The Democrats, the liberal big-business media and the middle-class left are stepping up their furious impeachment campaign based on charges coming from the rulers’ political police. Their goal is to overturn the 2016 election and oust President Donald Trump. Their real target is the working class.
Trump — a defender of the interests of the capitalist rulers against working people, like all the Democrats and Republicans — responds to the frame-up methods the liberals are using by portraying himself as a victim of an assault on due process and constitutional rights, questions of vital importance for the working class.
Using secondhand anonymous claims by two unnamed CIA agents — one now acknowledged to be a registered Democrat — House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi opened an impeachment inquiry in the House of Representatives. She brushes aside Trump’s insistence that any inquiry has to be debated and approved by the House before he will cooperate.
Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden says no evidence or hearing is necessary to dump the president. Trump has already “indicted” and “convicted himself,” Biden opined Oct. 9. Biden’s conduct as the Barack Obama administration’s muscle man in dealing with Ukraine and son Hunter’s shady profiteering there was part of the target of Trump’s inquiries.
The real focus of the liberals’ hatred are the millions of “deplorable” working people who either voted for Trump or refused to vote at all, looking for some way to fight back against moves by Democratic and Republican administrations alike to offload the capitalist economic crisis onto their shoulders and use them as cannon fodder in Washington’s decadeslong wars.
Liberal meritocratic “smarts” view these voters as dangerous, and assign themselves the right to nullify their ballots by overturning the 2016 election.
False claims to speak for ‘all Americans’
“Impeaching and removing the president is something the American people are demanding,” millionaire businessman Tom Steyer claimed on national TV after he bought his way into the Democratic Party’s Oct. 15 presidential candidates’ debate.
“If we don’t impeach the president, he will get reelected,” Democratic Congressman Al Green admitted earlier this year.
“They want to erase your vote like it never existed,” Trump told a rally of 20,000 supporters in Minneapolis Oct. 11.
The central claim of the Democrats’ impeachment witch hunt is that Trump withheld military aid to the Ukrainian government to force it to investigate Biden’s bullying conduct there. But they are stymied in making the “blackmail” claims stick by the fact that Washington did release the promised aid without Kiev buckling under, and by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s persistent denial that he was ever pressured or “blackmailed” by the president.
Both Democratic and Republican administrations use Washington’s economic weight and military might to press governments around the world to do their bidding.
Not confident that a hearsay account from anonymous liberal CIA agents is sufficient to bring down a president, Democrats are fishing around broadly. The inquiry is being run just like ex-FBI boss Robert Mueller’s three-year “special counsel” probe into Trump’s alleged “collusion” with Moscow. That operation led to indictments, guilty pleas and convictions from a number of Trump associates on utterly unrelated charges, but failed to find any real dirt on the president and fizzled out earlier this year.
Federal prosecutors indicted Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman Oct. 10. Both worked with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani when he was looking into Biden’s bullying in Ukraine. The charges are on unrelated allegations of campaign finance law violations, but Democrats hope they can use the threat of prosecution to get one of them to finger the president for something.
Workers basic rights under attack
Trump wrote Pelosi Oct. 8 that he will not cooperate because her star chamber probe denies him “the right to cross-examine witnesses, to call witnesses, to receive transcripts of testimony, to have access to evidence,” and to any legal representation.
These are all rights in the Constitution to protect people from attacks by the government. They are essential for workers to defend themselves against the capitalist rulers, their state, cops and courts.
The New York Times editors brushed aside the president’s argument. “Due process protections like these are provided at criminal trials” but are not required at an impeachment inquiry, they argued, which is more “like a grand jury.”
The comparison is apt. As many workers know from bitter experience, cops and prosecutors use grand juries to frame up those they target. Those they subpoena are compelled to testify or face jail, and are interrogated without legal representation or the right to refuse to testify on constitutional grounds.
Democrats want to use the same method to interrogate Trump and anyone else they feel like putting on the stand, while denying them the right to confront their accusers, whose identity they keep secret.
Fearing that Democrats will be unable to get federal prosecutors to launch criminal charges against White House officials who refuse to testify, Times writer Josh Chafetz insists the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives should bypass the courts and dispatch its “sergeant at arms” to seize anyone who repudiates a subpoena and imprison them in the House.
“The Socialist Workers Party doesn’t support any capitalist politician, Democrat, Republican or otherwise labeled,” Lea Sherman, SWP candidate for New Jersey General Assembly, said Oct. 16. “We view all political questions based on how they point the road forward for the working class and jealously guard our political rights that are needed to advance our struggles.”
Liberals use the FBI, CIA, special prosecutors and the rest to try and turn their political opponents into criminals. This helps pave the way for the rulers’ use of these same anti-working-class forces against fighting workers as the class struggle picks up — as they’ve done repeatedly in decades past.