An impeachment inquiry looms and the shrieks of outrage are beginning.

The Left is now suddenly voicing warnings that those who recently undermined the system could be targeted by their own legacies.

So, for example, now we read why impeachment is suddenly a dangerous gambit.

True, the Founders did not envision impeaching a first-term president the moment he lost his House majority. Nor did they imagine impeaching a president twice. And they certainly did not anticipate trying an ex-president in the Senate as a private citizen.

In modern times, the nation has not rushed to impeach a president without a special counsel investigation to determine whether the chief executive was guilty of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

But thanks to the Democrats, recent impeachments now have destroyed all those guardrails. After all, Trump was impeached the first time on the fumes of an exhaustive but fruitless 22-month, $40 million special counsel investigation—one designed to find him guilty of Russian “collusion” and thus to be removed from office but found no actionable offenses at all.

Instead, dejected Democrats moved immediately for a second try. In September 2019 a few weeks after Trump had announced his 2020 reelection bid, the Democratic House began to impeach the president on the new grounds that he had talked to the President Zelensky of Ukraine and said he might delay offensive arms shipments—unless the Ukrainians could demonstrate that they had ended corruption and, in particular, were no longer influenced by the Biden family quid pro quo shakedowns.

Trump was proven right: the Biden family is not just corrupt, but, in particular, Joe Biden as head of the family and Vice President had intervened in the internal politics of an aid recipient, by threatening not to delay but rather to cancel outright all U.S. aid to Ukraine—unless it fired Viktor Shokin, a Ukrainian prosecutor.

Shokin was then looking into the misadventures of Biden’s son Hunter, and why the Vice President’s imbecilic son was receiving lucrative compensation on the boards of a Ukrainian energy company Burisma, yet without any demonstrable expertise or education in matters of energy policy.

Since Trump was impeached, we now know that Joe Biden did lie that he had no connection with or even knowledge of his son’s business. And we know that the fired prosecutor believed the Bidens were recipients of bribes. We know that contrary to Biden’s assertions, he was not following State Department policy.

In contrast, the U.S. had, in fact, lauded Shokin’s efforts to repress corruption. In sum, Biden was undermining the stated policy of the U.S. government to protect his son’s—and his own—efforts to leverage money from Kyiv by monetizing the influence of his own Vice Presidency. In some sense, Biden was guilty of the very “treason” charge—altering U.S. foreign policy for personal benefit—by which Rep. Adam Schiff had earlier falsely accused Trump.

Given that reality, it is easy to argue that the House impeached Donald Trump in 2019 for crimes that he did not commit, but which the current president Joe Biden most certainly had during his Vice Presidency.

But weaponizing impeachment is just one baleful legacy of the Left. There are plenty more of their own precedents that Leftists now would not wish to have applied to themselves:

Will the next president have the FBI pay social media censors to suppress the dissemination of any news it feels is unhelpful to the reelection of a Republican president?
Is it OK now for the next Vice President to invite his son onto Air Force Two to cement multimillion dollars deals that benefit both, with Chinese, Russian, and Ukrainian oligarchs who enjoy government ties?
Should a conservative billionaire stealthily insert $419 million late in the 2024 campaign to absorb the work of registrars in key voting precincts?
If a Democratic president wins the 2024 election should conservative groups riot at the Capitol on Inauguration Day? Should a conservative celebrity yell out to the assembled crowd of protestors that she dreams of blowing up the White House? And if a Republican wins, should he prosecute any Democratic rioters who once again swarm Washington on Inauguration Day and charge them with “insurrection,” meting out long prisons sentences to the convicted?
Is Joe Biden now vulnerable to being impeached for systematic family corruption, or using the Department of Justice to obstruct the prosecution of his son in his last days in office, and then being tried in the Senate as a private citizen?
If the Republicans gain the Senate, will they move to end the filibuster in agreement with Democratic assertions that it is “racist” and a “Jim Crow relic”?
If the midwestern Electoral College “Blue Wall” seems to reappear, or if Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada recreate new blue walls, will there be a conservative effort to end the constitutionally mandated Electoral College?
If in 2024 there is a narrow Democratic win in the Electoral College, should conservative celebrities conspire to run ads urging the electors to reject their constitutional duties and not vote in accordance with their state’s popular vote that went Democratic? Should a Republican third-party candidate sue to stop a state’s selection of its electors on grounds the voting machines were rigged?
If Supreme Court decisions begin to appear to favor the left, will Republicans talk of packing the court, or have the DOJ turn a blind eye when mobs began to swarm the homes of liberal justices? Should the conservative media go after liberal judges with serial accusations of corruption? Should the Republican Senate leader assemble a mob of pro-life protestors at the doors of the court and call out Justices Sotomayor or Jackson by name, with threats that they will soon reap the whirlwind they have sowed, given they have no idea of what is about to “hit” them? Should conservative legal scholars urge the country to ignore Supreme Court decisions deemed liberal?
Will local prosecutors in red jurisdictions begin filing criminal charges against leading Democratic candidates on various charges, among them accusations of old inflated real estate assessments, campaign finance laws, questioning ballot results, or taking classified documents home? If Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton were to run in 2024, will their past illicit behavior gain the attention of a city or state attorney in Utah, West Virginia, or Wyoming?
If Joe Biden continues to decline at his present rate, will Republicans demand he be given the Montreal Cognitive Assessment? Will they subpoena Ivy League psychiatrists to testify that an intervention is needed to remove him from office? And will an FBI director and a deputy Attorney General plan to wear wires, and record Biden in his private moments of senility, as a way of convincing the cabinet or Congress that he is demonstrably mentally unfit for office?
In the 2024 election, should the Republican nominee hire a foreign ex-spy to compile falsehoods about the Democratic opponent and then seed them among the media, and Department of Justice? Should the FBI hire such a Republican contractor and likewise use him to gather dirt on the Democratic nominee?
If there appears incriminating evidence concerning a Republican nominee, should the FBI retrieve such evidence, keep it under wraps, lie about its veracity, and instead go along with media and ex-intelligence officers assertions that it is a fraudulent production of Russian intelligence?
Will conservative CIA and FBI directors, and the Director of National Intelligence be given exemptions from prosecutions for systematically lying while under oath in Congress or to federal investigators?
Will conservative celebrities ritually on social media, without fear of censorship, brag about ways of decapitating, shooting, stabbing, burning, or blowing up the Democratic nominee?
Since in many states the statues of limitations have not yet expired for arson, murder, assault, looting, and attacks on 1,500 police officers during the summer 2020 riots, will state prosecutors now begin identifying those 14,000 once arrested and mostly released, and begin refiling charges of conspiracy, racketeering—and “insurrection”?
Will they also file insurrection charges against those who torched a federal courthouse, a police precinct, and a historic Washington DC church, or conspired to riot and swarm the White House grounds in an effort to attack the President of the United States?
Will they file charges against Vice President Kamala Harris for “inciting” ongoing violent demonstrations with monotonous, emphatic, and repetitive threats in the weeks before her nomination? Contrary to liberal “fact checkers” at time of nationwide violence, Harris certainly did not distinguish violent from non-violent protests, but in fact implied that they were intimately tied to the upcoming election and beyond. So given the hundreds of police officers injured, the hundreds of millions in property damage, and the dozens killed, what exactly did Harris mean by tying that ongoing summer of often violent protests to Election Day?:
“But they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop, and this is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop, and everyone beware, because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not gonna stop after Election Day. Everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up — and they should not. And we should not.”

 

In one of his most ironic proclamations to date, Rob Reiner declared that “democracy” can only survive if former President Donald Trump is imprisoned and all third-party candidates are prohibited from running.

Rob Reiner — who is one of Hollywood’s biggest cheerleaders for Joe Biden — made his absurd statement in a recent post to X, formerly known as Twitter.

New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday suspended laws that allow open and concealed carry of firearms in Albuquerque for 30 days after declaring a  public health emergency. The order, in my view, is flagrantly unconstitutional under existing Second Amendment precedent.  It could also be a calculated effort to evade a ruling by making the period of suspension so short that it becomes moot before any final decision is reached by a court.


The order cites recent cases of gun-related violence in and around the city, including the killing of an 11-year-old boy dead and the wounding of a woman in their vehicle in an apparent road rage incident after a baseball game.

Grisham declared that “as I said yesterday, the time for standard measures has passed. And when New Mexicans are afraid to be in crowds, to take their kids to school, to leave a baseball game—when their very right to exist is threatened by the prospect of violence at every turn—something is very wrong.”

Democratic leaders have increasingly turned to a claim used successfully during the pandemic in declaring a health emergency to maximize unilateral authority of governors. There have also been calls to declare racism a public health emergency, supported by groups like the American Public Health Association. Transgender programs have also been declared a public health emergency by some groups. The motivation behind many of these calls is not to negate constitutional rights, but the question is whether such declarations allow governors discretion to suspend or curtail individual rights.

As the list of claimed health emergencies grow, even state Democratic judges may begin to balk at the obvious end run around constitutional rights.

The order allows for an expansion to other cities that meet the threshold for violent crime if 1,000 or more violent crimes per 100,000 residents have occurred per year since 2021. It also sets a threshold of 90 firearms-related emergency room visits per 100,000 residents have occurred between July 2022 and June of this year.

The taking away of individual rights as an emergency measure is hardly new. For centuries, governments have claimed that the suspension of individual rights is necessary for the good of citizens.

What is striking about this effort is the short specified period. By setting a 30-day period, the Governor makes it difficult to secure a final decision. She could face a preliminary injunction in that time. However, if she gets a sympathetic trial judge, the time could run out before a final ruling can be secured on appeal. In any case, it makes it less likely that the case can be taken to the Supreme Court or even through the federal court system.

Yet, challengers could argue that the matter is not moot when the order can be and is likely to be repeated in the future. That is always a challenging claim to make, but it is clearly true in this case. What is clear is that this is unambiguously and undeniably unconstitutional under existing precedent.

Even if an injunction is secured on the basis of a presumptively unconstitutional act, many will of course celebrate the boldness of Grisham in taking away an individual right under a clever measure. It is, however, too clever by half. If a court decides that this is not moot at the end of the period, New Mexico could supply a vehicle to curtail future such claims.

We have seen how Democratic strongholds have proven the greatest assets for gun-rights advocates.
Major Democratic cities are delivering lasting self-inflicted wounds to gun control efforts with poorly conceived and poorly drafted measures.

In 2008, the District of Columbia brought us District of Columbia v. Heller, the watershed decision declaring that the Second Amendment protects the individual right of gun possession.

In 2010, Chicago brought us McDonald v. City of Chicago, in which the Court declared that that right is incorporated against state and local government.

However, no state has done more for the Second Amendment than New York.  The state has been a fountain of unconstitutional laws — and the basis for a series of wins for Second Amendment advocates.

New Mexico could now prove the next big opportunity for gun rights advocates in tackling the public health rationale for gun control.

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Agovernment shutdown is imminent, but Republican messaging on the reason for the spending standoff is inconsistent thanks to the Senate GOP, which plans to greenlight the Biden administration’s cash infusion.

If Democrats get their way, Congress will send at least $13 billion taxpayer dollars to Ukraine, something a majority of U.S. taxpayers say they don’t want to do, and spend another estimated $27 billion cash on unspecified “emergency funding.”

Some GOP members in the lower chamber have pledged to do everything they can to ensure they are not funding a regime that weaponized itself against its own people.

The House Freedom Caucus specifically warned in August that its members won’t support a GOP-led continuing resolution unless both chambers agree to cut back Biden administration spending, pass policies and funding to curb the raging border crisis, punish the Biden regime for its “unprecedented weaponization of the Justice Department and FBI,” and end blank check funding for Ukraine.

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy expressed hesitation about their plan because, according to him, a government shutdown means a pause on “investigations and everything else” like Republicans’ impeachment inquiry, which he says “hurts the American public.”

McCarthy’s dilemma sounds like a recipe for disappointment. His feelings about the Democrats’ spending plan, however, are no match for the Senate GOP’s flat refusal to do anything that would benefit its constituents and unify Republican messaging.

The Senate GOP has an opportunity to force Democrats’ hand by using the threat of a government shutdown to pass policies that would slow or even stop the Biden administration’s destructive streak.

Instead, Republican leaders in the upper chamber are using their influence to eviscerate House Republicans for daring to oppose the Biden administration’s spending wish list.

While Democrats’ big-buck desires will be readily fulfilled if Republicans sign off on their plan, the GOP is stuck trying to sell keeping the federal government open as the one prize they can take from the negotiating table.

“The speaker and the president reached an agreement, which I supported, in connection with raising the debt ceiling, to set the spending levels for next year,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a speech in Kentucky shortly before he experienced yet another zoning out episode. “The House then turned around and passed spending levels that were below that level. … [T]hat’s not going to be replicated in the Senate.”

McConnell ally Sen. John Cornyn, who is rumored to be in the running to eventually replace the Senate GOP Leader, repeated this sentiment on X on Monday.

“The federal government will shut down in less than a month unless a funding bill is passed by Sept. 30. That’s only 16 legislative days away (and even fewer for the House) under the current schedule. The House and Senate are in completely different universes when it comes to how lawmakers should fund federal agencies in both the short and long term,” Cornyn wrote.



The Senate GOP’s staunch refusal to force a Democrat reconciliation with crises created by their president and his administration means Republicans are playing right into Democrats’ hands.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer admitted as much in a Sept. 1 letter to his Democrat colleagues.

“We cannot afford the brinkmanship or hostage-taking we saw from House Republicans earlier this year when they pushed our country to the brink of default to appease the most extreme
members of their party,” he wrote.

Schumer claimed the “only way to avoid a shutdown is through bipartisanship,” aka with the cooperation of spineless Senate Republicans. His hope is that the House GOP will simply cave to upper chamber pressure and “follow the Senate’s lead and pass bipartisan appropriations bills.”

The White House similarly signaled that the Senate GOP’s cooperation means a government shutdown could be blamed on “extreme House members.”

“The last thing the American people deserve is for extreme House members to trigger a government shutdown that hurts our economy, undermines our disaster preparedness, and forces our troops to work without guaranteed pay,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement.

Nothing would make the MAGA-hating coalition of McConnell-esque Republicans more happy than to see their House colleagues shoulder the blame for the shutdown while they fulfill their Ukraine funding fantasies.

Senate GOP leaders have already proven they are more than willing to sacrifice their voters to stay in Democrats’ good graces. Their track record suggests they are merely Democrats’ managed opposition instead of true opponents of the radical left.

In just the last two years, GOP senators joined forces to throw Republican Senate races, join Democrat-led attacks on the Second Amendment, dogpile their colleague for fighting the Biden administration’s taxpayer-funded abortion for all agenda, continue funding the federal agencies persecuting Americans including the leader of their party, do nothing about bombshell evidence of Biden family corruption, and refuse to condemn Democrats’ 2024 election rigging indictment scheme.

If House and Senate Republicans don’t take action now, they risk enabling the Biden administration’s attacks on its country, citizens, and the Constitution. Unfortunately, the Republicans running the GOP side of the Senate don’t care.

Every year since 1958, the West Texas town of Sweetwater has hosted the World’s Largest Rattlesnake Roundup, which is exactly what it sounds like. Thousands of the venomous ophidians are rooted out of their dens and brought to the Nolan County Coliseum to be gawked at, “milked,” and often beheaded and skinned. It started as a way for the region to rid itself of some of its least-welcome residents. Now community leaders wish they could do the same with several giant piles of scrap that have for too long been left to bake in the sun. But that’s proving to be much trickier than wrangling reptiles.

About forty miles west of Abilene on Interstate 20, Sweetwater has unwittingly become home to what is possibly the world’s largest collection of unwanted wind turbine blades. When forklifts deposited the first of these in a field behind the apartment complex where Pamala Meyer lives, on the west side of town, in 2017, she wasn’t initially bothered. But then the blades—between 150 and 200 feet in length and mostly made of composite materials such as fiberglass with a binding resin—kept coming. Each was cut into thirds, with each segment longer than a school bus. Thousands arrived over several years, eventually blanketing more than thirty acres, in stacks rising as high as basketball backboards. Every few dozen feet, a break among the stacks leads into an industrial hedge maze.

“It’s just a hazard all the way around,” Meyer said. She worries about neighborhood children exploring the unfenced piles and says that stagnant pools of water inside the blades breed swarms of mosquitos. Matt Jackson, who works in a nearby warehouse, has other concerns. The piles create shaded nooks and crannies, perfect for Sweetwater’s unofficial mascot. “It’s just a big rattlesnake farm,” he said.

The blades were brought here by Global Fiberglass Solutions, a company based in Washington State that announced in 2017 its intention to recycle blades from wind farms across the region. Instead of ending up in landfills, they would be ground up into a reusable material that could be turned into pallets, railroad ties, or flooring panels. Global Fiberglass is one of a few companies attempting to develop a viable business from recycling blades.

Besides the main boneyard—behind Meyer’s apartment—stacks of blades also occupy ten acres a couple miles south of town, and the company is storing blades in other locations in the county. “They have, in my view, abandoned them there,” said Samantha Morrow, the Nolan County attorney. “The county doesn’t have and cannot find millions of dollars to clean this up.”

The Sweetwater piles are also at least partly the indirect result of a rule clarification the Internal Revenue Service issued in 2016. Before then, a wind farm could collect valuable federal tax credits for only its first ten years of operation. But the IRS determined that it would restart the clock on the credits if a wind farm “repowered” its turbines—replacing most of their equipment with newer parts. So, despite the expected two-decade lifespan for turbine blades, wind farms across Texas and other states began replacing many that remained in good shape years early.

Some paid Global Fiberglass to remove the older blades and haul them away. The company set up shop in an empty industrial facility in Sweetwater that was once an aluminum recycling plant, but Don Lilly, the managing director of Global Fiberglass, told me that only a handful of blades have ever been ground up there. He said the company was close to ramping up and would soon mill the blades into pieces the size of coarse sand. “The blade material is sold,” he said, “but I can’t go into that part yet.”

Sweetwater has heard such pledges before. The county declared the stockpile a public nuisance a year ago. City attorney Jeff Allen said Sweetwater’s local ordinances are aimed at overgrown lots, not turbine blades, leaving the city with limited legal options. He said he believes Global Fiberglass “intended to be a viable business” but at some point “it just came off the rails.” (Lilly disputes this and says the delays have come from ensuring “all systems were engineered.”)

Sweetwater benefits from the wind-energy industry, including two large wind farms nearby. Drivers arriving on I-20 from either direction are welcomed by a giant wind turbine blade painted with the town’s name. But even the community’s biggest boosters of renewable energy long ago ran out of patience with Global Fiberglass’s mess. “We’d like to see them gone,” said Karen Hunt, director of the local chamber of commerce. “The sooner the better.”

Sweetwater isn’t the only place Global Fiberglass has stockpiled blades. It has a total of 1,300 in Newton, Iowa, and two other cities in that state, according to the state’s Department of Natural Resources. After an investigation, the agency concluded in 2021 there was no recycling going on, nor was any likely to happen. It declared the company to be running an unpermitted dump.

Frank Liebl, executive director of the Newton Development Corporation, testified at a state hearing that the initial excitement in 2017 of recruiting a blade-recycling company soon soured. In the intervening years, he asked Global Fiberglass many times when it would begin its recycling. He always got “the same answer: ‘Soon,’ ” he said.

By July 2021, the company owed more than $1 million in unpaid rent in Newton, according to testimony at the Iowa hearing from its landlord’s attorney. In Texas, it failed to pay taxes to Nolan County in 2020 and is now three years in arrears, according to tax records. Last year, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality fined the company $10,255 for what it described as illegally stored solid waste. It allowed the company to pay the penalty in monthly installments for three years. In June, Global Fiberglass defaulted, according to the commission.

In Newton, pressure from the state of Iowa seems to have worked. Craig Armstrong, a city employee, said that General Electric recently acquired the blades. It’s unclear whether GE purchased them from Global Fiberglass or from the landlord who was owed the $1 million in rent, who may have taken possession of the blades. The city was promised that they would be sent to a recycling center by the end of the year, although none had been removed by mid-August, according to a Newton city official.

Lilly declined to talk about the Iowa blades. He said the situation in Sweetwater is different and insists that Global Fiberglass will grind down and recycle these blades. “If you come back nine months from now, you will not see the material,” he said. We’re marking our calendars and will check back in May.