West Wing Reads

Schiff Impeachment Report Offers Nothing But Predetermined Conclusion “Funny: The dueling Republican and Democratic reports on the findings of the House Intelligence Committee hearings have one big thing in common: Neither offers hard evidence that President Trump committed a single impeachable offense. Yes, Rep. Adam Schiff, who helmed the hearings, says otherwise. But he’s been seeing ‘more than circumstantial evidence’ against Trump for three years now, since the early days of the ‘collusion’ probe,” the New York Post editorial board writes. “The GOP report accurately noted that Schiff only created a ‘misleading public narrative’ based on ‘hearsay, presumption and emotion’: Not one witness testified to the clear ‘quid pro quo’ that Democrats advertised would be exposed, nor to the ‘bribery’ they later talked of.” Click here to read more. “House Democrats do not seem to grasp that they cannot legitimize such an illegitimate process halfway through. This process has been unfair for the president and the Republicans from the start, with Democrats ignoring the historical precedents outlined in the Clinton and Nixon impeachments. When it comes to Trump, Democrats have created a whole new set of rules,” Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ) writes in USA Today. “‘No one is above the law,’ Speaker Nancy Pelosi insists. Now get ready for the switch: At the hearing, Democrats and their hand-picked legal experts will argue that a president can be impeached even if he hasn’t broken a law. Suddenly, impeachment isn’t about upholding the rule of law. Why the switch? Because Dems don’t have the goods to show Trump has committed a crime,” Betsy McCaughey writes in the New York Post. “Most Americans have no idea what a health care service costs before they get it. If we expect to lower health care costs, that must change.” That’s why in June, President Trump signed an order to eliminate barriers to price and quality transparency to protect American patients, CMS Administrator Seema Verma writes in the Chicago Tribune. “Between impeachment, all the hearings and testimonies which have essentially turned Congress into a TV courtroom, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s stall tactics which have prevented Congress from taking up key priorities, partisan politics has once again taken over, and things in Washington are not getting done”—including the important U.S.–Mexico–Canada trade deal to modernize NAFTA, writes Sarah Chamberlain, CEO of the Republican Main Street Partnership, in The Washington Times.