Opinion: Why I Support Impeachment but Fear Incompetent Democrat Hubris

NinaIllingworth September 25, 2019November 5, 2022 Amerikan Musik, corruption, Democratic Party, Democrats, Dick Cheney, Downmarket Mussolini, Essays, FA1, fascism, fascist creep, George W Bush, Giant Russia Theory, hubris, Hunter Biden, impeachment, Joe Biden, liberals, MP6, Nancy Pelosi, neoliberalism, Nina Illingworth, Nixon, Opinion, Pelosi, Politics, rich liberal, Russiagate, Trump, Ukraine, US Constitution

Editor’s note: originally I was going to post this op-ed as a thread on Mastodon and share it in tonight’s edition of “The Skinny” but as I was writing the piece, it soon became clear to me that it was going to be too awkward and require too many links for social media. The fact that posting it here will also reduce the number of dumb people I have to block online *may* have also factored into this decision; I’d plead the Fifth under oath here. Finally, please excuse me in advance for the informal nature of this essay – I’ve cleaned it up quite a bit, but it still began its life as a rant thread and I’m afraid that in some spots it shows.

Caveats and Qualifications

First of all let me start by noting that all Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats have really done here is open an impeachment inquiry and this may in the end all turn out to be just more posturing from the neoliberal wing of the Party. As anyone who knows Pelosi’s history when it comes to impeachment for obvious and objectively heinous crimes can attest, counting on her to take the heat in the name of justice is a fool’s errand – one needs only to look at her decision not to impeach George W. Bush or Dick Cheney to demonstrate this.

I certainly don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up that this is the end of Herr Donald and as regular readers will already know, we have been down this road many times before. Trump is a fascist, a rapist, a crook, a liar, an open white supremacist and he has not only broken the law, but violated the US Constitution many times since taking office. There have been good arguments for impeaching Trump since the earliest days of his presidency; I know, because I’ve repeatedly made them in writing – off the top of my head, personally profiting from the presidency, running concentration camps and obstructing justice all come to mind.

This list is by no means definitive and cataloguing all of Trump’s crimes and abuses is not really the point here because it would take perhaps thousands of upon thousands of words, many of which I’ve already written. The fact is the Democratic Party, corporate media “liberal” liberal influencers and Nancy Pelosi should have been leading nationwide protests to shut down this government already because Trump is literally a fascist and Democrats in Congress absolutely should have filed for impeachment ten minutes after they won control of the House during the 2018 midterms. That they never have is unarguably damning and calls into question their sincerity now.

Yes – Impeach that Sucker

With that having been noted and acknowledging that there have always been better reasons to impeach Trump before this, and that the failure to pursue them has lead to both the growth of U.S. fascism and literal dead victims of reactionary violence:

I do support this hypothetical impeachment.

If the basic claims in this story are true and Donald Trump did pressure the Ukrainian President to open an investigation into Hunter Biden as a favor to the sitting President of the United States, while literally refferencing his possible 2020 opponent Joe Biden (by name), then Trump is using the power of his office to persecute domestic political enemies and secure his re-election for a second term. That is not only “pretty damn fascist” but also as one lawyer I recently spoke to said “an absolute textbook case of public corruption.” Furthermore you don’t have to prove that Trump withheld the aid to force Ukraine’s hand to make that case either; but it sure as sh*t looks like he did. I’m not going to get into debates with disingenuous apologists about standards of evidence, we’re just engaging in real talk here – Downmarket Mussolini’s administration is still “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” and Giuliani’s statements alone implicate the President.

In particular I reject the astoundingly smooth-brained argument that Pelosi’s decision to open an impeachment inquiry is “all political” because it shows a staggering lack of understanding about how impeachment and indeed the entire American system of government works. As anyone who has been paying attention the past three years already knows, Trump’s position as the de-facto head of the Department of Justice renders him immune from criminal prosecution in a federal court; the big tip-off is he can hire and fire any Attorney General who’d try to charge him. Thus there currently is no criminal justice solution to a sitting President who breaks the law whatsoever – a fact that Trump’s own cronies have gleefully shared on cable news essentially non-stop since he was elected.

That leaves impeachment, which is an inherently political solution by design.

The dirty secret that nobody on either side of the elite establishment really wants you to know is that there is no definition whatsoever in the U.S. Constitution of what constitutes “high crimes and misdemeanors” – none, zero, impeachment is literally a question of political manuevering and will, not the written law. A President can be impeached for virtually any old thing at all if Congress and then the Senate agree; which is why the GOP was able to start impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton for lying on TV about getting a blowjob from a 21 year old intern.

Furthermore the expected results of an impeachment proceeding are *also* political – no U.S. President has successfully been removed from office by being impeached in both the House and the Senate. In our two modern examples Richard Nixon was forced to resign because the GOP indicated that they would likely support impeaching him, and Bill Clinton won re-election but the damage of exposing his corruption in Arkansas absolutely helped the Republican Party seize control of the rest of the U.S. government at the time. In other words – yes this impeachment inquiry is “all politics” and yes, that’s the system functioning as designed; the President is above the law but Congress and the Senate can join together to remove the President for any reason the public will accept without rioting.

This then brings up the second and in my opinion only slightly less moronic argument that impeaching Trump will somehow improve his re-election chances in 2020.

To which I say “bullsh*t” and point to Nixon’s cratering approval numbers during his impeachment inquiry. Even the supposed counter argument that impeaching Bill Clinton made the Republicans look bad is useless touchy-feely liberal nonsense about “norms” and “decorum.” Factually, the impeachment made Newt Gingrich the most powerful man in America, hamstrung Bill Clinton’s second term and paved the way for George Bush Jr’s nightmare two-term presidency. Anyone who thinks the GOP gave one stinky sh*t how they “looked” while taking power is drunk on stale, historically revisionist Clintonism. So from a realpolitik perspective, opening this impeachment inquiry is arguably the only damn thing Nancy Pelosi has done to resist the Klepto Kaiser and his fascist administration since Trump took office – she’s a day late and a dollar short, but politically the move is sound.

So yes while I would absolutely prefer this impeachment inquiry be about concentration camps and trying to criminalize political protest or persecuting his opposition, I still support this (again, entirely theoretical) impeachment of Trump and I don’t buy the right’s comically poor arguments in opposition. They did after all get Al Capone on tax evasion and Trump is without question running a racket out of the White House. If there weren’t so many literal dead victims involved in Pelosi’s delay, I might be tempted to suggest that being impeached now over this is a form of poetic justice. I wanted to impeach Trump because he’s fascist, using the President’s control over U.S. foreign policy to persecute political opponents is pretty damn fascist and while it’s certainly not the worst thing Trump has done, it’s also absolutely vital this not be allowed going forward. We aren’t talking about “Russian Facebook Memes“, criminalizing leakers and putting people in jail for publishing 100% authentic emails here. When you strip the story down to its base components, this is real, bog standard political corruption and fascist political strong-arming.

But Don’t Count on Liberals to Save The Day

So if this is all *that* obvious, what’s the problem? Why am I hesitant to get my hopes up and why are so many people on the left having trouble getting behind this? The short answer is rich corrupt liberals, the lapdog warmongering American media and our government’s historical (and largely bipartisan) failure to hold power to account. Setting aside the fact that I still have my doubts Pelosi would see an impeachment through and this is probably just designed to crater Trump’s numbers leading into the election, the packaging elite liberals are wrapping around this story threatens to sink the entire operation.

Even as you read this the pro-Democratic Party, pro-elite establishment, corporate liberal media and influential pundits are purposely entwining acknowledging Trump’s guilt with vehemently defending the innocence of a clearly guilty of something Joe and Hunter Biden. It doesn’t really matter whether or not Joe Biden had the prosecutor fired (although he certainly might have), it’s fairly obvious that Hunter, a lawyer with zero background in the energy industry, got a job by trading on his famous father’s influence – in other words, this is also bog standard corruption; albeit on a much smaller scale than anything Trump is accused of doing here.

Additionally in the most pathetically predictable development of all, liberal interventionist war hawks and decaying Bircher Democrats with Doctor Strangelove delusions are already trying to tie this whole affair to the ongoing flaming crater that is Russiagate. As I’ve written often in the past, the “Russia” portion of “Russiagate” is literally an establishment liberal psy-op designed to simultaneously keep everyone who lost to Herr Donald from getting fired, destroy the left wing insurgency in the Democratic Party and start a lucrative New Cold War.

More importantly at this point however is the fact that while Russiagate has been largely successful in protecting elite, incompetent neoliberals from the enraged proletariat, it has also proven itself a staggering failure against and a horrifying distraction from Moron Andrew Jackson’s creeping fascist agenda. Trying to rehabilitate the Russiagate scam by tying it to this impeachment is a lot like trading your cow for three “magic” beans in a world without giants, beanstalks or golden geese. In other words, it’s precisely the kind of daft liberal dipshittery the Democratic Party loves to do instead of actually trying to win elections and curb reactionary right wing power.

Look when you break it down to brass tacks the simple truth is that you can’t be against corruption, fascist abuses of power and Downmarket Mussolini’s nightmare authoritarian agenda and still not support this impeachment inquiry. It really doesn’t matter who got away with this kind of sh*t in the past, whether or not Nancy Pelosi has ulterior motives or for that matter how much the concept that rich corrupt liberals like Joe Biden might “win” somehow pisses you off.

If these charges are true then Trump has not only committed a crime but also claimed an authoritarian privilege for the office of POTUS that was never intended by the U.S. Constitution – if we don’t stop this right now, there’s really nothing to stop Trump (or anyone else) from using the full power of the Pig Empire to persecute domestic political enemies and opponents; thereby retaining or consolidating power through open tyranny. This is a make or break moment in the history of our society and if that means I have to let a scumbag like Nancy Pelosi take credit for something she clearly had to be forced into doing, so f*cking be it.

Personally I just wish I had any faith at all that she intends to, or is even capable of bringing the ball across the goal line.