Christopher Ferrara“For they have not rejected thee, but Me, that I should not reign over them.” ~ 1 Kings (Samuel) 8:7
As I write this column (Jan. 15, 2020), the curtain has finally come down on the impeachment theater of the absurd in the United States House of Representatives, a farce produced and directed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi – a doddering, nasty old biddy who pretends to be Catholic while she defends butchering unborn babies on their way out of the birth canal. Today, Pelosi finally released from her gnarly claws the sham “Articles of Impeachment” she had rushed the House to approve along strictly party lines without a single Republican vote and with two Democrats voting against the articles. As Senator Mitch McConnell observed: “They passed the first presidential impeachment that does not even allege an actual crime under our laws.”
The constitutional requirement of “high crimes and misdemeanors” (U.S. Constitution, Art. II, Sect. 4) was completely ignored in favor of a vague notional approach to impeachment that is essentially an attempt to convert the extraordinary impeachment process into what would be, if it became precedent, a mere vote of “no confidence” that could be held by the majority party during any administration, forcing the Senate to take up such votes and conduct a trial of the President again and again and again whenever the House majority wishes. Indeed, the Democrat lunatics in the House are already threatening multiple “impeachments” after this one fails in the Senate.
Analyzing the Faux “Articles of Impeachment”
The first “Article of Impeachment” for “Abuse of Power” labors to create the appearance of impeachable wrongdoing based on standard presidential political activity described with tendentious phrases devoid of evidential content. Trump, so the Article declares, “solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, in the 2020 United States Presidential election.” By which the House means nothing more than that, allegedly, Trump asked the Government of Ukraine “to publicly announce investigations that would benefit his reelection, harm the election prospects of a political opponent, and influence the 2020 United States Presidential election to his advantage.”
But the investigations – of Vice President Joe Biden’s blatant influence peddling to obtain unearned millions for his degenerate son, and alleged Ukrainian election interference in 2016 with the connivance of Hillary Clinton – were never announced. Nor were the investigations ever conducted. But even if they had been, so what? Since when does running for President against a sitting President immunize the candidate from investigation of his corruption or make even a request that it be investigated an impeachable offense?
This preposterous “Article of Impeachment” amounts to the claim that a president can be removed from office merely for asking that a foreign government announce legitimate investigations merely because they would confer a political advantage. That is not a crime; it is politics as usual in the realm of foreign policy. One might as well argue that a president can be impeached for asking a foreign government, in return for a political favor from him, to announce trade negotiations or a summit meeting that would bolster his chances for reelection. Which is the same as saying that a president can be impeached for engaging in routine quid pro quo foreign policy in any way his political opposition deems disadvantageous to their opposition, even if the President commits no crime whatsoever.
What was a crime, however, was the DNC’s and Hillary Clinton’s payment of money to unregistered foreign agents to manufacture fabricated evidence of Trump’s “collusion with Russia” while funneling the payments through a law firm to hide the resulting illegal campaign contributions. Perhaps the pending Durham investigation will result in the indictment of some of the real criminals in the Trump affair, who have been trying to impeach him on some pretext since Inauguration Day, when The Washington Post announced: “The campaign to impeach President Trump has begun”.
The first Article includes more of that lawyerly specialty: empty rhetoric that tries to make something out of nothing. Quoth the Article: “President Trump also sought to pressure the Government of Ukraine to take these steps by conditioning official United States Government acts of significant value to Ukraine on its public announcement of the investigations.”
But, again, there was no such announcement. Which explains the locution “sought to pressure”. Now, if a president merely “seeking to pressure” a foreign government to do something in exchange for the U.S. government’s favors were an impeachable offense, then every president ever elected has committed numerous impeachable offenses. Moreover, even if the pressure had succeeded, that, again, would be foreign policy not an impeachable offense.
Aside from “seeking to pressure” Ukraine for an announcement of investigations that never happened, the Article alleges, without a scintilla of evidence, that Trump personally conditioned the release of $391 million in military aid to Ukraine and a meeting in the White House with Ukraine’s President on the aforesaid announcement and investigations. But there was no announcement, there were no investigations, Ukraine’s President got his White House meeting anyway, and not a single witness during the sham impeachment hearings in the House was able to testify that Trump actually imposed preconditions on anything.
In sum, the first “Article of Impeachment” alleges nothing impeachable. It is mere verbiage occupying the space between the caption “Article I” and the caption “Article II.”
Article II need not detain us. Even more ludicrously, it alleges “obstruction of Congress” because Trump, like nearly every president at some point in his administration, asserted executive privilege. Accordingly, Trump directed executive branch officials not to testify on privileged matters and challenged in court the House’s fishing expedition subpoenas, which were blatantly violative of both executive and lawyer-client privilege. Thereafter the House dropped the subpoenas rather than contest Trump’s assertions of privilege so that it could hurry up and stage its predetermined vote to impeach before Christmas. In essence, Trump stands accused of “obstructing” a Congressional investigation of a sitting President by challenging its propriety in long-established ways. That is, he is accused of committing an impeachable offense by insisting upon the separation of powers. This is a joke.
The Motive Behind the Sham
So, what is this really all about? The motive for this impeachment has nothing to do with high crimes and misdemeanors, of which there are none, despite the endless, frenzied search for one since the moment Trump was elected. Rather, this phony impeachment is but the latest effort of the immune system of the global secularist hegemon to expel a foreign body it finds unaccountably in its midst. Trump’s election was the political miracle no one expected. Despite all his obvious moral faults, he is the first true outsider to ascend to the Presidency in living memory, perhaps ever.
But much more than that is how Trump succeeded in being elected: on the basis of a pro-life, pro-religion, pro-American, anti-immigration platform that is anathema to the secular hegemon. For the assured election of Hillary Clinton was supposed to be the hegemon’s worldwide triumph over what little remains of the moral order in a post-Christian, post-modern West; the apotheosis of the unholy trinity of abortion, contraception, and sexual deviancy of all kinds; the moment in which the Adversary’s non serviam would achieve an irreversible political consummation in America and thus throughout the Western world.
Yet there is Trump, a profligate billionaire playboy with a long history of adultery who, incredibly enough, like some latter-day King David – almost in spite of himself – is inching America back from the abyss in the most unexpected development in American political history. There he is nominating dozens of pro-life judges to the federal bench; personally addressing the March for Life; establishing a Conscience and Religious Freedom Division in the Department of Health and Human Services to address attempts to coerce Christians into participating in abortion, contraception, sex-change operations and other abominations; banning medical coverage for “transgender” surgery in the Armed forces; issuing an executive order protecting the conscience rights of Christians against Obama’s “contraceptive mandate” in their businesses and organizations; and taking the position through his Justice Department that “gender identity” is not a protected class under Title VII’s prohibitions of employment discrimination.
And there is Trump daring to pronounce the name of Christ in his Christmas address this past December, invoking Him more explicitly than any President in the history of the United States. His words on that occasion alone required his destruction:
“More than 2,000 years ago, a brilliant star shone in the East. Wise men traveled far, far afield. I mean, they were a long distance away. And they came and they stood with us under the star, where they found the Holy Family in Bethlehem. As the Bible tells us, when the Wise Men ‘had come into the house, they saw the young [C]hild with Mary, [H]is [M]other, and fell down and worshipped [H]im.’
Christians give thanks that the Son of God came into the world to save humanity. Jesus Christ inspires us to love one another with hearts full of generosity and grace.” (Emphasis added)
And so, all the powers that be have combined and conspired – literally all over the world, and even with the assistance of a fanatical modernist Pope – to find a way to destroy him. For Clinton’s election was to be the final victory in the Adversary’s long war against Christ, which is a war on being itself, on the created order in which His will as King of creation determines the natures of things, including the humanity of unborn children and the immutable constitution of the two sexes He made: “male and female He created them” (Gen. 1:27, 5:2).
Ironic Twist to the Tale
Trump identifies himself as a Presbyterian. Who knows – only God knows – how sincere his Christian professions are or whether, under the trials to which he and has family have been subjected, he has undergone something like a religious conversion. But I find it supremely ironic that it was Presbyterians as well who, more than 150 years ago, predicted the final state of a republic which from its inception had turned its back on the God made man that Trump – alone among all the Presidents – has publicly proclaimed the Savior of humanity.
In the midst of the Civil War, there emerged in America a national movement of conservative and primarily Presbyterian ministers, theologians, academics, lawyers, and jurists that called itself the National Reform Association (NRA). On the rolls of NRA’s elected officers was no less than William Strong, a retired Justice of the Supreme Court. The NRA’s primary mission, which failed, was to amend the Preamble of the Constitution to recognize precisely what we Catholics call the Social Kingship of Christ. Its proposed amendment read thus:
“We the People of the United States, [humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the nations, His revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government,] and in order to form a more perfect union…”[1]
The records of the NRA conventions during and after the war are replete with admissions by prominent American Protestants that the Civil War had been the outcome of a grave disorder in the Republic, a disorder that must be laid at the feet of the “sainted” (in a secular sense) Founders themselves in their attachment to the political philosophy and rationalism of the Enlightenment, which have reached their fatal terminus in America today. Typical of these admissions is the following from the proceedings of the NRA’s 1874 Convention in Pittsburgh, quoting a sermon by Rev. Horace Bushnell in July of 1861, three months after the War began:
“It is a remarkable, but very serious fact… that our grand Revolutionary fathers left us the legacy of this war in the ambiguities of thought and principle which they suffered in respect of the foundations of government itself.… [T]hey organized a government, such as we, at least, have understood to be without moral or religious ideas; in one view merely a man-made compact…
Proximately our whole difficulty is an issue forced by slavery; but if we go back to the deepest root of the trouble, we shall find that it comes by trying to maintain a government without moral ideas, and concentrate a loyal feeling around institutions that, as many reason, are only human compacts... [W]e have gradually been wearing our nature down to the level of our doctrines… Our merely terranean, almost subterranean, always godless fabric, becomes more and more exactly what we have taken it be in our philosophy.”[2]
Again and again, the NRA’s speakers predicted the moral and spiritual collapse of America if its Constitution, bereft of any reference to Christ and His Gospel, were allowed to dictate the form and pattern of American social order. For example, one Tayler Lewis accurately prophesied as early as 1872 that under the influence of the “Godless Constitution” as wielded by anti-Christian forces, it would not be long before “our whole political page becomes a pure, unbelieving, irreligious, Christless, Godless blank.”[3]
And so it has come to pass as we confront our desperate situation today, in which none other than Donald J. Trump, for all his faults, is the only figure on the American political scene who has shown himself capable of reversing, however slightly, the process by which American politics has indeed become “a pure, unbelieving, irreligious, Christless, Godless blank.” For this, he must be destroyed. For not even the feeblest suggestion of a return to a social order based on the Law of the Gospel, nor even a half-hearted attempt to reconstruct some semblance of sociopolitical and juridical adherence to the natural law as Our Lord enunciated it, can be tolerated by the forces arrayed against this most unexpected president.
God help America if Trump fails to be reelected. But let us be realistic: His presidency is at most a faint, barely audible, and garbled echo of the Social Kingship of Christ. Yet even this was enough to unleash the secular furies against him in a way we have never seen before in American political history. Because, in the end, it is Christ Himself whom the forces of what the moderns call Liberty are trying to impeach. And they will never give up trying to impeach Him until the Lord of History brings history to an end.
Want more great Catholic content? SUBSCRIBE to Catholic Family News and help support our work! DONATIONS are also accepted and greatly appreciated. God bless you and thanks for reading!
[1] Proceedings of the National Convention to Secure the Religious Amendment of the Constitution of the United States (Philadelphia: Jas. B. Rodgers Co., 1872), vii.
[2] Proceedings of the National Reform Convention to Aid in Maintaining the Christian Features of the American Government and Securing a Religious Amendment to the Constitution of the United States (Philadelphia: Christian Statesman Association, 1874), 53.
[3] Proceedings (1872), 59.
Matt Gaspers
