What a difference a day could have made! Imagine if Nancy Pelosi had held her impeachment fire for 24 hours.
Then she would have had the transcript of President Trump’s call with the president of Ukraine. Even a quick read would have told her it was not as advertised.
She would have learned there was no threat from Trump and no talk of a quid pro quo involving foreign aid in exchange for an investigation of Joe Biden. By the time she finished the five pages, Pelosi would have realized that the media’s promise of a smoking gun was a false promise.
With the facts in front of her, the House speaker would have wisely put off Tuesday’s doomsday impeachment push and waited for a more compelling issue to justify an historic effort to overturn the 2016 presidential election.
Instead, Pelosi plunged the country into a nightmare by surrendering to the most radical members of her party and the Trump-hating left-wing press. Political mistakes don’t get much bigger or more consequential.
Impeachment is now what next year’s election will be about. Not immigration, or health care, or the economy or national security or anything that really matters to the working people across the country. Those who get up and go to work in offices and stores, build the bridges, plow the fields, care for the children and keep us safe are officially now an afterthought to Pelosi’s foolish decision.
To be sure, the release of the transcript set off reactions in spades, with each side reading into it what they wanted to find. But there is no equivalency between the competing views.
Impeachment is a yes or no vote on whether a president has committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” that render him unfit for office. While there is no legal test for what constitutes an impeachable offense, there is a common-sense test, which is why the draconian option has been used only sparingly.
This case doesn’t come close to meeting any rational standard. The left can spin itself dizzy but it is impossible to believe a majority of all Americans will conclude that the president’s words in the transcript justify removing him from office.
Pelosi’s problem is that she promised they would. Recall that she specifically hung her commitment to an impeachment inquiry on the phone call.
Without having any evidence other than hysterical media accounts that were based on anonymous sources, she decided to jump because she reportedly believed the charges against Trump were serious and yet would be easily understood by the public. She convinced herself of this and declared Tuesday that the phone call showed Trump’s “betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections.”
Except the transcript shows nothing of the sort and no amount of sophistry can twist it into something it’s not. Pelosi screwed up but every American will pay the price through gridlock in Washington and deepening polarization everywhere.
Yes, the transcript reports that Trump did raise the issue of Joe Biden’s son’s lucrative job with an energy company in Ukraine, and the then vice president’s threat to withhold American aid unless a prosecutor investigating the company was fired.
And Trump clearly wanted Ukraine to give Attorney General William Barr any information it has about the origins of the 2016 spying on Trump’s campaign.
But none of this is the stuff that brings down a presidency.
Still, after a so-called whistleblower complained about the call, the Department of Justice even examined the transcript to see if Trump’s request on Biden amounted to a campaign finance violation, and concluded it didn’t.
In more normal times, that would be the end of it. The opposition party’s nominee would try to win the White House by arguing the incumbent failed to deliver peace and prosperity and would lay out his plans for doing so.
But these days, all the Dem presidential candidates are headed for the impeachment bandwagon. And there was one of Pelosi’s top confidants, Rep. Adam Schiff, claiming the transcript revealed a “Mafia-like shakedown of a foreign leader” and demonstrated the “depravity” of Trump.
Of course, this is the same Schiff who claimed for two years he had clear evidence Trump colluded with Russia.
Then it was Robert Mueller who announced he didn’t find any such evidence. This time, it fell to Ukraine’s president to set the record straight.
Volodymyr Zelensky said Wednesday he did not feel at all pressured during the call.
“We had — I think good phone call. It was normal. We spoke about many things, and I — so I think and you read it that nobody pushed me,” Zelensky told reporters at the United Nations.
Unfortunately, it would be a mistake to think Schiff and his ilk have any remorse. They don’t need to as long as they have the parallel universe of Trump haters to succor them.
The New York Times, the leader of the media wolf pack, is beating the drum for toppling Trump and its front-page scoreboard Wednesday showed 212 of the 235 House Dems favoring an impeachment inquiry.
Here’s a suggestion for the former paper of record: Run beside that count recent polls on where the public stands.
The gap would be instructive because most surveys show only about a third of Americans favor impeachment, and that was after a week of wild accusations and before the transcript was released.
The contrast is striking: Washington Democrats are approaching 100% support for impeachment, while only about one in three Americans is with them.
That’s the great political disconnect of our times, one that pits Pelosi’s party against America.
My prayers are for America.