Adam Schiff is the new Jonathan Gruber. Remember Jonathan Gruber? Professor Jonathan Holmes Gruber is the MIT economist who is credited as being the “architect” of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“ObamaCare”).
Gruber did the unthinkable. He committed the ultimate Washington “gaffe." He told the truth. After ObamaCare was enacted, he revealed the deviousness of his party’s thought processes in its formulation. He did this in braggadocious moments, opining before like-minded “intellectuals” in academic settings, around whom he no doubt felt at ease and could “open up,” never considering how a video record of his comments would appear to his fellow Americans.
On numerous occasions since the passage of the awful and unconstitutional ObamaCare, Gruber has confessed that the ObamaCare legislation was written by its Democrat creators with deception at its core and with the understanding that the American people are, in Gruber’s words, “stupid.”
In one setting, Gruber explained how the ACA was written to engage in taxman’s sleight-of-hand so that insurance companies, rather than individual taxpayers, would bear the brunt of a 40 percent tax increase on health care benefits, although noting that the net effect on taxpayers would be the same. But, as the good professor noted, the American people would be “too stupid to know the difference.” He also said, “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage.”
Jonathan Gruber understood something that Democrats, as well as Communists, Marxists, and Socialists the world over have long understood: the power of the lie.
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Today, we have Jonathan Gruber 2.0 in Rep. Adam Schiff.
Through a faux impeachment process headed by Schiff, we’re seeing the same sort of mass deception that occurred with the formulation of ObamaCare. This time, the grand lie through which the Democrats hope to dupe the American populace is the “impeachment inquiry” they are carrying out in a spectacle worthy of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Or perhaps Adolph Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. It should make the skin crawl of any American with an iota’s worth of understanding of history and tyranny.
This is not a real impeachment process, as established through over 150 years of precedence, beginning with Andrew Johnson in 1868. As constitutional scholars David Rivkin and Elizabeth Price Foley laid out in a brilliant Wall Street Journal legal dissection titled “This Impeachment Subverts the Constitution,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff are engaging in extraordinary extra-constitutional proceedings. They pursued an ersatz impeachment-like process for actions by the president which were not impeachable crimes, in an inquiry that was not authorized by a full vote of the House of Representatives, in secret hearings that were completely slanted to one political party, based on allegations made by an anonymous, politically biased “whistleblower” who had no first-hand knowledge about a presidential phone call over which he was “blowing the whistle.”
The entire process is otherworldly. After a declaration by fiat on September 24 that she had launched a “formal impeachment inquiry”, absent any vote by the House, and then taking one-sided depositions in secret in a sub-basement of the Capitol, with no opportunity for the President to have counsel present to cross-examine witnesses, Speaker Pelosi decided at the 11th hour to hold a “vote” in the House, fittingly on Halloween, to approve “rules” regarding a process that was already far along. Bizarre doesn’t begin to describe what is occurring.
In the same way that Jonathan Gruber had to trick the American people into thinking that they wouldn’t be slammed with massive increases in their health care premiums by saddling them on a middleman, the House Halloween vote on impeachment procedures was meant to trick the American people into thinking that their party’s already advanced, biased proceedings would magically be transformed into a legitimate impeachment process.
The result of that Halloween vote produced rules for the faux-impeachment hearings which are as fundamentally flawed as ever. In the open hearings, Intelligence Committee Chairman Schiff can question witnesses for 45 minutes, whereas Republican members are limited to five minutes of questioning. Schiff can call whatever witnesses he wants, whereas Republican members must submit a list of the witnesses they want to call and obtain Schiff’s approval. As Rep. Jim Jordan told Maria Bartiromo, “You can try to put a ribbon on a sham process, but that doesn’t make it any less of a sham.”
To add insult to constitutional injury, Congresswoman Katie Porter from California, naturally, wore a Batman outfit to vote on a matter that our Founders intended to be among the most serious and sober that the House of Representatives could contemplate: removing a sitting president through the impeachment process.
But the Golden State wasn’t done with its contributions to the Republic. Also voting to approve the grossly flawed impeachment resolution that day in the freak show vote was freshman Democratic Congresswoman Katie Hill, who had only that week announced her resignation from the House following revelations of her affairs with both male and female staff members in her office. The “rising star in the Democratic Party” proudly announced that she would make her final floor speech in the House following the vote. Perhaps after that, she would return to her office for a final hit from her bong. California, you must be so proud.
Just as Jonathan Gruber’s ObamaCare passed the Senate by a party-line vote on Christmas Eve 2009, Adam Schiff’s impeachment proceedings resolution passed by a virtual party-line vote on All Hallows Eve (with two Democrats, still clinging to political sanity and wanting to retain their seats in moderate congressional districts, voting with the Republicans.)
If Obamacare, which caused the Democrats to lose the House in 2010 by the largest net shift in seats in 62 years, is any guide, impeachment may prove to be an enormous gift for Donald J. Trump.
William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private, and non-profit sectors for more than 30 years. He is a senior investigator for Judicial Watch, Inc., the host of the JW podcast Inside Report, and a contributor to Townhall, American Thinker, and The Federalist. (The views expressed are the author’s alone, and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.)
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