Paul Ryan: Abandoning Ship before the GOP Sinks

I have always loved ships, especially the transatlantic liners of yesteryear and classic military ships (my screen saver is a gorgeous photo of the HMS Hood).  Given this background, when I heard the news that Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan was not going to run for re-election, I immediately had the image in my mind's eye of a man disguising himself as a woman (rumors persist to this day that White Star Line Chairman Bruce Ismay did just that) in order to gain entrance to one of the lifeboats on the Titanic. Ryan obviously sees the GOP about to strike the iceberg of the 2018 midterms  - or himself losing his re-election bid - and decided that it was best to abandon ship.  Personally, I view Paul Ryan as one of the most despicable members of Congress.  Just as some men on the Titanic took a "to hell with women and children first" tradition, so too has Ryan thrown countless women and children overboard in his quest to steal from the poor to give to the rich - a reverse Robin Hood, if you will.  In short, Ryan deserves no good words and the damage he helped to inflict will take years to undo if Democrats flip the House of Representatives and Senate in November.  A column in the Washington Post looks at Ryan's inglorious behavior.   Here are excerpts:

The Post reports: House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) has told friends and several colleagues that he has decided not to seek reelection this year and will soon inform colleagues of his plans, according to several people familiar with his plans.

The decision comes ahead of mid-term elections that were already looking treacherous for Republicans, who risk losing control of the House.

The party has seen a large number of retirements, and Ryan’s exit is certain to sap morale as Republicans seek to contain a surge in enthusiasm from Democrats, whose fortunes have been buoyed by the unpopularity of President Trump.

In a written statement, his longtime adviser Brendan Buck said, “After nearly twenty years in the House, the speaker is proud of all that has been accomplished and is ready to devote more of his time to being a husband and a father.  

The political reality is less noble. One can hardly imagine a more obvious signal that Ryan fears the prospect, if not of losing his own seat, than of losing the majority and hence his speakership. In the past, speakers — understanding the demoralizing impact that premature white-flag-waving would have on their troops — had the good sense to wait until after the election to announce that they would exit the leadership of their party. Ryan’s move has several consequences.

First, Democrats (who were heavily spending to defeat Ryan) can declare victory in that race and save the money it would have taken to knock out a sitting speaker. Get ready for Democrats’ taunts that Ryan lacked the courage to stand before the voters with a record like his.

Second, this is a flashing light to donors and candidates on both sides. For Republican money-men, the message is: Don’t throw away cash trying to save the House.  . . . . For Democrats, it will be further encouragement to add to the record number of candidates and to get on board for a Democratic sweep. In a wave year with the GOP leaderless, why not throw your hat into the ring?

Third, this will be seen in some quarters as a sign that Ryan cannot bear defending the president from potential impeachment. It has been a chore to act as Trump’s lead apologist, ignoring Trump’s outbursts and justifying his zigzags.  . . . .  it is effectively an admission: “I can’t take it anymore!” Imagine how much more stressful it will be if and when the special counsel returns a report that makes the case for impeachment.

Fourth, as we have noted, it is highly unlikely that Trump is going to deliver any more items on the GOP domestic wish-list. 

Fifth, Ryan’s departure makes his refusal to remove from committees characters such as Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) — who colluded with the White House in smearing the FBI and wrecking the intelligence-oversight system — all the more inexplicable. Why not take the heat to do the right thing, especially if Ryan is not going to run anyway? The lack of political courage still stuns onlookers who regarded Ryan at one time as a genuine policy wonk and serious leader.

In sum, Ryan retreats from the scene after loading the country up with debt and leaving virtually every other agenda item save tax cuts undone. 

Instead of achieving the entire GOP agenda, Ryan will leave a besmirched legacy defined by his decision to back, enable and defend Trump, no matter how objectionable Trump’s rhetoric and conduct. Ryan has come to embody the nasty scourge of tribalism that dominates our politics. The inability to separate partisan loyalty from patriotic obligation — or to assess the interests of the country and the need to defend democratic norms and institutions — is proving to be the downfall of the Republican Party and the principal threat to our liberal (small “l”) democracy. And no one is more responsible for this than Ryan. No one.

The Case for Impeachment

As regular readers know very well, I viewed Donald Trump as unfit for office and a downright danger to the nation and the world long before the election results of November 8, 2016, and the subsequent failure of the Electoral College to act in the manner envisioned by the Founding Fathers when it certified Trump's election win.   Sadly, many Americans, in my opinion, allowed themselves to be swayed by their racism, religious extremism, greed, and other forms of misogyny to see Trump for what he is - and has been throughout his public life.  Now, the nation and world find themselves with a dangerous - in my view - lunatic in the White House.  One can hope that the Mueller investigation takes Trump down (and Pence too), but if that fails, a piece in Vox looks at  why impeachment still could be a viable solution to the toxic cancer in the White House.  Here are article excerpts:

I recent months, I have grown obsessed with a seemingly simple question: Does the American political system have a remedy if we elect the wrong person to be president? There are clear answers if we elect a criminal, or if the president falls into a coma. But what if we just make a hiring mistake, as companies do all the time? What if we elect someone who proves himself or herself unfit for office — impulsive, conspiratorial, undisciplined, destructive, cruel?

My fixation on this question began with President Donald Trump’s tweets to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. This was the president of the United States, the man who controls the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, launching deranged, unvetted provocations at the most singularly irrational regime in the world. . . . . The rest of the Trump administration was trying to ratchet down tensions with North Korea. But the president himself was undermining the effort. . .

Republican Sen. Bob Corker, the widely respected chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, warned that the president was treating his office like “a reality show” and setting the country “on the path to World War III.” In an interview with the New York Times, he said of Trump, “I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him.” These concerns, Corker told the Times, “were shared by nearly every Senate Republican.”

It’s not just Senate Republicans who worry over the president’s stability. Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, told CNN that his reporting found “a consensus developing in the military, at the highest levels in the intelligence community, among Republicans in Congress, including the leaders in the business community,” that Trump “is unfit to be the president of the United States.” A subsequent poll by the Military Times found only 30 percent of commissioned officers approved of the job Trump was doing.

The fear is shared by members of Trump’s own staff. Axios’s Mike Allen reported that a collection of top White House advisers see themselves as an informal “Committee to Save America,” . . . . Their concerns echo across the broader public. A September Quinnipiac poll found that 56 percent of voters believe Trump is unfit for office. Of late, I have been asking Republicans who work either in the White House or closely with it whether Trump is learning on the job — whether he is becoming more judicious, more disciplined, more serious. The answer, unanimously, is that he is not. Of late, Trump has taken to suggesting the Access Hollywood tape — where he is clearly shown bragging about sexual assault — is a fraud. These are statements, notably, that Trump can not only be seen making, and heard making, but statements he has admitted making. As is often the case, it is unclear whether Trump is lying to us, or if he is somehow lying to himself, as well. And it is hard to say which would be scarier.

We talk often about running the US government like a business, but businesses — at least public ones — have clear methods for deposing a disastrous executive. The president of the United States controls the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, not to mention the vast resources and powers of the federal government, and so the possible damage of letting the wrong person inhabit the Oval Office stretches all the way to global catastrophe. But is there anything we can do about it?

A number of House Democrats have introduced bills that point toward Trump’s removal. Rep. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, introduced articles of impeachment built around Trump’s possible violations of the law. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, also a California Democrat, introduced a resolution calling for Trump to receive medical evaluation to uncover whether he is capable of carrying out the duties of his office — if not, the Cabinet could invoke the 25th Amendment and remove him.

But what if Trump isn’t a criminal or mentally incompetent? What if he’s exactly the man we saw in the election and that man just shouldn’t be president? What if America simply made a mistake?

Sometimes I imagine this era going catastrophically wrong — a nuclear exchange with North Korea, perhaps, or a genuine crisis in American democracy — and historians writing about it in the future. They will go back and read Trump’s tweets and his words and read what we were saying, and they will wonder what the hell was wrong with us. You knew, they’ll say. You knew everything you needed to know to stop this. And what will we say in response? The first federal official ever removed from office under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution — the impeachment clause — was Judge John Pickering, in 1803. Pickering was an alcoholic and likely suffered from early-stage dementia. He would rant and rave from the bench. The official charges held that Pickering exhibited “loose morals and intemperate habits,” neither of which sounds like a high crime or misdemeanor to modern ears. He was convicted on all counts and removed from office. Another way of looking at Pickering’s removal is that it shows the founding generation defining what the impeachment power was for, and what high crimes and misdemeanors meant. In his 1833 Commentaries, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story concluded that impeachment is “of a political character” and can be triggered by “gross neglect, or usurpation, or habitual disregard of the public interests, in the discharge of the duties of political office.”

The Constitution’s framers considered a few variants of the impeachment power. An early proposal would have restricted it to acts of “treason and bribery” only. That was rejected for being too narrow. A subsequent proposal would have expanded it to acts of “maladministration” as well. That was rejected for being too broad. “High crimes and misdemeanors” was the compromise, but it was never clearly defined.

What is clear is that high crimes and misdemeanors described far more than mere legal infractions. In The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton wrote that questions of impeachment will “proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.” “The grounds for impeachment can be extremely broad and need not involve a crime,” says political scientist Allan Lichtman, author of The Case for Impeachment. “That’s why they put impeachment not in the courts but in a political body. They could have put it in the Supreme Court, but they put it in the Senate.” In the course of reporting this piece, I spoke to a slew of legal scholars and impeachment specialists. Here is my conclusion: There is no actual definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” There is wide agreement that it describes more than violations of the criminal code, but very little agreement beyond that. When is the “misconduct of public men” impeachable? When does a tweetstorm rise to the level of “egregious violation of the public trust”?

On May 16, Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist at the New York Times, wrote a searing column arguing for President Trump’s removal from office. “From the perspective of the Republican leadership’s duty to their country, and indeed to the world that our imperium bestrides, leaving a man this witless and unmastered in an office with these powers and responsibilities is an act of gross negligence, which no objective on the near-term political horizon seems remotely significant enough to justify,” he wrote.

Douthat’s preference was to bypass impeachment entirely and invoke the 25th Amendment to the Constitution. That amendment, which permits the president’s removal if the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet certify him “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” was ratified in 1967 as a response to President Dwight Eisenhower’s health problems and President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

It is worth playing out that scenario. Imagine that Vice President Mike Pence and the Cabinet did compel Trump to undergo psychiatric evaluation. And imagine the psychiatrist did return a diagnosis of some kind, be it early-stage dementia or narcissistic personality disorder (plenty of psychiatrists stand ready to diagnose Trump with all manner of mental ailments, so this is not far-fetched). The vote is taken, and Trump is removed from office.

To many of Trump’s supporters — and perhaps many of his opponents — this would look like nothing less than a coup; the swamp swallowing the man who sought to drain it. Imagine the Breitbart headlines, the Fox News chyrons. And would they truly be wrong?

Here is the counterargument: Our political system was designed by men who believed the mass public could make mistakes, and so they set up failsafes, emergency processes by which political elites could act. The Electoral College, which was ironically the key to Trump’s victory, was one of those failsafes — a collection of political actors who would be informed by the popular vote, but not bound by it. Today, however, the ideology of democracy has taken fiercer hold, elites are held in low regard, and those failsafes are themselves failing. “The case for the 25th Amendment or any other solution is that if a situation is dangerous, elites have a responsibility to risk popular backlash and even appear to be overturning the results of the election,” Douthat told me. In this telling, it is the job of elites to be a bulwark precisely when that job is hardest to carry out. But this analysis leaves us in a place that seems absurd when stated clearly: Though we have mechanisms for removing a dangerous president, those mechanisms are too politically explosive to actually invoke. President Trump could order a nuclear holocaust before breakfast, but unless society can agree that he is either criminal or comatose, both America and the world are stuck with him and all the damage he can cause.  Can this really be our system?

Wayne LaPierre is the NRA's Hit Man

The recent horrific mass shooting in Oregon has triggered another round of discussion about the need to change America's insane gun laws.  As noted in prior posts, most of the GOP sees no need for change - no doubt in large part because of the millions of dollars GOP candidates in particular receive from the NRA.  Research has shown that the real financial strength of the NRA comes from the gun manufacturers and not the hunters who allow themselves to be used as tools by the ever mercenary gun manufacturers and their hit man, Wayne LaPierre who strikes me as a totally amoral - if not immoral - individual who makes a plush living pushing policies that ultimately kill people.  A piece in Salon looks at LaPierre and the death that he and the NRA peddle.  Here are some highlights:

Although 26-year-old Christopher Harper-Mercer pulled the trigger on the gun that killed nine people at Umpqua Community College in Oregon on Thursday, Wayne LaPierre, the fanatic executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, also has blood on his hands.

LaPierre, who has worked for the NRA since 1978 and served as its top official since 1991, is the organization’s hit man when it comes to intimidating elected officials to oppose any kind of sensible gun control laws, including a federal law requiring background checks on would-be gun buyers and a national registry of guns. LaPierre likes to fulminate about gun owners’ rights. But he’s been silent on the Oregon killings, just like he’s been silent after the murders of other innocent victims of America’s epidemic of gun violence.

For decades, the NRA has fought every effort to get Congress and states to adopt reasonable laws that would make it much less likely for people like Harper-Mercer to obtain a gun. The NRA even defends the right of Americans to carry concealed weapons in bars, churches, schools, universities, and elsewhere. This poses a huge threat to police and civilians alike.

Harper-Mercer was obviously an emotionally troubled man.  . . . . Although the murderer’s psychology and motives may be fascinating, it should not be the major focus. There are plenty of deranged people in the world, but in most well-off countries they can’t easily get their hands on a firearm.

Our nation’s weak gun laws allow felons, domestic abusers, and the mentally ill to arm themselves.

In 2013, there were 33,636 deaths from firearm violence in the United States, including 11,208 homicides (31 a day) and 21,175 suicides. Firearms were used in 69.6 percent of all homicides that year. Of course, many more people are injured — some seriously and permanently — by gun violence.

According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the medical cost of treating non-fatal gun injuries totaled $3.7 billion in 2005. The direct medical costs of treating fatal gun injuries combined with the economic damages of lost lives totaled $37 billion.

The Umpqua Community College incident was the 264^th mass shooting in the country this year, according to the Washington Post, which defines a mass shooting as involving at least four people shot. In those incidents, 380 people were killed.  

The NRA has two knee-jerk responses to the epidemic of gun violence. The first is that the Second Amendment gives all Americans the right to possess guns of all kinds — not just hunting rifles but machine guns and semi-automatics. Efforts to restrict gun sales and ownership are, according to the NRA, an assault on our constitutional freedoms.

The second is the cliché that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” To the NRA, gun laws have nothing to do with the epidemic of gun-related killings. This contradicts research documenting that states with stronger gun laws have fewer gun-related deaths.

[S]ince the Newtown massacre, most new state laws have loosened, rather than tightened, gun restrictions, according to the Pew Research Center.

One of the NRA’s biggest victories occurred in 2003, when passed a law sponsored by Rep. Todd Tiahrt, a former Republican congressman from Kansas that makes it more difficult for public safety officials to shut down the illegal market in gun sales. A handful of gun dealers are responsible for most of the guns used in crimes and seized by law enforcement officials. 

Under LaPierre’s leadership, the NRA has not only dramatically expanded its ties to the gun manufacturers, but has also linked the NRA to the far right, including the Tea Party. LaPierre is a regular presence at gatherings of extreme right-wing groups, whose paranoid warnings about the threat of tyranny and Obama’s secret plan to confiscate all guns are meant to scare Americans into buying more guns and joining the NRA.

A 2014 Pew Research Center survey found that gun ownership is concentrated among older adults, rural residents, and whites, especially white Southerners. The NRA is able to mobilize a small but very rabid and vocal group of gun owners — as well as owners of gun shops — to attend rallies, write letters to newspapers and comments on blog sites, and contact elected officials.

Every American grieves for the families and friends of the people killed in Oregon this week. But until we tame the power of the NRA, we can expect more killings like this, a part of the deadly daily diet of murders throughout America committed by angry gun-toting people whose “freedom” to own weapons of mass destruction that the NRA defends.

The NRA must be defeated and, preferably, destroyed.