For two years, I have been decrying how the US Republican Party Congressional lawmakers have been acting like cowardly, spineless politicians who have been terrified to hold their standard bearer President Donald J. Trump accountable for numerous wrongdoings, no matter how flagrant. They have been derelict in honoring their oaths of office, to protect the US Constitution and the peoples of this country because they are fearful of losing their jobs. They have given in to political expediency.

Now, the Democratic leadership in the US Congress are acting likewise. They are resisting tooth and nail the faction of its party who are calling for them to do their constitutionally mandated duty to start the impeachment process against President Trump based on the FBI’s findings that he committed felonious acts as detailed in its 3/22/2019 final report on its 22 months long Trump-Russia probe led by the Special Counsel Robert Mueller III. The benefit of formally invoking the -I- word, is that this act blessed by the US Constitution, grants the US House with much greater power than normal to demand the presence of key witnesses at oversight hearings as well as crucial documentation.

The US House leadership members have resorted to every excuse possible to avoid holding the president accountable via impeachment for his multiple abuses of power and his continuously obstructing of justice with the false argument that the republican led US Senate will never vote in favor of ousting him after he’s been impeached in the House, which is no different than what’s happening now, as the US House Dems pass numerous laws which go to die in the US Senate.

Then they argue that the president will play the ‘victim’ card’ which he will do whether the impeachment process has commenced or not.

The House Democratic leadership keep comparing current circumstances with the consequences of what happened  when  the House impeached the democratic President Bill Clinton. There are almost no similarities between the two cases. President Clinton was popular before and after he was impeached because the American peoples were not impressed by the ‘high crimes and misdemeanor’s charges over a married man lying under oath about a consenting workplace affair. They were smart enough to get that they may as well impeach half the members of Congress on similar charges.

What President Trump has been accused of by the FBI’s Mueller 3/22/2019 report are serious crimes which are not to be compared with whatever happened to President Clinton. There are over 700 prosecutors who have publicly gone on the record to state, that President Trump would have been indicted were he not our US president who’s protected from this consequence, as per a legal memo by the OLC Office of Legal Counsel within the DOJ the US Department of Justice. The only government body which can hold the president criminally liable is the US House of Representatives which has been granted the sole power by the US Constitution to initiate the impeachment proceedings.

This may very well be a tough political call, but that should not hinder the Democrats in the US House to do what the voters elected them to do, to be a true check on this lawless president.

To garner the public’s support, all the Democrats in the US House Oversight Committees have to do is to conduct hearings about how vulnerable US voting systems are to external manipulations by foreign adversarial countries like Russia. After all, the FBI has publicly indicated that at least 2 Florida counties had their voting systems hacked by Russia.

Recent Sen. Kamala Harris tweet:

Here is the rest of the story…

On May 15, 2019, Walter Dillinger, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel from 1993 to 1996, penned the following analysis for the Washington Post, “Democrats’ obsession with redaction is obscuring the obvious: Trump committed high crimes”

Excerpts:

“I have become increasingly concerned about how the country has received the Mueller report. The Republican talking point is that it exonerated the president. The message from the Democratic House, meanwhile, is that the report is inconclusive. Those responses, one mendacious, one tepid and both erroneous, have shaped public understanding. They have not only allowed the president falsely to claim vindication but also left the public without a clear understanding of just how damning the report is.”

“Most Americans, understandably not having read the 448-page (redacted) report, may be influenced by how the principal parties have responded. If the report were, as the Republicans insist, an exoneration, one might demand to know how this unwarranted investigation got started in the first place, which is exactly how the GOP has proceeded to turn the conversation.”

“And if you thought the report was merely inconclusive, your natural reaction would be that you need to know more. You would say something like what many House Democrats are repeating endlessly: “We need to see the redactions” and “hear from witnesses” — suggesting that there is as of yet no sufficient basis for judging President Trump’s conduct.”

“The more I review the report, the more absurd and misleading the we-need-to-know-more response seems to be. And the more it seems to have contributed to public misunderstanding. How different would it have been if a unified chorus of Democratic leaders in Congress and on the campaign trail had promptly proclaimed the actual truth: This report makes the unquestionable case that the president regularly and audaciously violated his oath and committed the most serious high crimes and misdemeanors.”

“Mueller’s extraordinary 2,800-subpoena, 500-search-warrant, two-year investigation fully established not merely crimes but also the betrayal of the president’s office: a failure to defend the country’s electoral system from foreign attack and acts of interference with justice that shred the rule of law. Congress doesn’t need to read more to announce what is obvious from what it should have read already.”

I do not doubt that Congress’s investigatory oversight function is important, legitimate and firmly grounded historically. The president’s response that “we will fight all subpoenas” is unprecedented and ominous. Getting special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and former White House counsel Donald McGahn to testify is a valid and important objective. And although it appears to me that most of the redactions were justified in the first instance, Congress is entitled to see most or all of them — particularly those in Volume One that would offer the most complete possible understanding of Russia’s influence and hacking operations. As the House resolution recommending contempt against Attorney General William P. Barr explains, without this detailed information Congress “is unable to fully perform its responsibility to protect the impending 2020 elections — and thus our democracy itself — from a recurrence of Russian interference.”

“My concern is that the House’s focus on process — such as requesting redacted material — constitutes a strong, implicit suggestion that what we have seen from Mueller is not enough to assess the president. That is just false. The report lays out in detail specific acts of obstruction by the president, as well as the extensive evidence that backs up those claims. More than 900 former federal prosecutors (including Republicans and Democrats) have publicly declared that, if anyone else had committed those same acts, they would be under indictment.”

“What will we say in the event the remaining 7 percent of text adds little or nothing to the overwhelming case of presidential wrongdoing already made out by the report? By not having begun impeachment proceedings or taken other strong action, Democrats may have conceded the debate over the Mueller report’s conclusion. Democrats are fighting on process grounds where the White House has some plausible arguments and where winning may add little or nothing to what we already know.”

“The burden, the House should assert, is now clearly on the president to show (if he can) where the report is inaccurate and why it is not the basis for severe condemnation and sanction of the president.”

“I’m not one to second-guess Nancy Pelosi. She is the greatest majority leader of the House of Representatives in my lifetime. I could be convinced that an impeachment inquiry has its own time for ripening. Or that in the end some form of censure is the better disposition in light of intransigent Republican control of the Senate.”

“All I am saying is that every day we should have been shouting from the rooftops: “The president is failing to defend democracy from attack”; “The president’s campaign welcomed and encouraged Russia’s efforts to change our election results”; “The president obstructed justice”; and “The president daily undermined the rule of law.”

Link to entire article: Democrats’ obsession with redaction is obscuring the obvious: Trump committed high crimes…