During his testimony in the House Judiciary Committee hearing in the impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump this week, GOP expert witness Jonathan Turley made a specific charge that we should not give in to anger on the matter of impeachment.
Turley charged that anger was the chief driving force behind the move for impeachment, that it was an irrational, nonsensical, and emotional motive overriding good sense, facts, and evidence. That Democrats were just mad and would drag the country down with them in their fury.
He has that half-right.
If you have watched how Donald Trump has stewarded this nation over the last three years and you aren't riven with anger, you haven’t been paying attention.
Turley was essentially playing the emotion card in order to argue that there was a paucity of evidence against Trump, and that Democrats have wanted to impeach him since he spoke the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2017. He of course ignores the fact that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi strongly resisted the urge to impeach for three full years. One thing you can find in abundance is articles since 2017 that talk about how much Pelosi was resisting the movement to impeach.
From CNN in May 2019.
From columnist Rob Stutzman in USA Today in June 2019.
My guess is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has seen this freight train coming at her for a long time — probably about the time President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, precipitating the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel.
The chugging engine is impeachment, and the shrewd speaker is tied to the tracks destined for an inevitable fate she wants to avoid: impeachment hearings.
From 2017 through the 2018 elections, Democrats howled with moral outrage about the lack of oversight — and at times outright accommodation — by the Republican House majority when it came to Trump, Russian interference in the 2016 election and the possible obstruction of the special counsel’s investigation.
Now it’s 2019. Pelosi is speaker, the gavels of the key House committees are controlled by chairs loyal to her, and Mueller’s report is complete. And the upshot of that report is crystal clear. Trump committed impeachable offenses. The subtext of Mueller’s public comments last week were just as clear: “Hey Congress, read my report and, per the Constitution, the ball is in your court.”
From an AP story published in HuffPost in September 2019.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says it’s time to change the law to ensure a sitting president can be indicted for wrongdoing.
Pelosi told NPR in an interview Friday that Congress will have to pass laws “that will have clarity for future presidents.”
The Mueller report said it did not indict Trump in part because of Justice Department guidelines against prosecuting a president while in office.
Pelosi said that guidance is “something cooked up by the president’s lawyers.”
She said a president should be indicted if they commit wrongdoing.
It is simply not the case that Pelosi and the Democrats rushed headlong into impeachment of Trump. There are reasons this has happened. When Rep. Al Green first called for Trump's impeachment in 2017, he did so not simply because Trump was sitting in the White House; he did it because of Trump’s statements in response to Charlottesville and other events in 2017, as The Texas Tribune noted:
Green’s articles of impeachment accused Trump of committing “high misdemeanors” while in office and asserted he is “unfit to be President.” Yet his resolution did not touch on Russia or that country's potential interference in the 2016 elections, the issue that some Democrats have argued could warrant an impeachment vote in the future following the conclusion of an ongoing investigation by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
[...]
Among the incidents included in Green's resolution are Trump's defense of white supremacists protesting in Charlottesville, Virginia; his criticism of NFL players for kneeling during the national anthem as a protest of police violence; and, most recently, his retweeting of anti-Muslim videos from a far-right British account. The resolution also mentions Trump's executive order aimed at creating "a partial shutdown of immigration from mainly Muslim countries" and Trump's treatment of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.
This motion was ultimately tabled in a vote of 364-58. In July of this year, Fortune reported, Green tried again over the issue of Trump’s treatment of “The Squad” when he demanded that they “go back home”:
Texas Democratic Rep. Al Green brought forth articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump on Tuesday night following the president's attacks on four progressive congresswomen of color on Twitter over the weekend.
Green has unsuccessfully pushed the House to vote to impeach the president multiple times since 2017. An earlier version of his measure introduced in December 2017 was backed by nearly 60 Democrats, but later killed by Republicans.
Green said his newest measure was prompted by the president's attacks on Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, in addition to statements Trump has made about immigrants and following the deadly white nationalist "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.
"Donald John Trump by causing such harm to the society of the United States is unfit to be president and warrants impeachment, trial and removal from office," Green said on the House floor Tuesday night, while reading from his impeachment measure.
Objectively, Green had a point: Trump has indeed been unfit for office since day one. But again, his push for impeachment in July only managed to garner 95 votes, far short of what was needed to move the motion forward. Even as of July of this year, after the release of the redacted Mueller report, the desire to impeach for Democrats simply wasn't there.
In the actual impeachment proceedings, the ones who seemed motivated largely by anger and rage were Republicans such as Rep. Doug Collins, who attacked law professor Pamela Karlan for supposedly not having read all of the previous witness testimony before her own appearance before the House Judiciary Committee.
“Here Mr. Collins, I would like to say to you, sir, that I read transcripts of every one of the witnesses who appeared in the live hearing because I would not speak about these things without reviewing the facts,” she said. “So I’m insulted by the suggestion that, as a law professor, I don’t care about those facts.”
[...]
“Everything I read on those occasions tells me that when President Trump invited — indeed, demanded — foreign involvement in our upcoming election, he struck at the very heart of what makes this a republic to which we pledge allegiance,” she said. “Drawing a foreign government into our elections is an especially serious abuse of power because it undermines democracy itself.”
And again we saw anger and plenty of poutrage on display as the professor made a harmless analogy about Trump’s son Barron not being a baron. Reported Raw Story:
While illustrating a point that it is unconstitutional to bestow titles of nobility, Stanford Law Professor Pamela Karlan noted that Trump could name his son Barron, but could not make his son a Baron.
Trump’s campaign argued, “she just went out of her way to mock and attack Barron Trump.”
“Democrats have disgraced themselves by giving a platform to this unhinged, petty kook,” the campaign argued.
The GOP naturally has a great track record when it comes to being “hands-off” with children.
And you could see anger as Rep. Matt Gaetz shouted at Karlan, ”You don't get to interrupt me.” According to Raw Story,
“Do you remember saying the following, ‘liberals tend to cluster more. Conservatives, very conservative people, tend to spread out more. Perhaps because they don’t even want to be around themselves.’ Did you say that?” Gaetz asked.
“Yes, I did,” she replied.
“Do you understand how that reflects contempt on people who are conservative?” he asked.
“No. What I was talking about there was the natural tendency, if you put the quote in context, the natural tendency of a compactness requirement to favor a party whose voters are more spread out,” she said. “And I do not have contempt for conservatives and I do not –”
Gaetz interrupted her, saying he didn’t have time for her answer.
“When you say how liberals want to be around each other in cluster and conservatives have to spread out, you may not see this from like the ivory towers of your law school but it makes actual people in this country –”
Karlan interjected, “When the president calls –”
Gaetz snapped at her, “You don’t get to interrupt me on this time! And when you suggest that you invoke the president’s son’s name here and try to make a joke at referencing Barron Trump that does not lend credibility to your argument, it makes you look mean and attacking someone’s family.”
This claim of anger is merely a stock tactic by the GOP. It’s exactly what Trump has long claimed initiated the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Russia and his campaign; only, his handpicked prosecutor has informed the Department of Justice inspector general that he was unable to find any evidence of personal bias against Trump in that investigation. Raw Story reported,
On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that John Durham, the longtime DOJ official and U.S. Attorney tapped by Attorney General William Barr to launch a criminal investigation into how the FBI’s Russia probe began, has told DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz that he can’t find any evidence to back up the theory, pushed by President Donald Trump and his allies, that the investigation was orchestrated by anti-Trump actors within the intelligence community.
This revelation comes days after reports that Horowitz’s own investigation, which has been running independently of Barr, largely concluded that the FBI was justified in pursuing the Russia investigation and did not plant spies within the Trump campaign.
Despite text messages between FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the overall investigation was not motivated by anger or revenge. It was not a plot to “get Trump.” It’s simply true that Russia attacked and manipulated our election in 2016. By reaching over 187 million Americans through social media with its troll farm, if Russia only impacted one half of 1% of those people, then the impact in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania would have been twice the number of voters by which those states were lost.
That was enough to swing the election.
When it comes to looking at how Trump has behaved in office, including the issues brought up by Rep. Al Green, you have: his caging of children at our border on the advice of documented white supremacists on his staff. He criticizes Hunter Biden's job choices while having his own children on his staff, and with them earning $82 million in the past year from their various private business interests. His vaunted border wall can apparently be defeated by a $100 saw from Walmart, or simply a rope ladder. His disastrous environmental policies are putting the lives of thousands of American children at risk. His handling of the economy is pathetic, while his trade tariffs are devastating the manufacturing sector. He’s an international laughingstock. He's done nothing about gun violence in our nation. He betrayed and abandoned the U.S.’ Kurdish allies. He’s a disgrace. He’s a cheat. He’s a criminal.
He solicited a foreign country to interject itself into the 2020 election and to kneecap the Mueller Russia investigation with a false conspiracy theory that the hacks were carried out and hidden by Ukraine.
There’s plenty to be angry about in relation to Donald John Trump. Franky, if you have a heart and soul and you’re paying honest attention, you should be livid with outrage over all this. We should all be shaking with anger.
But anger is not why Nancy Pelosi has called for articles of impeachment to be drawn up against him. It's because that's what the Constitution demands. It's what the time demands.
She’s even had to state specifically that she doesn't hate Trump. Reported Raw Story,
“As a Catholic, I resent your using the word hate in a sentence that addresses me,” Pelosi said. “I don’t hate anyone. I was raised in a way that is a heart full of love and always pray for the president, and I still pray for the president.”
“I pray for the president all the time,” she added, “so don’t mess with me when it comes to words like that.”
There’s plenty to be angry about, but Trump’s impending impeachment has nothing to do with anger.