“I suppose, indeed, that in public life, a man whose political principles have any decided character and who has energy enough to give them effect must always expect to encounter political hostility from those of adverse principles.” —Thomas Jefferson (1808)

Game on!

Democrat Party leaders are doing everything they can to further derail Donald Trump’s successful “MAGA agenda” ahead of the 2020 election. Their win-at-all-costs tactics include seeding an economic recession by angling for impeachment, which will undermine all the economic confidence indexes.

Phase 1 of their plan was promoting the phony Russian collusion investigation, which was sparked by the fake Russian dossier funded by Hillary Clinton and her DNC hacks. They then used that massive diversionary deception to complete their “Hate Trump” campaign platform to win back the House in 2018. With the help of hundreds of millions of dollars of “in kind” advertising from their Leftmedia propagandists, they succeeded.

Phase 2 is setting Trump up for an inquisition asserting he is guilty of impeachable crimes, using the same model as Phase 1. Their strategy is to drag Trump into impeachment proceedings through the 2020 election cycle, most likely with the goal of forcing a Senate vote to exonerate Trump and then use that vote to defeat vulnerable Republican Senators. Of course, impeachment has been the Left’s plan to overturn the 2016 election from day one. Recall that just 20 minutes after Trump was sworn in as America’s 45th President, The Washington Post posted this headline on its website: “The campaign to impeach President Trump has begun.”

The Demos’ angle of attack?

It won’t be Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s contrived “Russian collusion” charade because, after two years, that narrative completely collapsed. That scheme was hatched by Clinton’s political sycophants, former CIA director John Brennan, former FBI director James Comey and other deep-state operatives. In effect, they attempted a coup d'etat to entrap Trump so he could be expelled him from office – or at least obstruct his agenda. The fact that Brennan, Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and other co-conspirators have yet to be indicted is an affront to Rule of Law.

Two years into the “collusion” charade, the Senate has concluded its bipartisan Trump/Russia investigation and determined that there’s not a shred of evidence to support the Clinton/DoJ claims. And Mueller’s report will most certainly be a dry well providing no evidence to actually impeach Trump for colluding with the Russians.

Thus, Democrats have been readying Phase 2 of their MAGA obstruction — the assertion that Trump is impeachable for obstruction. Note, they don’t actually have to get to an impeachment vote to continue obstructing Trump’s agenda; they just have to keep the collusion and obstruction delusion alive.

So House Democrats will now conduct their own post-Mueller investigations, looking for other angles of attack and teeing them up by way of what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defined as a “Wrap-Up Smear.” It will include accusations of obstruction and campaign-finance violations, the latter fitting neatly into their “stolen election” narrative. Their “kitchen sink” approach will also find plenty of other things to “investigate” as fodder for corruption and impeachment charges.

Riding the publicity wave of House testimony by Trump’s disgraced former lawyer, Michael Cohen, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) launched the second phase of the Demo impeachment smear tactic. This week, Nadler issued “document requests” to 81 people and entities in Trump’s campaign, family, and business orbits. Most of those inquiries are an effort to keep the Russian collusion conspiracy alive, while others are aimed at opening up other pathways to impeachment — or at least endless speculation and media chatter about it.

Three other House Democrats are colluding with Nadler to form a four-pronged attack: Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings, and Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel (D-NY) simultaneously announced their investigations into Trump’s alleged collusion with Vladimir Putin.

Never mind that Special Prosecutor Mueller, whose investigation will likely conclude without evidence of Russian collusion, has already exhaustively probed this matter with far greater reach and resources than these House committees have. But this is not about, and never has been about, “collusion.”

Nadler outlined their impeachment strategy: “We must protect and respect the work of Special Counsel Mueller, but we cannot rely on others to do the investigative work for us. We have sent these document requests in order to begin building the public record. We do not now have the evidence all sorted out and everything to do an impeachment. Before you impeach somebody, you have to persuade the American public that it ought to happen.”

Nadler’s actions come just two weeks after billionaire Tom Steyer, a charter member of the Archenemies of Liberty club, held an impeachment rally in Nadler’s New York district. “The Special Counsel’s office and the Southern District of New York are aware that we are taking these steps,” said Nadler. “We will act quickly to gather this information, assess the evidence, and follow the facts where they lead with full transparency with the American people.”

They will not “act quickly.” They will not “follow the facts.” And this is most assuredly not about “full transparency with the American people.”

House members will haggle over their “findings” for the next year, until it’s politically feasible for a simple majority vote on impeachment. If they get that far, the case would then go to trial in the GOP-controlled Senate for a lot more theatrical Demo handwringing before it dies there ahead of the 2020 election.

Again, Democrats don’t actually have to undertake impeachment proceedings to continue obstructing Trump’s agenda; they just have to keep the narrative alive.

But some Republicans are certain they will actually pursue impeachment. Sen. Ted Cruz warned: “If anyone thinks that the Mueller report being concluded is the end of the Democrats’ attempt to take down President Trump, they haven’t been paying attention… They fully intend to impeach the president and they don’t care about the basis.”

For his part, Trump insists: “They realize the only Collusion with Russia was done by crooked Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. Nadler, Schiff and the Demo heads of the Committees have gone stone cold CRAZY — 81 letters sent to innocent people to harass them. They won’t get ANYTHING done for our Country! The greatest overreach in the history of our Country. The Dems are obstructing justice and will not get anything done. A big, fat, fishing expedition desperately in search of a crime, when in fact the real crime is what the Dems are doing, and have done!”

He added, “I cooperate all the time with everybody. It’s a political hoax. There’s no collusion. There’s no anything.”

White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders declared: “The American people deserve a Congress that works with the President to address serious issues like immigration, healthcare, and infrastructure. The Democrats are more interested in pathetic political games and catering to a radical, leftist base than on producing results for our citizens. Chairman Nadler and his fellow Democrats have embarked on this fishing expedition because they are terrified that their two-year false narrative of ‘Russia collusion’ is crumbling. The Democrats are not after the truth, they are after the President.”

Even former Obama strategist David Axelrod cautioned: “Maybe I’m missing something, but the hazard of an omnibus document demand by House judiciary … the wide-ranging nature of it too easily plays into the ‘witch-hunt’ meme.”

Political analyst Conrad Black notes that Nadler’s ruse won’t succeed: “As the abysmal, shaming failure of the Russian-collusion fraud reveals itself in the run-up to the production of the Mueller report, the president’s accusers, without even a subliminal hint of embarrassment, regret, or belated moderation, lower their sights. … Every conceivable epithet and charge has been hurled at Trump, and there is almost nothing to any of it. We’re only 20 months from the next election and the Democrats, with no show-stopper to disqualify Trump, are scrambling to the left like lemmings to mount a radical alternative to the incumbent. … The Democrats have had their long turn at mudslinging. Now professionally and discreetly, it is time to unearth the real scandal from the last election.”

Former federal prosecutor Joe DiGenova offered some advice to everyone on Nadler’s list: “This is a perjury trap. It is not a legitimate investigation; it’s a fishing expedition. They are trying to get people up there to make them look bad so they can try to make the president look bad. … This is a fraud … designed to smear people as witnesses and it is designed to perjury trap them and make phony referrals to the Justice Department. … No one should talk to this committee. Everyone should take the Fifth and if everyone takes the Fifth, the American people will understand that this isn’t a legitimate investigation. It’s political theater and disgraceful conduct approved of by the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.”

Fully ignored by the Leftmedia and yet fully ensnared within the Democrats’ political crossfire are the American people, whose jobs and income prospects will fall victim to the Demos’ politically induced recession — the direct result of having thrown economic confidence and prosperity under the bus in order to attack a sitting U.S. president.

As Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) concluded, “[Democrats] want Trump to lose more than they want the country to win.”

National Review’s Jim Geraghty concurred with a cautionary note: “If the economy goes into recession in 2019, President Trump may well relish having the Democratic-controlled House to blame. It’s unlikely that House Democrats will have much ability to influence U.S. economic policy, other than blocking any new initiatives from the Trump administration. But the timing for them would be pretty bad — they step into the new majority and the economy suddenly slows on their watch.”

As I noted in 2017, shortly after Trump took office, “The day he arrived in DC, he dropped a bomb on the status quo in Congress and its special interests. He dropped a bomb on the regulatory behemoths and their bureaucratic bottlenecks. He dropped a bomb on the trade and national security institutions and alliances that failed miserably over the previous eight years. And he dropped a bomb on all the pundits and mainstream media outlets.”

Consequently, the Democrats have been focused on a single all-consuming agenda item: a return to power over the American people.

And make no mistake, the current crop of socialist Democrats will stop at nothing. Like generations of socialists before them, they’re fully willing to crush American workers and families — the “Forgotten Man,” including many of their own constituents — in their relentless pursuit to restore their power.

Recall that as Nancy Pelosi took the speaker’s gavel in January, Trump declared, “As I have stated many times, if the Democrats take over the House or Senate, there will be disruption to the financial markets. We won the Senate, they won the House.”

But the Democrats’ failure to retake the Senate does not lessen their threat to our nation’s economy.

Relentlessly attacking Trump and blocking his administration’s MAGA agenda may well get Democrats the recession they’re hoping for ahead of the 2020 elections. If that happens, tens of millions of American workers and their families will be its casualties.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis

Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776