On Wednesday, House Democrats voted to impeach President Trump for “abuse of power” and “obstruction of Congress” and them immediately began signaling that they might refuse to send the supposedly “urgent” articles of impeachment to the Republican-majority Senate unless Majority Leader Mitch McConnell agrees to the Democrats’ impeachment trial terms. On his radio program Thursday, Rush Limbaugh responded to the Democrats’ long-anticipated impeachment vote by summing up what he says this is really about — and it begins not with the famous July 25 phone call but a seismic event that took place three years ago.
Limbaugh began the segment by stating he was going to try to “make the complex understandable” by answering what should be a straightforward question: “Trump is being impeached for what?”
The answer, he explained, is not the answer that Democrats gave during the impeachment debate yesterday, Trump’s alleged “pressuring” of Ukraine to investigate his political rival. “It isn’t about the Ukraine phone call,” said Rush. “It’s not about interfering in the election in 2020 and all of that.”
The real reason the Democrats just went through weeks of interviews and hearings and held their big vote yesterday is actually about what happened three years ago.
“They can’t let go of what they thought 2016 was gonna produce,” said Limbaugh. “They are still locked in on that. They’re still focusing on it, still hoping that the allegation that Trump’s 2016 election was illegitimate.”
So what are the Democrats accusing him of? His so-called “impeachable” offense comes down to simply “asking questions” about his opponents’ attempts to take him out.
“All Trump has done is ask questions,” said Limbaugh. “One of the questions was of the president of Ukraine. Trump is asking questions. He’s got investigations going, trying to find out what happened to him. Who did this to him? Who did this to his voters? Who’s in the process of trying to disenfranchise his voters. He’s simply asking questions. He’s being impeached for trying to get answers.”
As for the questions he wants answered, those involve something the Democrats desperately want to protect: the administrative state.
“The United States government — and by that I mean the administrative state — has literally lied to the people of this country for three years and counting now about Russia collusion,” said Limbaugh. “They’ve been trying to put Donald Trump in jail, not just reverse the election results. They have been trying to get Donald Trump in jail.”
But that effort eventually collided with reality in the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which, two years and $32 million later, was forced to inform the American people that the claim that the Trump campaign “colluded” with Russia was ultimately groundless.
The Democrats’ problem, said Rush, is that Trump “has been completely exonerated and vindicated by their own investigative body, the Mueller report.”
And with Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s FISA abuse report, we have now learned that the whole “collusion” investigation pivoted on a Democrat-funded opposition research project, the Steele dossier.
“So Trump is pursued, he’s lied about, he’s libeled, he’s slandered for three years. Then he is completely exonerated and vindicated, so what does he do? He starts asking questions about what the hell happened? He starts asking questions. He wants answers about how in the hell this happened. And he’s talking to the president of Ukraine, and he’s asking him to help come up with some of these answers,” the host said.
And to make matters even more outrageous, Limbaugh suggested, “the same people that set Donald Trump up, the same people that lied about him and tried to put him in jail are now impeaching him for defending himself.”
“They’re the ones who behaved illegally. They are the ones who threatened the Constitution. They are the ones who have stood everything decent upside down,” he stressed.
“He’s being impeached for defending himself, pure and simple,” Limbaugh said in summary. “Because in today’s Democrat world you are not permitted to defend yourself. You take the allegation and you deal with it.”
Limbaugh then turned to McConnell’s fiery speech on the Senate floor Thursday in which he gave his own summary of what has just taken place in the House under Pelosi’s leadership:
MCCONNELL: Speaker Pelosi’s House just gave in to a temptation that every other House in our history has managed to resist. They impeach a president whom they do not even allege has committed an actual crime known to our laws. They’ve impeached simply because they disagree with a presidential act and question the motive behind it. There were powerful reasons, Mr. President, why Congress after Congress for 230 years — 230 years — required presidential impeachment to revolve around clear, recognizable crimes, even though that was not a strict limitation. Powerful reasons why for 230 years no House, no House opened the Pandora’s box of subjective political impeachments. That 230-year tradition died last night…
President Trump is not the first president with a populist streak, not the first to make entrenched elites uncomfortable. He’s certainly not the first president to speak bluntly, to mistrust the administrative state, or to rankle unelected bureaucrats. None of these things — none of them — is unprecedented. I’ll tell you what would be unprecedented. It will be an unprecedented constitutional crisis if the Senate literally hands the House of Representatives a new partisan vote of no confidence. It will be unprecedented if we agree that any future House that dislikes any future president can rush through an unfair inquiry, skip the legal system, and paralyze the Senate with a trial. It will be unprecedented if the Senate says secondhand and thirdhand testimony from unelected civil servants is enough to overturn the people’s vote.