Betsy's right: High crimes and misdemeanors means offenses committed while in high office

It's not the severity of the crime which makes it high, but it damn well better be a crime. Democrats haven't been able to come up with one despite turning themselves and the country into pretzels.

And Trump's tax returns from the past and his dalliances from the past and why he named his son "Barron" are all completely irrelevant, as is everything else he's done while not in office. Those things matter only at election time.

Here's Betsy:

At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, the framers considered grounds for impeachment. On Sept. 8, George Mason suggested that bribery and treason were too narrow, and proposed adding "maladministration." But James Madison objected, explaining that "so vague a term will be equivalent to" saying the president serves at the pleasure of the Congress. The framers did not want to duplicate the British system, which made the executive dependent on Parliament. Mason's idea was dropped, and the framers instead agreed to the more specific term, "high crimes and misdemeanors," where "high" meant offenses committed while in high office, such as embezzling public funds.

Speaker Paul Ryan lectures us to be ideologues and remains ignorant of how our founders appealed to English identity

In March, the Speaker informed us thusly:

"I want to talk about what our country can be…about what our Founders envisioned it to be. America is the only nation founded an idea—not an identity. That idea is the notion that the condition of your birth does not determine the outcome of your life. Our rights are natural. They come from God, not government."

George Mason, principal author of the Fairfax County Resolves of 1774 in response to the Coercive Acts, in 1776 begged to differ:

"We claim nothing but the liberty and privileges of Englishmen in the same degree, as if we had continued among our brethren in Great Britain."

So also Supreme Court Justice Joseph Bradley in 1873:

"The people of this country brought with them to its shores the rights of Englishmen, the rights which had been wrested from English sovereigns at various periods of the nation's history.... England has no written constitution, it is true, but it has an unwritten one, resting in the acknowledged, and frequently declared, privileges of Parliament and the people, to violate which in any material respect would produce a revolution in an hour. A violation of one of the fundamental principles of that constitution in the Colonies, namely, the principle that recognizes the property of the people as their own, and which, therefore, regards all taxes for the support of government as gifts of the people through their representatives, and regards taxation without representation as subversive of free government, was the origin of our own revolution."

What's wrong with conservatism in America is that it has forgotten all this, if it ever knew it at all.