Calling Donald Trump’s impeachment trial a “sham,” Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) tacitly and rightly impeached the character of its Democrat authors in a rousing Tuesday Senate floor speech.
Aside from illustrating the hypocrisy of charging the ex-president with inciting an insurrection, when Trump’s rhetoric had been tame compared to that of a multitude of rabble rousing Democrats, Paul had also filed a point of order objecting to the trial on the basis that it’s unconstitutional. While he lost on that 55 to 45, with five GOP senators voting with the Democrats, his words were not lost on those with ears to hear.
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Paul made important points about the trial’s apparent unconstitutionality: that impeachment is meant for public officials, not private citizens; that using it against the latter is akin to a bill of attainder, prohibited under the Constitution, and that the Supreme Court’s chief justice will not preside, as the Constitution mandates. But then there was the moral dress-down.
Paul’s first salvo was to call the impeachment “nothing more than a partisan exercise designed to further divide the country.” In this, do note, it shares its character with the Democrats’ recent calls to blacklist and destroy Trump associates and even his supporters.
The senator is counted among the latter, too, and he defended Trump against the charges of inciting the Capitol riot. “‘I know everyone here will soon march to the Capitol to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard,’” said Paul, quoting Trump’s January 6 speech, given shortly before the violence erupted.
“Hardly words of violence,” the senator stated, before asking rhetorically, “But what of Democrat words? What of Democrat incitement to violence?”
“No Democrat will honestly ask whether Bernie Sanders incited the shooter that nearly killed Steve Scalise and a volunteer coach,” he continued, alluding to the 2017 congressional baseball shooting perpetrated by leftist James Hodgkinson.
“The shooter nearly pulled off a massacre, [and] I was there, because he fervently believed the false and inflammatory rhetoric spewed by Bernie and other Democrats — such as ‘The Republican healthcare plan for the uninsured is that you die,’” Paul passionately elaborated (video below). “As this avowed Bernie supporter shot Steve Scalise … he screamed, ‘This is for healthcare!'”
Continuing with his examples, Paul then said that no “Democrat will ask whether Cory Booker incited violence when he called for his supporters to ‘get up in their face’ of Congress people, a very visual and specific incitement. No Democrat will ask whether Maxine Waters incited violence when she literally told her supporters, and I quote, ‘that if you see a member of the Trump administration at a restaurant, at a department store, at a gas station or any place, you create a crowd and you push back on them’ . Is that not incitement?’”
Paul, who suffered fractured ribs in an attack by a neighbor in 2018, went on to describe an even more harrowing incident. “My wife and I were pushed and surrounded and screamed at by the same kind of mob that Maxine likes to inspire,” he explained. “It’s terrifying to have a swarm of people threatening to kill you, cursing you and literally holding you hostage until police come to your rescue. That night we were assaulted by the crowd; I wasn’t sure we would survive even with the police protection.”
The senator then said that despite this, no Democrats considered impeaching Waters. Republicans didn’t take action, either, stated Paul, not anymore than they sought to hold leftist politicians accountable for inciting last year’s 570-plus BLM and Antifa riots.
Paul mentioned other examples as well, from Kamala Harris infamously offering to “pay the bill” for the arrested rioters to Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan’s “calling the armed takeover of part of her city a ‘summer of love.’” There’ve been no GOP impeachment attempts against either.
The senator also asked the Democrats, “Who hasn’t used the word ‘fight’ figuratively, and are we going to put every politician in jail?” Paul’s points are all valid, too — and such hypocrisy should be highlighted. But another point should also be made:
The Democrats just don’t care.
Rules, propriety, fairness, laws, and Truth itself only matter to people with honor and integrity. The same is true of consistency. I forget who it was, but I think here of the person who related a story about how, during a moment of honesty, a leftist admitted to him (I’m paraphrasing), “You don’t understand. You care about consistency — we don’t.”
Also coming to mind is atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who readily admitted that he was contradicting himself. But he also said it didn’t matter.
We additionally should consider that in certain cases, the leftist double standards aren’t just the result of convenience and political expediency, but also malicious intent. Remember that an inordinate number of politicians are megalomaniacs, power mongers, and as I explained in November while addressing COVID-19 double standards, one way to enhance your sense of power is by flouting rules everyone else must follow.
It can make you feel special, above it all, like an elite, master of all you survey. Rules are “for the little people,” as the supercilious suppose, so you can feel like a big person if you’re beyond rules, beyond limits, beyond constraints. In fact, if you’re beyond morality, you can feel like a god.
Related to this, forcing your opponents to submit to injustice serves to humiliate them, and this is a way to remind them who’s boss. And when you can impose your will on a whim, it only intensifies those euphoric feelings of deific status.
Then, of course, there’s always just old-fashioned hatred. The bottom line, however, is that conservatives must stop projecting their mindsets onto leftists and assuming that, even in a small measure, the Democrats will play by their rules.
The Left has only one principle, the power principle, under which any tactic that brings power is acceptable. Thus will the power mongers not respond to talk, reason, responsibility, or rights, but only to power itself — applied against them.
