House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., seemed giddy Wednesday as she announced the impeachment managers who would go to the Senate and attempt to prosecute a case against President Trump.
“He’s been impeached forever,” Pelosi said. “They can never erase that.”
However, Pelosi has it exactly backward. The Senate is going to refuse to convict President Trump. He will be exonerated, and she and the Democrats will be condemned by history.
The wide repudiation of the House Democratic betrayal of the Constitution is already beginning. As a historian myself, I think it’s important to document these reactions.
Consider historian Victor Davis Hanson’s analysis for the National Review, which was subtitled: “The new normal: Impeachment as a routine partisan tool, endless investigations, lying under oath with impunity, surveillance of political enemies, zero accountability.”
This is hardly an endorsement of Pelosi’s trivialization of the Constitution.
Abraham Lincoln scholar and highly respected historian Allen Guelzo asserted in The Wall Street Journal:
[Charles] Pinckney and [Rufus] King might have been right in 1787. Americans prefer to choose their presidents with elections, and whenever impeachment is used in an attempt to nullify those choices, the results aren’t happy for anyone. That was true in 1868, and as both Andrew Johnson and his accusers might warn us, it remains true after a century and a half.”Clearly, Pelosi did not know enough history to understand the warnings of Pinckney and King – or the sad end of the impeachment process against President Johnson. – read more