Mitt Romney: A Profile in Courage as the American Republic Dies

On 16 January 27 BC the Roman Senate gave Gaius Octavius (a/k/a Octavian) the titles of Augustus and Princeps and effectively gave him dictatorial power despite the fact that the Roman Senate continued to have a facade of authority.  With that grant of powers, the Roman Republic died.  Today, Senate Republicans with one exception took a similar action and gave Donald Trump a clear signal that (i) their oaths sworn on a bible to defend and protect the U.S. Constitution meant absolutely nothing to them, (ii) how history will view them similarly means nothing, and (iii) Trump is free to whatever he wants and is above the law except to the extent the House of Representatives continues - for now - to have the power over initiating spending bills to finance the federal government.  The lone Republican was Mitt Romney, a man I have never particularly liked but who showed that he both took his oath of office seriously and that he cared how history would view him. A piece in The Atlantic looks at Romney's unlikely courage - I will look at some of his speech which can be found here later in this post - and where America now finds itself. Here are article highlights: 

Mitt Romney is doing something nearly unheard of these days: He’s putting his country above his party. He’s voting his conscience when doing so comes at a cost. He’s not rationalizing weakness and timidity by prettying them up as virtues. He will vote to convict President Donald Trump, in an act of extraordinary political courage.

This decision would have negative ramifications for Romney in any era, but he faces particularly harsh consequences in this one, when political tribalism has never been more acute, when hating those who see things in politics differently than you do is fashionable, and when invective against perceived enemies is more emotionally powerful (and satisfying) then is affection for those you believe to be on your side.

Mitt Romney knows this, and he therefore knows the attacks on him will be vicious. He will be accused of being a traitor not only by [Trump] the president, a cruel and unforgiving man, but also by his fellow Republican lawmakers, the right-wing media complex, and even many of his constituents.

The truth is quite the opposite, of course. Romney, on whose presidential campaign I briefly worked in 2012, is doing something he believes is morally right even while knowing he will face quite a high cost, both professionally and personally.

To see so many Republicans who know better tie themselves into ethical knots to justify their fealty to Trump—and then to watch them lash out defensively when they are called on it—is a sad and pitiable thing.

But Republicans aren’t alone in being exposed by Romney’s admirable conduct. Maybe Democrats and those in the media who delighted in vilifying Romney in 2012. . . . might, in their private moments, rethink and even feel some remorse for what they did.

There’s an old hymn with which Romney is familiar, “Do What Is Right.” The chorus includes this line: “Do what is right; let the consequence follow.” It’s one thing to sing those words. It’s an entirely different thing to live them out.

Mitt Romney has lived those words, and history will honor him for having done so.

I heard Romney's speech while driving and it was truly remarkable and suggests that he is the last honorable Republican (assuming he remains in the GOP).  Here are some excerpts:

The allegations made in the articles of impeachment are very serious. As a Senator-juror, I swore an oath, before God, to exercise “impartial justice.” I am a profoundly religious person. I take an oath before God as enormously consequential. I knew from the outset that being tasked with judging the President, the leader of my own party, would be the most difficult decision I have ever faced. I was not wrong. [T]he President’s insistence that they be investigated by the Ukrainians is hard to explain other than as a political pursuit. There is no question in my mind that were their names not Biden, the President would never have done what he did. The grave question the Constitution tasks senators to answer is whether the President committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a “high crime and misdemeanor.” Yes, he did.
 The President asked a foreign government to investigate his political rival.

The President withheld vital military funds from that government to press it to do so. The President delayed funds for an American ally at war with Russian invaders. The President’s purpose was personal and political. Accordingly, the President is guilty of an appalling abuse of the public trust. What he did was not “perfect”— No, it was a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security interests, and our fundamental values. Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine. [M]y promise before God to apply impartial justice required that I put my personal feelings and biases aside. Were I to ignore the evidence that has been presented, and disregard what I believe my oath and the Constitution demands of me for the sake of a partisan end, it would, I fear, expose my character to history’s rebuke and the censure of my own conscience. [W]ith my vote, I will tell my children and their children that I did my duty to the best of my ability, believing that my country expected it of me. I will only be one name among many, no more or less, to future generations of Americans who look at the record of this trial. They will note merely that I was among the senators who determined that what the President did was wrong, grievously wrong.

Wow!  If history looking back on today shows that the American republic did, in fact died today,  Romney will stand out like those who opposed Hitler and other vile dictators, putting their oaths and consciences above pandering for political advantage. 

The Abdication of Senate Republicans

McConnell - lead betrayer of the Constitution.

I've mentioned a book "Mortal Republic" which looks at the end of the Roman Republic and the rise of imperial rule in Rome.  A major player in the demise of the Roman Republic was the Roman Senate which ultimately abdicated it authority and gave way to Octavian - later Augustus - the first Roman emperor.  The Senator's motives 2000 years ago parallel what we are witnessing as the Republicans in the United States Senate throw away any allegiance to their oaths of office and telegraph to Donald Trump (and by way of precedent, future presidents) that government will be by presidential fiat and that there are no restraints on presidential power.  Avoiding a primary and re-election - and self-enrichment for those like Mitch McConnell - is all that matters in the short term, with there being no long term agenda.  Given Trump's extreme narcissism and desire to be an American equivalent to Vladimir Putin, this abdication of authority should be terrifying to every American of good will who believes in democracy.  Senate Republicans have made it clear that to them, the rule of law, facts, and morality mean absolutely nothing. All that matters is avoiding Trump's wrath and that of his increasingly ugly base of support in order to stay in power.  An editorial in the Washington Post looks at Senate Republicans betrayal of all their party once claimed to stand for.  Here are highlights: 

REPUBLICAN SENATORS who voted Friday to suppress known but unexamined evidence of President Trump’s wrongdoing at his Senate trial must have calculated that the wrath of a vindictive [Trump] president is more dangerous than the sensible judgment of the American people, who, polls showed, overwhelmingly favored the summoning of witnesses. That’s almost the only way to understand how the Republicans could have chosen to deny themselves and the public the firsthand account of former national security adviser John Bolton, and perhaps others, on how Mr. Trump sought to extort political favors from Ukraine.

The public explanations the senators offered were so weak and contradictory as to reveal themselves as pretexts.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)  . . . . Apparently she preferred a bad trial to a better one — but she did assure us that she felt “sad” that “the Congress has failed.”

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said the case against Mr. Trump had already been proved, so no further testimony was needed. But he also said, without explanation, that Mr. Trump’s “inappropriate” conduct did not merit removal from office; voters, he said, should render a verdict in the coming presidential election. How could he measure the seriousness of Mr. Trump’s wrongdoing without hearing Mr. Bolton’s firsthand testimony of the president’s motives and intentions, including about whether [Trump] the president is likely to seek additional improper foreign intervention in that same election?

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) echoed Mr. Alexander’s illogic, only he lacked the courage even to take a position on whether Mr. Trump had, as charged, tried to force Ukraine’s new president to investigate former vice president Joe Biden, or whether that was wrong. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) managed to be even more timorous, telling reporters that “Lamar speaks for lots and lots of us” and refusing to elaborate.

So cowed are most of those “lots and lots” of Republicans that few of them dared to go as far as Mr. Sasse. Some have echoed the president’s indefensible claims that there was nothing wrong with the pressure campaign. Their votes against witnesses have rendered the trial a farce and made conviction the only choice for senators who honor the Constitution.

Americans who object to Mr. Trump’s relentless stonewalling and Republicans’ complicity can take some comfort in the prospect that most or all of the evidence the White House is hiding will eventually come out. A reminder of that came Friday in a New York Times report about Mr. Bolton’s unpublished book, which describes how Mr. Trump ordered him last May to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to meet with his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani. Mr. Giuliani said publicly at the time he wanted to induce Mr. Zelensky to investigate Mr. Biden because it would be “helpful to my client,” Mr. Trump.

[T]here will surely be more reminders in the weeks and months ahead. We can hope only that voters who wanted that evidence to be heard in the trial will respond by showing incumbent senators they are a force to be reckoned with, as much as the bully in the White House.

Are Senate Republicans Setting the Stage for Dictatorship?

Watching Senate Republicans in the impeachment proceeds makes it clear that one thing is nowhere in their thoughts, namely living up to their oaths of office and defending the constitutional order.  Indeed, they seem poised to say that a president is above the law and can do literally whatever he/she wants. Even if the nation survives the Trump regime, the precedent may well come back to haunt Republicans should the Democrats capture the White House with an equally narcissistic, megalomaniac.  Sadly, Republican senators have put their own re-election and avoidance of upsetting Trump's white supremacist, Christian extremist base above the interest of the nation and the constitutional order.  A column in the Washington Post looks at Senate Republicans' abandonment of the oaths and concern for the nation.  Here are highlights:

[Trump's] The president’s lawyers this week floated their catch-all impeachment defense, one tailor-made for President Trump. It is, in essence, that a narcissistic president can do no wrong.

Like most of [Trump's] the president’s arguments, it’s erroneous. But no argument could have presented the issue more starkly to Republican senators: Will they follow their oaths to defend the Constitution and to do impartial justice? Or will they once again show fealty to Trump personally, thereby accepting his conflation of his personal interests with those of the nation?

Leave it to Alan Dershowitz to drive the point home with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.  If “a president does something which he believes will get himself elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment,” Dershowitz contended.

For a president psychologically incapable of distinguishing between his own personal interests and the nation’s, that amounts to the ultimate get-out-of-impeachment-free card. Trump already believes that “I have an Article II” — Article II of the Constitution — “where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” This self-described very stable genius, he of “I alone can fix it,” is convinced that his reelection, achieved by whatever means necessary, serves the interests of the country. In short, anything goes.

But the argument is a lie. It’s another example of how Trump corrupts all around him. Following the lead of the political aides and allies who came before them, during the past two weeks it has been the lawyers who have debased themselves. Defying their own obligations of candor to the tribunals before which they appear, they’ve lied to and misled the court of impeachment about the House proceedings and underlying facts, peddled conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation, and of course about Ukraine and the Bidens. Their legal position is likewise false. It’s just not true that good motives, when mixed with bad ones, compel acquittal under the law. If a politician takes a bribe to do what he thinks would have been best for the public anyway, he still goes to jail. If he’s president, under a Constitution that refers to impeachment specifically for “bribery,” as well other “high crimes and misdemeanors,” he should still be removed.

It’s also not true that “abuse of power” is not impeachable, or that a statutory crime is necessary for impeachment. And it’s not true, as Dershowitz argued Wednesday, that the Framers’ rejection of “maladministration” as a basis for impeachment means that abuse of power isn’t impeachable. The Framers rejected the word “maladministration” because it covered mistakes and incompetence, not because it also could mean abuse of power. In fact, they swapped “high crimes and misdemeanors” into the final document precisely because it does cover such abuse.

[I]f a president conditions another official act — releasing security assistance to a foreign country — on a requirement that the foreign country smear the president’s political opponent. That’s not politics; that’s corruption. And corruption, for all the Trump lawyers’ attempt to muddy the waters with tortured interpretations of the Constitution, is what this impeachment is all about. Trump acted with corrupt intent to damage a political opponent. Testimony from former national security adviser John Bolton seems certain to underscore that point. 

Which is precisely why Republican senators seem so desperate not to hear it and so willing to entertain a false reading of the Constitution that would effectively render the impeachment clause a nullity. Should they do that, they will have sacrificed their own oaths to protect their own electoral prospects, and the country and the Constitution will have been saddled with a terrible precedent. The Senate will have told Trump that, indeed, he can do whatever he wants.

Trump’s Legal Team Confederacy of Dunces

When one is an attorney, one does not have any obligation to take a legal case if you are conflicted as to the morality of the case and/or the guilt of defendant. Indeed, in a normal court setting, it is unethical for an attorney to argue a defense he/she knows is false so as to work a fraud on the tribunal. Sadly, some attorneys turn a blind to this ethical obligation.  We are now witnessing, in my opinion, a huge ethical fail on the part of Trump's impeachment defense team.   In the case of Jay Sekulow and Pam Bondi, the ethical lapse is no surprise given their histories.  Ditto for Alan Dershowitz who is now arguing the exact opposite of what he argued during the Clinton impeachment leaving one to wonder whether the man has any shame since publicity and whatever Trump is paying him would seem to be all that maters. A column in the Washington Post by former Republican Joe Scarborough looks at Trump's shameless (and, in my view, morally bankrupt) legal defense team.  Here are excerpts:

A confederacy of dunces stumbled onto the Senate floor this week to launch their bewildering defense of President Trump. This misfit band of lawyers brought with them arguments so stunningly stupefying, logic so fatally flawed and a cynicism so brazenly transparent that one suspects Baghdad Bob was viewing the entire spectacle with grudging respect.

On day one of Trump’s impeachment defense, [Trump's] the president’s team dismissed his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani as a minor player in the Ukrainian affair. Trump lawyer Jane Raskin said he was little more than a “shiny object designed to distract you.” Never mind that Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to contact Giuliani, assuring him that “Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you.”

Before Trump made the not-so-perfect call that would eventually lead to his impeachment, Giuliani ran frequent strategy sessions from the second floor of the [Trump's] president’s Washington hotel that were focused on getting Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. Giuliani repeatedly pressured U.S. diplomats and State Department employees to push his “drug deal” (as former national security adviser John Bolton described it). At the same time, America’s Mayor kept feeding Trump a steady diet of conspiracy theories that played into the president’s preexisting prejudices against Ukraine. Far from being a bit player and “shiny object,” Giuliani helped build the Democrats’ case for Trump’s impeachment better than anyone else in the president’s inner circle.
 If the claims about Giuliani were not preposterous enough, senators were also forced to endure Kenneth Starr’s self-righteous and hypocritical warnings regarding “the culture of impeachment.” Starr had, after all, once run a four-year investigation into obscure land deals, suicide conspiracy theories and intimate sexual details involving President Bill Clinton. Starr would later claim that Clinton’s abuse of power was the “capstone” of his impeachment case, but that did not stop the former independent counsel from mournfully warning senators Monday that “the commission of a crime is by no means sufficient to warrant the removal of our duly elected president.”

As Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes said, “Does Ken Starr know he’s Ken Starr?” That embarrassing performance seemed only to confirm Trump’s previous assessment of the former Clinton prosecutor as a “lunatic” and a “disaster.”

Such insults were never thrown in the direction of Pam Bondi, another member of the president’s legal team. Bondi had safely placed herself in Trump’s good favor by refusing to pursue claims of fraud against Trump University when she was Florida’s attorney general. In 2013, the Orlando Sentinel reported that Bondi’s office was deciding whether to join in the lawsuit against Trump. Four days after the article went to print, Bondi’s reelection efforts were boosted by a $25,000 check from Trump’s foundation. Soon after, Bondi announced she would be not suing the reality TV star.

[N]either Bondi nor Starr can be shamed. The same holds true of the other attorneys on the president’s defense team, who sullied their reputations this week defending a shameless huckster, and whom history will judge harshly as those whose dunce routines continued to enable this dangerously unbalanced man.

Wherever these attorneys are admitted to the bar, it might be appropriate to commence disbarment proceedings.   They have definitely violated the code of ethics. 

Does John Bolton Have the Goods on Trump?

I have never liked John Bolton who I have long considered a dangerous foreign policy hawk who has learned nothing from America's previous disastrous wars, particularly in Vietnam and Iraq/Afghanistan. Yet between Bolton's huge ego and perhaps desire for revenge after his firing by Der Trumpenführer, now seems poised to derail Senate Republicans - think Mitch McConnell - to hold a sham trial and not even hear from witnesses or review additional evidence.  Of course, Bolton also is likely to make a fortune on his tell-all book of his time with Trump. Whatever Bolton's ultimate motivation, as the New York Times stresses in a column, Bolton just might force enough Senate Republicans to do the right thing that McConnell's planned Soviet style trial may fall apart.  Anything that will dash McConnell's scheme and make Lindsey Graham look like an ass will be most welcome.  Here are highlights from the Times piece:

It’s just possible that common sense and reality have a shot at prying open the doors to the Senate chamber after all. After Republican senators claimed that it was perfectly reasonable to put a United States president on trial without hearing from any witnesses, a few of them are showing signs of recognizing that the truth matters. Or, at least, that the American people believe it does.

What’s changed? Shocking but not surprising revelations from John Bolton’s book manuscript, which The New York Times reported over the weekend, have made impossible to ignore what everyone has known for months: President Trump withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine to benefit himself politically, and against the strenuous objections of his top aides and both parties in Congress.

On Monday morning, Mitt Romney, of Utah, said, “I think it’s increasingly likely that other Republicans will join those of us who think we should hear from John Bolton.”

It’s refreshing to hear those words. And yet the fact that such a statement is noteworthy at all tells you how far from responsible governance Republicans have strayed. They hold 53 seats in the Senate, and yet the nation is waiting on just four — four!— to do the right thing and agree to call Mr. Bolton, the former national security adviser, and other key witnesses to testify in Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial.

A far more representative attitude in the Republican caucus was expressed by Roy Blunt, of Missouri, who said on Monday, “Unless there’s a witness that’s going to change the outcome, I can’t imagine why we’d want to stretch this out for weeks and months.” With this tautology Senator Blunt gives away the game: All witness testimony to date — all presented as part of the House impeachment proceedings — has only strengthened the case against Mr. Trump, but Republicans will not vote to convict him under any circumstances. By definition, then, no witness in the Senate could possibly change the outcome.

The reporting on Mr. Bolton’s manuscript, which is scheduled for publication in March, has scrambled that strategy. Mr. Bolton’s foreign-policy disagreements with Mr. Trump have been public knowledge for months. Last fall, Fiona Hill, a Russia expert and former Bolton aide, testified in the House that Mr. Bolton was alarmed by Mr. Trump’s aid-for-investigations scheme, which Mr. Bolton characterized as a “drug deal.”

In the manuscript, detailed descriptions of which were leaked to The Times, he recounts nearly a dozen instances in which he and other top administration officials pleaded with Mr. Trump to release the aid, to no avail.

Mr. Bolton, a hard-line conservative with decades of service in Republican administrations, is no anti-Trump zealot, which makes his allegations against the president that much more devastating. And his decision to tell these stories publicly nearly certainly waives any claims of executive privilege Mr. Trump might try to assert over their communications.

Let’s not forget the newly revealed evidence that came to light on Saturday, in the form of a tape recording released by the lawyer for Lev Parnas, who had worked for Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, in the Ukraine scheme. Mr. Trump has denied even knowing Mr. Parnas, but on the tape the two men can be heard in conversation at a dinner in April 2018. “Get rid of her,” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Yovanovitch. “Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. O.K.? Do it.”

You know what would be a good way to figure out who’s telling the truth? Subpoena Mr. Bolton to testify under oath.

This isn’t a close call. A majority of Americans of all political stripes want to hear from Mr. Bolton, at the least. They believe, as do congressional Democrats, that you can’t vote on whether to remove a president from office without getting the fullest possible account of his alleged offenses.

But Senate Republicans have so far refused to hear from any witnesses or to demand any documents, following the lead of Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, who has never hesitated to undermine the country’s institutions if he thinks doing so will help his party.
This is a risky strategy. One reason good lawyers insist on deposing witnesses and subpoenaing documentary evidence is to avoid any unwelcome surprises at trial. Mr. Bolton has now provided the latest of those surprises. It is surely not the last. Back in September, Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican and one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest defenders, said: “What would’ve been wrong is if the president had suggested to the Ukrainian government that if you don’t do what I want you to do regarding the Bidens, we’re not going to give you the aid. That was the accusation; that did not remotely happen.”

Except that it did, as Mr. Bolton is apparently willing to say under oath. Republicans don’t want him to do that because they don’t want Americans to exercise the simple good judgment that Mr. Graham once did.

When Will Republicans Realize Trump is Hurting Them?

For years now, the Republican Party has never focused on the future and the irreversible demographic changes coming to America.  Rather than broaden its appeal, it has concentrated its efforts on a shrinking, aging white demographic with undo reliance on Christian extremist voters even as the younger generations are leaving religion in droves.  Now, after Donald Trump won the presidency in what some see as a fluke, Republicans - mostly out of fear of their base - have made the conscious decision to tie themselves to Trump despite the losses the party has suffered since Trump's election and, arguably because of Trump's toxic policies and personality.  A piece in Newsweek looks at these Republican loses and the reckoning that may be awaiting Republicans in 2020 and beyond. Here are excerpts:

Like many things with Trump, his rhetoric bears no resemblance to the truth.

After losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, Trump won the Electoral College and, therefore, the White House in 2016 by 77,744 votes spread across three states. Put another way, Trump won the White House with fewer people than fit in many college football stadiums on Saturday afternoons.

And since that narrow victory, Republicans in the era of Trump have gone on to lose nearly every Election Day since. In 2017, Republicans lost the special election in deep-red Alabama, sending the first Democratic senator from the state in 25 years to Washington. Republicans lost the 2018 election, as Democrats had their biggest gain of seats in the House of Representatives since Watergate. And in 2019, Republicans lost again as Democrats flipped the governorship in Kentucky and won the governor's race in Louisiana—states Trump had won in 2016 by about 30 percent and 20 percent, respectively.

When you dig a little deeper, the numbers get much worse for Republicans. When Trump took office, Republicans controlled the House of Representatives 241-194; today, the Democratic majority is 232-197. When Trump took office, Republicans held the advantage in governors' seats 33-16; today, it is nearly even, at 26-24. And when Trump took office, Republicans had a 15 percent advantage in nationwide state legislative seats they held; today, that lead is down to only 5 percent.

I bet Republicans have a headache. But it is not from winning so much.

And all of that losing was before Trump was caught seeking foreign interference in our elections and the House impeached him.

This week, attention turns to the U.S. Senate and the impeachment trial that will start in earnest. Between the dizzying pace of bombshell revelations and the efforts of Trump and his allies in Congress and in conservative media to muddy the waters, the basic contours of this case easily get lost or blurred. But the facts are actually crystal clear: Trump used the powers of the presidency to solicit a foreign government to interfere in our election for his own political benefit. He then orchestrated a cover-up of his actions. And, finally, when he was caught, he obstructed the investigation.

Despite the mountain of evidence that proves the case, it is widely expected that a majority of Republicans in the Senate will join all their colleagues in the House in deciding not to hold Trump accountable for his abuses.

No matter what happens in the Senate, Trump will always be the third president in our nation's history to be impeached. But, by normalizing his abuses and his debasing of the office, Republicans are telling voters there is no action, including undermining free and fair elections in our country, that Trump could take for which they would hold him accountable.

While Republicans in Congress may fail to do their job, there are strong indications that voters will not fail to do theirs. And yet again, the Republican calculation that their loyalty to Trump will pay off in the next election will be exposed as deeply flawed, just as it has been in every election since 2016.

According to an ABC News/Ipsos poll, 70 percent of Americans think Trump's request to a foreign leader to investigate a political rival, the argument at the heart of the impeachment articles, was wrong. That is a remarkably high number. In today's highly polarized political environment, you probably can't get 70 percent of Americans to agree the sky is blue. Yet 70 percent agree that Trump's actions were wrong.

On top of that, support for impeachment and removal from office remains historically high. Fifty-two percent of Americans support removing Trump from office, according to a recent Politico/Morning Consult poll. 

Lastly, enter into this equation that Trump is a historically unpopular president and is the first president in modern polling to never poll above 50 percent approval.

Add it all up, and you have a historically unpopular president who has headed up historic losses for his party entering into a historically popular impeachment trial.

That is not a winning equation for Republicans.

The battle for control of the Senate this year will be fought in Maine, North Carolina, Arizona and Colorado. Since Trump took office, his net approval ratings decreased substantially in each of those states, according to Morning Consult. His approval is down by 14 percent in Maine, 18 percent in North Carolina, 23 percent in Arizona, and 19 percent in Colorado. As we enter the election year, Trump remains underwater in each of those states. Donald Trump entered the White House with virtually no ability to help down-ballot Republicans, and three years and three Election Day losses later, he has even less today.

So, as senators will sit in judgment of Trump during this trial, voters will sit in judgment of them. Republicans in the House have had their say. Soon, Republicans in the Senate will have theirs. But ultimately, it will be voters who will have the final say come November.

If Republicans fail to hold Trump accountable, voters will hold them accountable.

The Supreme Court Has Fueled Assaults on America's Democracy

There have been numerous contributors to the decline of America's democracy and the rise of plutocrat rule, but one institution bears a huge amount of responsibility: The U.S. Supreme Court.  More precisely, the conservative majority on the Court, including supposed swing vote, former Justice Anthony Kennedy. This clique of "conservatives" have put its collective religious and political views ahead of democracy and, in the process, has done severe harm to the constitutional system designed by the Founding Fathers and landmark civil rights legislation. One of the most damning  - and ridiculous - rulings  was Citizens United that held that corporations were "persons" under the law and, therefore entitled to assert "personal beliefs" and to give unlimited funds to political PACS and dark money groups. As a column in the Washington Post lays out, Chief Justice John Roberts is being forced to watch the fruits of the conservative justices toxic handiwork as he presides of Der Trumpenführer's impeachment trial - a trial Senate Republicans are turning into a farce and cover-ups.   Here are column excerpts:

There is justice in John Roberts being forced to preside silently over the impeachment trial of President Trump, hour after hour, day after tedious day.

Roberts’s captivity is entirely fitting: He is forced to witness, with his own eyes, the mess he and his colleagues on the Supreme Court have made of the U.S. political system. As representatives of all three branches of government attend this unhappy family reunion, the living consequences of the Roberts Court’s decisions, and their corrosive effect on democracy, are plain to see.

Ten years to the day before Trump’s impeachment trial began, the Supreme Court released its Citizens United decision, plunging the country into the era of super PACs and unlimited, unregulated, secret campaign money from billionaires and foreign interests. Citizens United, and the resulting rise of the super PAC, led directly to this impeachment. The two Rudy Giuliani associates engaged in key abuses — the ouster of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, the attempts to force Ukraine’s president to announce investigations into Trump’s political opponents — gained access to Trump by funneling money from a Ukrainian oligarch to the president’s super PAC.

The Roberts Court’s decisions led to this moment in indirect ways, as well. The court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder gutted the Voting Rights Act and spurred a new wave of voter suppression. The decision in 2014′s McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission further surrendered campaign finance to the wealthiest. The 2018 Janus decision hobbled the ability of labor unions to counter wealthy donors, while the 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause ruling blessed partisan gerrymandering, expanding anti-democratic tendencies.

The Republican Party, weakened by the new dominance of outside money, couldn’t stop Trump’s hostile takeover of the party or the takeover of the congressional GOP ranks by far-right candidates. The new dominance of ideologically extreme outside groups and donors led lawmakers on both sides to give their patrons what they wanted: conflict over collaboration and purity at the cost of paralysis. The various decisions also suppress the influence of poorer and non-white Americans and extend the electoral power of Republicans in disproportion to the popular vote.

Certainly, the Supreme Court didn’t create all these problems, but its rulings have worsened the pathologies — uncompromising views, mindless partisanship and vitriol — visible in this impeachment trial. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), no doubt recognizing that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is helping to preserve his party’s Senate majority, has devoted much of his career to extending conservatives’ advantage in the judiciary.

He effectively stole a Supreme Court seat by refusing for nearly a year to consider President Barack Obama’s eminently qualified nominee, Merrick Garland, to fill a vacancy.

It’s a symbiotic relationship. On the day the impeachment trial opened, the Roberts Court rejected a plea by Democrats to expedite its consideration of the latest legal attempt by Republicans to kill Obamacare. The court sided with Republicans who opposed an immediate Supreme Court review because the GOP feared the ruling could hurt it if the decision came before the 2020 election.

Roberts had been warned about this sort of thing. The late Justice John Paul Stevens, in his Citizens United dissent, wrote: “Americans may be forgiven if they do not feel the Court has advanced the cause of self-government today.”

Justice Stephen Breyer, in his McCutcheon dissent, warned that the campaign finance system post-Citizens United would be “incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy.”

Now, we are in a crisis of democratic legitimacy: A president who has plainly abused his office and broken the law, a legislature too paralyzed to do anything about it — and a chief justice coming face to face with the system he broke.

Can Anyone Save the GOP?

The answer to the question posed in the caption is probably no.  It's the conclusion I came to two decades ago when I left the Republican Party and the situation has become even more dire in the age of Trump with the party base now firmly controlled by evangelical Christian extremists and white supremacists and white nationalists. True, a group of former Republicans will be airing anti-Trump ads on Fox News - during two of Der Trumpenführer's favorite shows - and a few individuals are struggle to mount a primary challenge to Trump, one such individual being Bill Weld, a former Republican Massachusetts governor.  Given the toxic nature of the GOP base and the efforts of state parties in some states to block any challenge to Trump, Weld's effort is an extremely long shot as noted in a column in the New York Times. One can only wish Weld well and meanwhile hope Republican senators in Congress will belatedly put their oaths of office first (don't hold your breath).  Here are column highlights:

Bill Weld, the former Massachusetts governor and current long-shot — make that, loooooooong-shot — candidate for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, is a keen student of New Hampshire politics. In an interview with me this week, he noted the following fact: Every time an incumbent president of either party faced a significant primary challenge in the Granite State, he failed in his bid for re-election.

It happened to George H.W. Bush in 1992 after Patrick Buchanan took 38 percent of the New Hampshire vote.

It happened to Jimmy Carter in 1980 after Teddy Kennedy took 39 percent.

It happened to Gerald Ford in 1976 after Ronald Reagan took 48 percent.

It happened to Lyndon Johnson in 1968 after Eugene McCarthy took 42 percent.

It happened to Harry Truman in 1952 when Estes Kefauver beat him outright, 55 percent to 44.

So, Weld reasons, why not try to make it happen to Donald J. Trump, too?

That’s the hopeful thought in what otherwise seems to be Weld’s hopeless bid to derail [Trump] a president whose support among Republicans was 89 percent last month, according to Gallup.

But he’s also wise enough to know that losing well can achieve great things, like bringing down a president who, he said, “regards the law as something to be evaded.” Can that be done between now and Feb. 11, the date of the New Hampshire primary? Weld rests his hopes on two things: New England Republicanism, which remains alive and well despite reports of its demise; and Trump’s trial in the Senate, whose result may not yet be a forgone conclusion. On the former, note that Vermont, Massachusetts and New Hampshire all have G.O.P. governors, who, like Weld, are relative moderates compared to the rest of the party. On the latter, Weld knows a lot about the impeachment process, having worked on the House Judiciary Committee’s staff as a young lawyer in 1974 as it considered articles against Richard Nixon. Nixon, Weld recalled, “was essentially forced to withdraw from the presidency because he had been caught lying on television to the American people on one topic” — a foothill of a deception compared to Trump’s Karakoram range.

Weld also knows how quickly things can turn in the course of a trial. “Cases don’t look the same at the end as they do at the beginning,” he noted, recalling his prosecutions of public corruption in the 1980s as United States attorney for the District of Massachusetts, where he won 109 convictions in 111 corruption cases. He believes that if four Republican senators join Democrats in voting to call witnesses — Ohio’s Rob Portman could provide the decisive vote — then anything is possible.

Maybe that’s right, assuming devastating testimony from John Bolton, the former national security adviser; former Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas; and who knows who (or what) else. Not that any kind of testimony is likely to sway the 67 senators needed for a conviction. But it’s not quite out of the question that it might, in the coming weeks, sway a large fraction of New Hampshire Republicans to vote against the president, thereby setting into motion forces that could bring him down. That’s the hope, at any rate. The odds against? I’d say 20 to 1 — which is to say, still worth a shot. If it fails, Weld said he would not run as an independent. Unlike in 2016, when he ran with Gary Johnson on the Libertarian ticket (and won 4.5 million votes) he has no interest in playing the spoiler to anyone in the race except Trump.

The larger question if it fails is what becomes of the G.O.P. Weld compared the party to the late-stage Whigs of the early 1850s, which were riven between the nativist Know Nothing faction and the antislavery wing that would become the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln. Fortunately, the good side won that time.

And this time? The best conservative case for rooting for a Democrat to win this fall — any Democrat, including Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren — is that it might be the only way to save the Republican Party from itself. That could happen if a critical mass of conservatives repudiates Trumpism or forms a new party on the Lincoln model. Weld calls it the Liberty Party.

Alternatively a Sanders or Warren victory could send the G.O.P. to even further extremes. . . . . Democrats who want to see Republicans recover their center need to protect their own. In the meantime, wish Bill Weld well in his Granite State carom shot.

Probably far to optimistic.  Moral, moderates left the GOP long ago with Trump having accelerated the exodus. That said, one can always hope for a miracle.

The Christianity Today Editorial Won’t Sway Evangelicals

Evangelical moral bankruptcy is unabated.

Like many, I welcomed the Christianity Today editorial calling for Donald Trump's removal from office.  That said, I viewed it as doing little to break white evangelicals' unholy alliance with Trump for several reasons.  The first is that Christianity Today, while respected, is not read by many evangelicals.  It is well written and tends to cater to educated evangelicals - to the extent that term isn't an oxymoron given that evangelicals tend to be the least educated of Christian denominations in the USA. The second is that the professional Christians who are driven by money and power rather than the gospel message - e.g., Franklin Graham, Tony Perkins, Jerry Falwell, Jr., et al- are totally unmoved by arguments centered on morality.  Thus, the sad reality is that most evangelicals will be unmoved and will continue to confirm to the rest of society that they are morally bankrupt and have no standing to lecture others on matters of morality or faith.  A column in the New York Times looks at this reality.  Here are highlights:

Thursday night, Christianity Today, long known as the “flagship” magazine of American evangelicalism, broke the internet with an editorial arguing for the impeachment and removal of Donald Trump from office. The piece, penned by the magazine’s outgoing editor, Mark Galli, implored evangelicals to consider the “unambiguous facts” of the impeachment case against [Trump] the president, maintaining his actions not only violated the Constitution, but were also “profoundly immoral.” 

The reaction — particularly from non-evangelicals — was excited and swift. . . . . The magazine’s website, apparently buckling under the unusual spate of traffic, was down for part of the evening, but that did not stop the avalanche of coverage on television, news sites and social media.

For many outsiders, Christianity Today seems to speak for millions of evangelicals. After all, the magazine was founded by Billy Graham, the pastor to presidents since Eisenhower.

That assumption, though, profoundly misapprehends American evangelicalism in the Trump era.

Since his 2016 election, in which 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for him, Mr. Trump continues to enjoy their unwavering loyalty. Three-quarters of white evangelicals approve of his job performance, and 80 percent of them remain opposed to impeaching him.

While many conservative evangelicals respect Christianity Today, it is read by a small slice of them, and is unlikely to make any significant dent in the president’s remarkable popularity. . . . .  It did not take long after the editorial was published for the president’s staunchest evangelical defenders, including Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, to react.

Mr. Graham reproached the magazine for invoking his father’s name to support its position, maintaining that his father, who died in 2018, had supported Mr. Trump as “the man for this hour in history for our nation.” He even accused the magazine of being “used by the left for their political agenda,” and representing “the elitist liberal wing of evangelicalism” — a smear taken up, not surprisingly, by [Trump] the president himself in a tweet.

As I reported the same day the editorial was published, Mr. Trump’s evangelical supporters have built a powerful network of political organizations, prayer warriors, televangelists, religious media, mega-churches and voter identification and mobilization efforts . . . . In this insular ecosystem, [Trump] the president is seen as a divinely anointed leader, sent by God to save America at a critical moment in history, when, supporters claim, their religious freedom is under attack by secularists.

Mr. Trump’s support is not just about anointings and prayers. It is also about personnel, policy and law — in other words, a government led by Christians who will undo, for example, advances in L.G.B.T.Q. rights. The Christian right enjoys not just regular and frequent access to the president, but virtual carte blanche on dictating policy, as top ideologues have been placed in cabinet positions and other political appointments in federal agencies.

Ralph Reed, a leading evangelical activist and supporter of Mr. Trump, has boasted to his followers, “There are more Christians serving” in the Trump administration “than all previous presidents combined.”

Mr. Trump’s evangelical defenders may truly believe he is anointed, or they may just relish the unparalleled authority he has granted them. Either way, this actual mainstream of American evangelicalism is not likely to give up on its divine leader, or on its newfound power, no matter what the impeachment proceedings uncover.

The Tyranny of the Republican Minority

The sad reality is that Donald Trump is a racist misogynist who, as Christianity Today noted in an editorial Thursday, is morally unfit and who needs to be removed from office. Yet his base, especially evangelicals, who comprise a minority of voters,  continue to support him with an almost cult-like fervor.  Despite all the denials and excuses by members of his base, the take away is that members of his base are as depraved as Trump himself and/or outright racists who cannot countenance the demographic changes occur in the country or the reality that the 63 million voters Republicans whine about did NOT and do NOT represent a majority of voters.  Thus, the 2016 vote in no way granted Trump and/or Republicans a mandate.  Indeed, but for the highly flawed and outdated Electoral College, Trump would not and should not have been elected. A column in the New York Times looks at the disingenuous effort by Republicans to depict Trump's impeachment as an effort to overturn majority rule. Here are highlights:

[T]his constant trumpeting of a vote total that is more than two million less than the total received by Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton. Trump didn’t just lose the popular vote — he lost it by a greater margin than any successful presidential candidate in American history. The right’s bombastic repetition of Trump’s 63 million could be just a propaganda trick meant to bully America’s anti-Trump majority into seeing itself as marginal, despite the more than 65 million votes Clinton received. But as I watched impeachment unfold, it seemed like something more than that — an assertion of whom Republicans think this country belongs to.

Over the last three years, a political narrative has developed that Republicans in Congress secretly dislike Trump but overlook his personal degeneracy in the interest of enacting their agenda. Wednesday should explode that fiction forever.

The Republican identification with Trump is total. Again and again, histrionic Republican congressmen equated hatred of the president with hatred of themselves and hatred of the sacred 63 million. They spoke of Trump with an awe and a maudlin devotion bordering on religious; Barry Loudermilk, a Georgia Republican, declared that Trump had been given less due process than Jesus Christ himself.

All day, Republican speeches delivered by old white men alternated with Democratic speeches from women, people of color and young people. White men make up 90 percent of the Republican caucus and 38 percent of the Democratic one, and the day dramatized the representational gulf in the starkest visual terms.

We face the horror of Trump because the structure of American democracy gives disproportionate power to a declining demographic group passionately convinced of its right to rule. Trump, with his braying entitlement, his boastful ignorance, his sneering contempt for pluralism, is an avatar of a Republican Party desperate to return to the 1980s, or the 1950s, or maybe the 1910s. He can’t betray America if, to those who fetishize the 63 million, he embodies it.

At the start of this administration, many who are horrified by Trump, me included, thought that at some point the Republican fever might break, leading conservatives in Congress to check a dictator-worshiping buffoon for the sake of the Constitution they claim to revere. I’ve become ashamed of my naïveté in imagining any overlap between my ideas about what is valuable in this country, and theirs.

“There’s been a lot of talk about the 63 million people who voted for Mr. Trump,” the House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, said in his surprisingly moving speech on Wednesday. “Little talk about the 65 million people who voted for Hillary Clinton.” With the House’s impeachment vote, the America outside of Trump’s ruling faction finally mattered.

Democrats didn’t want to impeach, but once they decided to, Trump’s insistence that his Electoral College victory grants him impunity didn’t work. For one night, democracy asserted itself.

In the end, Trump’s impeachment passed with more House votes than Bill Clinton’s. All but one of the Democrats first elected in last year’s blue wave voted for impeachment, some at real political risk, given the conservative lean of their districts.

“Today, especially today, I reflect on the founding documents that have set us apart in the world, leading people across generations and across the world to risk everything because of their belief in our great nation,” said the Virginia Democrat Abigail Spanberger, a Constitution scarf around her neck, her voice charged with emotion.

Women and people of color, of course, were originally outside the protection of those founding documents. But on Wednesday, the most diverse Congress in history declared that even the most powerful white man in the world should be bound by them. When Republicans act as if that’s a sacrilege, they show us what they worship.

Christianity Today: Trump Must Be Removed from Office

Christianity Today is a magazine founded by the late Rev. Billy Graham, that has broad readership among evangelical Christians.  It is not the in the same league as the crazed publications of hate groups such as Family Research Council or American Family Association.  In fact, as noted, it was founded by Billy Graham and has not fallen under the influence of Graham's grifter children who use their family name and religion for self-enrichment and self-promotion. Thus, it is notable that in a main editorial, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today has laid out the case of why Donald Trump must be removed from office, both for the good of the country and for the term legitimacy of evangelical Christianity, Axios notes why this editorial is ground shaking: 

An editorial published Thursday by Christianity Today, a magazine founded by the late Rev. Billy Graham, called for President Trump's removal from office in the wake of his impeachment, deeming him "grossly immoral." . . . Why it matters: Christianity Today is an influential mainstream magazine for evangelicals, with 4.3 million monthly visitors on its site and hundreds of thousands of print subscribers. President Trump won 81% of the evangelical vote in 2016, a group that makes up about 25% of the electorate, according to the Pew Research Center. . . . . Go deeper... Josh Harris: Evangelical support for Trump "incredibly damaging to the Gospel"

I and many others, including the under age 30 generations, now view evangelical Christians and even Christianity as something morally bankrupt  that decent people should seek to avoid. Support of Trump and right wing Republican policies that are the antithesis to the true gospel message are the principal reason younger generations are engaged in a massive exodus from religion entirely. It would seem that Christianity Today has come to the realization that continued evangelical support of Trump will deprive evangelicals of what little moral credibility that still possess.  Will evangelicals listen?  Sadly, probably not.  Here are editorial highlights:

In our founding documents, Billy Graham explains that Christianity Today will help evangelical Christians interpret the news in a manner that reflects their faith. The impeachment of Donald Trump is a significant event in the story of our republic. It requires comment.

The typical CT approach is to stay above the fray and allow Christians with different political convictions to make their arguments in the public square, to encourage all to pursue justice according to their convictions and treat their political opposition as charitably as possible. We want CT to be a place that welcomes Christians from across the political spectrum, and reminds everyone that politics is not the end and purpose of our being. We take pride in the fact, for instance, that politics does not dominate our homepage.

That said, we do feel it necessary from time to time to make our own opinions on political matters clear—always, as Graham encouraged us, doing so with both conviction and love.

[T]he facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.

The reason many are not shocked about this is that this president has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration. He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals. He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his relationship with women, about which he remains proud. His Twitter feed alone—with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders—is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.

Trump’s evangelical supporters have pointed to his Supreme Court nominees, his defense of religious liberty, and his stewardship of the economy, among other things, as achievements that justify their support of the president. We believe the impeachment hearings have made it absolutely clear, in a way the Mueller investigation did not, that President Trump has abused his authority for personal gain and betrayed his constitutional oath. The impeachment hearings have illuminated the president’s moral deficiencies for all to see. This damages the institution of the presidency, damages the reputation of our country, and damages both the spirit and the future of our people. None of the president’s positives can balance the moral and political danger we face under a leader of such grossly immoral character.

This concern for the character of our national leader is not new in CT.

[T]he words that we applied to Mr. Clinton 20 years ago apply almost perfectly to our current president. Whether Mr. Trump should be removed from office by the Senate or by popular vote next election—that is a matter of prudential judgment. That he should be removed, we believe, is not a matter of partisan loyalties but loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments.

To the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record, we might say this: Remember who you are and whom you serve. Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior. Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency. If we don’t reverse course now, will anyone take anything we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come?

[W]e have done our best to give evangelical Trump supporters their due, to try to understand their point of view, to see the prudential nature of so many political decisions they have made regarding Mr. Trump. To use an old cliché, it’s time to call a spade a spade, to say that no matter how many hands we win in this political poker game, we are playing with a stacked deck of gross immorality and ethical incompetence.

It will crash down on the reputation of evangelical religion and on the world’s understanding of the gospel. And it will come crashing down on a nation of men and women whose welfare is also our concern.