Impeach watch: The Hole in the Dem Case

The Washington Examiner’s Byron York writes: “There’s no question House Democrats are determined to impeach President Trump. Some have been trying since shortly after his inauguration.” Yet their Ukraine-based case for removing him suffers from the same problem as “their case against the president in the Russia matter” — to wit, “they are accusing Trump of attempted crimes that never actually came to fruition.” For ­example, “in the Russia affair, Democrats hoped to show that the Trump campaign” colluded with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election — only have the claim debunked by special counsel Robert Mueller. Likewise, Dems are now touting a lawless “quid pro quo” with Kiev: military aid in exchange for Ukrainian dirt on Joe Biden. But even assuming Trump ­offered such an exchange, “it wasn’t done,” and “he dropped it.” An attempted quid pro quo isn’t the same thing as an actual one, which means “the Democratic case is perhaps not as strong as they would have you believe.”

Defense desk: Missile Defense Now

“Missile technology is advancing fast,” warns Christian Josi at The American Spectator, “but we can’t afford to simply wait for the next generation to deploy new and improved defenses.” To successfully protect “the United States from missile attack,” the nation needs a complicated, layered missile-defense system, and America has already made significant progress. Defense bureaucrats who are “taking steps that would slow down the development of the existing” system are thus making “a mistake.” The Pentagon, Josi argues, “needs to keep experimenting” to “help the program keep improving.” Or else the risk leaves the “country vulnerable at a time when countries such as Iran, North Korea, and even the recent wild card Turkey, are developing nuclear weapons that could threaten the homeland.”

Culture beat: Kanye Comes to Jesus

Kanye West has found God, opening up “about his porn addiction and why he banned his ‘Jesus Is King’ crew from engaging in premarital sex,” reports Andy Sahadeo at Fox News. The rapper came face-to-face with his porn habit a year after his mother’s death in 2017. As he told an interviewer, “some people drown themselves in drugs. And I drown myself in my addiction. . . . That’s what fed the ego, too. Money, clothes, cars, accolades, social media, paparazzi photos, going to Paris Fashion Week, all of that.” That is, until the “power of God” and “religion” helped him overcome the weight of sin.

Conservative: How America Became the Knicks

National Review’s Jim Geraghty thinks presidential candidate Andrew Yang “has a point” when he cites New York Knicks owner Jim Dolan’s “abysmal decisions” as a metaphor for the “arrogant, dismissive and incompetent brand of leadership flourishing in American life.” Many Americans would like to trust the “leaders and cultures” of America’s big institutions — the Catholic Church, the military, police and the like, “to say nothing of our faith in government at all levels.” Yet the “leaders of those institutions have betrayed that faith far too often in recent years and decades” — much like Dolan and his feckless team. No, the hyper-educated Yang is “probably not going to be the next president,” but his Knicks metaphor is both smart and something even “non-Ph.D.s can relate to.”

Energy wonk: Who Hyped the Electric Car?

The electric vehicle “is central to the notion that we’re on the cusp of a grand shift to a ‘new-energy economy,’ ” observes Mark Mills in City Journal. Each day brings new euphoric claims: that the cars are “easier to manufacture,” for instance, or that they “use less labor and will eventually cost less.” But not so fast. Yes, there are more of these cars on the road than ever before, but a lot of this growth is due to “mandates” to reduce fossil fuels and government subsidies to dealers to encourage sales of these “expensive” cars. Plus, electric cars aren’t even as green as the hype suggests. The 1,000-pound batteries require an “array of primary materials” like lithium, so producing them at “automotive scales would lead to an unprecedented global expansion in mining, with all the accompanying negative environmental effects.” Bottom line: “Rarely have so many claims about a product been so wrong.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board