughable levels want to raise the bar again. Republican turned Biden booster Alyssa Farah Griffin provides the perfect example.
Reading that, I’m left confused. While we’ve already established that all of us reading this are old enough to have witnessed Donald Trump’s first impeachment, I can only conclude that Griffin is one of those literate two-year-olds I mentioned. Otherwise, she would know that the bar for impeachment has already been lowered. She would also know that our institutions have already been irrevocably damaged. Lastly, Griffin would surely be aware that the precedent Democrats set is what ultimately set the stage for every future POTUS to be impeached.
But even if you assume she’s sincere, her critique still doesn’t work when you consider that bribery is directly mentioned in the United States Constitution as a justifiable reason for impeachment. There’s nothing in there about phone calls, but the part about bribery? That’s in there.
When you consider that, it’s clear that Griffin and other Democrats aren’t seeking to change the precedent as a way to restore honor and restraint to the federal government. Rather, they are suggesting the Constitution be ignored for purely political reasons. Namely, they just want to protect Joe Biden. It’s not any more complicated than that.
To offer some clarity to Griffin about the situation, Biden has been credibly accused by multiple whistleblowers and witnesses of being intimately involved in corrupt foreign dealings. His own son accused him of being in the room while a CCP operative was threatened to pay millions of dollars. There are even FBI informant-sourced quotes from the founder of Burisma stating that Hunter Biden’s high-paid employment was to ensure that Joe Biden would get Viktor Shokin fired, who was investigating the Ukrainian gas company.
In short, there is far more evidence that Biden committed impeachable offenses than there ever was that Trump did. So while Democrats are desperately trying to change the rules of impeachment again, that’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works.