House Democrats have been eager to vote to impeach President Trump  since January 3, 2019 when  they became the majority in the 116th Congress.  On that day, House Resolution 13 was submitted by Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) for himself and Rep. Al Green (D-Texas).  This resolution called for the "impeachment and trial, and removal from office" of President Trump.  It is to be expected that the impeachment vote will be adopted, roughly by the 232-196 vote that authorized a one-sided, invidious "impeachment inquiry."  The impeachment resolution will probably be brought to the Senate by early 2020, if not sooner.  The Senate, however, can be expected to give short shrift to the biased impeachment resolution drafted by the Democrats.

Bear in mind that 50 Republican senators sponsored a resolution that, in a remarkable final preambular paragraph singling out the chairman of the Intelligence Committee by name, declared: "Whereas, rather than giving President Trump the same due process rights that President Clinton had to raise and litigate claims of constitutional privilege, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff has repeatedly threatened to use President Trump's assertion of his constitutional rights as evidence of obstruction and to impeach President Trump for trying to litigate those claims..."  Chairman Schiff ignored this GOP plea for fairness, asserting, November 4, that the refusal of four White House officials to honor Intelligence Committee subpoenas for testimony was, as reported by CNBC, "'further evidence of an effort by the administration to obstruct the lawful and constitutional duties of Congress."  That is to say, House Democrats rebuffed the fairness plea from Senate Republicans and continue to insist on twisting constitutional rights into evidence deserving impeachment. 

Confronted by such intransigence, Senate Republicans are likely to act quickly against a Democratic impeachment resolution.  The usually mild-mannered U.S. senator Rand Paul, for example, took the stage, November 4, at a Lexington, Kentucky Trump rally for GOP governor Matt Bevin, to refer, in Trump-like manner, to "Shifty Schiff" and to advise congressional Republicans to walk away and treat impeachment as "a farce" if Hunter Biden didn't testify and the "whistleblower" didn't come forward.  The Senate's Republicans should be expected to dismiss "as farce" any impeachment resolution that maliciously converts constitutional rights into impeachment evidence.

For House Democrats, however, the impeachment resolution, likely, will be sufficient to their political purpose.  We can expect that Ms. Pelosi, the imperious House speaker, and Mr. Schiff, the cunning Intelligence Committee chairman, intend to weaponize impeachment.  Accordingly, they will lead a Democratic campaign to impress upon the voters the false accusations that the president pressured a foreign leader for political gain, had consistently obstructed justice and congressional oversight, and had acted contrary to U.S. foreign policy, thus harming national security.  The many megaphones in the media for the Democrats will blast out the anti-Trump — and now anti-Republican — accusations on a daily basis, throughout the 2020 campaign.

The Democratic logic, certainly, will be "'the logic of the big lie."  Harvard law professor Laurence H. Tribe gave that comment to The New York Times, directing it at the Republicans.  It is, however, rather more fitting as a Republican argument explaining Democratic conduct.  (It is, after all, the Democrats who have been practicing "big lie" arguments against President Trump since the 2016 Democratic National Convention.)  The Tribe quote, published in The New York Times, November 5, continued, "[I]f you repeat something often enough loudly enough to people who are not being critical in their analysis of what they're hearing, you may just get away with it."  After the House votes for impeachment, and the Senate dismisses the invidious Democratic action out of hand, Prof. Tribe, likely, will be among those railing against the Senate GOP majority for creating a constitutional crisis in rejecting the impeachment resolution. Senate Republicans will be accused of effectively approving the reckless conduct of a president who places himself above the law, causing grievous injury to the Constitution, and putting in peril America's democratic norms.  Democrats will be relentless in their anti-Trump hyperbole, and their media megaphones will blast the anti-Trump message continuously.

Michelle Goldberg, a New York Times columnist and, therefore, a reliable "big lie" practitioner, wrote in her November 5 anti-Trump column, "The main reason Trump should be removed from office is that he has subverted American foreign policy for personal ends."  For the anti-Trump impeachment-mongers who reject his legitimacy, Mr. Trump must be a presidential cipher, and, among other things, follow the foreign policy of his political enemies.  But those who reject the legitimacy of the Trump presidency also reject the voters who elected him president in 2016.  If President Trump's enemies should prevail, it is they would undermine the Constitution, leaving it, in the words of Chief Justice John Marshall, "a magnificent structure, indeed, to look at, but totally unfit for use."  These words come at the end of Marshall's opinion in the 1824 case of Gibbons v. Ogden.  He concluded the opinion with these words: "In such a case, it is peculiarly necessary to recur to safe and fundamental principles to sustain these principles, and when sustained, to make them the tests of the arguments to be examined."

Pelosi and Schiff will fail in their bid to terminate the Trump presidency before November 3, 2020.  Whether they succeed in terminating the Trump president as of noon, January 20, 2021, depends on the political acumen of President Trump and the Republican Party — and the good sense of the voters.

(Re: Prof. Tribe's "big lie remark," isn't it interesting how anti-Trumpers describe their own conduct in their strained attempt to impute such conduct to their opponents?)

Image: Lorie Shaull via Flickr.