What’s Wrong With Impeachment

11/14/2019—I could come up with a list.

1. Impeachment will not remove President Trump. Since I don’t think he has done enough to warrant being removed, in terms of the matters being discussed, this is not a bad thing. But it means that impeachment is irrelevant to getting rid of President Trump.

2. Impeachment distracts from worse things that President Trump is doing. How does Ukraine stack up against trying to end DACA? That is a really terrible thing. 80% of Americans support DACA. Yet, although the Supreme Court heard oral argument on ending the program, no one is talking about it because of the impeachment hearings. Impeachment is a gift to President Trump.

3. This one thing—asking Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden—is corrupt. But, by itself, I doubt that it is sufficient to warrant removal from office. Which brings me to…

4. It must be obvious that the Democrats are just using Ukraine as a kind of symbol for “everything else” that actually does justify removing Trump from office—including that he was grossly unfit in the first place. But, this is the problem—he got elected anyway. Impeachment only makes sense over Ukraine if you agree anyway that Trump should be removed from office.

5. Impeachment should not be partisan. The supposed answer to this is that it is the Republicans who are making it partisan. But I am not sure this is so. If the evidence showed that Trump countenanced a burglary into the DNC and then covered it up, I think a few Republicans would support impeachment and probably removal.

6. Hunter Biden really is corrupt and Joe Biden really did have a conflict of interest over Ukraine corruption, therefore, that should have kept him a million miles away. I agree that Trump still should not have been using military aid to force a foreign government to investigate the matter, but there really was something to investigate.

7. Since the President does actually believe that Ukraine, and not Russia, interfered with the 2016 election, efforts to get Ukraine to investigate that are not per se impeachable.

8. Holding up military aid is not an impeachable offense by itself. It’s laughable to hear Democrats and media voices complaining about that—like that is not a common practice. You shouldn’t do it for a corrupt motive, but if President Trump had been using the aid to obtain the release of an innocent American from a Ukraine prison, you think that would be impeachable?

9. Finally, for now, impeachment isn’t helping beat Trump in 2020—and won’t.

10. Already came up with one more--President Trump's view that Crimea should go to Russia, which a witness called inflammatory, is not only not impeachable, it is nobody's business in the State Department to denounce. They might try to counsel Trump on its wrongheadedness, but it is his call--like running guns to Britain in 1940 despite American neutrality.