The political issue that is occupying America at this time is the move to impeach President Trump.
THE IMPEACHMENT PROCESS
How does the impeachment process work?
“The Constitution gives Congress the power to remove a president before his or her term is up if enough lawmakers vote to say the president committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” It starts with an investigation by the House Judiciary Committee, hearings are held, and a vote is taken. If a majority of the House agrees to a resolution, called “articles of impeachment,” the President is technically “impeached” – something that’s happened to two presidents, Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998.
But being impeached doesn’t mean the President is immediately removed from office. Think of it as an indictment. What happens next is the trial. That takes place in the Senate, presided over by the chief justice of the Supreme Court. The House appoints “managers” to make its case, and the President has a legal team to make his.
The Senate then votes – and needs a two-thirds majority to convict and remove the President from office. There are currently 47 Senate Democrats, so it would take at least 20 Republican votes to remove President Trump from office(FoxNews.com).”
Now, let us state right from the start that barring some dramatic new facts emerging, it is highly unlikely 20 Republicans will vote to remove President Trump. It should also be noted that impeachment does not overturn the election results.
PREVIOUS IMPEACHMENTS
Two sitting presidents, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, have been impeached. Richard Nixon, in order to avoid being impeached, resigned. Chuck Colson gives a personal insight into the process, from his perspective of being directly involved with President Nixon.
“Nearly 25 years ago, I sat in the witness chair facing the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment hearings of Richard Nixon. It was hardly a happy day for me because I was there to testify under oath about all the transgressions we now know of as Watergate.
I left the hearings that night knowing I was going to prison, despondent because I knew that my friend President Nixon would soon be out of office. But, in a sense, I had a renewed confidence in the American system. Why? Because the congressmen seemed genuinely concerned about upholding the law. Even the Republicans, mostly partisan defenders of Nixon, recognized that the integrity of the presidency was on the line, and what was right had to take precedence over politics. Even though I was on the losing end, I was reassured that the American system was stronger than any man or partisan interest.
Chuck went on to note how those days were over, replaced by a culture in which political leaders were unwilling to put national interest above political ideology, and in which citizens had lost their confidence in the American system. . . . Still, in Chuck’s final analysis, after the Senate (wrongly, in his view) acquitted President Clinton, he reminded us that all the events of the cultural moment must be understood in light of something bigger, unchanging, and ultimately sure: And for all of us who are Christians, regardless of how we view this process, let us remind ourselves that we serve a God who rules over the affairs of men-whether they know it or not (Breakpoint.org).“
PRINCIPLE OR POLITICS?
If one examines the events of the last three years, it is not hard to see that this move to impeach President Trump is more a matter of politics than principle for a number of reasons.
- The talk of impeachment was there right from the time Trump was elected President. Newt Gingrich wrote an article entitled ‘The Resistance Against Trump Began the Day he was Elected – – This is not an Impeachment Process (Foxnew.com).’
- A comparison of what politicians said in 1998 and what they are now saying clearly shows that the pursuit of impeachment is based on politics not principle.
JOE BIDEN
Then (as a senator from Delaware): “The American people don’t think that they have made a mistake by electing Bill Clinton and we in Congress had better be very careful before we upset their decision and make darn sure that we are able to convince them, if we decide to upset their decision, that our decision to impeach him was based upon principle and not politics.”
– Nov. 18, 1998, speech at National Press Club
Now: “It is a tragedy for this country that our president put personal politics above his sacred oath. He has put his own political interests over our national security interest, which is bolstering Ukraine against Russian pressure. It is an affront to every single American and the founding values of our country.”
– Sept. 25, statement
SENATOR CHARLES E. SCHUMER, D-N.Y.
Then (as a House member): “It is time we move forward, and not have the Congress and the American people endure a specter of what could be a yearlong focus on a tawdry but not impeachable affair.”
– Oct. 6, 1998, news report
Now: “This document” – a White House summation of the phone conversation – “demonstrates that President Trump made it abundantly and redundantly clear to the president of the Ukraine that he wanted him to investigate his political opponent and further that he wanted him to work with Atty. Gen. [William] Barr to make it happen. This document absolutely validates the wisdom of … [the] decision to open up a formal impeachment inquiry.”
– Sept. 25, news report
Now, least you think I am only using Democrats to make this point, let me quote a Republican.
SENATOR MITCH MCCONNELL, R-KY
Then: “Our nation is indeed at a crossroads. Will we pursue the search for truth, or will we dodge, weave and evade the truth? I am of course referring to the investigation into serious allegations of illegal conduct by the president of the United States – that the president has engaged in a persistent pattern and practice of obstruction of justice. The allegations are grave, the investigation is legitimate, and ascertaining the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the unqualified, unevasive truth is absolutely critical.”
– Feb. 12, 1998, floor statement
Now: “Instead of working together across party lines on legislation to help American families and strengthen our nation, they will descend even deeper into their obsession with relitigating 2016. This rush to judgment comes just a few hours after President Trump offered to release the details of his phone conversation with President Zelensky. It comes despite the fact that committee-level proceedings are already underway to address the whistleblower allegation through a fair, bipartisan and regular process. It simply confirms that House Democrats’ priority is not making life better for the American people but their nearly 3-year-old fixation on impeachment.”
– Sept. 24 statement
The issue is about politics not principle. But let us remember the reason the founding fathers stated as the basis for impeachment was ‘Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors (U.S. Constitution Article II Section IV)’ was to prevent what still happens now in British politics where politicians can remove a leaders on the base of a vote of no confidence (parliament.uk)
HOW DID WE GET SO POLITICAL?
I am not a historian, but I believe the present divisive situation started back in 1987 with the battle over President Reagan’s nomination of Judge Bork to the Supreme Court. This was later followed by the battle over President Bush’s nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas in 1991. The tables were then turned with the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland by President Obama in 2016, which was held up by Republicans and not put to a vote. Then recently, we had the bitter battle over President Trump’s nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
On both sides of the aisle, it is not primarily principle. Rather it is primarily about politics and the quest for power.
One should note that the battle over the nominations for the Supreme Court also relates to the issue of abortion. However, the main issue, I believe, is the unwillingness of the left to accept the legitimacy of the 2016 election of President Trump. Hence the constant call for impeachment from the time he took office.
CLOSING THOUGHT
I am not seeking at this time to examine the evidence or otherwise for the impeachment of President Trump. What I have sought to do is to state that I believe that the issue is primarily political, not a matter of principle.
I do not always agree or condone the way President Trump has spoken or acted (The latest being the issue of Turkey and the Kurds). However, at the time of writing this Langstaff Letter, I do not believe that there are sufficient grounds for impeachment. I don’t believe that the accusations, which have currently not been proven, reach the level of ‘treason, bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors.’
There is a need for all the facts to be presented and examined regarding all the issues involved, but I firmly believe that this is primarily political and not a matter of principle brought about by people who hate President Trump and have not yet accepted that he won the Presidential election in 2016 and do not want to see him reelected in 2020.
RESOURCES
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/steve-hilton-impeachment-inquiry-trump-democrats
http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/09/breakpoint-how-to-think-about-impeachment/
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/newt-gingrich-resistance-trump-impeachment
https://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/?_escaped_fragment_=/articles/1/essays/11/impeachment
https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/glossary/motion-of-no-confidence/
Kairos Ministries 
In 1970, when Gerald Ford was still a member of the House of Representatives, he said, “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be.” It was a reckless and inaccurate statement.
Maxine Waters also said as much with her: “Impeachment is about whatever the Congress says it is. There is no law that dictates impeachment. What the Constitution says is ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,’ and we define that.”
Liberal lawmakers are dangerous. First it was legal to sell arms to the Contra Rebels. Then congress changed their position and it became illegal. Hence, the Iran-Contra affair.
Prior to President Barry Soetoro, it was legal to not have health insurance. Today, it is illegal.
What laws do partisans want? Hillary Clinton said “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.” She would force it by making laws.
In 2017, Bernie Sanders cited religious beliefs as disqualifying an individual for public office. As president, he would obviously seek to make congress enforce his anti-religious bias.
As a nation, we are on a slippery slope. Partisan laws, by a partisan congress, reported on by a partisan press spells nothing but disaster. Even today, in the Strib, a NYT opinion piece said that “The GOP is not a normal political party; its an… authoritarian regime in waiting”. This actually describes liberalism to a “T.”
I have my own ideas as to why the democrats choose to endlessly pursue unfounded claims.
1. The old adage is assumed to be true that, “Where there is smoke there is fire.” So to the average person hearing accusation after accusation, some will eventually think that there must be something to this somewhere. Or – Just tell a lie long enough and people will begin to believe it
2. To provide a chilling warning to any conservative who either wants to run for office or to even speak up, that they will be subjected to an endless tirade of unfounded and baseless accusations until they retreat.
Please do not post this on your timeline: 10/11/19 An article from Caroline B. Glick (Israel) re: Turkey and Kurds: Trump did not betray the Kurds
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by Caroline B. Glick
The US has neither major influence in Syria nor an interest in confronting Turkey to protect the Kurds. Trump avoided war with Turkey this week and began extracting America from an open-ended commitment to the Kurds it never made.
The near-consensus view of US President Donald Trump’s decision to remove American special forces from the Syrian border with Turkey is that Trump is enabling a Turkish invasion and double-crossing the Syrian Kurds who have fought with the Americans for five years against the Islamic State group. Trump’s move, the thinking goes, harms US credibility and undermines US power in the region and throughout the world.
There are several problems with this narrative. The first is that it assumes that until this week, the US had power and influence in Syria when in fact, by design, the US went to great lengths to limit its ability to influence events there.
The war in Syria broke out in 2011 as a popular insurrection by Syrian Sunnis against the Iranian-sponsored regime of President Bashar Assad. The Obama administration responded by declaring US support for Assad’s overthrow. But the declaration was empty. The administration sat on its thumbs as the regime’s atrocities mounted. It supported a feckless Turkish effort to raise a resistance army dominated by jihadist elements aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood.
President Barack Obama infamously issued his “red line” regarding the use of chemical weapons against civilians by Assad, which he repudiated the moment it was crossed.
As ISIS forces gathered in Iraq and Syria, Obama shrugged them off as a “JV squad.” When the JVs in ISIS took over a third of Iraqi and Syrian territory, Obama did nothing.
As Lee Smith recalled in January in The New York Post, Obama only decided to do something about ISIS in late 2014 after the group beheaded a number of American journalists and posted their decapitations on social media.
The timing was problematic for Obama.
In 2014 Obama was negotiating his nuclear deal with Iran. The deal, falsely presented as a nonproliferation pact, actually enabled Iran – the world’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism – to develop both nuclear weapons and the missile systems required to deliver them. The true purpose of the deal was not to block Iran’s nuclear aspirations but to realign US Middle East policy away from the Sunnis and Israel and toward Iran.
Given its goal of embracing Iran, the Obama administration had no interest in harming Assad, Iran’s Syrian factotum. It had no interest in blocking Iran’s ally Russia from using the war in Syria as a means to reassert Moscow’s power in the Middle East.
As both Michael Doran, a former national security adviser in the George W. Bush administration and Smith argue, when Obama was finally compelled to act against ISIS, he structured the US campaign in a manner that would align it with Iran’s interests.
Obama’s decision to work with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia in northern Syria because it was the only significant armed force outside the Iranian axis that enjoyed congenial relations with both Assad and Iran.
Obama deployed around a thousand forces to Syria. Their limited numbers and radically constrained mandate made it impossible for the Americans to have a major effect on events in the country. They weren’t allowed to act against Assad or Iran. They were tasked solely with fighting ISIS. Obama instituted draconian rules of engagement that made achieving even that limited goal all but impossible.
During his tenure as Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton hoped to revise the US mandate to enable US forces to be used against Iran in Syria. Bolton’s plan was strategically sound. Trump rejected it largely because it was a recipe for widening US involvement in Syria far beyond what the American public – and Trump himself – were willing to countenance.
In other words, the claim that the US has major influence in Syria is wrong. It does not have such influence and is unwilling to pay the price of developing such influence.
This brings us to the second flaw in the narrative about Trump’s removal of US forces from the Syrian border with Turkey.
The underlying assumption of the criticism is that America has an interest in confronting Turkey to protect the Kurds.
This misconception, like the misconception regarding US power and influence in Syria, is borne of a misunderstanding of Obama’s Middle East policies. Aside from ISIS’s direct victims, the major casualty of Obama’s deliberately feckless anti-ISIS campaign was the US alliance with Turkey. Whereas the US chose to work with the Kurds because they were supportive of Assad and Iran, the Turks view the Syrian Kurdish YPG as a sister militia to the Turkish Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The Marxist PKK has been fighting a guerilla war against Turkey for decades. The State Department designates the PKK as a terrorist organization responsible for the death of thousands of Turkish nationals. Not surprisingly then, the Turks viewed the US-Kurdish collaboration against ISIS as an anti-Turkish campaign.
Throughout the years of US-Kurdish cooperation, many have made the case that the Kurds are a better ally to the US than Turkey. The case is compelling not merely because the Kurds have fought well.
Under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey has stood against the US and its interests far more often than it has stood with it. Across a spectrum of issues, from Israel to human rights, Hamas and ISIS to Turkish aggression against Cyprus, Greece, and Israel in the Eastern Mediterranean, to upholding US economic sanctions against Iran and beyond, for nearly 20 years, Erdoğan’s Turkey has distinguished itself as a strategic threat to America’s core interests and policies and those of its closest allies in the Middle East.
Despite the compelling, ever-growing body of evidence that the time has come to reassess US-Turkish ties, the Pentagon refuses to engage the issue. The Pentagon has rejected the suggestion that the US remove its nuclear weapons from Incirlik airbase in Turkey or diminish Incirlik’s centrality to US air operations in Central Asia and the Middle East. The same is true of US dependence on Turkish naval bases.
Given the Pentagon’s position, there is no chance that the US would consider entering an armed conflict with Turkey on behalf of the Kurds.
The Kurds are a tragic people. The Kurds, who live as persecuted minorities in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, have been denied the right of self-determination for the past hundred years. But then, the Kurds have squandered every opportunity they have had to assert independence. The closest they came to achieving self-determination was in Iraq in 2017. In Iraqi Kurdistan, the Kurds have governed themselves effectively since 1992. In 2017, they overwhelmingly passed a referendum calling for Iraqi Kurdistan to secede from Iraq and form an independent state. Instead of joining forces to achieve their long-held dream, the Kurdish leaders in Iraq worked against one another. One faction, in alliance with Iran, blocked implementation of the referendum and then did nothing as Kurdish-controlled Kirkuk was overrun by Iraqi government forces.
The Kurds in Iraq are far more capable of defending themselves than the Kurds of Syria. Taking on the defense of Syria’s Kurds would commit the US to an open-ended presence in Syria and justify Turkish antagonism. America’s interests would not be advanced. They would be harmed, particularly in light of the YPG’s selling trait for Obama – its warm ties to Assad and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The hard truth is that the 50 US soldiers along the Syrian-Turkish border were a fake tripwire. Neither Trump nor the US military had any intention of sacrificing US forces to either block a Turkish invasion of Syria or foment deeper US involvement in the event of a Turkish invasion.
Apparently, in the course of his phone call with Trump on Sunday, Erdoğan called Trump’s bluff. Trump’s announcement following the call made clear that the US would not sacrifice its soldiers to stop Erdoğan’s planned invasion of the border zone.
But Trump also made clear that the US did not support the Turkish move. In subsequent statements, Trump repeatedly pledged to destroy the Turkish economy if Turkey commits atrocities against the Kurds.
If the Pentagon can be brought on board, Trump’s threats can easily be used as a means to formally diminish the long-hollow US alliance with Turkey.
Here it is critical to note that Trump did not remove US forces from Syria. They are still deployed along the border crossing between Jordan, Iraq, and Syria to block Iran from moving forces and materiel to Syria and Lebanon. They are still blocking Russian and Syrian forces from taking over the oil fields along the eastern bank of the Euphrates. Aside from defeating ISIS, these missions are the principle strategic achievements of the US forces in Syria. For now, they are being maintained. Will Turkey’s invasion enable ISIS to reassert itself in Syria and beyond? Perhaps. But here too, as Trump made clear this week, it is not America’s job to serve as the permanent jailor of ISIS. European forces are just as capable of serving as guards as Americans are. America’s role is not to stay in Syria forever. It is to beat down threats to US and world security as they emerge and then let others – Turks, Kurds, Europeans, Russians, UN peacekeepers – maintain the new, safer status quo.
The final assumption of the narrative regarding Trump’s moves in Syria is that by moving its forces away from the border ahead of the Turkish invasion, Trump harmed regional stability and America’s reputation as a trustworthy ally.
On the latter issue, Trump has spent the better part of his term in office rebuilding America’s credibility as an ally after Obama effectively abandoned the Sunnis and Israel in favor of Iran. To the extent that Trump has harmed US credibility, he didn’t do it in Syria this week by rejecting war with Turkey. He did it last month by failing to retaliate militarily against Iran’s brazen military attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil installations. Whereas the US has no commitment to protect the Kurds, the US’s central commitment in the Middle East for the past 70 years has been the protection of Saudi oil installations and maintaining the safety of maritime routes in and around the Persian Gulf.
The best move Trump can make now in light of the fake narrative of his treachery toward the Kurds is to finally retaliate against Iran. A well-conceived and limited US strike against Iranian missile and drone installations would restore America’s posture as the dominant power in the Persian Gulf and prevent the further destabilization of the Saudi regime and the backsliding of the UAE toward Iran.
As for Syria, it is impossible to know what the future holds for the Kurds, the Turks, the Iranians, Assad, or anyone else. But what is clear enough is that Trump avoided war with Turkey this week. And he began extracting America from an open-ended commitment to the Kurds it never made and never intended to fulfill
This info does not directly apply to the article written by Alan Langstaff. Just gives info on a minor comment by Alan Langstaff. Just for consideration to think about.