Trump Digs Up Footage of Biden, Pelosi, Nadler, Schumer Condemning Impeachment
What a difference two decades makes.
President Donald Trump late Wednesday published a new ad attacking some of the loudest voices of today’s impeachment efforts with a montage of some of those same voices speaking out on the topic during the impeachment proceedings against then-President Bill Clinton in 1998 and 1999.
It doesn’t come out well for the left.
With a series of clips from liberal luminaries like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Jerrold Nadler, the ad makes it clear just how much Democrats absolutely loathed the idea of an impeachment based on “partisan grounds.”
That was then, as the saying goes. This is now.
The message of the ad Trump posted on Twitter was simple: “Democrats know impeachment hurts the country. They don’t care.”
Check it out here:
DEMOCRATS WANT TO STEAL THE ELECTION! #KAG2020 pic.twitter.com/hz6fWLId3L
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 2, 2019
It’s like a greatest hits of liberal hypocrisy.
In the run-up to Clinton’s impeachment — which ended when the Senate declined to convict in February 1999 — the entire country had been treated to extensive evidence that the president had lied under oath, suborned perjury and tried to stonewall investigators over his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
There was virtually no doubt about Clinton’s offenses, and the only question was whether they merited his removal from office.
Then-Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut even took to the floor of the Senate in September 1998 to castigate the leader of his own party for “willfully deceiving the nation about his conduct.”
Yet the biggest names in the Democratic Party — then and now — spoke out publicly against impeachment.
On Dec. 10, 1998, at the outset of the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, now the chairman of the Judiciary Committee and one of the leading forces behind the Trump impeachment effort, stated: “We have no right to overturn the considered judgment of the American people.”
On Feb. 12, 1999, as the proceedings concluded, then-Sen. Joe Biden, now the former vice president and a front-runner for the Democratic nomination, used his Senate floor statement to declare it is “antithetical to our constitutional democracy to use impeachment to overturn an election on partisan grounds.”
And as the Trump ad shows, many Democrats who are in the news now were saying the exact opposite things then.
Two decades ago, clear and convincing evidence of presidential was dismissed by Democrats on the grounds that the will of the American people had been decided by a national election, and lawmakers should not interfere.
Today, with a member of the opposing political party in the White House, hazy accusations of borderline misconduct are enough for Democrats to launch an effort to overturn the result of a national election — with the potential of poisoning the result of the next national election only a year away.
As the ad says, Democrats know impeachment hurts the country, they just don’t care.
Millions of Americans remember what Democrats were like back then.
And for the ones who don’t, or who weren’t old enough, this ad should carry that message home.
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