Trump Is Forcing the House Towards Impeachment

Anyone who has followed Donald Trump's real estate career should have known the man is utterly unprincipled and has long viewed himself above the law.  He has long operated more in the mode of a Mafia Don than a normal businessman or entrepreneur. Placing him in the Oval Office was a disaster waiting to happen, and given his malignant narcissism and view of himself as unbound by the law or tradition, t has always been only of question of time until he crossed the line of legal presidential conduct. The man embodies why the Founding Fathers designed the Electoral College system - a system electors failed to honor so as to protect the nation from someone like Trump who seemingly views himself as George III or some other despotic monarch (which explains his love of brutal dictators).  A piece in New York Magazine lays out why Trump is pushing the House of Representatives to begin impeachment.  Increasingly, members of Congress who take their oath of office have no other option than to move to impeach an unfit and dangerous occupant of the White House.  Ultimately, the question for Republicans will be whether they place party over country and value avoiding a primary challenge over their constitution obligations.  Here are article excerpts: 

The anticlimactic denouement of the Mueller report produced a mixture of relief and gloating for Republicans. For President Trump it also produced something else: An almost intoxicating sense of impunity, a realization that his attempts to cultivate Russia as an ally, and largely successful efforts to gain control of the Justice Department, gave him carte blanche to plan his next crime. In June, he announced on television that he would accept dirt on his opponent from a foreign government if offered it again. He dispatched his lawyer to Ukraine to deliver the message that he demanded an investigation of his leading Democratic rival, and that he would use the powers of his office to leverage this end.

It is primarily because Trump is indicating his war on democratic norms will not end that Congress is barreling toward impeachment right now at astonishing speed. On Monday morning, the headline on Politico’s story on House Democrats began, “Reluctant Democrats Weigh Impeachment.” By evening, as more reporting poured in, it had changed to “Dems Moving to Condemn Trump as Impeachment Fever Grows.”

The most important impediment to impeaching Trump has always been the reluctance of the most vulnerable House Democrats to take a vote that they feared would alienate their constituents. But all the signs are now pointing toward those Democrats throwing aside their reluctance. Seven newly-elected freshmen Democrats from vulnerable districts have published an op-ed in the Washington Post demanding Trump hand over the suppressed complaint from an intelligence whistleblower of Trump’s pressure on Ukraine. “If these allegations are true,” they write, “we believe these actions represent an impeachable offense.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has urged restraint out of a desire to insulate those vulnerable members, who she needs to preserve her majority. Pelosi’s behavior, too, has shifted notably. Her close ally, Rosa DeLauro, issued a statement demanding the entire whistleblower’s complaint and opening the door to impeachment. The Post reports Pelosi is sounding out members on impeachment, and “many leadership aides who once thought Trump’s impeachment was unlikely now say they think it’s almost inevitable.”

It is possible Trump could defuse impeachment by releasing his block on the whistleblower complaint. But surrendering his claims of secrecy and almost unbounded executive privilege run counter to his instinct for domination. It could also quite likely supply evidence incriminating enough to lead to his impeachment anyway.

The politics of this maneuver are highly uncertain. Whatever their motive, Democrats are not seeking political advantage, and there is a distinct possibility proceedings would backfire on them. Despite Trump’s unpopularity, strong majorities have opposed impeachment throughout his term.

But there is at least some reason to believe the politics of the Ukraine scandal will play out differently than the politics of the Russia scandal. The Republican phalanx of support has failed to materialize in its usual strength. Normally passive Mitt Romney issued a surprisingly sharp rebuke, demanding Trump “should make available the whistleblower complaint that has been deemed to be credible and urgent, and that if not “it will be up to the House to decide how to proceed.”

Other signs of discomfort in the party are more subtle. The normal mouthpieces of the Party line, while tonally in support, are refusing to outright defend his actions in Ukraine. . . . The Wall Street Journal editorial page scolds, “What we know of the call underscores Mr. Trump’s greatest flaw as President, which is his political narcissism. Every decision boils down to how it affects him or his re-election prospects. Other Presidents have made similar calculations, but Mr. Trump lacks the basic filter to know when he is crossing a line that creates trouble for himself or the country.”

Even more tellingly, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declined to defend Trump’s coercion of Ukraine, or even to repeat his attacks on Biden, but instead made a tepid complaint that Democrats “have chosen to politicize the issue.” It is probably relevant that Trump was defying the wishes of Republicans themselves by refusing to allow the military aid to Ukraine that Congress had passed to go through. Trump personally ordered the aid to be held up, the Washington Post reports, in the latest explosive development. McConnell may or may not care that Trump is abusing his power to smear Biden, but he surely cares that Trump is abrogating laws passed by McConnell.

The House will probably vote soon to make clear its intention to impeach Trump unless he hands over the full whistleblower complaint. Perhaps he will do so, and perhaps it will not incriminate him. What seems more likely now is a prospect that had appeared remote just days ago: The House of Representatives will hold impeachment proceedings for President Donald Trump.

The U.S. Senate: Millennials’ Political Nightmare

U.S. Senate chamber.

The U.S. Senate, which Founding Fathers thought was a good check on possible rash actions by a majority of voters, is quickly becoming the vehicle whereby a minority of voters - mainly in red states - can block the will of the majority time and time again.   Ironically, meanwhile, it is the majority and the blue states that provide the taxes that allow federal handouts to red states which are in ways akin to the "welfare queens" their Republican elected officials constantly deride.  They receive far more in federal funding than they pay in  and they despise those in the states that are footing the bill. Something needs to be done to either reform the Senate - something not likely to happen - or to change the funding formula to reduce the amounts freeloading red states receive.  As Millennials become even more engaged in politics, the Senate will loom larger and larger in blocking democracy and allowing a tyranny of a shrinking minority.  A column in the Washington Post looks at a problem that will fester more and more over the coming years.  Here are highlights:

Tuesday’s midterm elections were much more than a national repudiation of President Trump, a reminder that the president is still strong in red states or a return to the divided government that Americans so often favor. They were a sign of the political nightmare that will define a generation of millennial politics.

The Democrats took the House thanks to an anti-Trump surge not just among traditional Democratic groups such as minority voters, but also among college-educated people, particularly women, in America’s sprawling suburbs. Republicans expanded their Senate majority as they ran up the score in red states such as Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota. Democratic incumbents lost big in each of these states.

[T]here is a trend at work bigger than the president. The nation is diversifying. Its cities are growing. Its coasts are increasingly vibrant, diverse and open to the world. These values better fit educated suburbanites than Trump’s xenophobia. These facts suggest that the Democratic coalition is likely to win more votes nationwide, as it has in every presidential election but one since 1992. Virginia, whose northern suburban districts turned the state from red to purple to blue over just a decade, is a harbinger. Given time, as electoral votes and congressional seats shift to these areas, the House and presidential elections are likely to be the Democrats’ to lose. Tuesday’s results are an early indication of this shift.

But the Senate is different. The chamber was never meant to reflect the will of the American majority, and it increasingly will not. . . . Republican tribalists will not suffer a Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) or a Joe Donnelly (Ind.) representing their states, no matter how centrist their records. Both lost, and by unexpectedly wide margins. The survival of West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin III and Montana Democrat Jon Tester look like ever-rarer aberrations.

Democrats will eventually pick off Senate seats that Republicans still hold in bluer territories, such as Susan Collins’s seat in Maine. But for electoral purposes, Republican voters are much more efficiently distributed across the country. No matter how many people vote in California, they still get only two senators, the same as tiny Idaho, South Dakota and Wyoming.

The Founders imagined that the Senate would check and cool the impulses of the majority. But the body is poised to serve as a reactionary rural veto on a center-left country, routinely thwarting efforts to address major issues such as immigration, climate change, the national debt, health care, international cooperation and wealth inequality. Staffing the government and the courts could become impossible, as GOP senators refuse to approve Democratic appointees. The judiciary could become more politicized and even more conservative.
 The United States could fail to compete in providing the sort of modern, competent and responsive government that fosters economic prosperity and attracts foreign talent and investment, unless Republicans start electing moderates who will compromise with Democrats. With the increasing geographic and identity-based divisions in the country, it is more likely that Republican voters will prefer candidates who will promise to take nothing over a compromise. My elementary school teachers taught me and my fellow children, succored as we were on multicultural urbanism while growing up in Los Angeles, that we benefited from a symbiotic relationship with the rural Americans who grew our food, watched over our nation’s vast open spaces and defined so much of the American experience for so long. We, by contrast, provided a market for their products, connected them to the rest of the world and provided the economic innovation that underpinned national progress. Neither could exist without the other, and both deserve respect.

Increasingly, the relationship will not be defined by respect, but by resentment. The result will be a toxic stalemate. 

The People v. the U.S. Senate

Anti-majority Senate Republicans.

The structure of Congress was a pragmatic deal struck by the authors of the U.S. Constitution to induce smaller states to ratify the document and create the United States of America.  The principal carrot for small states was the U.S. Senate which would give small states equal power with large states.  Its very structure was anti-democratic, but it was the sweetener needed to achieve ratification.  Fast forward to today and the imbalance of power in control of legislation and important confirmations is now firmly controlled by a minority of the population that has little acceptance for changing demographics, social norms and/or a fast changing economy.  The recent Kavanaugh confirmation underscored the problem.  The result: some are calling for abolition of the Senate or a major restructuring to end small state obstructionism.  Here are highlights from a piece in The Atlantic:  

Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the United States Supreme Court by a vote of 50–48, with one senator absent and one abstaining. Only one Democrat, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, voted with the solidly Republican majority, which represented just 44 percent of the country’s population. Indeed, when Americans last voted for their senators (over a period of six years), Democrats won the popular vote by more than 8 percent. It’s that disproportionality—and the reality that a majority of the country’s population is represented by just 18 senators—that is driving concerns about the Senate’s ability to function as a representative body in a changing America.

The Senate is embedded within the Constitution as few other institutions are, with a special clause that some believe makes it immune to the standard amendment process. Adding more diverse states is one solution — Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, and other U.S. territories would likely send Democrats to Capitol Hill if they gained representation, somewhat balancing the chamber.

And both Puerto Rico and D.C. seem agreeable: Last month, Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo Rosselló, stepped up his campaign for statehood, while the district’s congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, is a passionate advocate of admitting D.C.

[B]oth those who want abolition and those who want more modest, but nonetheless significant, changes agree: The Senate is increasingly unrepresentative of the American populace.

The Republican Party has an inbuilt advantage in Senate races. Since Democratic voters tend to cluster in cities and their inner suburbs, Republicans are more spread out over large geographic areas. While rural strength in a state like New York or California counts for little in Senate races dominated by large coastal cities, the abundance of sparsely populated, geographically vast states in the West and Midwest is a big help for Republican domination in the chamber. Wyoming, for instance, reliably returns GOP senators despite having about as many people as Albuquerque.

There’s also demography: The states Trump won, which tend to be more Republican in general, are also whiter. In the political world of 2018, that makes them harder to win for Democrats, though the party holds numerous safe seats in heavily white northeastern states in which the GOP is not seriously competitive. The most diverse states are also the largest, and, therefore, the most underrepresented on a per capita basis.

Senate critics also contend that smaller states tend to be more conservative, while larger ones are more likely to back Democrats, though this argument is belied by the nine largest states, which are represented by an even number of Democrats and Republicans. Yet even if partisanship is put aside, those nine account for more than half of the country’s population.

While other countries have disproportionately selected legislatures—Norway intentionally allocates extra voting power to rural areas, for instance, and Canada’s provinces have stark differences in parliamentary representation—the Senate’s extreme imbalance is essentially unique in the global pantheon of representative democracy.

On June 11, 1787, Roger Sherman rose in a Philadelphia room filled with other landowning men and recommended a bicameral legislature for America, with one house apportioned by population and the other apportioned equally among the states. This deal—the Connecticut Compromise, as it would later be known—has organized American legislative governance for nearly two and a half centuries. Sherman’s original proposal was not, of course, designed to boost popular representation.

The Senate would express the interests of the states, conceived of as sovereign entities unto themselves rather than as a wholly cohesive nation. Until the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in the spring of 1913, senators were elected by the legislature of their respective state.

Those who want to eliminate the Senate wholesale argue that the ship has sailed on states as sovereign entities. The federalism, they contend, fundamentally undermines basic democratic due process and the voting rights of actual people.

Daniel Lazare, a journalist who specializes in American politics and has written three books on constitutional issues, argued in Jacobin in 2014 that the Senate is “one of the most cockeyed systems of minority rule in history, one that allows tiny coteries to hold the entire country ransom until their demands are met.”

Senate abolition, no matter its support among left-wing groups, remains a remote prospect in the near term. Constitutional and political hurdles are massive, and despite gaining traction among many in the left-wing commentariat, popular support would likely be more elusive. However, stopgap measures—subdividing large states, for instance, or adding U.S. territories and the District of Columbia to the union—may be more viable and could address some Senate critics’ most immediate concerns.

But calls for radical reform can be useful in themselves. Issues of voting rights and disproportionality generally gain traction when attention is turned toward issues like the relative representativeness of the Senate. Electoral change—including measures to combat voter suppression and gerrymandering, or even more fundamental changes like instituting a proportional voting system for House elections—may become more palatable to the electorate at large as massive systemic changes like Senate abolition are discussed. “It’s always good to have a John the Baptist out there, painting a picture of what could be, but people change their minds relatively slowly,” Beyer says.

But in the near term, Democrats may not need John the Baptist—what they need may be Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, and time. To rearrange electoral geography, American history would suggest that time is the most critical.