By Daniel Greenfield
“We are not in favor of giving a vote to the negro, because we believe that he is not fit to enjoy that right,” Senator Thurman once said.
These days, even while Democrats topple the statues of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, two men that Thurman hated, the old dead racist has become the basis for th e unconstitutional Democrat campaign to impeach President Trump after leaving office.
Thurman, who was picked by the Democrats as their nominee for Vice President, had played a major role in the sole case of the Senate deciding to impeach a public official after leaving office. The Democrat case for impeaching President Trump rests on that one case.
And on Thurman.
Legal partisans have spent weeks debating whether President Trump can be impeached after leaving office. Every single one of these analyses is heavy on rhetoric and light on precedent.
There’s a very good reason for that.
Impeachment exists to remove officials who are in office. The brilliant legal scholars who argue otherwise might want to put down their law books and check a dictionary. Impeachment shares its origin with the more commonplace word, ‘impede’. The whole point of impeachment is to impede public officials from holding office by using legislators as investigators and courts.
The post-office impeachment arguments remind me of the movie, Gus, where a mule is allowed to play professional football because the referee can’t find anything in the rulebook that says the players can’t be mules. Every argument for impeaching President Trump comes down to the same position that mules can play football because the Constitution never says they can’t.
“It makes no sense whatsoever that the president or any official could commit heinous crimes against our country and then defeat our impeachment powers and avoid the vote on disqualification by simply resigning,” Senator Schumer argued.
Like saying, “You can’t fire me, I quit”, that gets the same result.
The purpose of impeachment is removing an official from office. If he quits, then he’s removed. And if he committed “heinous crimes” then a court of law could try him for those offenses.
Democrats are obsessed with removing President Trump from an office he no longer holds, but their only precedent for that is the impeachment of Belknap, Grant’s Secretary of War, who was tried and acquitted by the Senate after leaving office.
“The Senate convened a trial, and voted, as a chamber, that Mr. Belknap could be tried ‘for acts done as Secretary of War, notwithstanding his resignation of said office.’ The language is crystal clear, without any ambiguity,” Schumer blotivated. “The history and precedent is clear: the Senate has the power to try former officials.”
Schumer is quoting a resolution by Senator Allen Thurman, who opposed President Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation and campaigned against allowing black people to vote. But that’s just the old Democrat habit of refighting the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. Even while accusing President Trump of sedition, the Democrat cause is wedded to sedition.
The Democrat precedent for impeaching President Trump is a resolution put forward by a Senate Democrat who had opposed the Grant administration because he was a violent racist. Senator Thurman had previously delivered a speech to the Democratic State Convention in West Virginia declaring that Republicans wanted “to put the heel of the negro upon the neck of the white man” with the 14th Amendment.
That’s the Constitutional scholar on whose resolution the Democrat impeachment crusade rests.
If Schumer and the Democrats are going to use Thurman’s resolution as a constitutional precedent, making him the arbiter of what the Framers thought, then they must share his opinion of the 14th Amendment and allowing black people to vote. That would be consistent.