Meanwhile, while all this bitter domestic controversy had America increasingly separated into two hostile political camps, November 2018 came around and with that came the midterm Congressional elections (all House seats up for election and one third of the Senate seats).  Traditionally this was a bad time for the party of the individual in the White House.  The Democrats were expecting a big win.  They were convinced that with the help of the strongly anti-Trump "mainstream" press (CNN, MSNBC, ABC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, etc., even the British BBC!) they had awakened the nation to the various dangers facing the nation if Trump and the Republicans were not stopped cold with these coming elections:  the ecological disaster awaiting the world in the coming decade if climate change is not stopped; college would become totally unaffordable if tuition is not supported with "free" public funding; the cruelty in the way the masses of Central Americans were treated at the border by America's border security agency; the criminal nature of America's support of the Fascist nation Israel; and of course the ongoing investigation into the Trump-Russia connection.  Little mention was made of the growing problem of the uncontrollable national debt, or the dangers facing America abroad with the change in the international power structure favoring a rising Russia, Islamic Middle East, a still-crazy North Korean dictator pursuing nuclear development, and, most important of all, a China coming ever more tightly under the control of a very ambitious president-for-life Xi Jinping. Those issues were of no interest to a scandal-hungry press – and new political candidates seeking entry into the world of national politics.

Indeed, in the House, elections produced the expected political turnover, when the previous 241 to 194 Republican majority reversed to a 235 to 199 Democratic majority.  Thus House Democratic Party leader Nancy Pelosi was able to return to her position as Speaker of the House, a position that she had previously held from 2007 to 2011 (when then for the next eight years Republicans took control of the House).

But most unusually, the Republicans gained two seats in the Senate, giving them a 53 to 45 majority position (plus 2 independents).  Since most federal appointments are confirmed only in the Senate, this did not bode well for the Democrats.  Trump would continue to be able to fill federal posts, including the Federal Judiciary, with conservatives.

The House is the source of all impeachment proceedings.  And now with a Democratic Party majority there, the voices of impeachment would ring ever louder.  Of course there was no likelihood of a Senate conviction on any articles of impeachment coming from the House because of the huge Republican majority there.  But the House's impeachment hearings would nonetheless make a great political spectacle for ambitious Democrats, looking to head the Democratic Party's presidential nomination for the up-coming 2020 national elections.

Thus Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Jerry Nadler, chair of the House Judiciary Committee; and Elijah Cummings, chair of the House Oversight Committee, all set their Democrat-controlled committees to the task of holding well-publicized hearings on the issue of criminal behavior of the Trump White House.

A major target was Trump's personal finances, which under the law are indeed private.  But they wanted such protections set aside, convinced that if they could get their hands on his tax returns or bank statements, they would find something incriminating that they then could also bring specific charges against Trump, and get the people's enemy out of the White House.  This now became the major preoccupation of the House's most powerful committees.

What was even more amazing about the way American politics had come to take on a very different character than what it had been over the ages was the ability of three freshman congresswomen, the Hispanic, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York), and the Muslims, Ilhan Omar (Minnesota) and Rashida Tlaib (Michigan), to hold the American press in awe.  Usually freshman congressmen and congresswomen have a long way to go in congressional service before they begin to have any political weight to throw around.

Actually, Obama had achieved something of the same reshaping of seniority priorities in the Senate when as merely a freshman senator he was able to run for the presidency.  It was increasingly clear that "minorities" (not White, male, straight, elderly, etc.) now interested the press – greatly so.

Leading the pack within mere weeks of her taking office was the very young (only 29) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, soon so well-known by the press that she was referred to simply as AOC, proposing to America her "Green New Deal," to save the planet from an approaching ecological disaster – by enforcing environmental controls on the nation, costly measures that nonetheless would be paid for by a 70 percent tax on the earnings of the American wealthy!  Furthermore she amazed the world when she headed off the enormous American company, Amazon, from its plans to establish a national office in her New York City district, claiming that Amazon's placement there would upset the cultural character of the neighborhood (yes, but would have brought countless jobs to the neighborhood as well).  Furthermore, she made it clear that she was not afraid to use the old much-feared label for herself: "Socialist."  The press loved her.

To the great chagrin of the Democratic Party, the Mueller probe finally ended in early 2019 with the publication of its findings, with no call for criminal charges against Trump.  True, a number of people surrounding Trump had been sent to prison, or at least had their careers destroyed because of the findings of the probe. But Trump himself was not among that group.  Democrats of course claimed inside influences by Trump on the investigation itself, blaming Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein in particular as having somehow turned the investigation in Trump's favor.  Thus investigation of the investigation itself became the new order of the day in Congress (the Democratic-controlled House anyway).

Also interesting was that the Mueller report basically left untouched the matter of how this whole issue came up in the first place, notably the Steele dossier that set off the call for these investigations.  But that would be a matter which would bring Trump forward, demanding that it was time now to investigate the Hillary connection (and possibly also Obama) with all this Trump-Russia scandal.

But the Democrat-controlled House was not really interested.

Failing to get any traction with the Mueller report, the Democrats soon stumbled onto what they hoped was a new opportunity to move the planned impeachment proceedings forward.  At first the House's Democratic Party leader Nancy Pelosi was strongly set against continuing the impeachment movement, fearing that this was serving merely to work against the party's national standing. 

But then in August (2019) an "unidentified whistleblower" passed on to the Democrat Adam Schiff's House Intelligence Committee a report that on July 25, Trump in a phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky requested of him help in getting information concerning possible Ukrainian interference in the 2016 American elections.  But Trump also asked him to look into the involvement of former Vice President (also a leading 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate) Joe Biden in a huge Ukrainian corruption scandal.  This corruption had become a matter of great importance to the Obama administration because the U.S. was funding heavily Ukraine's efforts to hold on to its independence in the face of enormous pressures coming from Putin's Russia.  But much of the American funding seemed to have been funneled off to the pockets of very corrupt individuals high up in Ukrainian politics.

Included among those corrupt organizations was the Ukrainian natural gas company, Burisma Holdings, a company closely tied in with the Ukrainian government and famous for its political corruption. Trump was particularly interested in Burisma because while all this back and forth between Biden and Ukraine was going on in 2014, Biden's son, Hunter, was placed on Burisma's board of directors.  Hunter thus served from 2014 up until April of 2019 – receiving $50,000 a month in compensation (at the very least) for his services. 

Was Hunter's involvement part of the corrupt "insider deals" rampant at the time? Or was he placed there to try to block those same deals?  That question was the matter of interest to Trump.

Trump's request in itself was not exactly illegal, though politically questionable – depending on his motive for doing so.  Anyway, Trump admitted to just such a phone call.  The real question was, did the president tie this request to his decision earlier to suspend $391 million in military aid to Ukraine as "quid pro quo" (this for that) pressure solely to undertake this Biden investigation (the money was finally released in September anyway)? 

Trump said no, there was no connection.  He stated that he was concerned simply about the high level of corruption in general in Ukraine and reluctant to release funds until there was greater assurance that the Ukrainian government had a better grip on the loss of money through graft.

But those wanting Trump impeached said yes, that the ultimate purpose of the withholding of the funds was solely to utilize foreign (Ukrainian) intervention in order to undercut the candidacy of Biden – an illegal act under America's political campaign laws.  So what were the exact grounds for impeachment here?  At this point it got to be a case of whose version of Trump's motives one was to believe.

In any case, Trump was in no mood to be dragged before Congress to be interrogated by a hostile Schiff and his Democrats – and simply refused to appear on Capitol Hill.  So now the issue for the committee became one, not of activity involving the national elections or the Ukraine connection … but of Trump's "obstruction of Congress" and "abuse of power." 

So those two very vague procedural matters were what the Democrat-controlled House finally decided to impeach Trump over.

The Ukrainian issue was dropped because it had become increasingly clear that pushing on that issue was not going to work well for the Democrats … and in fact might actually do some considerable damage to Biden if there was too much digging into the details of the event.  So that part got dropped.

Thus on December 18th (2019) the House passed impeachment charges against Trump on those two counts, "obstruction of Congress" and "abuse of power." Unsurprisingly, the vote was almost completely along party lines … again, making the matter one of pure politics rather than the law.  But then on February 5 (2020) it was dismissed by the Senate.  There was no way that any Democrat-dominated House impeachment was going to get even close to a 2/3s vote needed to convict in the Republican-dominated Senate … although the "abuse of power" article did get the support of Republican Mitt Romney, another Republican whom the Trump mouth had succeeded in converting into a dedicated political opponent.

This was clearly a case of partisan politics, not the law, as indeed the impeachment urge had been since its origins in early 2017 … in fact every time it had been brought into play since the 1970s. And unfortunately, what the American public would be forced to make of this now on-going event would be shaped (as always) entirely by the way the media wanted to present the "facts" of the case itself.

In any case, it appeared that "impeachment" was now going to serve as a regular instrument of American politics, to be called on to cripple the White House by a hostile Congress … even though the 2/3's Senate vote requirement was going to make it difficult to ever get a conviction.  But the impeachment proceedings would of themselves offer all sorts of political opportunity for an anti-White-House congressional opposition … not to mention a scandal-hungry national press.

This was a very bad policy to be bringing into America's national political arena.  But it was there … fully supported by Congressional leaders who should have known how dangerous such a new political procedure could make America's national political life.  This was nothing more than sleazy Third-World political antics ... used regularly to negate national elections that did not go in the direction that certain politicians were wanting them to go.  That is to say, elections themselves would no longer be treated as final in their outcomes.  There would no longer be any graceful concessions by the defeated contestant … but instead simply an on-going contest of the election decision.