Final Word from Monday, December 30, 2019

If a legislative body votes to impeach its head of state, it is inevitably one of the major political events of the year, if not the decade or century. The Democrats in the U.S. have turned the impeachment of Donald Trump into a key campaign issue and are spreading it out over months and months. History is being made. Not so in the Czech Republic. The self-proclaimed democrats, with a small "d," dispensed with the issue in fairly short order in the Senate without holding any public hearings. The lower house then quickly killed the constitutional complaint. Some reviews of the major events of this year haven't even mentioned the fact that 48 of the 81 Czech senators declared that Miloš Zeman should be removed from office. Unlike in criminal cases, where double jeopardy is not allowed, there is nothing stopping the Czech Senate from filing another constitutional complaint for the same "crimes." In fact, senators who are convinced that a narrower complaint would have a bigger chance of passing in the lower house have almost a democratic duty to vote to impeach Zeman again. This would be historic. [ Czech Republic United States president impeachment ]