What Next for the Democrats?

It is becoming increasingly clear that Attorney General William Barr basically lied about much of what is contained in the Mueller report and as more details emerge, Trump is clearly a lawless and dangerous force in the White House.   That said, rushing to impeach him - like the usually suspects, including Elizabeth Warren are already doing - could prove counterproductive and politically damaging.  Before any such effort is made  (if made at all), House Democrats need to carefully undertake further investigations and make the case for (i) Trump's unfitness for office, and (ii) why impeachment rather than merely voting Trump out of office in 2020 is the responsible move.  The goal would be to convince non-politically voters, including soccer moms more worried about PTA events and children sporting events that the destruction of America's democracy, why impeachment would not be a raw political exercise and put pressure on Republicans to belatedly stand to protect the constitutional order.  A column in The Atlantic makes the case for this reasoned and judicious approach.  Here are highlights:

What next? The substance of the Mueller report is only now beginning to penetrate through the fog of lies and distortions coming from the Attorney General William Barr, backed by his loyal lieutenant Rod Rosenstein. Even the redacted version makes visible the despicable behavior that emanated from the Trump campaign and the Trump White House, not to mention Trump himself, and the shocking penetration of Russia into our elections—with no visible response then or now from Republicans in power. But most Americans will not read or even get the gist of the Mueller report, or know much of what is in it, as they lead their own lives largely unfocused on politics and government.

So what should Democrats do? There is ample evidence of behavior on the part of the president that fits any reasonable definition of high crimes and misdemeanors—and most likely there will be a lot more, when the Southern District of New York and other jurisdictions of the Justice Department finish their work—at least if Barr does not stymie them. There is a constitutional responsibility for the House to follow up.

But a formal impeachment inquiry in the House Judiciary Committee would be politically perilous—and while politics cannot override duty, Democrats cannot risk the kind of 2020 backlash that would come if a large share of the voting public came to see the House as Javert-like, abandoning its focus on health care, jobs and the other issues that dominate most Americans’ lives in a monomaniacal quest to get Trump. A quick move to impeachment would be used by Trump and his acolytes, from the Senate to Fox and talk radio, to incite and outrage the GOP base.

That said, a failure to act, to do anything meaningful to bring this president and his gang of corrupt miscreants to heel, would rightfully enrage most liberal voters. Remember that the rage Republican primary voters felt at their party establishment in 2016, over broken promises to bring Obama to his knees, led to the nomination of Trump. A parallel rage among Democrats could lead to a deeply divided party and a disastrous presidential nomination.

There is, I believe, a reasonable path forward that, besides being politically palatable, has the added advantage of being the right thing to do. It starts with a coordinated and in-depth examination of the Mueller report by the House.

What we need is for the Judiciary, Intelligence, and Homeland Security Committees to conduct a series of deep dives into the areas of communication and coordination between Trump and his campaign with Russians and their surrogates, like Wikileaks; the multiple categories and areas of obstruction of justice that Mueller outlined; the threats to our intelligence operations and our justice system from Trump and his operatives; and the moves by Russia to interfere in and influence our elections used by Trump and unchecked by Republicans. Other committees, such as Ways and Means and Banking, need to be ready to do the same thing as more information emerges from the SDNY and the New York Attorney General, among others, about Trump’s financial dealings, including with the Russians, and about Russian money-laundering.

Democrats need to stage and coordinate hearings across committees and subcommittees, to make sure they do not overload Americans’ ability to pay attention. Most important, they need to structure the public hearings in a dramatically different way than usual. Each committee needs to use experienced counsel—a good examples might be former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara—and limit if not abandon opening statements, except from the chairs. No five-minute rounds of questions going down the line of every committee member, . . .

Give the counsel an hour to set the frame and ask in-depth questions. Either follow that with another round for the counsel or have a small group of committee members take 15 or 30 minutes to ask questions in a sustained way with coordinated themes. This system might cause hard feelings among members who will not get their five minutes in the sun—and would reduce the public role for chairs—but it is better-suited to accomplish the larger goal. And that larger goal is to build a compelling record, through vivid testimony, of what Trump and his people, including his children, did and did not do, said and did not say truthfully, that are the core of Mueller’s report.

That kind of forum should be supplemented by another. Committees should do a series of roundtables, discussions with leading experts with deep experience in the Justice Department, including the FBI, in the White House, in the intelligence world, and elsewhere, to discuss in depth whether the behaviors they have seen in the Trump administration are typical or unusual, acceptable or unacceptable.

All of this is, in my view, a necessary predicate to the formal impeachment inquiry that could then follow. If done well—even as the House brought up measures to shore up the Affordable Care Act, to protect children from family separation, to improve the lives of working families, to begin to address infrastructure needs and clean energy, along with oversight of failures in disaster relief, border activities, college loan policy, and corruption in many departments—then impeachment would look powerfully more like a logical and necessary step, less like a vindictive, partisan move.

Democrats should not jump the gun on impeachment. But it would be a serious dereliction of duty if they did not move now to set the stage for what should happen when the time and setting are right.

Congressional Republicans: Unindicted Co-conspirators in Trump Crimes

Following up on what Megan McCain only hinted at is a piece in New York Magazine which, in my view, accurately calls out Congressional Republicans as unindicted co-conspirators in the many crimes of Donald Trump - an by extension, Mike Pence who smilingly goes along with every Trump outrage as he positions himself for power should Trump be impeached or die of aneurysm during one of his screaming rants.  Instead of oversight of the occupant of the Oval Office as designed by the U.S. Constitution, we now see what most charitably might be called enablers and at worst co-conspirators in a scheme to undermine the Constitution itself.  All is part and parcel with the Republican Party's descent into moral bankruptcy and behavior reminiscent of conservative Germans who thought they could control Hitler (the only difference is that those Germans still wanted the rule of law whereas today's Republicans seemingly do not)..   Here are article excerpts:

After John McCain’s death, as official Washington set its flags at half-staff, Chuck Schumer proposed another kind of tribute to the iconic senator and war hero: that the Russell Senate Office Building, currently named for a segregationist southern Democrat, be renamed for McCain. His Republican colleagues, however, demurred.

They could not admit that their real reason for opposing the honor was that McCain had crossed Trump. Nor could they defend Senator Richard Russell’s ardent white supremacy, which extended to denouncing laws to ban lynching. Instead, they flailed about, inventing pretexts on the fly.

What was at stake in this absurd stance was something large: Donald Trump was once again demanding a display of submission from his party. And once again, he received it. As in a Stalinist show trial, the preposterousness of the statements made them more rather than less valuable. Senate Republicans demonstrated their willingness to turn on a colleague out of fealty to Trump, and all the better for him that they did so out of transparent fear rather than conviction. . . . Whatever restraining force Trump’s party exerted against him has now almost completely dissipated.

Take, for instance, the election-security bill both parties worked together to craft this summer. The measure would have given top state election officials security clearances to view warnings about hacking threats, convened a technical advisory board to share best practices, and increased the use of paper ballots that could be checked in case of a hack, along with other steps that are both obviously needed and just as obviously unobjectionable. But the White House came out against the bill, so Republicans dutifully paused work on it. 

Senate Republicans have likewise all but abandoned the wall of defense they had once maintained around Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Trump demands and expects the attorney general to gin up criminal charges against Trump’s enemies while ignoring misdeeds by Trump and his allies. [Trump] The president told an interviewer, “The only reason I gave him the job [is] I felt loyalty.”

What has prevented Trump from firing Sessions until now were the quiet warnings from the attorney general’s former Republican Senate colleagues that they would refuse to confirm a successor.

A recent list circulated by congressional Republicans to members of their party demonstrates the degree to which Trump’s party has internalized its role as enabler of [Trum's] the president’s misconduct. Republicans have used their majority in Congress to quash almost any oversight of the administration. The list tallied all the scandals and acts of gross incompetence that Democrats would like to investigate if they win control of at least one chamber of Congress. The point of this impressive litany of scandals was not to show that Republicans have abdicated their basic responsibilities or that the public has a right to information about which business interests directly pay the president and his family, exactly which sources of blackmail he is vulnerable to, and so on. The point was to help Republicans warn their own side what might come to light if Democrats win the midterms. The prospect of Congress acting independently has “churned Republican stomachs,” Axios notes. That the GOP should or could restrain Trump’s corruption has become unfathomable.

As Republicans’ scant interest in inhibiting Trump has waned, his authoritarianism has grown more uninhibited. He threatened Google with unspecified consequences unless it tweaks its algorithm to drive readers toward more pro-Trump stories. He has edged closer to issuing a pardon of Paul Manafort as a reward for his former campaign manager’s refusal to cooperate with prosecutors. And he ranted in a meeting with leaders from the Christian right that antifa will launch violent attacks against them unless Republicans win in the midterms.

And he has increased the frequency of his Lenin-esque charges that the parts of the news media his party does not control are the “enemy of the people.”

Trump’s latest maniacal outburst coincided with — and was likely caused by — the deepening investigations. . . . . As Trump plunges deeper into his war against the rule of law, the Republican Congress marches along beside him, unindicted co-conspirators all.