{"id":1998,"date":"2019-12-20T18:53:57","date_gmt":"2019-12-20T22:53:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=1998"},"modified":"2019-12-20T19:03:58","modified_gmt":"2019-12-20T23:03:58","slug":"impeachmentgate-pelosi-has-engineered-a-hanging-chad-impeachment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=1998","title":{"rendered":"IMPEACHMENTgate: ‘Pelosi Has Engineered A Hanging-Chad Impeachment’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reindeer Games<\/strong><\/h1>\n

James Howard Kunstler<\/p>\n

The WashPo staffers had barely finished toasting \u201cmerry impeachmas\u201d \u2014 and then quickly deleting the incriminating tweet + photo that signaled their self-owned chagrin \u2014 when the implications of the day\u2019s\u00a0solemn\u00a0<\/em>work started sifting through those quarters of the alt-news media where the chronically self-owned don\u2019t dare to go, or even look: Nancy Pelosi and her too-clever-by-half Lawfare grunts had engineered a Hanging Chad Impeachment.<\/p>\n

Apparently, Mrs. Pelosi wants to play\u00a0Hide the Salami\u00a0<\/em>with the impeachment bill. She invoked some slippery procedure to stash it where the sun don\u2019t shine in the hope that the senate won\u2019t be able to follow through with its duty to try the very charges set out in the bill. How\u2019s that gonna go over when the details are actually sorted out?<\/p>\n

So far, there are just opinions a\u2019plenty. One was offered by Noah Feldman of Harvard, the very fellow who testified last week fervidly in favor of impeachment before Mr. Nadler\u2019s Judiciary Committee. He wrote, in a Bloomberg op-ed, that the action would signify that the president had not, in fact, been impeached, that it would only be so if the bill were\u00a0conveyed\u00a0<\/em>to the senate. The issue of\u00a0conveyance\u00a0<\/em>looms large in the present kerfuffle.<\/p>\n

The constitution says nothing about such conveyance, whether by errand boy, postcard, mounted messenger, dog-sled, palanquin, trumpet blast, Morse code, pneumatic tube, hog-call, smoke signal, telephone, FedEx, DM, skywriting, or a girl popping out of a cake with an envelope tucked in her brassiere. It just states that it\u2019s the\u00a0sole power\u00a0<\/em>of the house to draft the charges and the\u00a0sole power\u00a0<\/em>of the senate to conduct a trial of the charges. Of course, the charges have been published in the Congressional Record, which one might think is sufficient \u201cconveyance\u201d of the house\u2019s action and intent \u2014 though other voices claim not even that is required for the senate to act.<\/p>\n

The matter of conveyance derives strictly from precedent, tradition, and rules accrued over the centuries in legislative practice. But these, of course, are not stipulated in the supreme law of the land, the founding document. Since the house made up its own rather unsportsmanlike rules for assembling the charges, first in Adam Schiff\u2019s Intel Committee and then in Mr. Nadler\u2019s HJC \u2014 deviously disadvantaging the defense with star chamber subterfuges \u2014 the senate can follow its own rules, too, including the option to dismiss the bill summarily as devoid of merit. After all, \u201cabuse of power\u201d has no criminal specificity, high or low, and \u201cobstruction of the house\u201d refers fallaciously to the president\u2019s right to seek relief from the supreme court in a procedural disagreement with another branch of government.<\/p>\n

Mr. Trump appears eager and avid to go to trial, where his side could call witnesses to his heart\u2019s delight while denying the opposition any witnesses, just as the Dems did in the house. His managers could call in the Bidens, Joe and Hunter, to explain their 2014 adventures in Ukraine, and the impressive payments tendered to them \u2014 for what? The defense could compel the testimony of the rogue CIA agent, Eric Ciaramella, to explain his pretensions of whistleblowing, and also his enabler, Intel IG Michael Atkinson, who left a procedural slime-trail in his handling of the \u201cwhistleblower\u201d ruse. They could call in the fact-witness to all that, Rep. Adam Schiff, who would excite the wonder and loathing of the nation in being forced to reveal his part in that charade and to recount the myriad falsehoods he has spawned in three years of RussiaGate chicanery \u2014 which, in a truly just world, would prompt his expulsion from the house. They could haul in Messrs Obama, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Mueller, Weissman, Rosenstein, McCabe, Ohr, Lynch, Strzok, Ms. Page, Ms. Yates, Mrs. Lynch, Mr. Halper \u2014 though I suspect that bunch would be better left to the ministrations of John Durham, just as the Democratic primaries roll out.<\/p>\n

A trial like that would be a rich spectacle for sure after subjecting the nation to three years of malicious, perfidious sedition. But other gusts of rumor intimate that senators on the Republican side would prefer to not open any cans of Ukrainian worms in a trial, since money laundered through the Ukrainian oligarch mills may have found its way into their pockets as well. Who knows\u2026?<\/p>\n

The simplest explanation for this hot mess is that Mrs. Pelosi\u2019s team wanted desperately to just distract the country\u2019s attention from the Horowitz report \u2014 which it pretty much failed to do \u2014 and now that she\u2019s shot her wad with that gambit, she\u2019s left holding a bag of meritless impeachment bullshit that will disappoint and embarrass the Resistance just as much as the Mueller investigation managed to do. Which leads to the question: when does this faction finally lose its appetite for self-degradation and dishonor?<\/p>\n

___
\nhttps:\/\/kunstler.com\/clusterfuck-nation\/reindeer-games\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reindeer Games<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1998\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}