Kevin Williamson of National Review Online probes congressional Democrats’ move toward impeachment of President Trump.
I suppose it is no secret that I never thought Donald Trump should have been elected president of these United States in the first place. He’s dim, dishonest, and doddering, both intellectually and morally unfit for the office.
But: He was elected.
And, contrary to the endless litany of Democratic complaints, he was legitimately elected. You may not like the way we elect presidents through the Electoral College — I do; if anything, I think the Founders erred on the side of making the presidency excessively democratic in character, with the disastrous results we see before us today — but the Electoral College was not invented in 2016. …
… There are a few different ways to react to that. The thing that a normal political party in a normal country with a functioning political culture would do would be to crawl under the porch for a couple of days to recuperate, admit that your candidate was terrible and ran a terrible race with terrible advisers, and start looking around for somebody to do better next time. You might even — if you were smart and in possession of a reasonable degree of intellectual honesty — ask yourselves what it was about that other guy that some voters liked so much. …
… Or you could insist that the 2016 election was illegitimate, not because of any real procedural questions but because of its outcome. And that, more or less, is what Democrats did. It is worth keeping in mind that the effort to impeach Donald Trump began before he was even sworn in, with Senator Elizabeth Warren et al. beginning to lay the legal groundwork in December of 2016.
