Tag Archives: rights

Two Impeachment Moves

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Senator Josh Hawley (R, MO) has introduced a resolution to dismiss all impeachment charges if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) continues to obstruct the Senate trial by refusing to submit her caucus’ Articles of Impeachment to the Senate.  Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Senator Lindsey Graham (R, SC) says he’ll work with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) to change Senate rules to allow the Senate to begin the impeachment trial.

Hawley has proposed

So here’s what I think needs to happen. We need to change the Senate rules to allow the Senate to dismiss this case if she refuses to send the articles over[.]

Of the two, Graham’s is the more substantive.

What I would do, if she continues to refuse to send the articles as required by the Constitution, I would work with Senator McConnell to change the rules of the Senate so we could start the trial without her, if necessary[.]
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If we don’t get the articles this week, then we need to take matters in our own hands and change the rules, deem them to be delivered to the Senate so we can start the trial, invite the House over to participate if they would like[.]

We need to hold the trial. President Donald Trump is allowed to be vindicated by trial; simply dismissing the charges leaves them hanging. It also would give Progressive-Democrats opportunity to bellyache about unfairness. They’re going to do anyway on acquittal, but since they will, they might as well do it on their failed case, rather than on something nebulous.

“Rolling Impeachment”

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That’s how Kimberly Strassel characterized House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA) refusal to formally deliver her caucus’ Articles of Impeachment under the fiction that if she does not, the Senate cannot hold the trial. (It’s not entirely fictive under current Senate rules, but the Senate can straightforwardly change its rules.)

However, not one of the outcomes Strassel listed in her As long as the Senate doesn’t hold a trial… sequence are goals of the Progressive-Democratic Party.

They’re just intermediate steps along the way to the Progressive-Democrats’ true goal: the preemption of the 2020 elections and the denial of American voters our choice for President. They don’t expect actually to remove President Donald Trump from office, as Strassel noted. They do hope to so poison the election with the smears represented by those no trial machinations that our choice is denied by making one of them preemptively unelectable.

Impeachment And Trial

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) is continuing to refuse to deliver her caucus’ Article of Impeachment to the Senate for trial.  Leave aside the premises that by withholding her Articles, she is confessing that her caucus has no case to present for trial or that she is functionally absolving President Donald Trump of any impeachable wrong-doing.  As The Wall Street Journal noted, her move only trivializ[es] a serious constitutional power and process. As the WSJ further noted,

There’s nothing in the Constitution that says impeachment requires a formal transmittal of the articles to the Senate, whether by sedan chair or overnight FedEx, or that the House must appoint impeachment managers.

Here, though, the WSJ misstated the case:

If she never sends the articles and there is no trial, she will have effectively trampled on executive power and Senate prerogatives by maligning a President without the chance for acquittal at trial.

The claim is certainly true in the latter part, if there is no trial; however, Pelosi’s not sending along the Articles does not mean there can be no trial.

The Progressive-Democrat caucus’ Articles of Impeachment are recorded in the House Journal IAW our Constitution’s Article I, Section 5:

Each House shall keep a Journal of its Proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such Parts as may in their Judgment require Secrecy….

Of course, there’s nothing requiring Secrecy in the publicly done impeachment process.  The Senate can simply collect the Articles from the House’s publicly available Journal and proceed from there. If current Senate Rules don’t have provision for that, it’s a simply enough matter—a majority vote—to adjust its Rules.

Even with the Articles collected on Senate initiative, its current Rules say that a trial can’t be begun until the House appoints its impeachment managers, which Pelosi also is refusing to do. This is another easy adjustment to relevant Senate Rules.

The Progressive-Democrats have impeached our President, and with that, the House’s role in the process is done. All that’s happening now on the House side is a toddler’s temper tantrum, a toddler holding his breath until he turns…blue.

Harms in Public Spaces

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The Brits are working out a new way to intervene in private lives and in private businesses, this time in an attempt to control “harms” done via (not by, mind you) “online platforms”—social media.

Under the [British] government’s proposal, a new regulator would have the power to require companies to protect users from a number of identified online harms—such as pornography, extremist content, and cyber bullying.

And

[T]he pair talked through the different terms that had been used to describe social media in a legal context, looking for the right analogy. They tried “platform,” “pipe” and “intermediary.” Nothing seemed to fit. Then “we thought of a ‘public space,'” says Ms Woods. “People do different things online. It was just like ‘how do we regulate spaces?'”

“Identified” online harms? We can’t even define the harms—such as pornography, extremist content, and cyber bullying.  Even Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart ultimately walked back his foolish I know it when I see it nonsense, recognizing that such a nebulous “definition” had no place in law.

We have not—we cannot—define any of these harms, much less what constitutes a “public space;” there is no basis for Government regulating these things.

Nor have we succeeded in recognizing who actually is responsible for these harms, whether public or private.  See the disconnect, at a high level, between the Left’s Big Government is responsible on the one hand and the Right’s focus on individual responsibility on the other.

The British government may want to create a whole new, intrusive bureaucratic agency for controlling one more aspect of British citizens’ lives. When we wrote our Constitution and ratified it those two and a quarter centuries ago, we explicitly walked away from the British system of governance for a number of reasons; central among them being the illegitimacy of Government intrusions into private lives.

This is one more example.

Xi, Lam, and Hong Kong

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Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam met in Beijing with People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang earlier this week.  Li said, in a press conference afterward,

The city’s government must continue to make efforts in stopping violence and ending chaos in accordance with the law, and restore order.

On this, I agree.  Lam must have her police stand down from provoking violence in the protests by Hong Kong’s citizens and then using that violence as pretext for shooting tear gas at the protesters, beating them, and shooting them with live ammunition.

Lam must also have her government address in a serious manner—accepting the bulk of them, if not all—the five demands of the protestors:

  • withdrawal the extradition bill [lately done; although nothing has been done to prevent its being reintroduced]
  • Lam to step down
  • inquiry into police brutality
  • release of those arrested
  • greater democratic freedom

To which I add a sixth, a responsibility of the PRC press as well as of Lam’s Hong Kong government and of Xi’s PRC government:

  • To stop characterizing the protesters’ movement as an independence movement

It’s nothing of the sort. The protestors have been at pains to emphasize that they explicitly do not desire independence from the PRC; they want only their rights restored under the one nation, two systems framework promised by the PRC government at the time of handover from Great Britain.

When Lam has her government act responsibly, there can be a just peace and prosperous economic activity in Hong Kong.

The initiative is entirely hers. And Xi’s.