Op/Ed
Letter to the editor: Impeachment process will help the GOP in 2020
“There you go again” was a phrase used by Reagan against Carter in the 1980 debates and is apropos today regarding Adam Schiff, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Even after the Mueller Report was released, Schiff still insisted that there was “ample evidence of collusion in plain sight” between President Trump and Russia to sway the 2016 presidential election. The 448-page Mueller Report outlined an investigation, which lasted 675 days, employed 19 attorneys, “issued more than 2,800 subpoenas, executed nearly 500 search warrants, obtained more than 230 orders for communication records, issued almost 50 orders authorizing use of pen registers, made 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence, and interviewed approximately 500 witnesses,” according to Attorney General William Barr. And it cost the taxpayers $25.2 million. After all of that, the special counsel’s office determined it “did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia.” Case closed or so you would think. Then Chairman Schiff tried unsuccessfully to indict President Trump on obstruction of the collusion investigation, obstructing that which Mueller had concluded did not occur.
So now, to paraphrase country singer Mark Chesnutt, “we’re goin’ through the Big I and don’t mean Iowa.” True to form, Chairman Schiff is attempting to impeach President Trump on colluding with the Ukrainian President by digging up dirt on his opponent, Democratic front-runner V.P. Joe Biden. “There you go again” Adam. Remember that it was Joe Biden in March of 2016 who was the one caught bragging on video two years later that he pressured Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko to fire their Chief Prosecutor, General Viktor Shokin. Biden threatened to cancel $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to Ukraine unless, quid pro quo, Shokin was prevented from pursuing investigations of a natural gas company. This company, Burisma Holdings, owned by Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, had hired Biden’s son, Hunter, onto a lucrative board position with no applicable expertise. Joe Biden accused Shokin of being corrupt; Quid Pro Quo Joe.
Rep. Al Green (D-Tex.), together with Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), has been pushing articles of impeachment against President Trump ever since he was sworn in as president. Even our Representative Peter Welch decided, before the Trump-Zelensky phone call, that he wanted to impeach President Trump on the grounds Trump has obstructed congressional attempts at oversight and had stepped up his attacks on American citizens based on their ethnic origin, religion and race. Now Rep. Green has a dire warning for his Democratic colleagues, suggesting that they will suffer the consequences at the ballot box if they don’t impeach.
He’s right. Today we have the strongest economy in our lifetimes. And we are living during relatively peaceful times, even with inheriting the 16-year-old Afghanistan War from President George W. Bush. So, when we enter the voting booth in November 2020, each of us will be thinking peace and prosperity. Or as Ronald Reagan posed the question in 1980, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Or with the slogan which President Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist James Carville poignantly coined “the Economy, stupid!” in his 1992 presidential campaign against President George H.W. Bush. President Trump will not be impeached. Neither the phone call, the obstruction complaints, nor verbal attacks on American citizens are impeachable offenses. The American people have grown tired of being lied to about the facts behind the impeachment ordeal. Case in point, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow’s viewership declined by approximately one-third soon after the Mueller Report was released.
In our presidential election of 2016, 306 electoral votes went to Donald Trump, 232 to Hillary Clinton, with 270 required to win. After what President Trump has accomplished for the American people these last three years and with all of the U.S. House obsession over impeachment, more states are now in play: Nevada (6), Colorado (9), New Mexico (5), Minnesota (10), Virginia (13), New Hampshire (4), and Maine (3). It is likely that President Trump will receive 356 Electoral College votes versus 182 for the Democratic Party nominee, likely Elizabeth Warren, who will receive a bump in polls when Biden drops out from the Ukrainian scandal. It won’t be the landslide 1972 election where Richard Nixon carried 49 states, winning 520 electoral votes versus George McGovern’s 17, winning Massachusetts (14), and Washington, D.C. (3). Nor will it be like the 1984 election, where Ronald Reagan carried 49 states, winning 525 electoral votes versus Walter Mondale’s 13, winning Minnesota (10) and Washington, D.C. (3).
But it is the Impeachment which will guarantee that the GOP wins back the U.S. House. Only a net 21 Democratic representatives need to be won by Republicans in red states carried by our President in 2016. According to Newtonian physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Dan Monger
New Haven
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