On occasion my column at Real Clear Politics comes out early because of breaking news. Such was the case this week. My column usually appears on Monday, but ran last Friday to analyze Nancy Pelosi’s announcement that she would proceed with impeachment. I am running it again here to make sure my regular Monday readers had a chance to see it.
Speaker Pelosi Declares a Coup Against President Trump
By Frank Miele
Nancy Pelosi transparently announced a coup against President Trump on Thursday morning, Dec. 5, 2019, a date which will live in political infamy.
There was never any doubt that the House of Representatives will vote on a strictly partisan basis to impeach the president, but it could not have been foreseen that Pelosi would frame that approaching act as a naked power grab.
Yet that is exactly what she did.
In opening her announcement to draft impeachment charges by quoting the Declaration of Independence, she acknowledged more plainly than ever before that she is taking a revolutionary act, that she is overthrowing the established order and that, in modern terms, she has launched a coup.
Consider the words she quoted:
“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another …”
This is either wildly inappropriate or a fundamental clue to the deeper meaning of the necessity of impeachment, as seen by the Democrats. These are not the words of an orderly transfer of power via legal means. They are a confession of the underlying intent of what has long been called “The Resistance” — and that is revolution, rebellion, the overthrow of an executive power that does not conform to the expectations of an aggrieved ruling class.
What we must ask now is just who are “the people” on both sides of this conflict? Pelosi implied that “one people” are dissolving their political bonds with “another,” so who exactly are Pelosi and her like-minded revolutionaries declaring independence from? President Trump, the 63 million people who voted for him, the Republican Party or the authors of the Constitution itself?
Pelosi dangled her quote from the Declaration of Independence in front of us, but did not complete it — for good reason. The rest of what Thomas Jefferson wrote about the rebellious Colonists is that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
Jefferson and the co-signers of the Declaration bravely did just that, but as law professor Jonathan Turley so eloquently established in his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, the Democrats in Congress have done nothing of the same. This has been an impeachment in search of a crime, and even now Pelosi cannot establish any basis for impeachment that is guaranteed to win even one Republican vote.
That tells you all you need to know about how far we are from 1776. This impeachment is not a unifying act like the joining together of 13 Colonies against a common enemy, but rather the tearing asunder of a union into separate camps much like the rebellion that Abraham Lincoln encountered in 1861.
If Democrats alone perceive a tyrannical disregard for the law by the president, and Republicans instead uniformly accuse the Democrats of acting from base political motivation, there is no happy outcome possible. There is no distant enemy on a foreign throne who can unite us in common battle. We are instead engaged in a great civil war testing whether the nation conceived in liberty by the signers of that immortal Declaration can endure much longer.
Pelosi rightly notes that our Founders were declaring their independence from “an oppressive monarch.” She implies that her mission to unseat President Trump is similarly noble, even implying that Trump is a “king president.”
But how exactly has Trump acted oppressively or dangerously? By delivering an economy that has resulted in historically low unemployment? By demanding the respect of all nations for the mission of the United States as a defender of freedom? By working to expose the corrupt underbelly of the Washington, D.C., establishment? No, wait, I’ve got it — by having a phone call with the president of Ukraine in which they both spoke frankly about their concerns of election interference and corruption.
There has been no abuse of power by President Trump. Instead, he has done what he promised to do when he was elected — to disrupt the crony politics that have corrupted our government for so long, to restore the people to their place as the rightful rulers, and to make America great again.
On the other hand, Speaker Pelosi and the Resistance leaders in the House of Representatives have endeavored to protect their turf and to restore predictability to their long-established self-enrichment racket. If Pelosi were being honest, she could have had Adam Schiff rewrite the Declaration of Independence with the same creative zeal that he rewrote Trump’s phone call with Ukraine’s President Zelensky. This newly revised Democratic Declaration might have come out something like this:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all politicians are created equal, but that some are more equal than others — that they are endowed by the Deep State with certain unalienable rights, that among these are power, wealth and the pursuit of reelection. That to secure these rights, dirty alliances are instituted among politicians, deriving their unjust powers from the oppression of the governed. That whenever any President becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the politicians to impeach him.”
Although that is a Schiff-inspired parody, it is sadly close to the truth. No matter how many flags and prayers Speaker Pelosi wraps herself in, she is still standing naked before the American people as the author of the greatest insurrection against constitutional authority in more than 150 years. As the whistleblower’s attorney noted prophetically on Twitter in January 2017, “#coup has started. First of many steps. #rebellion. #impeachment will follow ultimately.”
Fortunately, the revolution now moves on to the Senate, it WILL be televised, and it will fail miserably. Madame Speaker, delete your account.
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.
