If articles of impeachment are introduced against President Donald Trump in the House of Representatives, you can bet it’ll end up being a complex document. After all, it would have to encompass everything the Democrats are trying to pin on Trump — and, given the number of witch hunts the Democrats have engaged in regarding the current president, this won’t be a short airing of grievances.
If brevity works in your favor in these matters, perhaps GOP Rep. Ralph Abraham of Louisiana will manage to win some votes with his attempt to get a political luminary removed from the position they hold in the Washington firmament.
His resolution consists of one sentence: “Resolved, That pursuant to Article 1, Section 5, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution, Representative Nancy Pelosi be, and she hereby is, expelled from the House of Representatives and the Office of the Speaker is declared to be vacant.”
That section of the Constitution states that “[e]ach House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member.”
According to Fox News, Abraham’s attempt to get Pelosi removed, introduced on Tuesday, unsurprisingly has no chance of passing the House.
The network reported it was “told that the resolution has been closely held, and hasn’t secured many Republican cosponsors — but that Abraham’s office expects it to gain traction.”
Good luck there. However, the network also reported the important juxtaposition the resolution creates: “Likewise, Republicans have argued that Democrats’ potential articles of impeachment are all but certain to stall if they ever reach the Senate.”
Well, duh. And as for Abraham’s reasons for wanting Pelosi removed as a member of the House, they had to do with the nature of the impeachment inquiry.
“Nancy Pelosi’s vicious crusade against our lawfully-elected President is nothing more than a politically-motivated witch hunt and it must be stopped,” a statement from Abraham read.
“She has disgraced the people’s House and weaponized the Speaker’s gavel for her party’s political gain.”
“House Democrats spent nearly three years obsessed with election meddling only to dwarf any such efforts with their own deceitful plan to nullify the 2016 election and prevent President Trump from winning in 2020,” he continued.
“I have introduced a resolution calling for her to be expelled from the House and for the Speaker’s Office to be vacated.”
Abraham, it’s worth noting, is running for governor of Louisiana in a jungle primary against Republican businessman Eddie Rispone and incumbent Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards.
If Edwards manages to win 50 percent of the vote — a distinct possibility, since according to The Hill polls already have him at 45 percent — he’ll avoid a runoff with the top Republican.
Stephanie Grace, writing for NOLA.com, had an interesting take on the timing of Rep. Abraham’s resolution in which she makes his argument for him in the most unintentionally hilarious of ways.
First, she calls the whole thing a “stunt” designed to increase Abraham’s electoral chances. I suppose the irony of that could slip by Grace and her editors, but I’d like to hear them explain how they missed this howler:
“The urgently pressing matter that turned his attention back to Washington hasn’t anything to do with his north Louisiana district, or with major matters of state. It’s that the Democrats won a majority in the House last year and elected a speaker named Nancy Pelosi,” Grace wrote.
“That’s the system, one that would have worked out quite well for Abraham’s Louisiana colleague Steve Scalise had the 2018 vote gone the other way. Democrats would have had no say over Scalise’s ascent to majority leader or even speaker, just as Republicans don’t get to pick Democratic leaders. Nor do they get to remove them for hyped-up alleged infractions.”
Wait, so you’re not supposed to remove duly elected leaders from their positions because of “hyped-up alleged infractions” if you don’t like the way those elections went?
Not even if the attempt to remove them is a political stunt that has zero chance of succeeding but could potentially improve your electoral chances? It’s almost as if this were ghostwritten by Abraham to prove the point he was setting out to make.
Removing Pelosi has zero chance of succeeding, but so does impeaching and removing the president of the United States. And, unlike the impeachment inquiry — and the subsequent trial in the Senate if the Democrat-led House succeeds in holding a successful impeachment vote — at least we won’t spend an obscene amount of time on this resolution.
In just one sentence, Rep. Abraham has managed to expose a whole lot of hypocrisy on the Democrat side. He’s also managed to refocus some of the debate on Speaker Pelosi’s multitudinous witch-hunts.
If this is indeed just an electoral stunt designed to increase his chances at the governor’s mansion, one has to hand it to the distinguished gentleman from Louisiana: He did pretty darn good.
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