I ’m old enough to remember when House Democrats impeached and Senate Democrats voted unanimously (though unsuccessfully) to convict and remove a president for withholding congressionally approved, taxpayer-funded aid from an allied country — one that desperately needed the aid while fighting a defensive war against a barbaric enemy — in order to pressure that desperate ally to help the president get reelected.
You’re old enough, too — this happened less than five years ago.
And the Democrats who impeached and sought to convict and remove then-president Donald Trump are pretty much the same Democrats now holding House and Senate seats.
Joe Biden was then Trump’s likely opponent in the November 2020 election. Now, as our editorial details, Biden is the American president who is withholding congressionally approved, taxpayer-funded aid from our ally, Israel, which desperately needs it while fighting a defensive war against Hamas — a barbaric enemy that killed, raped, and maimed Israelis on October 7 in its unceasing war of aggression.
Yes, that would be the same Hamas that has been formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization by our government for nearly 30 years (it was one of the first ever so designated, even before al-Qaeda).
More to the point, it is the same Hamas that is currently holding five American hostages — Keith Siegel, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Edan Alexander, Omer Neutra, and Sagui Dekel-Chen — abducted during its atrocities of seven months ago.
Theirs are names every American should know. Indeed, Biden’s hostage crisis should be neck-and-neck with Biden’s border crisis as the top news story in America. And it would be if the media–Democrat complex were not doing what Biden is desperate for it to do: Tamp down on news of his fecklessness, faithlessness, and incompetence for the sake of preventing a Trump victory in November.
Instead of showing single-minded determination to rescue Americans from our jihadist enemy, and to support our besieged ally in defeating that enemy, Biden is now denying Israel the munitions it needs to crush Hamas in its last Gaza stronghold in Rafah.
These include 2,000-pound bombs, which Biden’s administration claims are “too destructive” — despite the facts that they are vital to dismantling Hamas’s underground tunnel network, and that cutting-edge technology enables them to be guided in a manner even more precise than when our own armed forces used them in post-9/11 combat operations against jihadists. And as a new Wall Street Journal editorial summarizes, the denied munitions also include 500-pound bombs, Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) that convert unguided bombs into smart bombs, small-diameter bombs, and even tank shells and mortar rounds.
In the conflict between civilization and barbarism, Biden is thwarting Israel and coddling Hamas — even as the jihadists continue abusing hostages, including Americans. Under the guise of protecting Palestinian civilians, Biden is prolonging the conflict, intensifying civilian suffering, and rewarding Hamas’s war-crime tactic of using a civilian population and civilian hostages as a shield.
And he is exploiting his executive power to withhold essential, congressionally approved aid to an ally in a defensive war against American enemies for one reason and one reason alone: to bolster his personal political prospects.
Aid to Israel is unpopular among progressive Democrats of an Islamist bent in such key battleground states as Michigan. Without those voters, Biden’s reelection would be in grave doubt. That is, Biden is materially supporting Hamas, not in America’s national interests, not for grand geostrategic reasons, but to appease the Democrats’ radical Marxist–Islamist fringe. The embarrassing, lawless “activism” of that fringe, which increasingly targets Biden “failure” to openly abandon Israel (even as he quietly strangles Israel), could cost him the 2024 election.
In impeaching Trump in 2019, strictly on a party-line vote, House Democrats alleged that he had ordered suspended “the release of $391 million of United States taxpayer funds that Congress had appropriated on a bipartisan basis for the purpose of providing vital military and security assistance to Ukraine to oppose Russian aggression.” Democrats further alleged that Trump had corruptly done this to pressure the government of Ukraine to take actions — including the investigation of Biden (who was, in fact, implicated in corruption in Ukraine) — that would influence the 2020 presidential election to Trump’s benefit.
Moreover, House Democrats accused Trump of finally, grudgingly allowing the temporarily withheld aid to be transmitted to Ukraine only after he was “faced with the public revelation of his actions.” That will be worth bearing in mind as Biden and administration officials, such as Defense secretary Lloyd Austin, scramble to explain why they are straitjacketing Israel for the benefit of Hamas — after all Biden’s soaring (at least for Biden) rhetoric, months back, about standing with Israel in its imperative objective of obliterating Hamas as a fighting force.
To be clear, I am not urging that House Republicans impeach Biden. The president deserves to be impeached over his inexcusable dereliction of duty in refusing to secure the border and faithfully execute the immigration laws. I believe the House should have impeached him over that — instead of pointlessly impeaching Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the factotum who is carrying out Biden’s non-enforcement policy — because an impeachment investigation followed by a Senate trial of the president would have riveted the nation’s attention to the crisis. No, Biden would never have been convicted and removed, but the political fallout might have forced Biden to change a policy that is doing incalculable damage to the nation.
On the other hand, the president’s sabotage of Israel is of a piece with a number of abuses of power, particularly Biden’s unconstitutional executive edicts and punitive exploitation of the administrative state against political enemies and other burrs in the progressive saddle. Impeachment should be a last resort, a nuclear option for misconduct so grave the consensus to condemn it cuts across partisan and ideological divides. Wisely, the Framers believed impeachment-and-removal was an indispensable component of our constitutional structure but feared that it could be abused by self-interested factions. Hence, they made it extraordinarily hard to accomplish. Biden will get the verdict of American voters soon enough. That is how it’s supposed to be.
My purpose is to make two points.
First, the voters’ verdict should account for Biden’s selling out Israel while it is imperiled, and aligning with Hamas jihadists while they hold American hostages and plot to celebrate their survival by yet again raping and marauding their way from the River to the Sea.
Second, the Ukraine impeachment of Trump was sheer partisan hackery in which Democrats struggled, unsuccessfully, to formulate a crime they could say Trump committed (they settled on “abuse of power,” which can be impeachable but is not criminal). Don’t expect Biden to be subjected to the sort of high dudgeon Democrats aimed at Trump’s abandonment of our brave allies in their war of survival against an enemy’s rapacious aggression. Voters ought to remember that, too, come November.