Last week’s impeachment trial side show was a showy performance that cost the country a lot of words, a lot of dollars and not much common sense.
The Democrats took a political crisis and used it to shore up their power base. It was a costly move.
How much does it cost to be impeached?
While there is no clear answer as to the final figure on the 2021 impeachment trial price tag, Nancy Pelosi did have this to say.
“I want the American public to know there is no opportunity cost for defending the Constitution.”
(If you are not familiar with Econ 101, opportunity cost is the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen.
Maybe this is just Pelosi’s way of saying if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.)
One thing, however, is certain. Democrats have shown they do not understand the value of a political dollar. The cost of impeaching a president who is not a president anymore was ultimately a waste of time and money. The trial has landed Democrats in the red and it will cost them.
From the start, the acquittal was a done deal.
“The president’s acquittal on Saturday was predetermined, as in the first impeachment effort a year ago — and known to be so to the Democratic prosecutors. The constitutionally mandated presiding judge — the chief justice of the Supreme Court refused to show up. ”
As a purely partisan time-wasting exercise, the impeachment trial highlighted yet another shameless Democratic display of duplicity and hypocrisy.
While Democratic politicians and the corporate media blamed President Donald Trump for the mob riot at the Capitol saying his rhetoric incited violence, many of these same lawmakers and bureaucrats have for years called for violence and physical action against those who believe differently than they do.
During the trial, Democrats did their best to defend their claim that on January 6, their lives were put at risk by identifying themselves as victims and dramatically turning the day’s violence into a metaphor for America.
In an interview on CNN Rep.Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass. said that her experience hiding in the Capitol from a largely white supremacist mob had parallels to violent terror attacks Black Americans have endured throughout the country’s history.
“As a black woman, to be barricaded in my office, using office furniture and water bottles, on the ground, in the dark, that terror, those moments of terror, is familiar in a deep and ancestral way for me,” Pressley said.
“One of the images that I’m haunted by is the black custodial staff cleaning up the mess left by that violent white supremacist mob,” she recalled. “That is a metaphor for America. We have been cleaning up after violent white supremacist mobs for generations. And it must end.”
The lives of Republican politicians and House members and the conservative segment of American society, however, were also put at risk on January 6 and continue to be put at risk. Democrats are not only looking to punish Trump. They are also after the ones who voted for him.
In the Epoch Times on Feb. 16 Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) says Democrats used the impeachment of former President Donald Trump as a tool to paint all his supporters with the brush of Capitol breach-related criminality.
“Johnson told Breitbart News in an interview on Feb. 14 that the ultimate aim of impeaching Trump a second time was to associate the 75 million Americans who voted for him with those individuals who on Jan. 6 broke the law.
“They really wanted to use impeachment as a vehicle because they wanted to equate all those tens of millions of Trump’s voters and all of his supporters and everybody who came to the rally, they wanted to equate all of those people with the couple hundred criminals who came in and ransacked the Capitol,” Johnson told the outlet.”
The ironic part is that with all the misspent time, effort and the money, the Democrats just bet against the House with their attempts to impeach Trump.
Trump or Trumpism is not going away. Democrats surely understand this. It is not Trump, however, they need to hope disappears. It is Joe Biden.
Without Donald Trump and the impeachment trial side show, Joe Biden, and the mistakes and the fumbles his administration have made so far – overturning immigration policies, canceling the Keystone Pipeline, a faltering vaccine plan, an absurd $1.9 trillion aid package with no GOP votes and more – are about to take center stage.
“No matter what the accusations against former President Trump are, his base cannot leave him because the alternative is so unacceptable to them,” said Newt Gingrich.
Outsiders look at the trial not as a tactical battle over domestic politics, nor even about Donald Trump as an individual, but as a national reckoning.
Conservatives will be shouldering the cost of this impeachment too. If action is not taken, crippling interest will accrue.
