Psychiatrists, Impeachment, and Justice.

• Author: Orient, Jane M.

* After a period of silence, Dr. Bandy Lee and her committee of mental-health "experts" have again burst onto the scene, angling to participate in the impeachment of President Trump. They are defying the Goldwater Rule, which holds that it is unethical for physicians to diagnose patients they have not personally examined. They claim that President Trump is a such a serious threat to the nation that they are allowed to violate rules.

"We don't believe there is the need for any further evaluation, and we are making ourselves available for the impeachment hearing because we believe that mental health issues will become critical as pressures from the impeachment hearings mount," Dr. Lee told the Washington Examiner. "In other words, the more successful the impeachment proceedings become, the more dangerous the psychological factors of the president will become."

Obviously, the thing to do is to increase the psychological pressure on a person you declare to be unstable.

Dr. Lee's "medical assessment" of the President's "mental capacity to fulfill the duties of his office" includes the examination of tweets, public appearances, and the 448-page Mueller report. "There is very little that a personal examination will add," Lee said.

She denies that she is actually making a diagnosis. Indeed, "unfitness for office" is an opinion, a conclusion that is not in the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of currently defined psychiatric diagnoses.

Regardless of one's opinion about President Trump, this self-appointed "Independent Expert Panel for Presidential Fitness" should concern all Americans. Where does a group of academic experts get the ability or the authority to determine whether the President is "capable of keeping the country safe"?

The U.S. Constitution provides several methods of "regime change," which is what Congressional Democrats, the mainstream news media, and this Panel seem determined to achieve. The first is elections. In 2016, Americans voted for a change from the policies of Obama and Clinton and the imbedded bureaucracy. Ever since then, the losers have been seeking to nullify this result. Attacks on the President by the press have been unrelenting. Unlike Abraham Lincoln or Woodrow Wilson, this President has not imprisoned any journalists or shut down any newspapers. But he does make sarcastic remarks--and his opponents would like to deny him the forum of social media.

Second is the 25th Amendment, which provides for the...