I thought this week we'd turn from Brexit to take a look at the President Trump impeachment story, at least until the new year. On the subject of the new year, one of the people I'm hoping to see recognised in the new year honours list is Jeremy Corbyn for services to the Conservative Party.

Anyway, the impeachment story, or saga, or mess, or as it will probably later be known: that time President Trump's opponents alienated enough people that they all but guaranteed his re-election. It's really a bit like if Keir Starmer had spent too much time on Facebook and later tried to win over the rest of the public by claiming that Boris Johnson flying a union jack constituted a hate crime and demanded he be arrested. How does the American system work though?

Under the US system, if the house of representatives have evidence of serious wrongdoing, then they can pass a motion for an impeachment trial to be held in the senate. Note that these are meant to be serious criminal things, it's only happened a handful of times in several hundred years but of course it's President Trump so if they could then his opponents would probably impeach him for stealing a pen from the doctors office or bumping the side of a vending machine.

And so for 2 years they've been trying to find some evidence but the Russia conspiracy didn't work out so they went for corruption, then bribery, then abuse of power, then obstructing Justice but they annoyingly they still didn't have a shred of evidence, and to make things worse President Trump released all the call transcripts of him and the Ukrainian president showing that everything was above board and no wrongdoing took place. But then the Democrats won a majority so they decided to go with it anyway and they've now told that Senate that they *have* to have that trial, at an unspecified time, in the next few months, as soon as they can find something, anything, to prove that he's guilty of something, other than winning that darned election 3 years ago.

It should be noted that this is also all being pushed by new congressmen who ran on an election pledge this year to impeach the president regardless of "evidence" and the whole thing makes about as much sense as inviting Peter Sutcliffe on as a Question Time guest. Labour's Brexit position made more sense then this impeachment proceeding and yet we're now going to see it steamroller everything in its path with more legal back and forth then if you tripped over a floor mat in a personal injury lawyer's office, "yeah son, let's see who's responsible for that accident now"

Beyond the fresh-faced new politicians, the older Democratic leadership to an extent also forced this through by a need for PR ahead of important fundraising for next year's election but it was astonishing to see the actual debate where both sides stood up in turn with someone announcing the crimes saying they'd vote yes, and the republicans saying they'd vote no because there wasn't any evidence of wrong-doing, just a will to get President Trump removed from office before he can be re-elected. That I think is the real point here: only politicians get to vote on the impeachment and the only way the Democrats can prevent a 2nd term is to keep the general public as far away from the decision making process as humanly possible.