The post-presidency impeachment of Donald Trump isn’t a political stunt. It’s a serious effort to subvert democracy, and it’s rooted in the left’s belief that the American people are the greatest threat to America.
The only discernible motive for impeaching a president long after he has already left office — the Senate trial isn’t even slated to begin until February 9, nearly three weeks after Joe Biden’s inauguration — is that the Democrats are terrified that Trump might actually pull a Grover Cleveland and reclaim the presidency four years from now. Impeachment creates the possibility of barring him from holding federal office in the future, preempting the possibility that voters could ever return him to the White House.
Barring credible political opponents from competing in free and fair elections is the sort of thing you see in one-party states such as Russia, where the main opposition leader was recently arrested after a failed attempt by the state to assassinate him with poison. Here in the United States, we expect our leaders to put their faith in the system of government created by the Founding Fathers, which entrusts the people to decide for themselves who should represent them.
Unfortunately, the Democratic Party is currently intent onestablishing one-party ruleby relegating the Republican Party to the status of token opposition — an impotent foil that lends to the illusion of democracy without presenting any real threat to the political establishment’s grip on power. That’s what House Resolution 1 is all about.
The Democrats recently resurrecteda package of radical voting reformsdesigned to neuter ballot security laws and codify the irregularities that plagued the 2020 elections, including widespread absentee voting with minimal oversight and multiple weeks of early voting. HR 1 would also mandate that states participate in automatic voter registration, allow “ballot harvesting,” and even let absentee voters print their own ballots at home and have harvesters deliver those ballots to election officials who would be mandated by law to accept the ballots without question.
All of this is directly contrary to the purpose of the many safeguards that state legislatures have put in place to protect against the possibility of large-scale election fraud. Verifying the identities of voters, policing voter intimidation, and making it difficult to counterfeit ballots are all common-sense fraud prevention measures, yet HR 1 would compel the states to do away with them if they wish to continue receiving federal election funding.
After the experience of the 2020 elections, when billionaire oligarchs such as Mark Zuckerberg injected hundreds of millions of dollars of private funding into the election process, it’s easy to imagine state and local election officials turning to private interests to make up the funding gap if they wish to preserve and enforce ballot security laws. The inevitable result would be relentless jockeying for influence on the part of wealthy partisans, further corrupting and debasing our electoral process.
In addition, HR 1 seeks to advance the left’s long-standing goal of separating Americans into group-based identities. Not only do the bill’s proponents like to play the race card by claiming that anybody who opposes HR 1 is trying to “suppress” the black vote, but the legislation also seeks to cultivate new constituencies for the Democratic Party by extending the franchise to convicted felons — including those on probation and parole — and laying the groundwork for lowering the voting age to 16 while incentivizing public schools to turn out that vote.
If this legislation were to become law, it would advance the left’s objective of forcing the GOP into a permanent minority status, incapable of achieving any conservative policy priorities, or even of acting as a meaningful barrier to the far-left progressive agenda.
Impeaching Donald Trump and prohibiting him from ever again holding federal office is part and parcel with the left’s broader anti-democratic strategy. Think of it as an “insurance policy” just in case the Democrats aren’t able to tilt the playing field in their favor before the 2024 presidential election.
Phill Kline is the Former Kansas Attorney General. He currently serves as Pulpit Pastor of Amherst Baptist Church, a law school professor, and director of the Amistad Project of The Thomas More Society. Previously, he served as president of the Midwest Association of Attorneys General, was on the Executive Committee of the National Association of Attorneys General, and was co-chairperson of the Violent Sexual Predator Apprehension Task Force. He was a Kansas House member for eight years where he chaired the Appropriations Committee and the Taxation Committee and authored victims rights laws and welfare reform.