On Tuesday, Nancy Pelosi refused to hold a vote in the House of Representatives on impeachment using the formal impeachment process, which would grant President Trump due process by forcing all 435 members – both Democrats and Republicans – to say whether or not they are in favor of impeachment.
Instead, Pelosi has defended a closed-door approach to the impeachment inquiry and keeping meetings largely under wraps from Republicans – even cutting off the mike of House Minority Leader Republican Steven Scalise when he asked on the House floor if “the House been authorized to conduct an impeachment inquiry into President Trump?”
Just one day prior to this, Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz had been kicked out of a meeting regarding impeachment by Adam Schiff.
Pelosi's defense of such a secretive, closed-door means of handling the impeachment inquiry against President Trump has legal experts, journalists, and politicians alike worried that the Democrat party is spawning a "Star Chamber" court in America.
The Star Chamber was a 16th-17th century court in England that did not give defendants due process, met in secret, gave verdicts with no chance of being appealed, and usually gave out cruel punishments. It was one of the things that drove folks overseas to America to settle the first colonies.
"Schifty" Schiff's lies with regards to the "whistleblower" that started the whole impeachment circus aren't making anything better!
The Epoch Times has more to say about the "Star Chamber" fears emerging from the sketchy impeachment inquiry:
The closed-doors have civil rights-law experts such as Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies noting that Star Chamber oppression, especially during the reigns of Kings Henry VII and Charles I, prompted the founders to include strong due process guarantees in the Constitution.
“We established basic rules of due process in this country in order to avoid the way things had been done in England with secret, anonymous accusations, with witnesses you couldn’t confront and cross-examine,” von Spakovsky told The Epoch Times on Oct. 15.
“I mean, all the kinds of things the way Star Chambers operated, and even though impeachment isn’t a legal prosecution or legal case in the courts, it is such a serious undertaking, with such substantial consequences that those same basic rules of due process should apply even more so than in court,” he said.
“Other than declaring war, there is no more serious undertaking by the House of Representatives than impeachment because they are removing a duly elected president and over-turning the choices of the American electorate,” von Spakovsky noted.
A former Department of Justice counsel, von Spakovsky was a member of the Federal Election Commission for two years.
Mark Fitzgibbons, president of corporate affairs for Virginia-based American Target Advertising, is an expert in federal administrative law.
He told The Epoch Times on Oct. 16 that “comparisons of this secretive, unconstitutional impeachment process to the Star Chamber are appropriate because impeachment is an adjudicative process, not legislative, even though conducted by Congress.”
The Pelosi-Schiff process to date “violates constitutional rights by, at a minimum, prohibiting confrontation of witnesses and violating due process. It has become a dangerous mockery of the constitutional process,” Fitzgibbons said.
Brian Darling, former counsel to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and an authority on congressional rules, told The Epoch Times, “The fact that House Democrats are departing from precedent shows this is not a fair process, and President Trump will be impeached by the House no matter what evidence is presented to the contrary. The great risk for Democrats is that the American people correctly discern this to be a wholly partisan effort.”
Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani has also expressed such fears.
As Fox News noted:
President Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani blasted Democrats' impeachment inquiry of the president as a "one-side Star Chamber investigation" designed to trap President Donald Trump and protect former Vice President Joe Biden and the legacy of the Obama administration.
"Basically [Democrats] want to say 'Let's give Biden a pass, like we gave Hillary a pass, like we gave the crooked Clinton Foundation a pass, and what I say is they know the problem," Giuliani said on Fox Nation's "Reality Check with David Webb." "They have a major pay-for-play scheme at the core of the Obama administration. And you know how Obama goes around saying there were no scandals during his administration... it's going to turn out that he's had scandals that equal the Teapot Dome and they're all worried about it."
On Monday, the Democrat-led House Intelligence Committee issued a subpoena for Giuliani to appear before their panel, as part of Democrats' formal impeachment inquiry announced by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., last week.
Giuliani and others have pointed out that Pelosi broke from historical precedent by declaring an "official" impeachment inquiry, instead of calling for a full vote in the House to open a formal inquiry, which is how impeachment proceedings have been handled in the recent past.
The Wall Street Journal Editoral Page wrote last week, "This isn’t how impeachment worked against Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. In those cases, the full House voted to authorize the Judiciary Committee to investigate if impeachment was warranted."
Also missing from the Democrats' current impeachment proceedings is an opportunity for the House minority -- in this case, Republicans -- to participate in the investigation.
Joel Pollak of Bretibart also had the following to say about how Pelosi and Schiff are handling the impeachment inquiry, especially with regards to witnesses and due process:
What is actually happening is that the Democrats are trying to violate existing processes for interviewing witnesses. As Secretary of State noted in a letter Tuesday to Rep. Eliot Engel (D-CA), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Democrats are telling State Department staff that they are compelled to testify without issuing subpoenas, or even providing formal notice — and without giving them time to consult with their own lawyers.
Defending the rights of potential witnesses is not “obstruction.” It is fundamental to our system of justice.
And note that there is one witness that Schiff and the Democrats will not allow the president to call. Schiff and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) continue to deny President Donald Trump the right to confront his accuser, the so-called “whistleblower,” a right arguably guaranteed under the Sixth Amendment. No, the president does not face a criminal prosecution, but an impeachment inquiry is meant to be a public process, not a Star Chamber or a Stalinesque show trial. Democrats act as if the hearsay “whistleblower” can be concealed forever.
Pelosi even continues to claim that an “impeachment inquiry” is not the same as an “impeachment.” She will not force Democrats to take a politically difficult vote to authorize a formal impeachment investigation, so she is just making up the rules as she goes along. That puts President Trump in the Kafkaesque position of not only being accused of things that are not crimes, but also being uncertain if he is being formally accused of anything at all.
Schiff, Pelosi, and the Democrats are behaving like totalitarians — perhaps providing a taste of what the public can expect if Democrats win in 2020.
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