Thread by @JewhadiTM

Why Impeachment Failed

@HouseDemocrats rushed through a botched process and then complained bitterly and endlessly that Senate Republicans wouldn’t do their work for them.

(via @davidharsanyi)

nationalreview.com/2020/02/why-im…

It’s difficult to recall a single Democratic senator throwing anything but hosannas Obama’s way, which allowed the former president to ride his high horse from one scandalous attack on the Constitution to the next.

In 1998, not a single Dem voted to convict Bill Clinton, who had engaged in wrongdoing (lying under oath to a federal grand jury in a sexual-harassment case in an effort to obstruct justice) for self-serving reasons, despite the GOP’s case being methodical and incriminating.

Perhaps if the public hadn’t been subjected to four years of interminable hysteria over the United States’ imaginary decent into fascism, it might have been less apathetic toward the fate of “vital” Ukrainian aid that most Democrats had voted against when Obama was president.

Perhaps if institutional media hadn’t spent 3 years pushing a hyperbolically paranoid narrative of Russian collusion (a debunked conspiracy theory incessantly repeated by Dems during the impeachment trial) the public wouldn’t be anesthetized to another alleged national emergency.

You simply can’t expect a well-adjusted voter to maintain CNN-levels of indignation for years on end.

Beyond that, the Dems’ strategy was a mess. @HouseDemocrats and their 17 witnesses set impossible-to-meet expectations, declaring that Trump had engaged in the worst wrongdoing ever committed by any president in history. (No exaggeration).

Schiff reeks of partisanship. Not only because he’s been caught lying about the presence of damning evidence against Trump on more than one occasion, but because he personally played a sketchy role in helping the whistleblower responsible for sparking the impeachment come forward

Lots of Americans rightly believe that a large faction of Democrats has been looking to impeach the president from Day One. Nadler happened to be someone who was actually caught scheming to do it.

Even then, instead of spending the appropriate time building a solid case, subpoenaing all the “vital” witnesses, and laying out a timeline, House Democrats, by their own admission, rushed forward.

They justified taking shortcuts by warning that the country was in a race to stop Trump from stealing the 2020 election just as he had allegedly stolen the 2016 election.

That wouldn’t have been a big deal if Nancy Pelosi hadn’t exposed the supposed need for urgency as a ruse, by withholding the articles of impeachment from the Senate for weeks.

She did so despite having zero standing to dictate the terms of the trial, no constitutional right to attempt to dictate them, and no political leverage. In the end, she got nothing from Mitch McConnell for her trouble.

Democrats had spent most of the House hearings focusing on the specific criminal offenses of “bribery” and “extortion” — poll-tested words that were taken up after the House realized “quid pro quo” didn’t play as well with the public.

If, as seems likely, it’s true that Americans are more familiar with the concepts of “bribery” and “extortion” than with the concept of a “quid pro quo,” that just means they have clearer expectations regarding the evidence needed to substantiate those accusations.

And the Dems didn’t have such evidence. They didn’t even bother including the former “crimes” in their open-ended articles of impeachment, which were expressly written to compel Senate Republicans to conduct an investigation for them.

The House had no right to demand that & the Senate had no reason to comply. So when the Senate took up impeachment, Dems began dropping one “bombshell” leak after another (Brett Kavanaugh strategy) to try and drag out the spectacle & maximize political damage. It didn’t work.

Democrats, though, keep demanding that Republicans play under a different set of rules. The Constitution, a document that is under attack by the very people claiming to want to save it from the president, worked exactly as it should in this case.