The House Progressive-Democrats have settled on two Articles of Impeachment.
The first article is on abuse of power. Democrats allege that Mr Trump took advantage of his position as president to pressure Kyiv to investigate a political rival. The second article is on obstruction of Congress, related to the president’s moves to block aides from participating in the impeachment investigation.
In conjunction with this, The Wall Street Journal asked a question:
Do you think President Trump will be impeached in the House under these two articles?
Of course he will. It’s long since become politically impossible for the Progressive-Democrats to step back from this. They’re wholly committed; even stepping back to a vote of Censure, as some have suggested, would be a confession that they’ve just been engaged in a smear campaign.
Never mind that they insist, with straight faces, that it’s an impeachable offense for a President to move to defend himself against Congressional accusations, including this Congress’ empty ones.
Never mind that the Progressive-Democrats’ hearings, even as one-sided as they’ve constructed them to be, completely failed to reveal a shred of evidence of anything—only 2nd- and 3rd-hand, even some 4th-hand, hearsay and suppositions and presumptions.
And Fiona Hill’s being “quite cross” that she was being bypassed in foreign policy development vis-à-vis Ukraine.
And the Progressive-Democrats putting more stock in an ad hoc “interagency coordination group”—which has no existence in law or Executive Order—than it does in the policies of the person Constitutionally in charge of foreign policy.
The trial in the Senate will be interesting, and not only for the trial itself. It’ll be interesting to see whether Congressman Adam Schiff (D, CA) will answer a summons to testify, or whether he’ll hide behind his (likely) role as prosecutor in that trial, just as he hid behind his role as House Intelligence Committee Chairman to refuse to testify before the House Judiciary Committee.
It’ll be interesting to see what the Senate does about Schiff’s likely refusal.
It’ll be interesting to see how the Senate handles its summons of the whistleblower and that one’s refusal to appear.