OpEd By Brian Cates
After bragging endlessly for weeks about the “decisive and irrefutable” case they’d made for impeaching the President when they passed the two articles last December, the Democratic leadership is suddenly demanding the Senate trial include new evidence and start subpoenaing new witnesses. What’s wrong with this picture?
Fake Subpoenas for A Fake “Impeachment Inquiry”
To fully grasp the fraud being perpetrated on the entire country by congressional Democrats, you must go back to how this impeachment farce began last September. Doing a real impeachment investigation with real subpoenas that had real legal teeth would have required a full House vote. But that’s not what happened. Instead, House speaker Nancy Pelosi merely announced that an “impeachment inquiry” was beginning without the full House having voted.
Not only is "Obstruction of Congress" a make-believe impeachment charge, the subpoenas sent out by Schiff and Nadler's House committees (subpoena's that Trump and others didn't respond to) weren't even real. The Democrats knew all along the subpoenas they were issuing were not properly authorized, and no one was breaking the law by not responding to them. None of those subpoenas had any legal force and Democrats managed to successfully hide this fact from their base.
When House committee sent one of these fake subpoenas to Charles Kupperman, he took it before a federal judge so the judge could rule on this exact issue. Was this a real subpoena with legal force and did Kupperman have to comply with it? What happened when Democrats who had issued that subpoena learned what Kupperman was doing? They immediately rushed to the courtroom to withdraw the fake subpoena before the judge could rule on its validity, then they asked for the judge to dismiss the lawsuit, ensuring he would never rule on the validity of the contested subpoena. That also is very revealing.
So, every time Schiff, Nadler, Schumer or some other top Democrat gets in front of a camera to loudly whine about subpoenas they want the Senate to authorize for them after the trial has already started, keep this in mind. How can you “obstruct” an impeachment investigation that isn’t real and wasn’t started by House rules? How are you breaking the law or obstructing justice if all the subpoenas the Democrats were handing out had no legal force?
Attempted Manipulation of the Senate
Having attempted the use of sham subpoenas to compel testimony at the House impeachment hearings, the Democrats are now demanding the Senate issue real subpoenas. They want the senate to call witnesses the House Democrats refused to subpoena or call themselves. This is absurd. This is the trial. The trial has already started. The Senate’s decision as to whether to remove the President from office is to be based on the case voted on and then sent up from the House. Democrats have spent weeks arguing it’s now the Senate’s job to launch its own investigation to supplement the case sent up from the House.
The President’s lead counsel, Pat Cipollone, made a great point on Tuesday when he spoke in response to the Democrat’s initial opening statements. He pointed out that there is no courtroom in America where a judge asks both sides if they are ready to begin the trial, and one side suddenly says “No your honor, we need to gather new evidence and have witnesses called who have yet to talk to us. Also, we’d like to have the jury try our case, gather more evidence, and do this new investigation for us.” The judge would laugh at them and then immediately toss their case out of court.
The Democratic House Managers are being forced to admit they were not yet ready to go to trial. How is that the Senate’s fault, or Mitch McConnell’s fault? They are saying they need to hear from an entire slew of witnesses they didn’t call to testify earlier during the House’s investigation and never bothered to subpoena (or did subpoena but then withdrew the subpoena when challenged) and so the Senate must now do this for them.
So, in just a matter of weeks, the Democrat’s case for impeachment, a case prepared by their House committees to be submitted to the Senate, has gone from “indisputable” to “incomplete”. Have you watched three full days of the Democratic House managers whining incessantly about the mean old Senate not sending real subpoenas to people? People that the House could have issued their fake subpoenas to during the investigation phase, but didn’t?
A mockery of impeachment, and what happens next
Let the magnitude of the farce going on in that Senate chamber right now fully dawn on you. Impeachment in the House (and then the Senate trial that follows it) is supposed to be a serious and solemn matter. The Democratic Party is seriously abusing the Constitution to ‘get’ Trump. The House Democrats, as much as they would like to have one, cannot have a do-over in the Senate. The case they sent up is going to be the case that gets tried. The Constitution is clear about this, as Trump’s defense team will show when it is their turn to present their case. If these witnesses, many of them never subpoenaed to testify when the House was investigating, were so important to making the impeachment case, why weren’t they called weeks ago when the House investigation was going on?
But all of this will be coming out now in the Senate trial. After spending months issuing fake subpoenas with no legal force because they broke the House rules, their strategy of trying to jawbone the Senate into doing a real investigation, with real subpoenas is going to completely fail. Again, these are subpoenas house Democrats refused to issue themselves! The strategy as I see it is to pin Trump’s inevitable acquittal on the Republican Senate leadership, primarily Mitch McConnell.
Democrats are going to concoct an excuse. They are going to say that the fact that they weren't able to ‘finish’ the case they were supposed to finish in the House, and use this as excuse for losing this trial. That tells me they knew they were going to lose this case at the very beginning, and this is all about putting on a show to make excuses to the Democratic base.
Schiff came right out on Wednesday during the opening arguments and insisted Trump's removal from office cannot be left up to the voters this November. What does that tell you? People who actually care about the American Constitutional system of government would not be doing this. They wouldn’t abuse our system in this fashion.
Voters must punish a political party that would abuse this system in this crude fashion. And the voters will have a chance to do that this coming November.
Brian Cates entered the political arena in March 2012, following the death of Andrew Breitbart. He is currently a political columnist for The Epoch Times and UncoverDC. Brian is based in South Texas and is the author of: “Nobody Asked For My Opinion … But Here It Is Anyway!”
Twitter: @drawandstrike
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