A Disgusting Warping of the Constitution for Political Gain

by

       M. Richard Maxson

      The American Constitutionalist has refrained from commenting on the impeachment investigation until now as this IS an assault on the Constitution. In our system of government, power resides with the American people, who delegate executive power to the President through an election once every four years. Unelected officials and career bureaucrats assist in the execution of the laws. The unelected bureaucracy exists to serve the elected representatives of the American people.

      The Democrats’ impeachment inquiry is not the outgrowth of serious misconduct; it is an orchestrated campaign to upend our political system. The Democrats are trying to impeach a duly elected President based on the accusations and assumptions of unelected bureaucrats who disagreed with President Trump’s policy initiatives and processes. The evidence presented does not prove any of these Democrat allegations, and none of the Democrats’ witnesses testified to having evidence of bribery, extortion, or any high crime or misdemeanor.

      The Democrats’ impeachment narrative flips our system on its head in service of their political ambitions. They have violated every conceivable due process right….counsel, confrontation, cross-examination, compulsory process. They have conducted secret hearings leaking selectively and deceptively. This Democrat Congress will be remembered for wholesale trashing of the U.S. Constitution to satisfy the politically-driven irrational hatred of a president who challenges the Lefist idea that they are intellectually and morally superior to the rest of us.

      The parade of witnesses(?) is a whose-who of Deep State characters and Leftist jurists with a long history of published anti-American and Socialist viewpoints. The three liberal professors with knowledge of the Constitution whom Democrats dragged in to advance their case weren't witnesses to anything -- they are merely Democratic donors and/or partisans with an axe to grind against the president. The only recent voice of reason comes from George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley, who himself admitted that he did not vote for the president but as a true American and constitutionalist, could not remain silent.

      In his testimony at the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Turley warned Congress that it was abusing its power suggesting that Congressional Democrats would be committing the high crimes and misdemeanors — not President Donald Trump — with the way that they are conducting their impeachment efforts. “If you impeach a president, if you make a ‘high crime and misdemeanor’ out of going to the courts, it is an abuse of power. It’s your abuse of power. You’re doing precisely what you’re criticizing the president for doing,” he stated.

      “If this Committee elects to seek impeachment on the failure to yield to congressional demands in an oversight or impeachment investigation, it will have to distinguish a long line of cases where prior presidents sought the very same review while withholding witnesses and documents,” Turley said. “Basing impeachment on this obstruction theory would itself be an abuse of power … by Congress. It would be an extremely dangerous precedent to set for future presidents and Congresses in making an appeal to the Judiciary into ‘high crime and misdemeanor.'”

      Professor Turley also stated, “In the current case, the record is facially insufficient. The problem is not simply that the record does not contain direct evidence of the President stating a quid pro quo, as Chairman Schiff has suggested,” Turley continued. “The problem is that the House has not bothered to subpoena the key witnesses who would have such direct knowledge. This alone sets a dangerous precedent. A House in the future could avoid countervailing evidence by simply relying on tailored records with testimony from people who offer damning presumptions or speculation.”

      Their impeachment inquiry lacks any substance and they know it so they play dirtier than anything ever done in the history of the United States. The Democrats release the private phone numbers of their opponents. The last few years of Democrats encouraging their radical bases to attack and assault their political opponents is disgusting. This time they put it in overdrive as Republican Congressmen and Senators now require extensive security.

      House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) has done almost exactly what he and fellow Democrats accuse President Donald Trump (falsely) of doing: he abused his power to ask an outside entity to investigate political opponents. Schiff subpoenaed phone records from AT&T that he then used to claim his Republican counterpart, Ranking Member Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), was part of a plot to smear a U.S. ambassador.

      What Schiff did is arguably worse than what he claims Trump did in his telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. AT&T is an American company, not a foreign government. Schiff didn’t simply ask AT&T for dirt on his opponents. He forced it to hand over the records. And he did so without giving Nunes any warning, or any opportunity to respond to the claims he would later sneak into his 300-page impeachment report.

      Kimberly Strassel at theWall Street Journal notes: “Mr. Schiff claims the ignominious distinction of being the first congressman to use his official powers to spy on a fellow member and publish the details.” She adds, quoting former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, that Schiff’s subpoena may have broken the law. Phone carriers cannot divulge call records without an individual’s consent, except for a legitimate law enforcement purpose: this was not. Schiff ordered the phone records on Sep. 30, but the House impeachment inquiry was not properly authorized until Oct. 31, so he cannot claim the subpoena was justified. Strassel adds, citing constitutional law expert David Rivkin, that anyone swept up in Schiff’s phone snooping might have the right to sue. Shockingly, she adds, “The media is treating this [the phone records] as a victory, when it is a disgraceful breach of ethical and legal propriety.”

      The Wall Street Journal editorial board blasted not only the attempt to smear/suggest the involvement of the included people by the records without, of course, any evidence, but also the unprecedented abuse of power. Now we have elected members of Congress using secret subpoenas to obtain, and then release to the public, the call records of political opponents. “Apparently Mr. Schiff now wants to impeach Members of Congress too.”

       Americans see how unfair and corrupt the entire impeachment process has been from the start but this act was brazen and shameful. While it may not have been illegal (because Congress writes its own rules on investigations) it certainly was wrong. It certainly tramples on rights normally held dear by the left. But most of all what it did was expose that Schiff, for all of his pompous bluster, is doing exactly what he has accused President Trump of doing: using his power to investigate his political opponents.

      Schiff has destroyed the ability of the Intelligence Committee to work in a bipartisan fashion, which is crucial to its oversight function. But what is even worse is that he has private information about the conversations of an unknown number of Americans, including journalists and elected officials. His “inquiry” is no longer just about the president. It has become an Inquisition, encroaching on the rights of ordinary citizens who have nothing to do with Trump.

      This is all bad political theater on the backs of taxpayers footing the multimillion-dollar tab. Meanwhile, Democrats aren't doing the work of the American people -- work they were elected to do.

• They refuse to pass the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a trilateral deal that will strengthen crucial trade alliances with neighboring Canada and Mexico, create an estimated 176,000 new jobs, increase wages and add $68.2 billion to the U.S. economy.

• They're turning a blind eye to other needs such as failing infrastructure; funds for our military and the government; lowering prescription drug prices; and fixing the broken immigration system jeopardizing national security.

• They're also ignoring one the biggest issues voters across the aisle care about, health care, evidence that liberal lawmakers care more about power and all its self-serving manifestations than doing what's best for our country and the American people.

      The hypocrisy is mind-blogging. Just go back to Barack Obama. The same president who ignored Congress and created laws by fiat. The man who ignored laws when they were inconvenient, and then ignored courts that told him to stop doing it. The man who ignored congressional subpoenas after his administration put 2,000 weapons into the hands of narco-traffickers (and an Islamic terrorist), leading to the murder of at least one American. More than once, Obama spied on the press. He ordered law enforcement to back off a terrorist organization that was engaged in criminal behavior in the United States, so that he could make a deal with Iran and bolster his political agenda. More than any modern president, Obama was rebuked by the Supreme Court, often 9–0. To watch a supporter of the previous president — a president who abused his executive power in unprecedented ways — playacting as a constitutional purist is intolerable.