GOP Congressman: Mitch McConnell is "the Marie Antoinette of the Senate"

After Donald Trump, the man who has done more damage to America and exhibited more disregard of the U.S. Constitution is the ever despicable (and self-enriching) Mitch McConnell.  Now, with states struggling financially with the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, McConnell has said that he would prefer that states go bankrupt rather than have the federal government provide financial assistance.  This, from the man who had no qualms giving away $1,5 trillion to the extremely wealthy and large corporations, exploding the federal deficit in the process.  Combined with McConnell's protection of Trump and putting the GOP above the country, McConnell deserves the nickname "Moscow Mitch."  He needs to be voted out of office and he and his wife investigated.  A piece in Salon looks at even a Republican calling McConnell out. A piece in Salon looks at McConnell's Marie Antoinette comparison (which probably is slanderous toward Marie Antoinette).  Here are excerpts:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., caught fire from both parties after telling the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Wednesday that he would rather see states declare bankruptcy — which they cannot do — than wait for expanded federal aid that would demand further deficit spending.

"We all have governors regardless of party who would love to have free money," McConnell said. "I think this whole business of additional assistance for state and local governments need to be thoroughly evaluated."

Hours later, Rep. Pete King, R-N.Y., publicly rebuked McConnell, calling his Republican colleague's remarks "indefensible."

"To say that it is 'free money' to provide funds for cops, firefighters and healthcare workers makes McConnell the Marie Antoinette of the Senate," King tweeted.

McConnell — who nicknamed himself the "Grim Reaper" — made the remarks the day after the Senate passed a relief bill that excluded the hundreds of billions of dollars in federal aid requested by a bipartisan coalition of governors.

"These continuing losses will force states and territories not only to make drastic cuts to the programs we depend on to provide economic security, educational opportunities, and public safety, but the national economic recovery will be dramatically hampered," Gov. Larry Hogan (R-MD), chairman of the National Governors Association, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.), vice-chair, wrote in a joint letter to Congress last week.

Though McConnell said he prefers the bankruptcy route, President Donald Trump has said he wants to add a relief package for state and local governments in the next round of emergency funding.

McConnell's office published a press release to promote the interview, tossing off the requested funds as "blue-state bailouts," . . . . Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., put McConnell's colleagues on the spot Thursday morning, tweeting: "Republican Senators: Raise your hand if you think your state should go bankrupt."

King and Schumer both veterans of Congress  — King has represented parts of Long Island since 1993 — have teamed up against McConnell before. In the wake of last summer's mass shooting at a San Antonio Wal-Mart, the pair called on McConnell to call an emergency session to vote on a background check bill that passed in the lower chamber.

McConnell's Senate office could not be immediately reached for comment. His campaign redirected Salon's request to his Senate office.

Trump is Behaving Like a Dictator

I believe Donald Trump is an existential  threat to American democracy.  Sadly, today's Republicans' only concern is staying in office and avoiding the wrath of Trump and his hideous base of support , so behavior that would never have been tolerated even five years ago is shrugged off leaving the nation to slide towards fascism.  Yes, I will vote for any Democrat in November running against Trump in the hope that he will be defeated and forced from office - assuming he will leave voluntarily if he loses the election. Frighteningly, many Americans seem indifferent to what is happening and are all too reminiscent of Germany's citizenry as Hitler rose to power.  A piece in Salon from this past Saturday looks at Trump's conduct last week and why Americans must act to stop him before it is too late.  Here are article highlights:

There will come a time when we look back on this week as the moment in our history when we finally understood that we have a man as president who is acting like a fascist dictator. Just look at the headlines from one day's New York Times alone: "Alarm in Capital as Axes Swing in Growing Post-Acquittal Purge," "Justice Dept. Acts to Ease Sentence for a Trump Ally." If either one of those headlines had run on the front page of a major American newspaper before now, not to mention both of them at once, we would have believed as a people, as a citizenry, that we were facing a national crisis. But this week? Wednesday was just another day in Donald Trump's America.

The day before that, in what became known as the "Tuesday night massacre," all four prosecutors in the case against Trump's longtime friend and political bad boy Roger Stone had resigned in protest of the intervention by Trump and his attorney general, William Barr, to reduce the sentence recommended by the Department of Justice in Stone's conviction for lying to congressional committees and tampering with witnesses. 

All of this followed closely the "Friday night massacre" of last week, when Trump fired two of the impeachment witnesses against him, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman of the National Security Council and Gordon Sondland, ambassador to the European Union. 

But two "massacres" in a row was just the beginning. By mid-week, Trump was suggesting that Army officials with court-martial authority over Vindman should "take a look at" punishing him for testifying at the impeachment hearing. On Thursday, the New York Times front page trumpeted, "U,S. Lawyers Fear Removal of a Guardrail: Stone Case Stirs Worry of What's to Come."

Folks, let's not mince words: This is the kind of stuff we read about happening in dictatorships like Russia and North Korea and Iran. And yes, it's the kind of rule by strong-arm fiat that was  practiced by Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany.  Before this week, I would have thought it an exaggeration to compare Trump's frequent rallies to the infamous Nuremberg rallies Hitler held during the1930s. No longer. Trump's rallies are unnervingly close to those held in Nuremberg. The MAGA hat has become a kind of Trumpian Nazi  helmet. The denunciations of hated minorities are the same. As is his insane bellowing before a crowd screaming its slavish obeisance.  To call for the imprisonment of political opponents without trial is not playing with rhetoric for effect. It's not political gimmickry. It's not cute. It's not funny. It's not clever. Let's say out loud what it is: It's pure fascism, plain and simple.  The man who stands before those rallies and encourages such idolatry isn't merely running for president. He is calling, directly and without apology, for the kind of obedience and loyalty demanded by dictators. He is commanding worship and submission. It must be why he attracts so completely the support of evangelical Christians. He truly is the false idol their Bible warned them against. They have fallen for him in the same way the most conspicuously devout worshipers commit sins. The inevitability of Trump and his evangelical masses is jaw-dropping, and yes, biblical.  It's hard to put a finger on the worst thing Trump has done since taking office, but right up there is the complete destruction of the idea that the person in the Oval Office is the president of all the people. He isn't. He doesn't want to be. If you didn't vote for him, if you're not out there wearing a MAGA hat and screaming at his rallies, you're a non-person. If your state didn't go for him in the 2016 election, forget about it. Just ask California, or Puerto Rico, still waiting for federal assistance after natural disasters. Or ask New York, which Trump is now extorting like a domestic Ukraine, by denying New Yorkers access to the "Trusted Traveler" program unless the state "stop all of its unnecessary lawsuits & harrassment" [sic].  

To divide the country into those Trump approves of and those he does not is inherently fascistic. That way lies the singling out of non-supporters and minorities for special treatment.

Donald Trump is an existential threat to the virtues of the democracy we have enjoyed for more than two centuries. He is a real threat to the things we have thought we shared as Americans: the love of variety and dissent, and a belief in the consent of the governed. The capacity of all citizens to respect each other's opposing positions, even amid vigorous disagreement. A respect for the disadvantaged and a scorn for the absolutism of the strong. A universal contempt for the public lie. Trump stands in outright opposition to all of this, and he is a threat to us all. It's time for another Moratorium [Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam] march, this time against Donald Trump. It's not enough to vote against him in November. We're sliding into a fascist dictatorship. The time to act is now.

Trump's Insane Letter to Pelosi Shows Why He’s Unfit For Office

Any number of mental health experts - including Virginia's governor who is a surgical neurologist by profession - have opined that Donald Trump is mentally ill.  More specifically, he is a malignant narcissist which by definition meas this: 

. . . . a psychological syndrome comprising an extreme mix of narcissism, antisocial behavior, aggression, and sadism. Grandiose, and always ready to raise hostility levels, the malignant narcissist undermines families and organizations in which they are involved, and dehumanizes the people with whom they associate.

Given this diagnosis, it is little surprise that Trump's actions lead him to be impeached since, in true narcissist fashion, he views himself above the law and the rules that bind the rest of us.  As evidenced by Trump's raving letter he sent  Nancy Pelosi one of the laws that Trump views as inapplicable to him is the U.S. Constitution. A piece in New York Magazine looks at what Trump's letter tells us.  Here are excerpts:

Trump’sletter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is obviously written, or at least dictated, in large part or in whole by the president himself. Its most notable quality is its lack of any coherent structure. It does not build an argument, or even group like points together. It careens wildly from point to point.

Trump’s letter strengthens the case for impeachment in two important ways. First, he portrays impeachment as constitutionally illegitimate. By this, Trump doesn’t mean simply that his actions do not rise to an impeachable offense, or even that the accusations are completely meritless. He repeatedly denies that the House has any constitutional right to undertake impeachment at all.

Of course the Constitution gives the House of Representatives the power to determine what presidential acts constitute impeachable offenses. Trump seems to believe that he as president has the power to determine whether a president’s actions are impeachable. Trump argues that if Congress can impeach him, which is a clearly delineated power, then he can prosecute Congress for crimes of Trump’s choosing, a power that exists nowhere in the Constitution.

The most telling passage comes at the end, where, having unloaded various grievances, Trump lingers on the psychic pain that the Russia investigation and now impeachment have inflicted: . . . Trump identifies first his family, and then the Republic, as the parties enduring this mental anguish, no doubt in an effort to feign stoicism. But the letter makes it perfectly clear that Trump himself is in agony, to the extent where his mental health is very much in question.

If a juror in Trump’s coming impeachment trial had no other evidence except this letter, it would provide ample grounds for impeachment. Trump openly denies the Congress’s constitutional prerogative, and makes plain his mental unfitness for the job.

Trump sees himself as a monarch and answerable to no one.  Never does Trump look at his own actions as the basis of why he has now been impeached. Should the Senate acquit him, there may be no limits to what he may do.  Be  very, very afraid.

The Founders Would Be Revolted By Trump, Today’s Republicans

As perhaps a majority of Republicans continue to gush about Donald Trump's Soviet-style parade and military display on July 4th and his regime's human rights abuses continue on the nation's southern border, those who know accurate history of America are revolted by what they have witnessed - many of us refused to tune in - and are struck by just disgusted the Founding Fathers would be.  Significant portions of Republicans now support government censorship of the free press while a majority believe that Christianity should be made the nation's established religion.  Anyone versed in accurate history of the nation understands that these views were anathema to the Founding Fathers. A column in the New York Times looks at the increasingly anti-American positions of today's Republicans, not mention Der Trumpenführer.  Here are column highlights:

Kids in cages and tanks for the tyrant. After that dictator-friendly Fourth of July, it’s time for all true patriots to conduct a political gut check.

Like many people, I’m worried about the Democrats. A majority of Americans are desperate for someone to dislodge the despot from the White House. And yet some Democrats are pushing policy positions — such as taking away private health insurance from more than 150 million people — that are deeply unpopular. The smarter candidates will rethink this, and soon, or otherwise ensure that an awful American aberration is more than a one-off.

But as troubled as I am by the Democrats, I’m terrified of the Republicans. In numerous surveys of a party that has adopted the worst pathologies of President Trump, Republicans have shown themselves to be explicitly anti-American. The Founders would gag. So would Abraham Lincoln.

Consider the Republicans’ view of the First Amendment, the most sacred of the freedoms embedded in this country’s governing blueprint. Just under half of Republicans now believe government should be able to shut down “biased or inaccurate media.” And close to half of Republicans have adopted Trump’s authoritarian view that the news media is “the enemy of the people.”

I don’t expect Republicans to know Thomas Jefferson’s words by heart — that if he were forced to choose between “a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” This from a man who was subject to a lifetime of biased and inaccurate press.

But what part of “Congress shall make no law” abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, do these citizens not understand?

Regarding the other foundational liberty in the First Amendment, restricting an “establishment of religion” by the state, the cult of Trump would throw that under a steamroller of bigotry as well.

A majority of Republicans think Christianity should be the established national religion. And half of all Southerners — the deepest, most anti-American part of Trump’s base, with the DNA of Civil War traitors still coursing through the region — believe the United States was founded as an “explicitly Christian” nation.

George Washington made clear it was otherwise in a letter to a Jewish congregation in 1790 celebrating religious tolerance and diversity. “The citizens of the United States have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy,” he wrote.

Jefferson expressed a similar feeling, touting a homeland for “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”

So, quick summary: Republicans of today would not approve of the First Amendment as written. They would give Big Government free rein to quash dissenting voices in the press, and would prefer a merging of church and state.

[A]s they have picked up Trump’s hatreds as their own, Republicans have turned a cold shoulder to the wretched masses yearning to breathe free. Less than 40 percent of Republicans, in three recent polls, now believe immigrants are a benefit to the country. This could be because of ignorance: Even though the vast majority, 77 percent, of immigrants in this country are legal, a plurality of Republicans believe they are not.

Trump has compared himself to Abraham Lincoln, which is like comparing a noxious weed to a redwood tree.

The modern-day Know-Nothings are the pink-faced mobs calling for a wall at Trump rallies. They are the architects of a government policy that puts children in filthy cages and forces them to drink fetid water, that sees helpless and newly orphaned babies as subhuman — all while laughing at the cruelty.

You can see why Republicans with a sense of history and fealty to the great sweep of their party’s finer principles describe themselves as politically homeless in 2019.

And when Trump rolls out weapons of war to celebrate the birth of a nation that never even had much of a standing army until the 20th century, you can see why passionate pride in this country is at its lowest point since Gallup started measuring this sentiment in the modern era.

Democracy is not mentioned in the Constitution nor in the Declaration of Independence, as the historian Virginia Anderson recently noted. It’s a human construct, more fragile than any of us believed until now. But when it’s gone, no one should be surprised.

A piece in The Atlantic continues this theme by looking at Trump's so-called speech at his Red Square like event.  Here are excerpts:

Were these wars right or just? Why were they fought? What were their outcomes? Except for the mentions of “freedoms” sprinkled randomly through the text, those questions went unconsidered. Instead, Trump would periodically ad-lib “What a great country!” after this or that mention of power and violence. America is great because it crushes all before it. Altering for circumstances, it was a speech that could have been given by Kaiser Wilhelm or Napoleon or Julius Caesar or the Assyrian Emperor Sennacherib. A great country is one that is feared by its enemies, that can inflict more devastating destruction than any other.

Devotion. Unity. History. Fighting. But not: Democracy. Justice. Individuality. Peace.

From time to time, one of Trump’s more devout speechwriters will try to insert references to God into the president’s mouth. Those references never sound natural from the least spiritual president in the nation’s history. They were, fascinatingly, all but absent from this speech commemorating the independence of a nation, in the apt phrase of G. K. Chesterton, with the soul of a church. Instead, there was only vainglorious boasting: See our wealth, see our power, see our glorious triumphs over the mounded corpses of our enemies. We will always win, because we always fight.

No non-American could watch that spectacle at the Lincoln Memorial and feel that America stood for anything good or right or universal. Power worshipped power, for its own sake.

“We will always be the people who defeated a tyrant, crossed a continent, harnessed science, took to the skies, and soared into the heavens because we will never forget that we are Americans and the future belongs to us.” That sentence of self-congratulation toward the end of Trump’s speech was probably lodged in the clipboard memory of some 1980s vintage word processor hauled from the Executive Office Building.

It’s bumpf, a thousand times typed, a thousand times said. And yet this July 4, after all the rodomontade that preceded it, I found myself paying attention to those hackneyed words in a way I never had before. Will Americans always be that people? Are Americans that people now?

Be very, very afraid.

Trump Destroys American Greatness From Within

The Trump/Pence regime's slogan is "make America great again" and many of those who support this toxic regime strut around patting themselves on the back for being "real Americans" and viewing themselves as great patriots.  Meanwhile they and the regime they support - a mix of a would be Hitler and the Three Stooges - are destroying America from within.  In their minds, American greatness equates solely to maintaining and/or restoring white privilege and bullying the less fortunate and non-whites and non-Christians.  Worse yet, blinded by their hatred of others be they blacks, gays, Hispanics and anyone else they deem as "other," they are silently permitting the institutions that made America great (despite its many failings) are being eroded and/or destroyed by the narcissistic occupant of the White House and Republicans only too happy to lick his boots so as to avoid a primary challenge by the ugliest elements in today's GOP. Rather than being patriots, these Trump supporters are subversives and, if support for the U.S. Constitution defines the government, are actively supporting its overthrow.  A column in the New York Times looks at this destruction of America from within.  Here are highlights:

It’s hard to work up much sympathy for the hollowed-out husk of a human being that is Mitch McConnell, or Lindsey Graham for that matter. This country is a harder, colder, more meanspirited place because these senators would rather bootlick a bully than stand for the principles they once espoused.

Surely, they know the price of their vassalage. To serve Donald Trump is to lose all self-respect. You lie for him. You cover for him. You hate for him. John Boehner, the former House speaker, has more honor as a mercenary for marijuana than the elected Republicans shoveling dirt over the grave of the Constitution.

But Americans should care about a more lasting and damaging corrosion — the destabilizing of venerable institutions. It’s one thing to corrupt a politician, the natural osmosis of the species. It’s quite another to debase the foundations of a great democracy.
It started on Day 2, when the hapless liar, newly subsidized by taxpayers, tried to conscript the National Park Service into the fantasy that his crowd was the largest ever.

After the inauguration debacle, Trump moved on to bigger targets — the judiciary, the military, the press, and the professional class of bureaucrats who have made the United States a model for competence and incorruptibility in the Civil Service.

With William Barr, Trump now has an attorney general who doesn’t care how much lasting damage he does to truth, justice and the American way. His mandate as the nation’s top prosecutor is to carry out Trump’s private vendettas.

Next week, the House will vote on whether to hold Barr in contempt for defying the constitutional role of oversight by the legislative branch. Get used to it. Barr is marshaling the enormous legal muscle of the people’s Justice Department as a political hit squad. He’ll use the law, which he ignores when it suits him, to try to imprison public servants who launched an early investigation of Russian attempts to subvert an American election.

No matter that an earlier presidential quisling, failed Kansas gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach, could find no evidence of another of Trump’s fictions, millions of illegal voters. Barr’s job is to muddy the origins of the Russian investigation enough to frame career public servants as traitors.

Normally, the courts would be bulwarks against the barbarians. And indeed, many judges have stood up to some of Trump’s most outlandish and illegal behavior. But the Trump effect, turning everything he touches to a cheap commodity, is to denigrate the legal arbitrators as “Obama judges” or “Mexican” judges. You’re with him or against him.

This is dangerous stuff. And it gets worse. The most disgusting of the recent corruptions is the attempt to make the military another extension of presidential vanity. The White House wanted to “minimize the visibility” of the U.S.S. John S. McCain while Trump was in Japan. So, a family name synonymous with sacrifice on behalf of country was covered up so that President Bone Spurs would not be offended. Kim Jong-un has to be jealous.

You would think that matters of the soul would be harder for the soulless occupant of the White House to tarnish. After a round of golf last Sunday, a disheveled-looking Trump abruptly showed up at a church in Virginia. The White House said Trump wanted parishioners to pray for victims of a recent mass shooting. Instead, they were asked to pray for Trump. The pastor later said he had been blindsided.

The same cannot be said for the man who oversees the Census Bureau, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. He’s trying to use a mandate of the Constitution, the decennial census, to shore up power in the Electoral College and Congress for the aging white men of Trump’s base.

Any day now, the Supreme Court will rule on Ross’s effort to insert, into the census form that goes out to every household, a citizenship question, something that hasn’t been asked since 1950. It could mean that about 6.5 million people would go uncounted — citizens and noncitizens.

This is a blatant abuse of power and of an otherwise benign government agency, affecting not just the number of representatives or electoral votes each state gets, but also the fate of numerous cities dependent on federal billions in mostly blue America.

We’ve had a census every decade since 1790, after the colonies threw off a king and created a governing document establishing an independent judiciary, a legislative branch that writes the rules of the land, and asserting that no man is above the law. To the present occupant of the White House, it’s only a piece of paper.

Frighteningly, far too many Americans are simply looking the other way or bloviating that they stay out of politics because they don't like politics - just like many "good Germans" did as Hitler rose to power. Citizenship imposes obligations as well as privileges, one of which is to be informed and support constitutional government. Too many Americans prefer watching mind numbing reality TV and sitting on their asses.  Be very afraid. 

The Case for Impeaching Donald Trump

I have always viewed Donald Trump as unfit for office both due to his total immorality and his greed and never ending quest for self-enrichment.  It's telling that New Yorkers who knew him best and had most closely witnessed his skirting of the law and questionable business practices overwhelming voted against him.  Indeed, Trump embodies the personification of the type of individual the Founding Fathers feared and caused them to build in two safeguards for the nation.  The first was the Electoral College which was empowered to overturn the election of a dangerous and immoral demagogue to protect the nation.  Sadly, in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, the electors failed to uphold their constitutional duty and instead rubber stamped the Trump victory even though he had lost the popular vote by 3 million votes and had already displayed his unfitness for office throughout the campaign.  The second mechanism to protect the nation was impeachment whereby an unfit and dangerous occupant of the White House could be removed from office. Given the failure of the Electors to do their duty, a very lengthy piece in The Atlantic makes the case for beginning impeachment proceedings now against Donald Trump.  It's very long and deserves a full read.  Here are substantial highlights: 

On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise.

Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.

This is not a partisan judgment. Many of the president’s fiercest critics have emerged from within his own party. Even officials and observers who support his policies are appalled by his pronouncements, and those who have the most firsthand experience of governance are also the most alarmed by how Trump is governing.

“The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naïveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate,” the late senator and former Republican presidential nominee John McCain lamented last summer. “The president has not risen to the mantle of the office,” the GOP’s other recent nominee, the former governor and now senator Mitt Romney, wrote in January.

The oath of office is a president’s promise to subordinate his private desires to the public interest, to serve the nation as a whole rather than any faction within it. Trump displays no evidence that he understands these obligations. To the contrary, he has routinely privileged his self-interest above the responsibilities of the presidency.

More troubling still, Trump has demanded that public officials put their loyalty to him ahead of their duty to the public. On his first full day in office, he ordered his press secretary to lie about the size of his inaugural crowd. He never forgave his first attorney general for failing to shut down investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and ultimately forced his resignation. “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty,” Trump told his first FBI director, and then fired him when he refused to pledge it. . . . His efforts to mislead, impede, and shut down Mueller’s investigation have now led the special counsel to consider whether the president obstructed justice.

As for the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, Trump has repeatedly trampled upon them. He pledged to ban entry to the United States on the basis of religion, and did his best to follow through. He has attacked the press as the “enemy of the people” and barred critical outlets and reporters from attending his events. He has assailed black protesters. He has called for his critics in private industry to be fired from their jobs. He has falsely alleged that America’s electoral system is subject to massive fraud, impugning election results with which he disagrees as irredeemably tainted.

[T]he Framers were concerned that a president could abuse his authority in ways that would undermine the democratic process and that could not wait to be addressed. So they created a mechanism for considering whether a president is subverting the rule of law or pursuing his own self-interest at the expense of the general welfare—in short, whether his continued tenure in office poses a threat to the republic. This mechanism is impeachment.

Trump’s actions during his first two years in office clearly meet, and exceed, the criteria to trigger this fail-safe. But the United States has grown wary of impeachment. The history of its application is widely misunderstood, leading Americans to mistake it for a dangerous threat to the constitutional order.

That is precisely backwards. . . . . Impeachment, in fact, is a vital protection against the dangers a president like Trump poses. And, crucially, many of its benefits—to the political health of the country, to the stability of the constitutional system—accrue irrespective of its ultimate result. Impeachment is a process, not an outcome, a rule-bound procedure for investigating a president, considering evidence, formulating charges, and deciding whether to continue on to trial.

The fight over whether Trump should be removed from office is already raging, and distorting everything it touches. . . . . By denying the debate its proper outlet, Congress has succeeded only in intensifying its pressures. And by declining to tackle the question head-on, it has deprived itself of its primary means of reining in the chief executive.

With a newly seated Democratic majority, the House of Representatives can no longer dodge its constitutional duty. It must immediately open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump, and bring the debate out of the court of public opinion and into Congress, where it belongs.

In no small part, this trepidation is due to the fact that the last effort to remove an American president from office ended in political fiasco. When the House impeached Bill Clinton, in 1998, his popularity soared; in the Senate, even some Republicans voted against convicting him of the charges.

Pelosi and her antediluvian leadership team served in Congress during those fights two decades ago, and they seem determined not to repeat their rivals’ mistakes. . . . . To move against Trump now, Democrats seem to believe, would only strengthen the president’s hand. Better to wait for public opinion to turn decisively against him and then use impeachment to ratify that view. This is the received wisdom on impeachment, the overlearned lesson of the Clinton years: House Republicans got out ahead of public opinion, and turned a president beset by scandal into a sympathetic figure.

Congress can’t outsource its responsibilities to federal prosecutors. No one knows when Mueller’s report will arrive, what form it will take, or what it will say. Even if Mueller alleges criminal misconduct on the part of the president, under Justice Department guidelines, a sitting president cannot be indicted. Nor will the host of congressional hearings fulfill that branch’s obligations. . . . . Only by authorizing a dedicated impeachment inquiry can the House begin to assemble disparate allegations into a coherent picture, forcing lawmakers to consider both whether specific charges are true and whether the president’s abuses of his power justify his removal.

Waiting also presents dangers. With every passing day, Trump further undermines our national commitment to America’s ideals. And impeachment is a long process. . . . By delaying the start of the process, in the hope that even clearer evidence will be produced by Mueller or some other source, lawmakers are delaying its eventual conclusion. Better to forge ahead, weighing what is already known and incorporating additional material as it becomes available.

Democrats’ fear—that impeachment will backfire on them—is likewise unfounded. The mistake Republicans made in impeaching Bill Clinton wasn’t a matter of timing. They identified real and troubling misconduct—then applied the wrong remedy to fix it. Clinton’s acts disgraced the presidency, and his lies under oath and efforts to obstruct the investigation may well have been crimes. The question that determines whether an act is impeachable, though, is whether it endangers American democracy.

Trump’s bipartisan critics are not merely arguing that he has lied or dishonored the presidency. The most serious allegations against him ultimately rest on the charge that he is attacking the bedrock of American democracy. That is the situation impeachment was devised to address.

The process of impeachment itself is likely to shift public opinion, both by highlighting what’s already known and by bringing new evidence to light. If Trump’s support among Republican voters erodes, his support in the Senate may do the same. One lesson of Richard Nixon’s impeachment is that when legislators conclude a presidency is doomed, they can switch allegiances in the blink of an eye.

[T]his sort of vote-counting, in any case, misunderstands the point of impeachment. The question of whether impeachment is justified should not be confused with the question of whether it is likely to succeed in removing a president from office. The country will benefit greatly regardless of how the Senate ultimately votes. . . . The protections of the process alone are formidable. They come in five distinct forms.

The first is that once an impeachment inquiry begins, the president loses control of the public conversation. Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton each discovered this, much to their chagrin. . . . . Trump is easily the most pugilistic president since Johnson; he’s never going to behave with decorous restraint. But if impeachment proceedings begin, his staff will surely redouble its efforts to curtail his tweeting, his lawyers will counsel silence, and his allies on Capitol Hill will beg for whatever civility he can muster. His ability to sidestep scandal by changing the subject—perhaps his greatest political skill—will diminish.

As Trump fights for his political survival, that struggle will overwhelm other concerns. This is the second benefit of impeachment: It paralyzes a wayward president’s ability to advance the undemocratic elements of his agenda. . . . It is, rather, the extraordinary elements of Trump’s presidency that merit the use of impeachment to forestall their success: his subversion of the rule of law, attacks on constitutional liberties, and advancement of his own interests at the public’s expense.

The most a president generally has to fear from congressional hearings is embarrassment; there is always an aide to take the fall. Impeachment puts his own job on the line, and demands every hour of his day. . . . . There may be no more effective way to run out the clock on an administration than to tie it up with impeachment hearings.

But the advantages of impeachment are not merely tactical. The third benefit is its utility as a tool of discovery and discernment. . . . The process of impeachment can also surface evidence. . . . . The evidence that drove Nixon from office thus emerged as a consequence of the impeachment hearings; it did not spark them. The only way for the House to find out what Trump has actually done, and whether his conduct warrants removal, is to start asking.

Hosting that debate in Congress yields a fourth benefit: defusing the potential for an explosion of political violence. . . . . A system without a mechanism for removing the chief executive, he [Benjamin Franklin] argued, offered an invitation to violence. Just as the courts took the impulse toward vigilante justice and safely channeled it into the protections of the legal system, impeachment took the impulse toward political violence and safely channeled it into Congress.

[T]he overwhelming majority of political violence is committed by the far right, albeit on a considerably smaller scale than in the Nixon era. Trump himself has warned that “the people would revolt” if he were impeached, a warning that echoes earlier eras.

The predictions were wrong then, as Trump’s are likely wrong now. The public understood that once the impeachment process began, the real action would take place in Congress, and not in the streets. Johnson knew that inciting his supporters to violence would erode congressional support just when he needed it most. That seems the most probable outcome today as well. If impeached, Trump would lose the luxury of venting his resentments before friendly crowds, stirring their anger. His audience, by political necessity, would become a few dozen senators in Washington.

And what if the Senate does not convict Trump? The fifth benefit of impeachment is that, even when it fails to remove a president, it severely damages his political prospects. Johnson, abandoned by Republicans and rejected by Democrats, did not run for a second term.  . . . . If Congress were to impeach Trump, whatever short-term surge he might enjoy as supporters rallied to his defense, his long-term political fate would likely be sealed.

Today, the United States once more confronts a president who seems to care for only some of the people he represents, who promises his supporters that he can roll back the tide of diversity, who challenges the rule of law, and who regards constitutional rights and liberties as disposable. Congress must again decide whether the greater risk lies in executing the Constitution as it was written, or in deferring to voters to do what it cannot muster the courage to do itself. The gravest danger facing the country is not a Congress that seeks to measure the president against his oath—it is a president who fails to measure up to that solemn promise.

18 Reasons Trump Could be a Russian Asset

When asked during a Fox News, a/k/a the Trump Propagandaministerium, whether he was working for Russia, Donald Trump gave a rambling, convoluted non-responsive answer but never said a simple "no."  With two bombshell reports out last week and over the weekend, many Americans - other than Trump's cultist followers and Fox News viewers - are perhaps beginning to fully comprehend the magnitude of the danger that the Trump/Pence regime poses to the nation.  Conservative columnist and former Republican Max Boot has a column in the Washington Post that looks at the reasons by his own behavior Trump has signaled that he may well be a Russian asset.  Here are highlights:

On Friday, the New York Times reported that “in the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests.” That investigation may well be continuing under the auspices of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. We don’t know what Mueller has learned. But we can look at the key, publicly available evidence that both supports and undercuts this explosive allegation.

Here is some of the evidence suggesting “Individual 1” could be a Russian “asset”:

— Trump has a long financial history with Russia. As summarized by Jonathan Chait in an invaluable New York magazine article: “From 2003 to 2017, people from the former USSR made 86 all-cash purchases — a red flag of potential money laundering — of Trump properties, totaling $109 million. In 2010, the private-wealth division of Deutsche Bank also loaned him hundreds of millions of dollars during the same period it was laundering billions in Russian money. ‘Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,’ said Donald Jr. in 2008. ‘We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia,’ boasted Eric Trump in 2014.”

These are the kind of financial entanglements that intelligence services such as the FSB typically use to ensnare foreigners, and they could leave Trump vulnerable to blackmail.

— The Russians interfered in the 2016 U.S. election to help elect Trump president.

— Trump encouraged the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails on July 27, 2016 (“Russia, if you’re listening”), on the very day that Russian intelligence hackers tried to attack Clinton’s personal and campaign servers.

— There were, according to the Moscow Project, “101 contacts between Trump’s team and Russia linked operatives,” and “the Trump team tried to cover up every single one of them.”

— The Trump campaign was full of individuals, such as Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and Michael Flynn, with suspiciously close links to Moscow.

— Manafort, who ran the Trump campaign for free and was heavily in debt to a Russian oligarch, now admits to offering his Russian business partner, who is suspected of links to Russian intelligence, polling data that could have been used to target the Russian social media campaign on behalf of Trump.

— Trump associate Roger Stone, who was in contact with Russian conduit WikiLeaks, reportedly knew in advance that the Russians had hacked Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails.

— Once in office, Trump fired Comey to stop the investigation of the “Russia thing” — and then bragged about having done so to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister while also sharing with them top-secret information. . . . . Trump has been effectively protecting the Russians by trying to impede the investigation of their attack on the United States.— Trump has refused to consistently acknowledge that Russia interfered in the U.S. election or mobilize a government-wide effort to stop future interference.

— Like no previous president, Trump attacks and undermines the Justice Department and the FBI (“a cancer in our country”) — two institutions that stand on the front lines of combatting Russian espionage and influence operations in the United States.

— Again, like no previous president, Trump attacks and undermines the European Union and NATO . . . . The E.U. and NATO are the two major obstacles to Russian designs in Europe.

— Trump supports populist, pro-Russian leaders in Europe, such as Viktor Orban in Hungary and Marine Le Pen in France, just as the Russians do.

— Trump has praised Putin (“a strong leader”) while trashing just about everyone else from grade-B Hollywood celebrities to leaders of allied nations.

— Trump was utterly supine in his meetings with Putin, principally in Hamburg and Helsinki. Even more suspicious, according to a Post article on Saturday, Trump “has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with . . . Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials. . . .

— Trump defends the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and repeats other pro-Russian talking points.

— Trump is pulling U.S. troops out of Syria, handing that country to Russia and its ally Iran.

— Trump has effectively done nothing in response to the Russian attack on Ukrainian ships in international waters, thereby encouraging greater Russian aggression.

— Trump is sowing chaos in the government, most recently with a record-breaking partial government shutdown and “acting” appointees in key posts such as the Defense Department and Justice Department, thus furthering a Russian objective of undermining its chief adversary.

Now that we’ve listed 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset, let’s look at the exculpatory evidence. . . . I can’t think of anything that would exonerate Trump aside from the difficulty of grasping what once would have seemed unimaginable: that a president of the United States could actually have been compromised by a hostile foreign power.

Chief Justice Roberts Rebukes Trump

Chief Justice John Roberts.

Since entering the White House - thanks to Electoral College electors failing to protect the nation as envisioned by the Founders - Donald Trump has proceeded to undermine and destroy public confidence in America's core institutions, including but not limited to the federal court system.  No doubt Vladimir Putin is smiling broadly as he watches from afar and sees Trump trying to replicate Putin's dictatorial rule in Russia.  Typically, the Supreme Court remains aloof from political disputes - although this may change given Trump's placement of rank partisans Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh on the Court - but this week Chief Justice John Roberts found he could no longer bite his tongue and issued a rebuke to Der Trumpenführer's attacks on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that sounded like it came from Hitler or Putin's playbook of how to emasculate the judiciary and turn it into a tool of autocracy.  A piece in NPR looks st this rare but much needed rebuke of the foul individual at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Here are highlights:

In a rare moment of direct criticism, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts rebuked President Trump on Wednesday for [Trump's] the president's description of a federal judge who ruled against his asylum policy as "an Obama judge." Within hours, the president fired back on Twitter, launching an unusual conflict between the executive and judicial branches.

"We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges," Roberts said in a statement. "What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them."

"That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for," Roberts said. Roberts has never responded to any president so directly and publicly before.

Trump's initial response was to a ruling by U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar, who issued a temporary restraining order against Trump's asylum policy Monday, saying it violated a provision of the asylum law. Trump called the decision a "disgrace," adding, "this was an Obama judge and I'll tell you what, it's not going to happen like this anymore."

Trump went on to excoriate the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals which he wrongly blamed for the ruling, saying, "Every case that gets filed in the Ninth Circuit, we get beaten. And then we end up having to go to the Supreme Court, like the travel ban, and we won," Trump said.

However, Tigar is a district court judge who sits in San Francisco, and the Ninth Circuit, which encompasses much of the western United States, has not yet been asked to rule on his decision. Tigar's decision is also temporary, lasting only until Dec. 19 when the judge is scheduled to hear arguments about whether the order should remain permanent.

This is not the first time Trump has criticized a judge. During the presidential campaign, he called one judge with a Spanish surname who ruled against him a Mexican, alleging he couldn't rule fairly because of Trump's proposal to build a wall along with border with Mexico and called another who ruled against his travel ban "a so-called judge."

The American Bar Association joined in the criticism of Trump's comments.

"Disagreeing with a court's decision is everyone's right, but when government officials question a court's motives, mock its legitimacy or threaten retaliation due to an unfavorable ruling, they intend to erode the court's standing and hinder the courts from performing their constitutional duties," said ABA president Bob Carlson.  

The Post also noted the rare rebuke to the man seeking to destroy the independent judiciary: 

[I]t appeared Roberts, when asked to comment by the Associated Press, was eager to counter Trump’s criticism Tuesday of District Judge Jon S. Tigar. The Roberts statement did not mention the president by name.

The chief justice is an aggressive defender of the judiciary and has frequently expressed concern about attacks on its impartiality, whether they come from the left or the right. In 2010, he called the timing of President Barack Obama’s criticism of the court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC during the president’s State of the Union speech “very troubling.”

Roberts made it clear last month that he is particularly sensitive about the image of the courts because of the recent partisan battle over the confirmation of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.

At an event at the University of Minnesota just after Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Roberts said the court served “one nation” and not “one party or one interest.”

“Our role is very clear: We are to interpret the Constitution and laws of the United States, and to ensure that the political branches act within them,” he said. “That job obviously requires independence from the political branches. The story of the Supreme Court would be very different without that sort of independence.”

Veterans Slam Trump for Border "Stunt"

Trump seeks to use the military  against refugees.

In an effort to energize his racist, white supremacist base, Donald Trump wants to send 5,000 U.S. military troops to the US/Mexico border - a move that is likely illegal since federal troops are banned from being used within the country.  Like everything else he does, Trump seemingly sees himself as above the law and above the Constitution.  The reaction from military veterans has not been positive with many no doubt fearful of the optics both at home and abroad of soldiers confronting women and children (especially if they fire on unarmed families) and also concerned about the illegality and cost of the move.  Sadly, evangelical Christians - who as noted have confirmed their racial animosity towards non-whites in a recent poll - are likely cheering and further perverting what being "Christian" is supposed to mean. If allowed, the move could create a dangerous precedent for using the military domestically against those Trump labels as "a threat to national security.).  Here are highlights from CNN:

With his decision to deploy more than 5,000 troops to the US-Mexico border, President Donald Trump has ordered more military personnel to the US southwest than he has serving in some of the world's most contentious combat zones.

[T]he mission -- dubbed Operation Faithful Patriot -- raises a slew of questions, with many veterans condemning it as a political stunt by a President eager to fire up his political base just days away from the midterm elections. "Donald Trump thinks unarmed people who are fleeing horrors and are still 1,000 miles away are a national security threat a week before election day?" said Will Fischer, a former Marine who now works for the VoteVets, a progressive veteran's organization.

"I don't think so," Fischer said. "It's a political ploy to blow upon the embers of racism and nativism, and he is using the military again as a political prop to advance his own agenda" 

Fischer and other veterans point to the unknown cost to taxpayers, given that much smaller deployments of National Guard to the border have cost hundreds of millions of dollars. They also question the cost the military will bear, as the operation pulls troops away from training, other missions and their families. And then, they say, there's the murky legality of the mission, its scope and its purpose.

US troops will join over 2,000 National Guardsmen who are already at the border, meaning upwards of 7,000 American forces will be mobilized to stop Central American migrants that are still some 900 miles away from the border and weeks away from arriving in the US.

Despite Trump's unsubstantiated claim that the group of Central Americans includes "gang members and some very bad people," most of the migrants have reportedly indicated that they plan to apply for asylum once they arrive in the US.
 This is not a national security issue. ... We're seeing women, children and the elderly within this caravan fighting for their lives. We don't need more military there," according to Bishop Garrison, the interim executive director of the Truman National Security Project . . . "We don't need to make a sensitive issue and situation all the more dramatic," said Garrison, a former Homeland Security and Pentagon official.
 Both Fischer and a former military official, interviewed separately, raised the question of the rules of engagement for the troops. . . . "what if something does happen and lethal force is deployed and you have the US military firing at unarmed civilians?" Anger about the deployment and the perception that Mattis is allowing the military to be used for political purposes led one former Pentagon official to call for him to step down.

"This is a craven political stunt by President Trump ahead of the US midterms, and a cynical capitulation by a secretary of defense who has prided himself on improving the readiness, focus and lethality of the US armed forces," Kelly Magsamen, a National Security Council official under both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, wrote in Defense One. The former military officer, who logged two decades of experience as an army officer before moving on to become a strategist, said the troops were being sent to "do a mission that could ... be done by another entity" such as the National Guard.  Dave McGinnis, a former Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense, agreed. [A] former official pointed out that US laws prohibit the military from detaining people, "so it's not like we're sending down an operational force, it's just people in a largely supportive role. That's why I say it's a stunt, so [Trump] can say, yeah, we're sending the military down to the border." McGinnis said Trump's move also sets a precedent. "If Congress allows him to do this, you're pushing the envelope on using the military for things this country has never, ever permitted," he said. "The visual on this for the world is really bad from a military perspective," McGinnis said. "It's using regular military troops for things that democracies really don't do."
 Cost also remains a major concern. Congressional sources with the House and Senate Armed Services Committees told CNN that they have not received cost data from the Pentagon.

Vote Democrat on November 6, 2018 - Trump and his lawlessness must be stopped. #NotMyPresident.