It’s “the criminalization of political differences” said Democrat law professor Alan Dershowitz, long ago, about the impeachment of President Donald J. Trump. And now 21 Republican state attorneys general are echoing Dershowitz’s warning that the action “endangers” the Republic. Stating in a letter submitted to the Senate Wednesday morning that the effort “establishes a dangerous historical precedent,” they urged the chamber to roundly “reject” the impeachment articles.
“This impeachment proceeding threatens all future elections and … will erode the separation of powers shared by the executive and legislative branches by subjugating future Presidents to the whims of the majority opposition party in the House,” the AGs wrote.
“If not expressly repudiated by the Senate, the theories animating both Articles will set a precedent … entirely contrary to the Framers’ design and ruinous to the most important governmental structure protections contained in our Constitution: the separation of powers,” they warned.
The AGs thus implored the Senate to reject the impeachment articles not only for lacking substance, but also for “being fundamentally flawed as a matter of constitutional law.”
“Impeachment should never be a partisan response to one party losing a presidential election,” they stated, and the current Democrat impeachment fiasco is exactly that: “a partisan political effort that undermines the democratic process itself.”
While true, the unfortunate reality is that the precedent has already been set, and as with Humpty Dumpty, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put the standards back together again.
It’s as with any standards: Once people are inured to a new level of vice — once it doesn’t shock them emotionally anymore and begins seeming commonplace — it becomes the new normal.
Our declining civility and sexual mores are perfect examples. The vulgarity and sexual devolutionary norms (positive portrayals of fornication, cross-dressing, etc.) in entertainment today would have shocked Americans several generations back. Objecting to them now gets you labeled a priggish prude.
Also untrue — though widely repeated by pundits — is that all future presidents would be subject to politically driven impeachment. Only Republican/anti-establishment presidents would be.
First, conservatives are more rules-oriented than leftists are. If this smacks of mere partisan prejudice, know that it was echoed by Democrat operative Scott Foval. Admitting when caught on hidden camera in a 2016 vote-fraud sting that Republicans are more honest, he said, “There is a level of adherence to rules on the other side that only when you’re at the very highest level, do you get over.”
Second, the Democrats can only pursue the impeachment witch hunt without mortally damaging themselves (their consequences have thus far been limited) because the mainstream media act as their PR team.
The media are the people’s conduit of information; they thus frame debates and shape opinion. Media “filtering prevents us from seeing the world as it actually is,” as UCLA political science professor Tim Groseclose put it in his 2011 book Left Turn.
“It is as if we see the world through a glass — a glass that magnifies the facts that liberals want us to see and shrinks the facts that conservatives want us to see,” he continued. So while German leader Otto Von Bismarck noted that “politics is the art of the possible,” the media largely determine what’s possible — and a completely frivolous power-grab of an impeachment just isn’t politically possible for conservatives.
Many people attribute what’s currently happening to Trump Derangement Syndrome. While a factor, this analysis trivializes what we’re actually witnessing: a function of extreme, civilization-rending moral decay.
Dershowitz wrote in 2017 that the impeachment fiasco reminds him “of what Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the KGB, said to Stalin. He said, ‘show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.’” But what is this attitude but gross immorality? “The end justifies the means” is what it’s called.
And this is what happens in a society experiencing rapid dislocation from Moral Reality, from Truth. Our problems aren’t really “political”; that just reflects a deeper realm. They are spiritual and philosophical.
Epitomizing the people called “leftists” is not merely an “ideology”; in fact, it’s not an ideology at all (but an entropic process), as their positions change with the wind. What defines them is moral-relativism/nihilism, the notion that right and wrong are illusion, mere social constructs to be cynically used to achieve ego-driven ends.
It’s a worldview perfectly articulated thus: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” In fairness, though, while this credo was formulated by occultist Aleister Crowley, he wasn’t exactly like the world’s Adam Schiffs.
He was far more honest.
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
