1 month, 2 weeks, and 4 days , that is the amount of time it took for President Trump's impeachment trial. From Fox News Online: The third impeachment trial in U.S. history is rapidly heading toward a close, with President Trump’s acquittal . According to an estimate from the Heritage Foundation in December, the Democrat-led House of Representatives inquiry, and eventual impeachment of Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress on Dec. 18, cost taxpayers an estimated $3.06 million. That price tag includes the money spent on the salaries of 106 congressional staffers from the House Intelligence Committee, the Judiciary Committee and the Oversight and Reform Committee, who worked on impeachment from Sept. 24 to Dec. 13, according to the Daily Signal. It also included the estimated hourly fees of six attorneys who appeared during hearings. At the heart of the impeachment case is the allegation that Trump intentionally withheld military aid from Ukraine in order to pressure the country to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, who served on the board of Burisma, Ukraine’s largest natural gas company, while his father was vice president.
While the figure doesn't include the Senate trial, the tab through December is sharply lower than the one for the impeachment investigation and trial of President Bill Clinton two decades ago. According to CNN, the independent probe into Clinton cost taxpayers $80 million in 1994.
The Senate has voted against impeaching President Trump, defeating two articles of impeachment by votes of 52-48 and 53-47. Trump joins two former presidents, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, in being impeached by the House of Representatives before being acquitted by the Senate. The House failed to produce credible evidence that the president committed any “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” or engaged in any action that justified his impeachment by the House, let alone his conviction and removal from office by the Senate.Despite Democrats’ loss in the Senate, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Reps. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., are no doubt basking in the admiration of their liberal allies for their actions, and they are hoping that their attempt to damage the president in the eyes of the public will be successful in the 2020 election.However, history is often an unforgiving critic. Historians in the future may judge them far more harshly for abusing the impeachment power in the Constitution. That provision was not intended to allow 285 members of Congress – a simple House majority and two-thirds of senators – to remove a duly elected president for partisan reasons or over matters of style, no matter what his margin of victory in the last election.Impeachment was to be used only in the direst of circumstances to remove a president clearly guilty of such serious, substantial misconduct that he posed a danger to the nation, and who was clearly unfit to continue in office until the next election when the public could make its own choice.House Democrats did not come even close to meeting that standard.It seems highly likely that Pelosi and company will be viewed in the same manner as historians now view the “radical Republicans” who impeached Andrew Johnson, and who came within one vote of convicting and removing him from office.Republicans personally hated Johnson, who became president after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and they virulently disagreed with Johnson’s decision to implement Lincoln’s conciliatory policies toward the Southern states.
Liberals can certainly criticize the president for some of his policies that they may disagree with, but claiming he is a despot and a dictator is so over the top, so far from reality, that it helped destroy whatever credibility the House managers may have had at the start of the impeachment process. Their wild exaggerations made it pretty clear this was a partisan, politically driven impeachment. Now that the process is over, at least for now, it is hard to come to any conclusion other than that this impeachment, which Democrats started talking about doing as soon as Trump was inaugurated, was the result of personal and political "vendettas" against the president.Given that some polls show that Trump is now more popular with the public than at any time during his presidency, Democrats may also end up suffering the “political consequences” of their abuse of the impeachment process and the “discrediting of those who conducted it.”
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