The partisan impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump is little more than the Democrats' latest attempt to gain what has always been the object of their party's desire: political power. To the end of obtaining power, the Democratic Party has supported every tyrannical and immoral policy — from slavery to confiscatory taxation to abortion — presented in the political domain over the past two hundred years. Paraphrasing Vince Lombardi: For the Democrats, power isn't everything; it's the only thing.

Aiding and abetting this impeachment process are the mainstream media, whose portrayal of the Democratic primary candidates as the cool cats from Ocean's 11 (when from a political perspective they actually resemble the mutants of The Island of Dr. Moreau), combined with an unceasing barrage of Trump-hatred, would seem to offer the Democrats an unbeatable advantage in the 2020 race. Why, then, is such feverish energy being channeled into impeachment, which will likely die on the vine in the Senate led by recent pro-Trump ally Mitch McConnell? Because with Democrats, some things never change. Trump's dogged refusal to back down in the face of all their shenanigans simply aggravates their rabid and insatiable lust for power. By pursuing impeachment, they are aiming to harass the president into resignation. If that fails, they hope to weaken him sufficiently that whichever candidate emerges from the Democratic primary will actually win the Electoral College in 2020.

To achieve their current goal of ousting Trump, perhaps the Pelosi-Schiff-Nadler cabal decided to study their party's history, because their conduct in their persecution of President Trump looks remarkably like that of their party forefathers in two analogous cases. In the first analogue, today's nefarious bunch have taken a page from the playbook of their Democratic predecessors who successfully dislodged a Republican executive near the end of Reconstruction.

Southern Democrats tasted blood in the water subsequent to the 1874 midterm elections, when, like the undead, their party rose from the political grave dug for them at Appomattox Court House in 1865. Having regained control of Congress, the Democrats ramped up their efforts to conquer the state governments of the old Confederacy. In 1875, Adalbert Ames — a Civil War veteran and Radical Republican who favored civil rights for the freedmen — was in the middle of his term as governor of Mississippi. Former slave and one of the first blacks to serve in Congress John Roy Lynch recounted in The Facts of Reconstruction (published in 1913) that winning control of the Mississippi Legislature was insufficient for the Democrats:

[T]the Democrats could not afford to wait until Governor Ames' term expired. They were determined to get immediate control of the State Government. There was only one way in which this could be done, and that was by impeachment.

In a like manner, controlling the purse strings for San Fran Nan's crew is insufficient to satiate the congressional Democrats' craving for power. They want control of the full government, and impeachment of Trump seems to be their avenue to getting it.

The Mississippi legislators had no substance upon which to impeach Governor Ames, of whom Lynch wrote:

Governor Ames was a clean, pure, and honest man. He had given the State an excellent administration. The State judiciary had been kept up to the high standard established by [the previous governor.] ... The State was in a prosperous condition. The rate of taxation had been greatly reduced, and there was every prospect of a still further reduction before the end of his administration.

Despite his roguish past and the constant allegations of misconduct lobbed at him, Donald Trump as president has been basically clean, pure, and honest. Like Ames, he is a great administrator who is building a sound judiciary, reducing taxes, and promoting prosperity. But just as Ames's goodness meant nothing to the Democrats then, so Trump's performance means nothing to Team Pelosi now.

Lynch then explained how the anti-Ames Democrats went farther to set the example for their political descendants:

Personally they had nothing against Ames. It was not the man but the office they wanted, and that they were determined to have. They knew he had committed no offense, but, as matters then stood, being a Republican was an offense which justified removal from office. To punish him otherwise, for anything he had done or failed to do, did not at any time enter into their calculations.[1]

Outmaneuvered, Governor Ames stepped down before impeachment was carried out. The message was clear: being a Republican in the way of Democratic Party rule was justification for being harassed out of office.

The second analogue is better known: the aftermath of Watergate. Richard Nixon was less morally upright than Adalbert Ames, but it was the Democrats' constant haranguing coupled with the president's unwise political calculations that left him without GOP support, so he too resigned rather than face the indignity of an impeachment trial. This second impeachment effort eliminated a hated Republican president, although the Democrats back in the mid-1970s were satisfied to suffer through two blundering years of a decidedly non-conservative replacement, Gerald Ford, until they successfully recaptured the White House with the pointless Jimmy Carter.

Donald Trump's ascension to the presidency was more than the Democrats could handle. Their ability to tolerate anything but total control of the government had been exhausted by the time Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush, and their raw hatred of Donald Trump has led them to employ similar impeachment tactics to those used against Ames and Nixon. Seeing Trump in the seat they believe belonged to Hillary Clinton (and by extension having Gorsuch on the SCOTUS instead of their messiah's nominee, Merrick Garland) has been for the Democratic Party a long horror movie. They are pressing every button on their remote control, but they just can't seem to turn off the TV. Impeachment is their way of smashing the TV just to make it stop.

Pelosi and Company know they have nothing at all close to the constitutional bar of "high crimes and misdemeanors" upon which to base the impeachment of Donald Trump. The fact is that Trump is effectively advancing Republican policies (national defense, lower taxes, religious liberty, and the like) while concurrently reversing much of the program of the Obama era and blocking the Democratic Party from exercising the political power that it so eagerly desires. As such, being a Republican — one who is both effective and popular — makes Donald Trump quite like Adalbert Ames and Richard Nixon (the latter of whom just two years before his resignation had won a landslide re-election). The Democrats' blood lust for Trump's removal through impeachment is part and parcel of what their party has done in previous cases, and will certainly do again in the future if they succeed this time.

John Steinreich has an M.A. in church history from Colorado Theological Seminary. He has authored two Christian-themed books available on Kindle: The Words of God? and A Great Cloud of Witnesses. His works are also on Lulu Press. He is currently developing a stage production and a nonfiction book on the life of Frederick Douglass (www.facebook.com/freementheater).