OPINION

Is Due Process Dead?

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Impeachment, have you heard about it? Apparently, Democrats are impeaching President Donald Trump because they hate him, essentially. They had to create crimes – abuse of power and obstruction of Congress – in order to come up with something to charge him with. Facts don’t matter, proof is for suckers; all that matters is the end result.

By now (this is being written Tuesday night because of an early Wednesday deadline), President Trump has been impeached. The grand jury in the House had their results long before Democrats created the charges. Now the Senate will hear the weak case.

The Senate is promising to give the partisan “he’s guilty of something” charges the hearing they deserve. As Chuck Schumer demands witnesses the House didn’t bother pursuing, Mitch McConnell isn’t having any of it. If the House didn’t demand to hear from them, why should the Senate?

That’s smart. Government doesn’t get to accuse someone of something, only to figure out what it might be later. The impeachment process isn’t a trial balloon. The House doesn’t get to operate under the standard that “impeachment is a political act” and the Senate under “this is just like a court of law.” It’s either all political or all legal. Democrats chose political because they knew they couldn’t meet the bar of the legal, mostly because the charges are made up and would be laughed out of court.

But there will be a trial, whether just a couple of days or a drawn-out process. This “witch-hunt,” as the president rightly calls it, is not just limited to him. Democrats are imposing this “guilty until proven innocent” standard (if you can call it that) on everyone who isn’t them.

Accused of “hate speech” on a college campus? You’re guilty of creating an unsafe environment and must be punished.

Accused of running gang rape parties when you were 15 years old? You’re guilty, even though no other human being who was supposedly there has any memory of anything close to that, and are disqualified from sitting on the Supreme Court.

Accused of sexual assault? Well, this one is a little different. You could have your career ruined, or you could win an Oscar. Democrats, as you know, are not held to the same standards they impose on everyone else.

It’s not just high-profile cases or college campus fever dreams, liberals have taken this guilty until proven innocent mentality into every aspect of life.

Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham have been labeled racist simply because they have to be. Taking snippets of comments out of context and lying about them is much easier than debating their points.

Pimple-faced, pants-less, vitamin D deficient parental disappointments now make up an army of flying monkeys the left unleashes on anyone, particularly people who work at Fox News, to accuse them of anything. Facts don’t matter to the left, the allegations do. They’re declared to be true simply because they’re made, and they’re made so they can be declared to be true.

Even in business, even in businesses friendly to the left, liberal progressives are using the “you’re guilty because we accuse you” standard.

One of the last acts of the Obama administration was to set new standards of what constitutes discrimination in hiring practices. Statistics, not proof, are now enough to smear companies with lawsuits claiming bigotry.

The Obama administration changed federal contracting regulations to unleash the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs “to harass a number of tech companies with frivolous lawsuits. That agency is supposed to promote affirmative action with federal contractors, yet the Obama game plan was to aggressively use only statistical analysis to claim companies were discriminating against minority employees.”

The result is “(t)he agency was originally tasked to promote affirmative action with government contractors, yet liberal activist lawyers morphed the agency into a battering ram of lawsuits intended on creating new case law establishing the idea that the government merely can use statistics to prove discrimination.”

When I first read about this, I was shocked. I shouldn’t have been. Liberalism/progressivism destroys everything, big and small. Now, if the numbers say you’re guilty, you’re guilty. Like impeachment, facts be damned and proof is for suckers.

Republicans need to stand up to all of this. In the Senate, dismissing this bogus impeachment trial as quickly as possible is the way to go. They need to stand up for due process rights of Americans everywhere, from academia to Silicon Valley. Innocent until proven guilty is not just a suggestion, it’s what separates us from tyrannical regimes. It’s telling that the people screaming the loudest about how the president is a dictator-in-waiting are the ones using the tactics of dictators to impose what they can’t otherwise get, isn’t it?

Derek is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!), host of a daily radio show on WCBM in Maryland, and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.