Impeachment hysteria is consuming the Democratic Party, pushing their 2020 presidential candidates’ competition aside, as the party’s leaders in the House of Representatives have launched “impeachment inquiries” against President Donald Trump in no less than six different House committees. Their goal is to overturn the results of the 2016 election, and, if possible, to get Trump indicted.
For the most zealous liberals, evidence doesn’t matter. Days after the inquiry announcement, Hillary Clinton told CBS News that Trump should be thrown out because he’s an “illegitimate president.”
Clinton derisively smeared workers who backed Trump as “deplorables” in 2016. The real target of the Democrats and middle-class left mania against the Trump presidency is the working class. The liberals believe the “deplorable” workers have to be corralled, their rights constrained, so they can’t ever effect the outcome of a bourgeois election again.
New York Times columnist Charles Blow insists Trump should be impeached over and over, regardless of the outcome of this second witch hunt attempt, initiated on the heels of the failure of the inquisition run by former FBI boss Robert Mueller. Trump should be booted out because of his “unfitness” for office. Blow agrees with Clinton that the problem is working people, who he insists are reactionary and racist. He says the only reason Trump is in the White House is because of his “base.”
The Democratic House leadership says they got word of two “whistleblowers” who are unidentified CIA operatives. The first of these issued a complaint based on secondhand reports from other anonymous people about Trump’s phone calls with Ukrainian government officials.
The CIA is the U.S. rulers’ political police tasked with operations abroad. It is notorious for decades of interference in the affairs of other governments, and with torture and abuse against workers’ organizations and political struggles. It was set up and staffed in 1947 by “Cold War” liberals, and these types have honeycombed its ranks ever since.
Both of the unnamed CIA agents are represented by Andrew Bakaj, a lawyer with close ties to the Democrats, and who previously worked for Hillary Clinton.
The Democrats’ ire is focused on Trump’s urging Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to look into past efforts to sabotage exposure of corruption there. Trump mentioned Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden, to Zelensky.
While he was vice president, Joe Biden was tasked as the Barack Obama administration’s “point man” for Ukraine. In that role he used threats and bribery to get Ukrainian officials he didn’t like deep-sixed. And his son was suddenly appointed to the board of scandal-plagued Ukrainian natural gas giant Burisma, with a sweet salary of $50,000 a month.
Similar U.S. government arm-twisting, bribery and influence peddling has marked all administrations, Democratic and Republican alike.
“We have not spoken directly to the whistleblower,” Adam Schiff, Democrat in charge of the House Intelligence Committee, one of those leading the witch hunt, flatly lied Sept. 17. The New York Times admitted Oct. 2 that he and his staff members had been meeting with the CIA operative for weeks.
In another Times article, Allison Stanger portrays these “whistleblowers” as “stewards of our constitutional democracy” who speak “truth to power.” But in fact they are CIA agents, joining Democrats’ efforts to void the 63 million votes cast for Trump in 2016.
Trump says ‘full halt’ to cooperation
Democrats say they will churn out more articles of impeachment, if the administration doesn’t comply with the raft of subpoenas for documents and committee interrogations they’ve issued. The president says he won’t cooperate with any of the partisan witch hunt committees the Democrats have cranked up.
While not ruling out future cooperation, Trump says he won’t now. In particular, he points out, unlike the impeachment inquiries into former Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, there has been no debate and vote in the full House to open an investigation.
And in both those cases, the inquiry was assigned to only one House committee, the Judiciary Committee, not a plethora. And, by nonpartisan agreement, the president was permitted to have his attorneys sit in on all sessions — open or secret, and both major capitalist parties were to be consulted on any subpoenas to be issued. None of these things have been done here, Trump points out, saying it shows the Democrats’ operation in the House today is a “totally compromised kangaroo court.”
Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who took it on herself to just “announce” the far-reaching probe, alleges nothing “requires” her to have the House vote.
The sharpening factional conflict reflects the growing crisis of the capitalist two party system. And if liberals feel comfortable with using these kinds of methods against the president, who defends the interests of the bosses, think about what lengths they’ll go to, to shut up workers they consider “deplorables.”