Michigan Rep. Shri Thanedar isn’t the first Democrat to file quixotic, attention-grabbing articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump on entirely specious grounds.
He break new ground, however, in being the first known mass serial animal abuser ever to do it. Take that, Al Green!
Thanedar, a first-term Democrat who’s already facing a tough primary challenge — thus, you can probably guess at the why behind this stunt — introduced seven articles of impeachment against Trump this past week.
The reasons including obstruction of justice, usurpation of appropriations power, violation of First Amendment rights, creation of an unlawful office (the Department of Government Efficiency — which technically isn’t a new office, but this isn’t a guy who cares about details), and “bribery and corruption,” among other things.
Basically: Everything short of shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die. (I really shouldn’t give the guy ideas, even if they’re technically Johnny Cash’s.)
“Donald Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that he is unfit to serve as president and represents a clear and present danger to our nation’s constitution and our democracy,” Rep. Thanedar said in a media release.
“His unlawful actions have subverted the justice system, violated the separation of powers, and placed personal power and self-interest above public service. We cannot wait for more damage to be done. Congress must act.”
Democrats in Congress did act … by pulling their support from Thanedar’s articles where it existed. Co-sponsoring Democratic Reps. Kweisi Mfume of Maryland, Robin Kelly of Illinois, and Jerry Nadler of New York all pulled their name from the package once they realized it had less support in reality than it had on paper, and it had virtually none on paper.
But it gets more darkly comic — albeit sickening, if you’re an animal lover. Unique among Trump impeachment-mongers in the House, Thanedar has long been attached to animal abuse allegations after an animal research facility he owned in New Jersey closed in 2010.
Should those guilty of animal cruelty be subjected to the same cruelty they perpetrated on animals?
As the HuffPost reported in 2018, when Thanedar was a Michigan gubernatorial candidate, AniClin Preclinical Services was forced to close after its parent company went under. When it did, roughly 170 dogs and monkeys had to be rescued from the lab his company ran after they were left to rot inside the facility.
From a USA Today report about the group that rescued the abandoned beagles at the facility:
They had lived the most sterile, regimented lives imaginable.
Day after day, month after month, year after year, they were confined to plexiglass crates, fed and watered on precise schedules, kept clean. But with no opportunity to leave their solitary little boxes and spend time with others like themselves, with nothing but the most antiseptic contact with humans and no time outside the gleaming, climate-controlled facility, the 118 beagles — lab dogs used to test drugs and chemicals—displayed nothing of the much-acclaimed breed characteristics: joyful, noisy and curious.
Another 55 long-tailed macaque monkeys also were left to fester in the facility.
At the time, Thanedar said that Bank of America had taken control of the operation and it was their responsibility.
“I have no knowledge how well the bank took care of the animals,” he said.
“It is my understanding that Bank of America made arrangements to assign caretakers for the animals and secure homes for them, but those decisions came from the bank after I left the company,” Thanedar said. “I am an animal lover and completely understand the sensitivity of this issue.”
Yes, because the please stay on the line, your call is very important to us, but not really people are going to take fantastic care of lab animals. That’s his excuse? Would you like to phone a lawy… er, friend, Shri?
I get it: lab animal testing is brutal but necessary. Once it ceases to become necessary, however, one has a certain responsibility — and that responsibility is not to hand care of over a hundred dogs and 50 monkeys to Bank of America, especially when nonprofit rescue groups were more than capable of handling the task once they heard about it.
And none of this would matter if it weren’t for a mote-in-your-eye, log-in-mine thinking that went behind these impeachment articles. They’re less than non-substantive; they’re anti-substantive, given that none of them are high crimes or misdemeanors or true.
This would just be inane if it had come from one of those clean-as-a-whistle backbenchers both parties have. (Hi there, Rep. Massie!)
Instead, it came from an opportunistic, embattled mass beagle-abandoner. Dems really have a knack for picking the worst heroes possible, don’t they? I mean, say what you will about Al Green and his stupid cane-waving antics, at least he doesn’t have to defend keeping over a hundred dogs in cages when there was no reason for them to still be there and insisting, by way of an excuse, that he figured they’d be in good hands with Bank of America. That’s next-level insulting, and not just to dog lovers.
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