Don's Tuesday Column

          THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   12/24/2019

Peace, good will delivered, disturbed

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men!” comes from the New Testament book of Luke. Other translations say “Glory to God in the highest heaven…” Also: “peace among men with whom He is pleased!” or “men on whom His favor rests!” A preacher might make the salient point that God’s intended recipients of “peace (and) good will” are not all mankind but rather those whose lives display adherence to the admonitions of God and His Son, Jesus the Christ and Savior.

My late December birthday has, for many years, produced a holiday that deemphasizes the “falderal” of cards, gifts, parties and so on in favor of reflections on the year just ended and the solemnity of Jesus’ birth. My 69^th calendar year results in feeling physically years older, unlike in my 20s and 30s when things got better, and the 40s and 50s when they at least didn’t get noticeably worse. Well-intended efforts of parents to make a late December birthday special and distinct from Christmas were gratefully accepted.

It is with a heavy heart that writing must focus on that which now disturbs the peace of a nation and the goodwill of its people: the partisan impeachment of our President, Donald J. Trump. Set aside the disputed meaning of phone calls between Trump and Ukraine’s President Zelensky, transcripts of which simply cannot be used as literal proof of what Democrats insist are impeachable “abuses of power.” (Remember that the Ukraine events are a convenient “hook,” since calls and votes for impeachment have issued forth from the Democrat/media cabal from the moment Trump won the election.)

The power to conduct foreign policy indisputably resides in the chief executive, the President, the only person elected by the voters, through the constitutional device of the Electoral College, to speak and act on America’s behalf internationally. Congress provides funds to express that body’s imprint but do not control the words and actions of an American president toward and among other nations.

It also cannot be refuted that presidents and their representatives routinely use the leverage of “give and take,” or “quid pro quo”—the term of art recently sullied by Trump’s enemies attempting to somehow set his actions apart from even their most recent chief executive, Barack Obama—to influence other countries. A Congressional mandate signed by Bill Clinton requires cooperation in anti-corruption prosecutions involving named countries, including China and Ukraine.

Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama or Trump have had no impediments to fighting corruption in principle or specifically under that law. Corruption of one sort is as plain, and obvious to an average citizen, as the financial rewarding of politically connected persons with unearned wealth, allocated illegitimately for purposes of favoritism, aka bribery. Such corruption commonly entails the illegal enrichment of relatives: wives, husbands, offspring or siblings, allowing the instigator of the corrupt arrangement the façade of personal noninvolvement and innocence.

No reasonable, objective person could dispute the above. To say that someone suspected of such evident corruption (as has been credibly asserted for then-Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in financially lucrative dealings with Ukraine and China) is exempt from appropriate investigation, exoneration or conviction simply because they are now running for office is to have a literal double standard.

If you’re Joe Blow, private citizen, arranging generous unearned payments to enrich your brother, wife or son, you live at risk of discovery and punishment. If you are V.P. Joe Biden, and such unearned payments, corrupt on their face, have gone to your son Hunter, and you skated out from under scrutiny while in office, you can campaign and disingenuously claim to be exempt from scrutiny because investigators of said corrupt transactions are in an opposing political party. That’s nice work, if you can get it.

However, all of that is just a flimsy pretext for nullifying the result of the 2016 election of President Trump. Nary a Democrat exists that wouldn’t love to rewind the clock and see Hillary Clinton elected. But that won’t happen in their wildest political wet dreams; they would, with Trump’s removal, only have V.P. Mike Pence, who would, of course, be impeached and removed to pave the way for President Nancy Pelosi. Trust me, it hurt worse and longer to write that than for you to read it.

Absent the requisite “Treason, Bribery or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors”—which don’t exist in this case except in Democrats’ Trump-Deranged fantasies—any intelligent, informed observer would have to agree with the only rational legal mind to address the House committee, Jonathon Turley. He castigated the Democrats’ impeachment “casus belli” (literally “act or event used to justify war”) as insufficient to the constitutional requirement. The fact is that all Republicans and half of independents agree.

Here we come to the nub of this “impeachment” (assuming Pelosi sends it to the Senate): Without the qualifying reasons for the Democrats’ Articles (to impeach), you are left with nothing less than a crass power play, an attempt to use the sheer force of political votes to remove Republican President Trump.

There is a form of government under which that exact scenario is legitimate and normal: a parliamentary system as they have in the United Kingdom’s elections. If Democrats really want to set up, or “constitute,” America’s federal government after that fashion, they should dispense with the deceptive rhetoric about upholding America’s Constitution and tell the American people the honest truth that they are in “rebellion” against our representative democracy.

They owe it to voters to state that they will never allow another Republican President to govern if they have the Congressional power to replace him or her, reasons be damned. Thy name is, therefore, Treason!