The partisan farce that is President Donald Trump Impeachment Theater is a political puppet show, a diversion that covers a truly titanic battle obscured by the dancing marionettes.
The audience knows how the Democratic impeachment show ends, with likely acquittal by the Republican majority in the Senate.
Some must figure Trump's impeachment has been designed by Democrats to continue their delegitimization of the president. And, aided as they are by their liberal Beltway media handmaidens, they seek to weaken the Republican hold on the Senate.
But what this is really about is Democratic desperation to protect their true source of power. It's just off-stage, in the wings of the theater -- the magic weapon they need to continue remaking America in their own image:
The federal administrative state.
This administrative state is driven by the Kemalist bureaucrats who write the law and protect the state from the people, and by the liberal federal judges who empower them.
It is a state plopped down on top of the republic from the time of President Woodrow Wilson and the beginning of progressivism, if not before, originally as a reasonable response to the excesses of the robber barons who bought politicians and ruled feudal American empires.
And now that administrative state has grown so large, it reaches into every aspect of Americans' lives.
It gives liberals power they can't otherwise achieve over the middle class that they've abandoned, as Democrats align themselves with the new robber barons, the high-tech giants who help make up the new Democratic coalition.
I've touched on this before, and my friend Charles Lipson, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Chicago, has made it a focus of recent writings in Real Clear Politics, as have others.
It is this administrative state that Trump, through his appointment of scores of federal judges and two Supreme Court justices, is waging war against. His attack on the administrative state is his great sin, as far as Democrats are concerned.
And for this, the Democrats must stop him.
At Tuesday's opening of the puppet show, there was some drama, as evidenced in the preening of House impeachment manager Adam Schiff, the California Democrat and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
Schiff talked of fairness.
If Schiff were in fact the demigod of truth and beauty that he pretends to be (or that CNN and MSNBC and others portray him as being), then his lips would have certainly burst into flame.
Adam Schiff and fairness? He must have mentioned "fairness" a half dozen times, but I couldn't write down his quotes, as I was too busy stabbing my eardrums with forks to stop the pain.
It was Schiff who kick-started this impeachment episode over the president's phone call to Ukraine. It followed the Democrats' failed effort to get rid of Trump through their debunked Russia collusion theory, which cost tens of millions of dollars to investigate and fizzled upon the release of the Mueller report, which found no collusion by Trump with Vladimir Putin's gang.
If Mueller had found Trump/Russia collusion, Trump would have already been bounced from office. The American people would have demanded it. But Mueller didn't find that, and so Democrats latched onto the new shiny object, the phone call from Trump to the president of Ukraine.
It was ill-advised, and it was wrong of Trump to ask a foreign country to investigate rival politicians, even if that politician was Joe Biden, Barack Obama's vice president and point man to Ukraine. Biden's son Hunter had cashed in with a corrupt government and was protected by his daddy's threats to withhold $1 billion in U.S foreign aid.
Trump's call was perhaps worthy of censure. But is it worthy of impeaching and removing a president -- less than a year before an election -- without overwhelming support from the American people on his removal? No.
Schiff, who talks about fairness, played a central role in unfairly orchestrating the Ukraine scandal into impeachment. He or his staff colluded with the so-called whistleblower, the one we can't name, the one who was placed in the Trump White House by former CIA boss and Trump hater John Brennan. The complaint of the "whistleblower" was leaked by Schiff's team to the media, and Schiff protected the "whistleblower" from testifying in the House.
To be fair, the lips of the lipless Mitch McConnell should have burst into flame as well. The Republican Senate majority leader from Kentucky also invoked "fairness" repeatedly.
Fairness and Mitch McConnell? That's like putting a delicate orchid into the withered palm of Emperor Palpatine and expecting the blossom to thrive.
Fairness has nothing to do with it. This is about power. And this is about the administrative state, which is true power.
Trump is not a moral or philosophical man. You could say he's not a very good man. The vulgar things he says and tweets don't cover him with virtue.
Years ago, America did have a virtuous and moral man as president in Jimmy Carter. He was an abject failure. And Democrats hated him for his weakness.
Trump is transactional, a dealmaker, and so he dangles the appointment of conservative judges in order to win re-election.
He relies on the good counsel of the Federalist Society to make those conservative judicial appointments to dismantle the administrative state.
And for this, Democrats want him stopped, which is why America is being treated to a puppet show, with politicians talking about fairness with Kemalists and the liberal judges of the administrative state in the wings, watching.
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John Kass is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune who also hosts a radio show on WLS-AM.
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