Donald J. Trump may be only the third U.S. president to be impeached. I say “may” because the Democrat-led Judiciary Committee’s star legal scholar witness, Harvard Professor Noah Feldman, has cast significant doubt on whether a House impeachment vote without actual delivery of the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate qualifies as impeachment (his fellow Harvard legal scholar Laurence Tribe takes a different view).
In January, assuming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi transmits the articles, the Senate will weigh in along with our own senator, Cory Gardner.
Gardner has remained mostly silent on this impeachment, the shortest, thinnest, narrowest and only partisan impeachment in modern U.S. history.
Instead, he’s met with Colorado constituents over 200 times this year, according to his campaign staff, including 50 events in August alone, and accomplished great things for Coloradans such as bringing the BLM to Grand Junction, the Space Force to Colorado Springs, pushing for hard sanctions against Russia, promoting his three-digit suicide hotline proposal and much more.
I expect Gardner to join with at least 50 other Republicans to stop the impeachment charade quickly and work with Trump in and out of Colorado for the benefit of our nation and their own re-elections.
Though Gardner is not regularly on TV discussing impeachment, his thoughts on the matter are easily found. He signed onto the (Sen. Lindsey) Graham Resolution and publicly expressed early opposition to the impeachment inquiry itself with comments like: “I had hoped Speaker Pelosi would turn away from the sharp partisanship that has driven the House process, but she has not.”
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His campaign reported that “Senator Gardner believes Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment inquiry to appease the far-left has been a total circus that has only served to divide this country.” The resolution Gardner signed describes a multitude of problems in the conduct of the inquiry, including a lack of fairness to the “accused,” a lack of due process, selective leaks, selective releases of only certain closed-door testimonies and much, much more.
Gardner is absolutely right about the impeachment inquiry as I have laid out in other forums such as my Facebook page and Twitter. It has been a purely political exercise by a desperate, radical, leftist-controlled Democrat Party that knows it can’t win the presidency in 2020 with Trump in the way.
Once the impeachment process is over, whether by default, acquittal, or full exoneration, the nation will be looking ahead to the Nov. 3, 2020, election where the fates of the two men are tied at the hip. The president can win re-election without our senator, but Gardner cannot win re-election without Trump.
Gardner must decide if he agrees with those pundits who claim that Trump is toxic to other candidates in Colorado. This claim is based primarily on the Blue Wave that hit Colorado in 2018, but is questionable in light of the fact that Trump performed better in Colorado (-4.9% to Hillary Clinton) than his two Republican presidential candidate predecessors, John McCain (-9%) in 2008 and Mitt Romney (-5.4%) in 2012. I and others believe that there are significant numbers of right-leaning voters who voted in 2016, but not 2018 when Trump was not on the ballot. Democrats have created and perfected a machine in Colorado for identifying voters and harvesting ballots. But, Republicans have learned from the Democrat Blueprint and the incredible first-term results of the Trump presidency will matter in Colorado.
Gardner doesn’t talk a lot about Trump. But his campaign freely affirms that the two men talk at least once per week on average. Gardner is the point man for Trump’s Asia policy, votes with Trump over 90% of the time to reduce taxes and regulation, strengthen the military, etc., and has helped confirm Trump’s record-setting number of constitutionally conservative federal judges (Two Supreme Court Justices and approximately 185 others) including 11 on the day the House voted to impeach the president.
Working together, Trump and Gardner have delivered a historic period of economic growth, a strengthened and better paid military, increased wages (especially among lower wage-earners), full employment, and increased opportunity for Colorado and the nation.
These are demonstrable results that will also deliver nine Electoral College votes for President Donald J. Trump and a second term for Sen. Cory Gardner in 2020.
Randy B. Corporon is a Denver native, husband, dad and granddad who dropped out of high school at 15, worked as a mechanic for 20 years and is now in his 22nd year as a trial lawyer. He chairs the Arapahoe Tea Party, is on the Executive Committee for the Arapahoe County GOP and does talk radio Saturday mornings and fill-in on 710 KNUS AM.