August 19, 2019 --

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler was quoted in the Hill, August 10, to have indicated on CNN, two days earlier, that "'formal impeachment proceedings" are underway. He was further quoted as indicating that his committee is gathering evidence and "hopefully by the end of the year -- vote to vote articles of impeachment to the House floor. Or we won't."

The Hill story also quoted Rep. Eric Swalwell (D.-Calif.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, as having told CNN, "We're conducting an impeachment investigation, and we want to hear from all of the witnesses to President Trump's lawlessness."
The Nadler and Swalwell comments indicate opposition to the view of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to consider impeachment proceedings.

If, in fact, the House of Representatives votes to impeach President Trump, the action will not reflect "lawlessness" on the part of the president, but continued bitterness over the results of the 2016 presidential election. According to the story in the Hill, "[I]mpeachment advocates have been heartened by Nadler's heightened rhetoric, which they see as a significant step in the march toward official votes to oust the president." LPR wonders if House Democrats are now jumping on the impeachment bandwagon because they fear primary challenges is they do not comply with the wishes of House radicals against the president.

Hate speech against President Trump has intensified since the horrific incidents, August 3, in El Paso, where 22 people where murdered and Dayton, Ohio, where 9 where shot and killed that Saturday night/Sunday morning. Most of the Democratic presidential candidates were quoted as attributing the El Paso shootings to President Trump's "racist rhetoric." On Meet the Press, August 5, moderator Chuck Todd remarked, "The El Paso [gunman] post[ed] an anti-immigrant screed online. This comes after a month of President Trump stoking racial resentment."

It did not take El Paso for a journalist to direct a "stoking" accusation against the president. On July 31, during the second night of the second Democratic presidential debate, CNN's Don Lemon asked Senator Michael Bennet, "Why are you the best candidate to heal the racial divide that exists in this country today, which has been stoked by the president's racist rhetoric?" Bennet replied, in part, "First of all the president's racist rhetoric should be enough rounds for everybody in this country to vote him out of office."

LPR expects that the Democratic candidates will regularly tar the president with smearks of "racism" and "white supremacy."

On August 8, The New York Times, reporting President Trump's visits to Dayton and El Paso, led with a "stoking" headline: "President Uses/A Day of Healing/to Stoke Discord." The Times reported that what was meant to be "a show of compassion" turned "into an occasion for anger-fueled broadsides against Democrats and the news media." Michael Goodwin, in his August 11 New York Post column pointed out, however, that "Democrats had attacked first by calling Trump a racist and white supremacist, and he was responding." In his August 7 column, Goodwin asserted "that Trump has been on the receiving end of a ruthless, unprecedented barrage of personal and political attacks" He added, "Richard Nixon got off easy by comparison." (Indeed the barrage is unceasing with the political aim of improving the chances of a House impeachment vote (which vote, if taken, would not lead to ousting the president because of his support in the Senate. It would, however, be a key element in the Democrats's 2020 election campaign.)

It is likely that when Congress returns in September, Chairman Nadler's committee will devote itself to drawing up articles of impeachment. Alas, the allegations do not have to reflect reality, much less due process. They simply will reflect Democratic hostility to a Republican president who responds to political attack. This would suggest that the Democratic presidential campaign will unfold on a track parallel to impeachment. There is another factor, however, that should come into play: the results of investigations into the origins of "Russiagate," the false claim that President Trump colluded with Russians to win the presidency. If the attorney general's investigations and the report of the Department of Justice inspector general prove embarrassing to the FBI under James Comey, and the intelligence community that served President Obama, one should think that the anti-Trump campaign by Democrats and their media allies would incur a setback. The more likely reaction would be that the matter of the origins of "Russiagate" is irrelevant to the question of the president's tenure in the White House -- unless, somehow, opinion polls were to disclose that the American people are tired of the left's political gamesmanship and just want the 2020 election campaign to proceed.