There is widespread reporting that the Democrats are planning to draft three or four Articles of Impeachment. Bribery is very likely to be one of them. Despite there being no offer or acceptance in the July 25 phone call between Presidents Trump and Zelensky, the Democrats have focus grouped the word “bribery” and it is listed in the Constitution.

The words “treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors” are in Article II, Section Four of the U.S. Constitution. The Democrats and the legacy media (I know, redundant.) tell us that those words mean whatever Congress says they mean:

Under the Constitution, a president can be impeached for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” — terminology that has been the subject of some debate.

Gerald Ford, a former U.S. president, famously said while in Congress that “an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.

Gerald Ford was wrong. If this were true, any President could be impeached, but maybe not convicted, any time a majority of Congress got their collective knickers in a knot. To paraphrase Adam Shiff, “We are better than that”.

The Democrats had two weeks of the most stultifying and inane testimony in the history of the Galaxy. There were third-person telephone conversations overheard at outdoor restaurants in Kiev (pronounced Keev, not Key-ev, we learned.), a chest and resume puffing Army officer, and career bureaucratic diplomats who got their feelings hurt that they weren’t listened to by the President.

The Democrats, led by Schiff, feel they have made their case to the American public and are now settling in to prepare the Articles of Impeachment. Fox News reported:

Abuse of power. Bribery. Contempt of Congress. Obstruction of justice.

Those are the four potential articles of impeachment that House Judiciary Committee Democrats could draw up against President Trump as soon as next month, Fox News is told, after all scheduled public hearings before the House Intelligence Committee wrapped up on a testy note Thursday.

At a meeting with top GOP senators and Trump administration officials at the White House on Thursday afternoon, Fox News is told there was a consensus that should Trump be impeached by the House, the GOP-controlled Senate should hold a full trial, rather than ignore the issue.

Abuse of Power? The President was being a good steward of the peoples’ hard-earned money, I believe. Contempt of Congress? They are worthy of contempt, but we’ll have to see what the Democrats make up. Obstruction of Justice? Trump has fought back and the Democrats consider that obstructing their attempts to falsely impeach him. Let’s focus on bribery.

“Bribery Is Right There in the Constitution” writes The Atlantic. The author, a law professor, is writing of the July 25 phone call:

Defenders of the president, such as the Fox News host Laura Ingraham, have said that Trump’s actions are, at worst, “attempted bribery,” not bribery itself.

In making this argument, they are relying on the facts that the military aid was ultimately delivered to Ukraine and that the Ukrainian president never made a public statement announcing those investigations that President Trump wanted. Because things didn’t go as President Trump wanted, some seem to think that he can’t be guilty of bribery—he only attempted to commit bribery. This distinction matters, according to Ingraham, because “attempted bribery isn’t in the Constitution.”

Here is Speaker Nancy Pelosi explaining Trump’s bribery, from CBS Evening News:

I cannot assert more strongly that I believe that bribery, quid pro quo, or conditionality all constitute diplomacy. State actors say, “You do this for me, and I’ll do that for you.”.

But, what if all of these learned, public servants are wrong about bribery in the Constitution. Andrew McCarthy is a lawyer, former U.S. Assistant District Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and one smart man. In 1995, he led the prosecution of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman and others in the first bombing of the World Trade Center. McCarthy believes that all of those involved in this most recent impeachment scheme don’t understand the intent of the Founding Fathers, when they wrote the Constitution. He wrote in National Review:

For present purposes, though, I want to focus on bribery — specifically, on what the Framers had in mind when they wrote bribery into the Constitution as a predicate for impeachment.

Hint: It was not the above-described federal bribery statute, the current version of which was enacted in 1962, some 175 years after the Constitution was written.

The Framers made “Treason, Bribery, and other high Crimes and Misdemeanors” the triggers for impeachment. Obviously, they were referring to bribery of a high order, on the scale of treason. The latter offense involves making war on the U.S., including giving the enemy aid and comfort. Enemies are foreign powers with which we are at war. The Framers, however, were worried that other foreign powers — even ones with which we are at peace — could corrupt an American president. Bribery was meant to fill that gap. It made impeachment available if a president was bribed by a foreign power to put the might of the United States in the service of the foreign power at the expense of the American people.

Get that? The Framers weren’t worried about our President bribing another Head of State. The Founding Fathers worried that another State actor would try to bribe an American President.

It is so important to understand the intent of each word in the Constitution. The Founding Fathers argued over every word. They meant what they wrote. Every word.

If this weren’t just a scheme to rid themselves of a President they despise, the Democrats would try to understand the Constitution. This is just Impeachment Scheme 4.0. And, the Democrats are not serious persons. They are venal, angry, bitter people.

We Republicans must scream this from the rooftops. This is not what they Founding Fathers meant by bribery. Remember, that the Democrats hate us more than they hate Trump.

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