As the long-running Mueller Witch Hunt pulled into the station empty, the one thing that held together the disparate factions of the Democratic Party -- the thought that Mueller would hand them grounds for impeachment -- was lost and a “Gadarene stampede” (in Conrad Black’s fine phrase, descriptive of a pack of crazed swine heading for the abyss) has followed.

To be sure, those who believed Mueller would save them from the Trump revolution didn’t give up entirely. Tom Maguire had some fun at the expense of the diehards:

The Walls Are Closing In On Trump Again!

After a brief respite the media is back to Waiting For The Mueller Report: sources NOT on Mueller's now-disbanded team tell the Times that some of the team think the Barr summary went too easy on Trump. This is impressive 'sources say other sources say' journalism. High school -- the wonder years! As in, I wonder why Times reporters never outgrew that.

Whatever. Mueller ran a tight ship for two years but now his gang is dispersed. Some are back in private practice and no one is worried that Mueller will fire them for chatting a bit. We'll see the report soon enough. Another week or two of staring down their rabbit hole won't hurt the Democrats any.

Victor Davis Hanson sets the historical background:

[A]n investigation that for two years had reconciled the irreconcilable serves no longer as a source of Democratic unity.

We are going to see hard-left Democrats and socialists force their mostly unpopular agenda on politicians and candidates from their own party. And they are now putting their identity-politics money where their mouth is by openly discouraging candidates on the basis of their race and gender.[snip] With the end of the Mueller investigation, thousands of government documents, mostly unredacted, will be released. The result may be that the hunters of Trump soon become hunted by federal prosecutors. Sworn statements of Obama administration officials in the Justice Department, CIA, FBI and other bureaucracies will contradict newly released documents.

To escape punishment, all of these players in the Russian collusion delusion may now begin to turn on one another after being so united in going after Donald Trump.

The media sensationalism and optics will play out in reverse as the "noose tightens" and "the walls close in" on people such as former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former FBI Director James Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

There will also be more infighting over the collective embarrassment of the Russian collusion hoax.

It’s impossible to disagree with Conrad Black’s description of the present wreck of the Democratic party with 18 announced candidates , not counting Joe Biden:

It is uproariously entertaining to see the scurryings of the innumerable host of Democratic presidential candidates in what is already more of a lottery than a quest for the nomination of a great party to the world’s greatest office.

The Gadarene stampede to (and over) the edge of the abyss of all who advocate open borders, 70 percent income taxes, the green terror, socialized medicine, legalized infanticide, reparations to native and African-Americans, packing the Supreme Court, and vacation of the Electoral College, has finally elicited, in a Churchillian expression, a tiny mouse of dissent. [snip] The Democrats temporarily have become a hopeless party. As the Russian collusion fraud vanished, so did any possible argument that there isn’t really a crisis on the southern border. The Trump tax and deregulation reform, which Speaker Pelosi called “the worst disaster in history” (no “constructive Trumpian hyperbole” here), maintains a full employment, noninflationary economy with rising family purchasing power and a growing workforce.

The Democrats haven’t got the message, but those who aren’t punch-drunk out of their senses will decode the political message the night of the election in November 2020. Then, when they have dug out from under the rubble of their fantasies, they can start to rebuild.

To be sure the Congressional Democrats are floating a series of moves with more public relations impact than likely success.

The planned subpoena of an unredacted Mueller report is unlikely to yield results.

A House panel voted yesterday to authorize subpoenas to obtain Robert Mueller’s full report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The vote was strictly along party lines. 

Democrats aren’t going to issue the subpoena yet. First, they will negotiate with the Justice Department.

But Democrats are holding a losing hand. This subpoena, like all the others House Democrats are thinking about issuing, cannot, in all likelihood, be effectively enforced.

The normal enforcement mechanism for a subpoena is to cite for contempt the party that refuses to comply. But it’s up to the Justice Department to prosecute that case. The DOJ isn’t going to prosecute its head. 

There’s precedent for not prosecuting in these circumstances. The Justice Department declined to prosecute when then-Attorney General Eric Holder refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking documents related to the “Fast and Furious” scandal. Indeed, the Justice Department is most unlikely to bring an action for contempt against any part of the Executive branch.

Congress can proceed without the Justice Department by bringing its own action in federal court to compel compliance. But the judicial process doesn’t move quickly enough for this option to bring about the result Democrats desire. 

For example, Holder refused to comply in 2012. It wasn’t until 2016 that a district court ruled in favor of Congress. Holder was out of office by then. The parties proceeded to settle the dispute (though it still hasn’t fully been resolved). Had they not settled, the matter would have dragged on through the appellate process.

One can imagine liberal judges moving faster in the case of the Trump presidency than they did during the Obama administration. Even so, time is not on the Democrats’ side. 

If Trump loses in 2020, the new Attorney General could authorize release of the full, unredacted Mueller report. But with Trump out of office, few will care about the Mueller report. 

If Trump wins and the GOP recaptures the House in 2020 (or 2022 if the matter is still being litigated), the House would almost certainly relent in the dispute over the subpoena.

Moreover, a recent D.C. Court of Appeals decision makes it particularly unlikely that Congress will ever obtain transcripts of the grand jury proceedings in that long-running probe and those will certainly be redacted by the attorney general before the report is given to Congress.

The majority explained that the Supreme Court has long recognized the vital purposes served by grand-jury secrecy, and thus that secrecy must be protected unless there is some clear contrary indication in a statute or rule. Disclosure is the exception, not the rule.

In Rule 6(e), Congress has prescribed grand-jury secrecy and its exceptions. Those who contend that a court may permit disclosure outside the rule argue that judges had such authority before the rule was enacted. The panel majority, however, emphasized the rule’s sweeping language: Officials must refrain from disclosure “unless these rules provide otherwise.” The rule also takes pains to spell out the situations in which a judge may authorize disclosure. Plainly, the intent of the rule was to limit disclosure; were an unwritten judicial power to ignore the limitations recognized, the rule would be pointless. [snip] This means Attorney General Barr must redact grand-jury material from the Mueller report before disclosing it to Congress. Democrats will complain long and loud about this, but I don’t see how Barr can be reasonably faulted for following the law. Congress, after all, has the power to legislate an amendment to Rule 6(e) that would permit disclosure of grand-jury materials from a special counsel investigation to appropriate congressional committees. 

Prepare now for the consequences of the Deep State’s efforts to directly manipulate the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election, a conspiracy well described in this lengthy article detailing how Obama, Hillary, John Brennan and James Clapper, and others schemed to keep the duly elected president from assuming office: 

The article is persuasive and well-documented but too lengthy for me to do a proper summary, so I urge you to read it all. But the author’s description of its contents should pique your interest and encourage you to read it all at a time convenient for you.

• Hillary Clinton’s campaign used the Christopher Steele dossier before their involvement was covered up
• Senior Obama administration officials secretly plotted to involve senators in the “Russia” conspiracy
• James Clapper tried to use the “Russia” narrative to get the Supreme Court to invalidate Trump’s presidency
• Natalia Veselnitskaya was a Fusion GPS set-up agent who worked out of an Obama official’s office in D.C.
• Peter Strzok ran point on destroying General Flynn and covering up for Hillary Clinton
• Barack Obama used foreign powers to keep the scheme going, even after he left the Oval Office to President Trump

The plotters were too sure of their success to completely cover their tracks and frankly too bumbling to succeed. And the equally incompetent and unlikeable Hillary Clinton failed to make it over the finish line to cover up for them after the fact. In the meantime, the party that relied on these clowns is now heading for the abyss.