RUSH: Chicago. Steve, great to have you with us, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Just a quick question. Is it possible for Nancy Pelosi to withhold articles of impeachment from the Senate until after the 2020 election, wait for a possible Democratic win, then submit?
RUSH: I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know. This is uncharted territory for a lot of people. The idea of holding these articles until after 2020 — you’re presuming Trump’s reelected?
CALLER: Yes. Of course. Yeah.
RUSH: My off-the-cuff answer to this is gonna be that unless specified, like legislation, an act of Congress ends when that Congress ends, and Congresses have two-year life spans because that’s the term of House of Representatives terms. In the Senate it’s six. There’s one more year to go for this current Congress, which was sworn in this January, January 2019.
CALLER: Hm-hm.
RUSH: I don’t think it would work that way. But it’s kind of academic because they’re not gonna stop. I fully expect them to add to these articles.
CALLER: Yes. That would give them time to add also.
RUSH: I think that’s gonna be the name of the game. As long as Pelosi is convinced that there will not be a conviction, she’s never gonna permit a trial. Now, there’s another thing that she’s attempting here. I should have mentioned this at the top. She is attempting, along with Chuck You Schumer, to engineer a Senate trial that actually is an investigation of additional charges.
That’s why they want four witnesses called. That’s when McConnell shut that down yesterday. Said, look, we judge the case. The House makes the case. The House is the prosecutor. They do the indictment, articles of impeachment, deliver to us, and we act as the jury and the chief justice is the judge and we go from there. We do not conduct investigations. We do not, as the jury, add to whatever is presented to us.
But they’re gonna try to force that under this rubric of fairness. And they have experience succeeding with this. Accusing the Republicans of being unfair in the past has worked. It worked in the Kavanaugh thing, for example. They let Blasey Ford come forth at the last moment and gum up all the works. They’re gonna try something like that here too.
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RUSH: Okay. Here’s Joel Pollak’s piece in Breitbart: “Senate Can Acquit Even If House Withholds Articles of Impeachment.”
Now, a lot of people have asked me that if Pelosi refuses to send the articles to the Senate, is there really any impeachment? Yes. She doesn’t have to send the articles for Trump to remain impeached forever.
Impeachment is a two-pronged process. And he has been impeached. They voted articles of impeachment in the House of Representatives. They created an indictment with two charges. So he’s been impeached. If there is nothing further that happens, if there’s no trial, if there’s no verdict, he’s still been impeached. (interruption) No, impeachment is not inclusive of a trial. He has been impeached. No matter what happens from this day forward, he has been impeached.
Bill Clinton was impeached and acquitted. Found guilty of lying. Trump will be impeached and maybe no decision, which is what Trump doesn’t want. But, no, nothing erases the fact that he’s been impeached. The problem, the reason people are asking this is ’cause a lot of people think impeachment means guilty. It doesn’t.
Impeachment is not a statement of innocence or guilt. It simply says the president has been judged, by the House in this case, which is rabidly partisan, to have engaged in constitutional high crimes and misdemeanors.
There’s Lisa Page on TV. You know, this is class. Classic, classic, classic. Lisa Page, who’s going back and forth with her texts with Strzok and just ridiculing Trump and plotting Trump’s demise, putting together a plan whereby she and her buddies at the FBI can get rid of the guy, can falsely charge him, falsely accuse him.
And then it’s all revealed that she’s been engaged in these texts back and forth with Strzok. It’s been revealed that she was a lousy FBI agent and lawyer. It’s been revealed that she was part of a process trying to rig the outcome of this investigation. And it was revealed she was having an affair with Strzok.
So what does Trump do? At Trump rallies, he simulates Strzok and Page having a very wonderful, romantic interlude. And she loses it. She loses it. She thinks it’s outrageous, it was the last straw, that’s why she had to go public, when Trump started making fun of her orgasms. So you see, these people can dish it out, and they can do whatever they want to do to literally destroy people. But you make fun of them, and they haven’t the guts — these people couldn’t take one one-hundredth of what they dish out to Donald Trump.
They’re nothing but a bunch of, when you get right down to it, wimps who live in little protective cocoons that they have built for themselves where they’re able to tell each other how important they are, how wonderful they are, how great they are, and therefore they get to create the illusion of their wonderful life. Somebody like Trump comes along and blows it up, and they can’t deal with it. It happens all the time.
Now, here’s Joel Pollak’s piece. “Senate Can Acquit Even If House Withholds Articles of Impeachment.” That’s because the Constitution, says Joel Pollak here, is absolutely clear about the Senate’s authority. Article I, Section 3, says the Senate shall have the sole power to try all impeachment. That is all it says. It doesn’t say that the Senate will. It doesn’t say that the Senate has to. It doesn’t say that the Senate must conduct a trial. It says the Senate shall have the sole power to try all impeachments.
“The Chief Justice presides over a trial involving the president, but the Senate makes the rules. And the Senate is controlled by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who regards what the House has done with contempt. Politico outlined Democrats’ new idea,” citing the so-called constitutional authority Laurence Tribe, who’s a Harvard Law professor. They don’t cite the Constitution. No, no, no. In outlining the Democrats’ idea, they go to a Harvard Law professor who is himself a rabid, sick, partisan Trump hater.
“Pelosi hopes to pressure McConnell into holding a ‘fair trial’ — this, after she and her party broke every relevant House rule and precedent, and several Amendments in the Bill of Rights, all in the name of their ‘sole Power of Impeachment.’ They forget that a ‘fair trial’ applies to the accused, not the accuser, and has since 1215.” Magna Carta. The right to a fair trial is solely about the accused.
“If Pelosi refuses to submit the articles of impeachment to the Senate, McConnell can convene the Senate anyway, summon the Chief Justice, and swear in the Senators as jurors.” And he can dismiss the case. And that’s what the hell ought to happen. And it ought to happen before Christmas. It ought to happen by the end of this week, dismiss this, because McConnell has the full authority and power to do it.
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Oh! Let me reiterate something here. I had to hurry that in to get it in before the program’s previous hour ended. The way this can end even with no articles of impeachment sent over to the Senate is very simple. Mitch McConnell runs the Senate. The Senate has sole power to conduct a trial. Pelosi has nothing to say about it.
She can whine and moan and complain about a fair trial, and Schumer can run around and say, “All we want is a fair trial.” It’s the accused who gets a fair trial. Not the prosecutors. It’s the accused. In American jurisprudence, the whole concept of a fair trial is the concept applied to the accused. And once again, it’s the Democrats’ bastardizing the American constitutional process and the rule of law and trying to make everything all about them.
But the way that McConnell can dispense with this without the articles of impeachment ever being sent over, is the chief justice is the judge. So McConnell calls him in, gavels the Senate (i.e., the jury) into order. Look at him as the foreman of the jury, if you will. He swears in the chief justice, and then dismisses the case. He takes a vote on dismissing the case, dismissing the charges — summary judgment, however you want to look at it — and does so, and it’s over.
If he gets 51 votes to dismiss the case, it’s over with, and no articles of impeachment will have been presented. Everybody’s seen them. Everybody knows what they are. If Pelosi refuses to send the charges over, why, the jury, the judge, the Senate can go ahead and say, “Okay, fine. We’re gonna dismiss this. We’ll throw it out ’cause you got nothing anyway.” Now, while that would be delicious, we can all probably conceive of the reasons the Turtle wouldn’t do it.
The media would have a cow. The media would start bleating like we haven’t heard them bleat — and, of course, Pelosi and Schumer would start bleating, “It’s not fair! It’s an unfair process. It’s what we told you: A partisan process!” It would be entirely constitutional. It would be entirely legal. However, there is the political aspect to consider. But I think the end result of this is what matters, not the process.
If you allow them any control of the process, then you’re gonna get any number of Christine Blasey Ford types thrown into all of this after the fact with their demand for new witnesses, their demand for further investigation. That simply does not have to happen. They do not get that. They can demand it; they can cry all they want about it; but they get nothing. The Senate has the sole power to conduct a trial.
And dismissing the charges is a far more preferable outcome than a never-ending trial, ’cause I’m gonna tell you like I told you yesterday: If a trial ever does begin, it’s gonna become a yearlong circus, and it will be used as a campaign aid for which it will be costing the Democrats no money. It will all be televised, and it will be nothing more than the primary impetus for the 2020 campaign to not elect Trump and to elect whoever the Democrats nominate.
That will be its purpose. Now, Pelosi — again to reiterate — is not gonna send those articles over there unless she can be assured by somebody that she’s gonna get a conviction. She’s not gonna do it. That would undercut everything. An acquittal would undercut the entire premise of everything they’re doing. The last thing they… This is the thing about it, again, that has never made sense to a lot of people. It’s made perfect sense to me. All these analysts on TV have been asking, “Why — why — why even do this if the end result is gonna be he gets acquitted?”
And the answer has been, “All she wants is the blemish. All she wants is to be able to say Trump’s been impeached.” No, that’s not all she wants. They want Trump gone, folks. They want the 2016 election overturned. They want the precedent of being able to say they did it once. They want to be able to overturn the election results. If they can do it this time, they can do it any time in the future they want — and that’s McConnell’s point in allowing this to go forward as it sits now.
There’s no reason for it to go forward if she’s not gonna send the articles over because she doesn’t want an acquittal. So that’s why she’s not sending over articles, not any other reason. That’s it. She knows the articles don’t have any substance. She knows the charges are entirely bogus. There’s not a crime specified. There’s not an impeachable offense specified. It’s nothing but a bunch of opinions from scholars and so forth.
There’s nothing in this that is substantive in any way, shape, manner, or form.
It’s all happened before; so she’s not gonna send this over there, these articles.
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RUSH: There are a couple of blog posts here I want to share with you on the impeachment before we get to the Democrat debate. The Federalist has a piece here by Christopher Bedford, “Why Impeachment Is A Massive Blunder For Nancy Pelosi.” In a political sense. Let me share with you a couple of pull quotes from this piece.
“There’s a willful suspension of belief at work in the capital city. Self-proclaimed defenders of the Constitution make excuses for sloppy spying on a major candidate for president. Men who compare themselves to those at Valley Forge shift seamlessly from allegations of urine-soaked escapades to collusion with the Kremlin, from the Kremlin to Ukraine, and finally from quid-quo-pro to bribery to obstruction, with stopovers on NFL anthem protests and insults to ‘The Squad.’ The speaker quotes the deceased Elijah Cummings in wondering, ‘When we’re dancing with the angels, the question will be asked, in 2019,’ did we impeach Donald Trump?
“Understand that to the political press corps, a GOP that unanimously backed the president and opposed Pelosi is ‘at times irrational,’ and three Democrats voting against their speaker and one defecting from the entire party is ‘almost uniformly’ in line. This ‘conventional wisdom’ is accepted by nearly the entire corporate media, and parroted to Americans forced to listen at airports and gyms across the country.
“Amazingly, though, it is not nearly the greatest media distortion of even the day. For example, it is far surpassed by the worship, adoration and glorification of Madam Speaker, the Democrats’ leader in the fight. ‘Her command of legislation, her control over her caucus, her ability to confront a historically hostile president and GOP-run Senate on equal terms are unparalleled,'” they write about her.
“Just before the impeachment vote, while not agreeing to the number the White House asked for, Congress sent another $1.4 billion to build the president’s wall. The day after impeachment, Pelosi appears ready to pass the president’s trade deal. And since impeachment began, the president’s party gained more than 600,000 new donors and raised more than $10 million.”
The point of all of these assertions is that every bit of this is going against Nancy Pelosi in real political terms — polling, fundraising, popularity. And he’s exactly right. Mr. Bedford here is exactly right. They’re digging a grave. They have been digging this grave since they undertook this. And they just keep digging.
And then Issues & Insights has a piece where they opine here that the real impeachment goal is the sabotaging of Trump’s second term.
“Democratic Party leaders can’t possibly be unaware of the fact that their impeachment case has no merit. Despite the endless talk of bribery, extortion, campaign finance violations and other supposed crimes Trump has committed, not one of the articles of impeachment accuses Trump of breaking any of those laws, or any federal law for that matter.
“Democrats also can’t be unaware that impeaching Trump on these grounds won’t do anything to help their chances in 2020. If anything, it might make it harder for them to win the election, since it bolsters Trump’s case that the Deep State will do anything to kick him out of office.
“Worse for Democrats, once the impeachment trial is over, they will have nothing left to talk about. The economy is doing well. The middle class is thriving. Trump is signing trade deals. The border is more secure than it was, even without the wall. The courts are filling up with conservative judges. Trump will be able to honestly say that he’s delivered on more campaign promises in his first term than many, if not most, of his predecessors.
“So why bother with impeachment? The clue is in how Democrats are framing the debate today. They are no longer claiming bribery or quid pro quo, since they had no evidence to prove such charges.”
They were gonna claim that ’til Trump released the transcript of the phone call. He blew that sky-high. “They are simply charging that Trump invited a foreign government to interfere in the U.S. election. Which is exactly what Democrats were claiming before the 2016 election. In early September 2016 … we noticed something Hillary Clinton had told reporters on her campaign plane.”
And this is why it’s important for the Senate to investigate Biden, aside from impeachment. “We all know what happened next. As soon as Trump won the election –“ This was what was on the Hillary campaign plane. “– Democrats accused him of colluding with Russia to steal it from Clinton, and then hounded the White House about it for more than two years.
“Well, now they are accusing Trump of trying to enlist Ukraine to do the same in 2020. You can bet that if Trump does win in 2020, Democrats – and the press – will use this argument, or some other claims of foreign interference, to contend that Trump stole his reelection, too.”
So that’s the theory from Issues & Insights. They know they’re gonna lose. They know they don’t have a prayer of winning. Their candidates all suck. All they’re doing is setting up a continuation of “Trump is illegitimate.”
Now, what would be the point of carrying that forward to a second term when Trump can’t run again? What would be the point of continuing something that has bombed on them, that Trump is an illegitimate winner because foreign governments colluded with him to steal the election. What does that get them in a second term? Any ideas?
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RUSH: Marcus, Richlands, Virginia. Great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hey. Merry Christmas, Rush. Great to talk to you, sir.
RUSH: Thank you, sir. Thank you.
CALLER: I have a couple of other reasons that I think Nancy Pelosi is wanting to stonewall this thing, this trial. Number one, they want this process to drag out as long as possible because should opportunity arise, they don’t want Donald Trump to appoint another justice to the Supreme Court. They want to say, “He’s under impeachment; he should not be allowed to appoint one.” You know, that’s becoming a big push that I’m starting to hear a lot of chatter about as well.
But on a lesser level, the proposal by Mitch McConnell to have this trial in the Senate in January creates an issue for Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, because they would like to be out campaigning for the Iowa caucuses instead of having to stay in the Senate to conduct this trial. And, you know, kind of word has it that Nancy Pelosi’s not a huge fan of Joe Biden (chuckling), so I don’t think she’d want to help him out there, either. So that’s, you know, my thoughts on the matter.
RUSH: Well, those things have… (drops) Sorry. I can’t get these buttons straight no matter how hard I try. Thank for the call. The bit about Supreme Court is a major reason. I mean, they’re looking at another Trump four years, and a Supreme Court 7-2 conservative. The idea that Trump should not be able to name a Supreme Court justice while he has been impeached, they may try that. It’s not gonna fly as long as the Republicans keep the Senate.
You know, elections have consequences here, folks. The business about the Democrat candidates being forced to sit there in a trial instead of being able to go out and join the campaign trail and Pelosi not liking Biden? This whole party is unloading on Biden. That’s the Stack that I have here. Look, these Democrats are constantly opposed to Republicans appointing people on the court, and there’s no shortage of that being one of the motivations here. But this really is above that.
The reason Pelosi is not sending these articles over is because it does them no good to have the man acquitted. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, how little time it takes. She thinks that if she doesn’t send the articles over, he can’t be acquitted, because there can’t be a trial because there will not be a case presented. That’s why McConnell can convene the Senate, call the chief justice in, say, “Swear us all in,” and dismiss the charges on the basis that the prosecutors have not presented them.
Dismiss the case.
That’s the end result here that everybody should want from our side.
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RUSH: Now, we just had a guy call. We’ve had a lot of people talk about how the Senate trial would lock Fauxcahontas, Crazy Bernie, Amy Klobuchar, and Cory Booker into the Senate during the campaign, and they would not be able to go out and campaign. “How unfair is that!” That’s the wrong way to look at this. Four senators — Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker — are running for president.
In January if there is a trial, they will be voting on Trump, who is who? He is their likely opponent, if any of them are nominated. So all of this time the Democrats are running around claiming Trump has a conflict of interest bringing up Biden because he’s now a candidate. “He asked the Ukraine president to investigate Biden! Oh, that’s horrible. We can’t have that. That’s interfering and that’s meddling!”
Yet Warren, Bernie, Klobuchar, Booker are gonna get a vote in whether Trump is convicted or not, and nobody’s concerned about whether or not that is a conflict. See, it only works one way. When Trump wants to find out what Biden may have done — which Biden, by the way, has admitted doing — (sputtering), “Why… why… we can’t have that! That… that… that’s dirty politics! We can’t have that.”
But these guys? Oh, they can render an opinion on Trump and vote on his guilt or innocence any time they want because it’s constitutional. But there’s no conflict of interest here? You think these people would be open to ever finding Trump not guilty when they are perhaps his actual opponents in 2020? This such an abject crock.