My column at Real Clear Politics today celebrates President Trump’s decision to put a roadblock in front of the runaway congressional impeachment train. If the Declaration of Independence was a rebuke against a reckless king who had abused his power, the letter written by White House Attorney Pat Cipollone to Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a masterful rebuke of a reckless Congress that has abused its power. The danger to the republic has been exposed; now it is up to We the People to excise it and restore health to the body politic.
Trump Defends Due Process From Congressional Usurpation
By Frank Miele
October 8, 2019, like July 4, 1776, should be long remembered as a crucial date when Americans stood up for their freedom after being subjected to what Thomas Jefferson called “a long train of abuses and usurpations.”
In 1776, it was the British crown that had violated morality, law and decency to oppress the will of the American people, making necessary the Declaration of Independence, which was signed on July 4.
In 2019, it is the Democratic Party and its allies in the media and the Deep State that have violated morality, law and decency to oppress the will of the American people by seeking to overturn a free election and overthrow a legitimate president.
Although there have been political skirmishes prior to October 8, equivalent to the battles of Lexington and Concord, there was no definitive statement of the abuses of the Democrats, nor a battle cry to rally around, until presidential attorney Pat Cipollone crafted his response to the usurpers who had stormed the White House under a theory of the divine right of Congress.
As a catalog of injustices, Cipollone’s letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her three henchmen — er, committee chairmen — is worthy of comparison to the Declaration of Independence and should take its place as an essential document of American history. All it lacks is a name worthy of its content to ensure that it not be forgotten. I propose that it be called the Declaration of Due Process for its vigorous defense of that foundational principle of the rule of law.
Listen to the impassioned plea of Cipollone’s words addressed to Pelosi:
As you know, you have designed and implemented your inquiry in a manner that violates fundamental fairness and constitutionally mandated due process.
For example, you have denied the President the right to cross-examine witnesses, to call witnesses, to receive transcripts of testimony, to have access to evidence, to have counsel present, and many other basic rights guaranteed to all Americans. You have conducted your proceedings in secret. You have violated civil liberties and the separation of powers by threatening Executive Branch officials, claiming that you will seek to punish those who exercise fundamental constitutional rights and prerogatives. All of this violates the Constitution, the rule of law, and every past precedent. Never before in our history has the House of Representatives — under the control of either political party — taken the American people down the dangerous path you seem determined to pursue.
Put simply, you seek to overturn the results of the 2016 election and deprive the American people of the President they have freely chosen. Many Democrats now apparently view impeachment not only as a means to undo the democratic results of the last election, but as a strategy to influence the next election. … Your highly partisan and unconstitutional effort threatens grave and lasting damage to our democratic institutions, to our system of free elections, and to the American people.”
If Republicans in Congress believe in rule of law — if they believe that “no free man shall be … deprived of his standing in any way … except by the law of the land,” as set forth in the Magna Carta — then they must rise up in unison and stand together with the president against the usurpers.
To be truly counted as friends of freedom, they must each figuratively sign their names to the Declaration of Due Process just as our founders pledged to each other their lives and their sacred honor and put their signatures on the declaration that started the Revolutionary War. You are not just standing with the president; you are standing with the people and the Constitution.
Do not be cowed by the threats of the House majority. Do not be intimidated by the insistent drumbeat of surrender to authority being urged upon you by the complicit media. Pelosi and her henchmen are acting with all the authority of the British king when he threw his enemies into the Tower of London and later beheaded them. It is the authority of fear, the imprimatur of terror.
The entire House impeachment “inquiry” is more akin to the Spanish Inquisition than to a legitimate tribunal to determine guilt or innocence. The whistleblower is closer to a teenage girl making accusations of witchcraft than to a serious witness of wrongdoing, yet the House Democrats have succumbed to the mass hysteria of Trump Derangement Syndrome without the slightest hint of self-awareness that they are re-enacting the Salem witch trials. If one low-level CIA officer was terrified by the idea of the president seeking justice for corruption and abuse of power, that does not establish anything other than the hypocrisy of an intelligence service noted for its own willingness to skirt the law or abandon it entirely.
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I, along with others, have cataloged the significant work of Sean Davis, Catherine Herridge and Paul Sperry, among others, to expose the suspicious underpinnings of the impeachment inquiry in regard to inappropriate contacts between the whistleblower and House Democrats, the rule changes approved by the inspector general that were necessary to allow the complaint to proceed, and the self-evident bias of the whistleblower as a partisan Democrat who apparently had worked for Joe Biden previously. Those revelations alone should be enough to dismiss the dirty impeachment and to launch an independent investigation into its origins.
The New York Times and the rest of the left-wing media characterized Cipollone’s letter to the Democratic Congress as a declaration of war, but they had it backwards. The war was already started when Pelosi launched an impeachment inquiry the day before she saw the evidence. And if we are being honest, this war started before Trump was even elected when an “insurance policy” was put in place by Peter Strzok and others in the Deep State who refused to trust the people with the responsibility of choosing their president.
Let us give Jefferson the final word — for his description of the indifference of the British people to injustice aptly depicts also the necessity that forced President Trump to “reject [Congress’] baseless, unconstitutional efforts to overturn the democratic process”:
We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. … We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
WHO WE ARE
Frank Miele has spent four decades in the news business and now offers conservative commentary to counter the left-wing bias in the national media. If you enjoy reading these daily essays, I hope you will consider purchasing one of my books. They are available at Amazon in paperback or Kindle editions. My new book — “The Media Matrix: What if everything you know is fake?” — shows that Fake News has been around for years. The “Why We Needed Trump” trilogy tackles the politics of the last two decades: Part 1 is subtitled “Bush’s Global Failure: Half Right.” Part 2 is “Obama’s Fundamental Transformation: Far Left.” Part 3 is “Trump’s American Vision: Just Right.” Also consider subscribing to Heartland Diary on YouTube by clicking here for News Every Conservative Can Use.
Well written!
Thanks!
Beautiful!
Thanks!