Dakota Beacon

As Congress moves toward a vote on impeachment of President Trump it is vital for us to consider just what the actions of Congress mean to the rest of us.

We may or may not be great fans of Mr. Trump as President.  Some of us, and I include myself, feel that he has largely failed in the desperate need to cut federal spending.  In other ways we might feel that he has misstepped in what we can generously term “faux pas”, such as congratulating Xi Jinping on 70 years of Comminist tyranny and oppression in China.  Not everything is negative - many will appreciate (as do I) a greater respect for the human rights and political rights of Jews and of a stand for free speech, at least in our own nation.  While immigration has not been adequately addressed and there is no wall, none of these shortcomings is grounds for impeachment.

Congress is relying on a raft of non-criminal, non-impeachable acts/omissions plus a ton of highly suspect hearsay “evidence” which has been debunked.  First we had over a year’s worth of the Mueller investigation - which produced absolutely nothing. Perhaps our investigative dollars could have been better spent.  We do have important issues we should be looking into, from the shady practices of major pharmaceutical companies to Chinese involvement and espionage in our industry and national security interests as well as their theft of intellectual property.  We could look into the problems of homelessness and the drug cartels and into illegal immigration and how best to curb that. But instead, we threw everything we had at attempting to isolate something - anything - in Trump’s conduct either before or since his election which a Democrat-controlled Congress, bitter in its humiliating loss, could possibly hang an impeachment process on, as its only way to nullify Trump’s election.  

In the case of this Congressional “process”, at least, to the objective person everything they have dredged up with respect to their star charge, “Ukranian tampering with our elections” has not even remotely been proven.  In fact, the more closely this is examined - again, by the objective person - the more incriminating it appears of former Vice President Joe Biden and the Obama Administration.

Congressman Jerrold Nadler, in fact, has already intimated that our right to elect our own leadership is outmoded and that we cannot be relied upon to elect the person he would approve.  Should we stand down, then, and had our process over to Nadler?  Should we accept that we are not competent, as he suggests we are not, to govern ourselves?

Those who dislike Trump - and that’s everyone’s right - need to tread very carefully however, when using spurious, fake “evidence” in trying to “nail” him, or in abbreviating our due process by attempting to establish the President as a class of person who has no Constitutional right to what the rest of us demand.  If we allow this to go forward without rebuke of Congress (and the polls next year are a good place to register that rebuke) we risk something even greater - that once we establish that anyone can be exempted from our Constitutional rights and our equal protection of law and our due process, we can all be so deprived.  Think about that for a moment.

One place this might have grave consequences is in the “red-flag” laws, popular of late, whereby a citizen can be fingered by a former girlfriend or boyfriend, a jealous neighbor, an ex-spouse, a business competitor or anyone with a grudge either against the individual or any group of which he might be a member (such as ex-military).  Then the citizen simply loses his Second Amendment rights. This can become a very toxic climate in America. We could see the same thing happen in other areas as well. If we discontinue our right to due process and an expectation that evidence used in convictions or other legal processes must be valid and that we all have the right to call our own witnesses in our defence and cross-examine our adversaries’ we will very soon see the end of all of our freedoms.  How are we to defend ourselves if we don’t have the ability to assert right superior to those the President appears to have in this case? If hearsay is now admissible, if wild accusations may be made and we may not defend ourselves agains them, it is a foregone conclusion that we shall have lost our freedom.

We cannot defend just “me”.   We must defend everyone - the homeless man, the President, the accused murderer, the corporate thief.  Each of us and all of us have the expectation in America of a fair application of law and of full due process.  We cannot abridge that right just because the defendant is the President any more than we can do away with it because he is homeless and doesn’t count.  We are pretty careful not to abuse the rights of street people or, say, a union member. We must be equally careful with all. Freedom is never secured for the rest of us by denying it to some - or to one.

Comments:  (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)