Daily Caller associate editor Virginia Kruta wrote in an op-ed Friday that House Democrats who impeached President Donald Trump and then demanded testimony from additional witnesses in the Senate trial “deserve to be primaried in their home districts” in 2020.
Democratic lawmakers in the House failed to present a complete impeachment case in their rush to pass articles before Christmas, Kruta reasoned. They then tried to get the Senate to do the job they didn’t do when they had the chance.
The Dems abdicated their responsibility and were contrary to the Constitution in doing what they did, Kruta opined. For that, she argued, they deserve to lose their elected positions.
“House Democrats have demonstrated that they are willing to not only abdicate their responsibility but also cede their power in the impeachment process, giving the Senate the power to both investigate and try the accused,” Kruta wrote. “In addition, they are openly advertising their inability to do the job they were elected to do — that is, when tasked with a specific investigation, to follow it through to completion without begging another body to complete the work that was too difficult or would take too long.”
No witnesses in the Senate
Senators decided in a 51–49 vote Friday evening against calling more witnesses in the Senate trial, The Hill reported. In this way, the constitutional order of things was preserved, but it very nearly went the other way and opened Pandora’s box.
Allowing Senate Democrats to continue the fishing expedition House Democrats started would have been harmful to future impeachment processes without helping the Dems’ case. Republicans needed to shut down these attempts, and voters throwing some Democrats out of office in November would be another helpful step in curtailing future impeachments of this sort, according to Kruta.
“If the Senate gives the House Democrats what they want, the face of impeachment will forever be changed: the House will no longer feel obligated to complete investigations, lowering the threshold for impeachment even further, and the Senate will absorb an unprecedented amount of power,” she wrote ahead of the Friday vote.
She went on: “That House Democrats would ask for this to happen is evidence that they are incapable of performing their prescribed duties and should face primaries in their home districts.”
The public’s not fooled
Although the impeachment saga seems to have hurt Democrats, they saw no reason not to at least try to use it to hurt Trump. Still, even with the media functioning as accomplices, it quickly became clear to the American voting public that the impeachment efforts were partisan and politically motivated.
Time will tell whether these realizations will translate into Democrats getting voted out of office this November. Certainly, there are enough vulnerable Democrats in the House for it to flip back into the Republican column if people are still as upset about impeachment this fall as they seem to be right now.
It’s a scary thing to think about how close the country is to being a place that could happily overturn an election and remove a president who was fairly elected.
Luckily, a majority still care about doing the right thing, being fair, and following the law.
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