Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

mickeyrat

 February 3, 2021 (Wednesday)

While Republican lawmakers continue to grab headlines with outrageous behavior and obstructionism, President Biden has been derailing them in the only way no one has tried yet: ignoring them and governing. Only two weeks into his administration, this approach appears to be enormously effective.

The two Republican factions continue to compete for control of the party. That struggle has been personified this week by the relative standing of new Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and established Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, the House Republican Conference Chair, who is the third person in the line of Republican House leadership.

In her two weeks in Congress, Greene has made the news with her support for the extremist QAnon movement, harassment of school shooting survivor David Hogg, and past support for executing Democratic politicians, among other things. After news emerged that she had agreed with a Facebook commenter that the 2018 Parkland school shooting was a “false flag” operation, Democrats were outraged that Republican leadership assigned her to the House Education and Labor Committee. They demanded House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy strip her of committee assignments.  

Meanwhile, Cheney has won the ire of pro-Trump Republicans by voting to impeach the former president for instigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Trump’s supporters, including Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), want to strip Cheney of her leadership role in the party, and Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) traveled to her home state of Wyoming to urge voters to turn her out of office. Still, some observers think the Trump faction is attacking Cheney simply to provide the kind of sound bites that will please their voters.

Today, McCarthy said he would not punish Greene for her statements, and the Republicans on the House Rules Committee said they would not strip her of committee assignments (although McCarthy stripped former Representative Steven King [R-IA] of his assignments after racist comments). Later, when the House Republicans met for the first time this session, about half of them gave Greene a standing ovation when she rose to speak.

Thrilled at the attention she is getting, Greene told the Washington Examiner that there is no difference between establishment Republicans and the Democrats, and she is eager to bring more action-oriented people like her to Congress to help Trump with his plan, “whenever he comes out with [it.]”

And yet, at the same meeting, when party members held a secret vote on leaving Cheney in her leadership position after she voted to impeach Trump, they did so, by a vote of 145-61-1. Increasing numbers of Republicans—including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—are eager to put daylight between themselves and the Trump wing, likely because they know that the political and legal calculus has changed now that the Democrats are in power.

Biden continues to put the government on firm footing. He came into office with a series of executive actions at hand to do exactly what he promised during the campaign: combat the coronavirus pandemic and bolster the weakening economy.

To that end, he is moving forward quickly with a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package. Today, the Democratic Congress took steps to prepare the way to pass the measure without Republican votes if necessary, although Biden met yesterday with ten Republican senators and says he is willing to talk with Republicans if they are serious. What he refuses to do, though, is what tripped up President Barack Obama, who negotiated with Republicans for months over the Affordable Care Act, only to have all but one of them refuse to vote for the measure.

Biden has also launched a sweeping set of plans to combat climate change—including today calling on Congress to end the $40 billion taxpayer subsidies to fossil fuels-- bringing a wide range of interests behind the plans.

The new administration has also reestablished norms. Yesterday, for example, the Senate confirmed Alejandro Mayorkas as the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. This is a big deal because it gives DHS an actual Senate-confirmed head, which it has not had since at least 2019 as Trump appointed various acting heads, including Chad Wolf. According to the Government Accountability Office and a number of judges, Wolf was in the office illegally.

Biden has also reinstituted the oversight that was largely ignored by the previous administration. Today, Robert Stewart Jr., who won more than $38 million in federal contracts to deliver N95 masks despite the fact he had none and had no way of getting any, pleaded guilty to three counts of making false statements, wire fraud, and theft of government funds. Also today, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced the hiring of a number of officials who will be part of a crackdown on enforcement of tax laws both at home and abroad; the Internal Revenue Service estimates that about $441 billion a year in taxes owed are not collected.

Also today, in his first interview since taking office, Biden promised that none of his family members will work at the White House.

Biden has moved quickly to get rid of the political appointees Trump tried to burrow into the federal government. Yesterday, Biden fired all ten of the anti-labor activists Trump had put on the Federal Service Impasses Panel, the panel in charge of resolving disputes between unions and federal agencies when they cannot resolve issues in negotiations. The head of the union of federal employees, representing 700,000 federal employees, thanked Biden for his attempt to “restore basic fairness for federal workers.” He said, “The outgoing panel, appointed by the previous administration and stacked with transparently biased union-busters, was notorious for ignoring the law to gut workplace rights and further an extreme political agenda.”

The two themes of Republican factionalism and the Democrats’ return to American norms came together today. After negotiating for weeks, McConnell and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) finally came up with a plan to organize the Senate, which will turn the chairs of committees over to the Democrats.

This means that Biden’s pick for attorney general, Merrick Garland, should finally get a hearing for his confirmation. The attorney general is a leading figure in our national security apparatus, overseeing our legal system as well as the FBI. Former Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was slow walking a hearing for him, but as soon as Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) takes the gavel, Garland will be on the schedule.

If he is confirmed, Garland will oversee the prosecution of those involved in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Garland is known as a straight shooter who will uphold the law impartially.

Today, Reuters broke the news that the Justice Department is considering charging those engaged in the Capitol riot under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). RICO cases are complicated and take a long time to put together, but the law was designed to enable prosecutors to reach those, like criminal ringleaders, who keep their own hands clean but tell others to commit crimes.

If the Department of Justice is indeed considering RICO, which sweeps in a wide range of participants in a crime, Republicans not associated with the attack on the Capitol might have good reason to back away from those who are.

mickeyrat

 February 4, 2021 (Thursday)

Today Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) proposed giving at least $3000 annually per child to American families. This suggestion is coming from a man who, when he ran as the Republican candidate for president in 2012, famously echoed what was then Republican orthodoxy. He was caught on tape saying that “there are 47 percent of the people who… are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”  

Romney’s proposal indicates the political tide has turned away from the Republicans. Since the 1980s, they have insisted that the government must be starved, dismissing as “socialism” Democrats’ conviction that the government has a role to play in stabilizing the economy and society.

And yet, that idea, which is in line with traditional conservatism, was part of the founding ideology of the Republican Party in the 1850s. It was also the governing ideology of Romney’s father, George Romney, who served as governor of Michigan from 1963 to 1969, where he oversaw the state’s first income tax, and as the secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Richard Nixon, where he tried to increase housing for the poor and desegregate the suburbs. It was also at the heart of Romney’s own record in Massachusetts, where as governor from 2003 to 2007, he ushered in the near-universal health care system on which the Affordable Care Act was based.

But in the 1990s, Republican leadership purged from the party any lawmakers who embraced traditional Republicanism, demanding absolute loyalty to the idea of cutting taxes and government to free up individual enterprise. By 2012, Romney had to run from his record, including his major health care victory in Massachusetts. Now, just a decade later, he has returned to the ideas behind it.

Why?

First, and most important, President Joe Biden has hit the ground running, establishing a momentum that looks much like that of Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933. Roosevelt had behind him stronger majorities than Biden’s, but both took office facing economic crises—and, in Biden’s case, a pandemic as well, along with the climate crisis--and set out immediately to address them.

Like FDR, Biden has established the direction of his administration through executive actions: he is just behind FDR’s cracking pace. Biden arrived in the Oval Office with a sheaf of carefully crafted executive actions that put in place policies that voters wanted: spurring job creation, feeding children, rejoining the World Health Organization, pursuing tax cheats, ending the transgender ban in the military, and reestablishing ties to the nation’s traditional allies. Once Biden had a Democratic Senate as well as a House—those two Georgia Senate seats were huge—he was free to ask for a big relief package for those suffering in the pandemic, and now even Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), who had expressed concern about the package, seems to be on board.

FDR’s momentum increased in part because the Republicans were discredited after the collapse of the economy and as Republican leaders turned up as corrupt. Biden’s momentum, too, is likely gathering steam as the Republicans are increasingly tainted by their association with the January 6 insurrection and the attack on the Capitol, along with the behavior of those who continue to support the former president.

The former president’s own behavior is not helping to polish his image. In their response to the House impeachment brief, Trump’s lawyers made the mistake of focusing not on whether the Senate can try a former president but on what Trump did and did not do. That, of course, makes Trump a witness, and today Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the lead impeachment manager, asked him to testify.

Trumps’ lawyers promptly refused but, evidently anticipating his refusal, Raskin had noted in the invitation that “[i]f you decline this invitation, we reserve any and all rights, including the right to establish at trial that your refusal to testify supports a strong adverse inference regarding your actions (and inaction) on January 6, 2021.” In other words: “Despite his lawyers’ rhetoric, any official accused of inciting armed violence against the government of the United States should welcome the chance to testify openly and honestly—that is, if the official had a defense."

The lack of defense seems to be mounting. This morning, Jason Stanley of Just Security called attention to the film shown at the January 6 rally just after Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani spoke. Stanley explained how it was an explicitly fascist film, designed to show the former president as a strong fascist leader promising to protect Americans against those who are undermining the country: the Jews. Stanley also pointed out that, according to the New York Times, the rally was “a White House production” and that Trump was deeply involved with the details.

Trump’s supporters are not cutting a good figure, either. Today, by a vote of 230-199, the House of Representatives voted to strip new Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) of her assignments to the Budget Committee and the Education and Labor Committee. It did so after reviewing social media posts in which she embraced political violence and conspiracy theories. This leaves Greene with little to do but to continue to try to gin up media attention and to raise money.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) had declined to take action against Greene—although in 2019 he stripped assignments from Steve King (R-IA) for racist comments-- and only eleven Republicans joined the majority. The Republican Party is increasingly associated with the Trump wing, and that association will undoubtedly grow as Democrats press it in advertisements, as they have already begun to do.

McConnell has called for the party’s extremists to be purged out of concern that voters are turning away from the party. Still, the struggle between the two factions might be hard to keep out of the news as the Senate turns to confirmation hearings for Biden’s nominee to head the Department of Justice, Merrick Garland.

Going forward, the attorney general will be responsible for overseeing any prosecutions that come from the attempt to overturn the election, and the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will question Garland, has on it three Republican senators involved in that attempt. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has been accused by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of calling before Trump did to get him to alter the state’s vote count. Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) both joined in challenging the counting of the electoral votes.

It is hard to imagine the other senators at the hearing will not bring the three compromised senators into the discussion. The Republicans have so far refused to schedule Garland’s hearing, although now that the Senate is organized under the Democrats, it will happen soon.

Trump Republicans are betting the former president’s endorsement will win them office in the future. But with social media platforms cracking down on his disinformation, his ability to reach voters is not at all what it used to be, making it easier for members of the other faction to jump ship.

In addition, those echoing Trump’s lies are getting hit in their wallets. Today, the voting systems company Smartmatic sued the Fox News Channel and its personalities Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs, and Jeanine Pirro, along with Giuliani and Trump’s legal advisor Sidney Powell, for at least $2.7 billion in damages for lying about Smartmatic machines in their attempt to overturn the election results.

Republicans rejecting the Trump takeover of the party are increasingly outspoken. Not only has Romney called for a measure that echoes Biden’s emphasis on supporting children and families, but also Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) today released a video attacking the leaders of his state’s Republican Party after hearing that they planned to censure him for speaking out against the former president.

“If that president were a Democrat, we both know how you’d respond. But, because he had ‘Republican’ behind his name, you’re defending him,” Sasse said. “Something has definitely changed over the last four years … but it’s not me.”

mickeyrat

 February 5, 2021 (Friday)

Yet another Friday without a news dump from the federal government (woo hoo!) means that I have the room to highlight something really interesting that was buried in President Biden’s speech at the State Department yesterday afternoon. Not surprisingly, Biden announced a return to a more traditional foreign policy than his predecessor’s. But he did more than that: he tied foreign policy to domestic interests in a way that echoed Republican president Theodore Roosevelt when he helped to launch the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century.

Biden’s predecessor wrenched U.S. foreign policy from the channel in which it had operated since WWII, replacing it with a new focus on the economic interests of business leaders. Trump chose as Secretary of State the former chief executive officer of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson, who oversaw the gutting of career officers in the State Department. When the department lost 12% of its foreign-affairs specialists in the first eight months of 2017, it was clear that the Trump administration was abandoning a foreign policy in which the United States tried to defend the idea of democracy and to advance its interests through diplomacy.

Instead, in his first trip overseas, the former president traveled to Saudi Arabia, where he announced the largest single arms deal in American history, worth $110 billion immediately and more than $350 billion over ten years. The White House noted that the deal was “a significant expansion of… [the] security relationship” between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.

"That was a tremendous day. Tremendous investments in the United States," Trump told reporters. "Hundreds of billions of dollars of investments into the United States and jobs, jobs, jobs." Lockheed Martin, one of the world’s largest defense contractors, cheered the sale.

It was a public relations victory for Mohammed bin Salman, often referred to as MBS and the deputy crown prince of Saudi Arabia at the time, coming as it did just a year after Congress voted to allow the families of those killed in the 9/11 attacks to sue the country from which 15 of the 19 hijackers came. It also would increase the U.S. supply of arms to his country’s intervention in Yemen, the country to its south, where a pro-Saudi president had been ousted in 2015 by the Houthi movement, whose members accused him of corruption and ties to Saudi Arabia and the U.S.

In his remarks during his May visit to Saudi Arabia, Trump backed away from the role the United States had claimed to take on since its war with Spain in 1898, aiming to defend democracy around the world. “We are not here to lecture—we are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship,” Trump said. “[W]e are here to offer partnership-- based on shared interests and values—to pursue a better future for us all.”

For the rest of his presidency, Trump worked to weaken the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance among 30 nations of Europe, the U.S., and Canada, formed in 1949 to stop the spread of Soviet, and now Russian, aggression in Europe. Instead, he worked to strengthen U.S. ties to countries with strongman leaders, such as MBS and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. He sidestepped career diplomats to run his own, shadow diplomacy out of the White House, tapping his son-in-law Jared Kushner to secure peace in the Middle East, for example, and asking administration officials to pressure Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

And he continued to sell billions worth of arms to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, even after Congress halted such transfers as indiscriminate Saudi bombing in Yemen created a deadly humanitarian crisis.

One of the first things Biden did when he took office was to freeze for review $23 billion in pending arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates negotiated by his predecessor (including 50 Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets). Yesterday, he announced he was ending U.S. support for the Saudi war in Yemen.

In his speech to the State Department yesterday Biden immediately indicated that he was restoring traditional American diplomacy. The first thing he did was to acknowledge his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, a career diplomat with a degree from Columbia Law School and a long and impressive resume including work on U.S. policy in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan.

The next thing Biden said was to assure the world that diplomats around the world spoke for the country again: “when you speak, you speak for me.” Later on, he reiterated that idea: “I value your expertise and I respect you, and I will have your back. This administration is going to empower you to do your jobs, not target or politicize you.”  

Biden emphasized that he had spoken to “the leaders of many of our closest friends — Canada, Mexico, the UK, Germany, France, NATO, Japan, South Korea, Australia — to [begin] reforming the habits of cooperation and rebuilding the muscle of democratic alliances that have atrophied over the past few years of neglect and, I would argue, abuse.” The message he wants the world to hear is: “America is back.  America is back. Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy.”

Also back at the center of American diplomacy are “America’s most cherished democratic values,” Biden said, “defending freedom, championing opportunity, upholding universal rights, respecting the rule of law, and treating every person with dignity.” The case of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who was poisoned in August and returned to Russia in mid-January only to be thrown into jail, has enabled Biden to illustrate how dramatically his foreign policy differs from that of his predecessor. Biden called on Putin to release Navalny “immediately and without condition.”

Biden outlined his approach to Yemen, China, and Russia… and then he said something that jumped out.

Biden argued that foreign policy is an integral part of domestic policy. It requires that the government address the needs of ordinary Americans. “We will compete from a position of strength by building back better at home,” he said. “That’s why my administration has already taken the important step to live our domestic values at home — our democratic values at home.”  

This idea—that the U.S. must reform its own society in order to extend the principles of democracy overseas-- was precisely the argument Theodore Roosevelt and other reformers made in the late 1890s when they launched the Progressive Era. When Roosevelt became president in 1901, he used this rationale to take the government out of the hands of business interests and use it to protect ordinary Americans.

Roosevelt argued that the government must clean up the cities, educate children, protect workers and consumers, support farmers, and make business pay its fair share. Biden shared his own list on Thursday: ending the so-called Muslim ban, reversing the ban on transgender troops, defending the free press, respecting science, addressing systemic racism and white supremacy, and rebuilding the economy.

“All this matters to foreign policy,” he said, “because when we… rally the nations of the world to defend democracy globally, to push back… authoritarianism’s advance, we’ll be a much more credible partner because of these efforts to shore up our own foundations.”

Halifax2TheMax

Seems to me, the repubs have a lot of great ideas and policy proposals. Seems to me being how they won so many state legislatures and the Congress, they’re the party of principled tax cuts AND deficit reduction, not to mention, delivery of services, you know, for the people. I digress or BLATHER, as some may accuse. Sexy.  Seems to me, both parties are the same but tax cuts, with no means testing, no, what do you call it, analysis, no thought other than, hell yea, trickle it down and blow the fucking roof off the deficit, and give it to those poor, poor suckers who need it the least. Amen brother but you know? Deficits. 

And people wonder why a vaccine can’t be distributed? 

mickeyrat

seems an answer in a different thread.

brianlux

Halifax2TheMax said:

Seems to me, the repubs have a lot of great ideas and policy proposals. Seems to me being how they won so many state legislatures and the Congress, they’re the party of principled tax cuts AND deficit reduction, not to mention, delivery of services, you know, for the people. I digress or BLATHER, as some may accuse. Sexy.  Seems to me, both parties are the same but tax cuts, with no means testing, no, what do you call it, analysis, no thought other than, hell yea, trickle it down and blow the fucking roof off the deficit, and give it to those poor, poor suckers who need it the least. Amen brother but you know? Deficits. 

And people wonder why a vaccine can’t be distributed? 

Wait a minute!  Stop the presses! 

Hear ye, hear ye!  @Halifax2TheMax said "both parties are the same".  It's right there in black and white!

You read it here first!   

 

Halifax2TheMax

brianlux said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

Seems to me, the repubs have a lot of great ideas and policy proposals. Seems to me being how they won so many state legislatures and the Congress, they’re the party of principled tax cuts AND deficit reduction, not to mention, delivery of services, you know, for the people. I digress or BLATHER, as some may accuse. Sexy.  Seems to me, both parties are the same but tax cuts, with no means testing, no, what do you call it, analysis, no thought other than, hell yea, trickle it down and blow the fucking roof off the deficit, and give it to those poor, poor suckers who need it the least. Amen brother but you know? Deficits. 

And people wonder why a vaccine can’t be distributed? 

Wait a minute!  Stop the presses! 

Hear ye, hear ye!  @Halifax2TheMax said "both parties are the same".  It's right there in black and white!

You read it here first!   

 

I speak the truth, Mr. Lux.

mickeyrat

 February 6, 2021 (Saturday)

A year ago yesterday, on February 5, 2020, the Republican-dominated Senate acquitted President Donald J. Trump of two charges for which the House had impeached him: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in order to rig his own reelection.

A year ago today, February 6, 2020, 57-year-old Patricia Dowd of San Jose, California, died suddenly after feeling ill for several days. She is the nation's first known victim of coronavirus.

Now, a year later, on February 6, 2021, the official count of coronavirus deaths in the United States is more than 460,000, significantly more Americans than died in World War Two.

And on Tuesday, February 9, 2021, the second impeachment trial of former president Donald J. Trump will begin in the Senate. This time, the House impeached him for incitement of insurrection in a desperate attempt to retain control of the presidency despite losing the 2020 election.

It's been quite a year.

I'm going to take the night off. I'll catch you tomorrow.

[Photo by Peter Ralston, of Rockland, Maine, "Coming and Going."]

Halifax2TheMax

mickeyrat said:

 February 6, 2021 (Saturday)

A year ago yesterday, on February 5, 2020, the Republican-dominated Senate acquitted President Donald J. Trump of two charges for which the House had impeached him: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in order to rig his own reelection.

A year ago today, February 6, 2020, 57-year-old Patricia Dowd of San Jose, California, died suddenly after feeling ill for several days. She is the nation's first known victim of coronavirus.

Now, a year later, on February 6, 2021, the official count of coronavirus deaths in the United States is more than 460,000, significantly more Americans than died in World War Two.

And on Tuesday, February 9, 2021, the second impeachment trial of former president Donald J. Trump will begin in the Senate. This time, the House impeached him for incitement of insurrection in a desperate attempt to retain control of the presidency despite losing the 2020 election.

It's been quite a year.

I'm going to take the night off. I'll catch you tomorrow.

[Photo by Peter Ralston, of Rockland, Maine, "Coming and Going."]

The chem trails did it.

mickeyrat

 February 7, 2021 (Sunday)

Pundits are saying that the Senate will vote to acquit former president Donald Trump at the end of his second impeachment trial, set to start on Tuesday.

I’m not so sure.

After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the House of Representatives passed an article of impeachment against Trump for “incitement of insurrection.” The article accuses the former president of engaging in high crimes and misdemeanors “by inciting violence against the Government of the United States.” It charges him with lying about voter fraud, trying to get the Georgia secretary of state to falsify election results, and encouraging his supporters to attack the Capitol to stop the process that would certify Biden’s victory.
 
The article charges that the former president “has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution… and has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with self-governance and the rule of law…. [He] warrants… disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.”

The House passed this article of impeachment with 232 representatives voting yes and 197 voting no. Ten Republicans joined 222 Democrats to impeach Trump in his last days in office. The Senate will hold a trial to determine whether to convict the former president of this charge. If all 100 senators are present, the number needed to convict is seventeen. But there is no requirement that all senators be present.  

Pundits are basing their belief that senators will vote to acquit on the fact that 45 Republican senators voted against a motion proposed by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), calling for a debate over the constitutionality of trying a former president. Paul insisted that vote was a proxy for conviction, but a vote immediately after that one, on the structure for the trial, drew only 17 no votes from Republicans. Thirty-three voted yes. My guess is that neither vote is a definitive sign of what is to come.

There are a number of things going on.

This trial brings into public view the fight for control of the Republican Party. Business Republicans, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), have run the Republican Party since the 1980s. They cultivated the populists for their votes, but business Republicans never intended to give them power.

The two wings jockeyed along together because both like tax cuts and originalist judges, who reject the idea of business regulation and government protection of civil rights. But that uneasy alliance is wrenching apart. Trump gave his populist supporters a taste of power, and they do not want to give it up. The Trump wing has become a personality cult, embracing violence and an attack on the rule of law in order to keep the former president in office.

Business Republicans cozied up to the Trumpers because they need the votes Trump turned out and the money he raised. But it is no longer clear that he can keep commanding votes or raising big money.

Since the January 6 coup attempt, social media giants Twitter and Facebook, as well as others, have banned the former president, taking away his ability to marshal his troops. Lawsuits from voting machine companies that Trump surrogates attacked have shut up media personalities, hampering the Trump team’s ability to spread their narrative.

Trump and his inner circle have also lost their access to major publishing venues: the last major publisher willing to buy books from Trump’s people turned away from them after January 6, handing them back to smaller publishers.

At the same time, Trump supporters increasingly look unhinged. Their face is the new Georgia representative who has, in the past, embraced political violence and QAnon. Since January 6, Republican voters have been leaving the party. Their timing is a red flag: voters usually only change parties before an election.

Voters are not the only ones disgusted by the riot. Major Republican donors have announced that they will not donate to anyone who voted to challenge the counting of the electoral votes on January 6 and 7. Others have announced at least a temporary hold on political donations.

So for a Republican senator, what’s the political calculation on impeachment?

The course for Trump Republicans is easy: they will defend their man. Today, in what appeared to be a coordinated publicity maneuver, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows tried to argue that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is to blame for the January 6 attack on the Capitol. (Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani blamed “Antifa” and “BLM.”)

But the calculation for the business Republicans is not so clear. They don’t want to alienate either Trump voters or anti-Trump voters, and they need to raise money.

Trump and his supporters have tried to lock up the party apparatus. The former president controls money and email lists, and is trying to put his people into positions of power at the state level. They are publicly challenging the ten Republican representatives who voted to impeach Trump. Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) actually traveled to Wyoming to urge voters to turn Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), the third-ranking member of the Republican House leadership, out of office. It is likely the Trump wing will launch primary challengers against anyone who votes to convict the former president.

At the same time, Trump’s support is falling. An ABC News/Ipsos poll released today shows that 56% of Americans believe that Trump should be convicted and barred from ever holding office again. By a 17-point margin, Americans say that the Republican Party has more radical extremists than the Democrats.

There is another problem: it is likely that the more we learn about what happened on January 6, the worse the participants are going to look. And, if indeed the Department of Justice decides to use RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, against those who participated in the insurrection, it might well sweep in Republican lawmakers or operatives who spoke at, raised money for, or planned the January 6 rally. In that case, a vote to acquit the president would tie a senator who is not associated with the rally to those that are.

Republican senators have tried to stay quiet about the upcoming trial. When forced to comment, some leading business Republicans have pushed back against the Trump wing. McConnell has called the right-wing fringe a cancer that must be cut out, and today Cheney—who won Gaetz’s challenge to remove her from leadership by a 2-1 vote-- went for Trump himself, saying he “does not have a role as a leader of our party going forward.” On “Fox News Sunday,” Cheney told host Chris Wallace that Trump lied when he said the election had been rigged. She warned that Republicans had to face reality or face defeat in the future.

In contrast, Democrats are operating from a position of strength. It seems likely they will use the impeachment trial to explain to the American people what happened on January 6. Using videos and the words of those who were in the Capitol when the mob stormed in, they will paint a picture of an attempted coup, incited by a former President of the United States.

mickeyrat

 February 8, 2021 (Monday)

The news today centers on the Senate impeachment trial for the former president, which begins tomorrow, and the Democrats’ maneuvering to pass a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package.

Both of these issues deal with vital immediate questions. Will there be consequences for Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, a refusal that led to a coup attempt? And will the government help out those suffering from the economic dislocation caused by the pandemic? Behind those immediate questions, though, is a larger question: what direction will the nation take in the years to come?

In both of these issues, Trump supporters on the one hand, and Democrats on the other, appear to be very aware they will be making an appeal to voters in the future based on their actions today. Trump’s lawyers are teeing up the idea that the former president is a victim of Democratic obsession and that the Democrats are wastrels. The Democrats are setting up the idea that the Republicans are a danger to the nation and its people.

Today Trump’s lawyers submitted a 78-page trial brief to the Senate, arguing that it is unconstitutional to try a former president on articles of impeachment, that Trump’s speech at the January 6 rally urging his supporters to “fight” was rhetorical, and that the former president was well within his First Amendment rights to speak as he did. It blames the attack on the Capitol not on Trump’s incitement of violence over time—as the article of impeachment does—but on “a small group of criminals.”

The document seems designed to appeal to an audience of one: Trump himself. It repeatedly uses “Democrat” as a derogatory adjective, accusing “Democrat members” of Congress of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” It calls the House impeachment managers intellectually dishonest and fact free. Curiously, in what is perhaps a nod either to his vanity or to the QAnon believers who think Trump is still president, it never acknowledges him as a former president, repeatedly referring to him simply as “the 45th President.”

Trump’s lawyers throw Trump’s supporters under the bus, saying “the people who criminally breached the Capitol did so of their own accord and for their own reason,” and that their actions “were utterly inexcusable and deserve robust and swift investigation and prosecution.”

They examine Trump’s words at the rally, noting that he used the word “fight” “little more than a handful of times and each time in the figurative sense that has long been accepted in public discourse when urging people to stand and use their voices to be heard on matters important to them: it was not and could not be construed to encourage acts of violence.” “He simply called on those gathered to peacefully and patriotically use their voices” [italics and boldface in original].

The document blames House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and her allies for trying “to callously harness the chaos of the moment for their own political gain.” Democrats, it says, are “never willing to allow a ‘good crisis’ to go to waste.”

This document tries to rewrite what we all saw with our own eyes. It will not convince anyone who has been paying attention to what happened on January 6, but that’s clearly not its purpose. Instead, it reinforces the narrative that Trump has been persecuted by his enemies, and that he was not responsible for the most serious attack on Congress and on our democracy in our history. That attack was simply the bad actions of “a small group of criminals.”

This account will please Trump and those of his supporters it does not throw under the bus, but it puts Republican senators who are not aligned with Trump in a perilous position.

The Democrats, who are famous for their measured attempts to argue about policy, appear recently to have adopted the Republicans’ advertising tactics, pushing a single, strong narrative theme.

What if Republican senators vote to acquit Trump, only to have more information drop that associates him even more closely with the insurrection? Today, Georgia’s secretary of state’s office began an investigation into Trump’s phone call pressuring Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn Georgia’s election results, a call mentioned in the House’s impeachment article.

Also today, Proud Boy Ethan Nordean, under arrest for his role in the January 6 riot, was transferred from the state of Washington to Washington, D.C., to face federal charges. It seems likely that arrests will continue and information will continue to come in. It is unclear how many people will be swept into this story, but it is not impossible that people close to the former president, and even the former president himself, will find themselves in jeopardy.

If this happens after senators vote to acquit, the Democratic ads in 2022 and 2024 will virtually write themselves.

Republican senators clearly see this peril. Tonight, conservative writer Bill Kristol noted: “All the Trump supporters saying the outcome’s pre-ordained and that the presentations, evidence and witnesses couldn’t make a difference, seems to be an attempt to make sure Republican senators pay no attention to the presentations, evidence, or witnesses. But what if they do?”

While the impeachment trial approaches, the Democrats are preparing to write a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief measure along the lines that President Biden has requested. The new coronavirus measure is very popular, despite Republican attempts to argue that it is unnecessary. Since at least 1893, Republicans have insisted that Democrats are bad at managing the nation’s finances, but that myth is suddenly under attack as recent articles, including a New York Times piece by David Leonhardt, have noted that the U.S. economy historically fares much better under Democratic presidents than under Republicans.

And yet, as of right now, no Republicans have signed on to the coronavirus measure. After four years of endorsing Trump’s explosion of the deficit and the national debt, right on cue, the Republican Party has rediscovered the beauty of reducing the deficit.

This sudden austerity, too, will not look good in advertisements in 2022, should Democrats choose to point out that Republicans supported Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy, and then voted against a coronavirus relief bill designed to help ordinary Americans survive the pandemic.

So while we are looking at the short-term effects of these two major issues—an impeachment trial and a coronavirus relief package—we are also looking at both parties making a case to the American people for why their own approach to the future is the best one.

The Trump campaign continues to offer only a fierce resentment of those who are trying to hold the former president to account for his refusal to accept the results of an election, which led to the unprecedented attack on the Capitol. The Democrats are offering to make the former president accountable for the fact “he willfully incited violent insurrection against the government,” and offering a way forward for the nation as a whole.

Over the course of the next week or so, the Republican senators who are not aligned with the Trump wing must choose between these two visions, knowing that in 2022 and 2024, there will be no escaping the consequences of their choices. Democrats will broadcast them to voters relentlessly.

brianlux

It's going to be an interesting week!

mickeyrat

 February 9, 2021 (Tuesday)

Today began the second impeachment trial for former president Donald J. Trump, this time for incitement of insurrection against the American government.

Still, the people who are really on trial are the 50 Republican senators judging Trump’s guilt.

The impeachment trial today covered whether it is constitutional to try a former official. This angle was designed to get Republican senators off the hook: if not, they could avoid voting on the article of impeachment.

The proceedings went badly for the defense. Lead House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin (D-MD) began the session by pointing out that Trump’s lawyers were arguing for a brand new “January exception to the Constitution of the United States of America.” Constitutional lawyers from across the political spectrum, he pointed out, agree that former officials must be held accountable for their actions after they leave office. Otherwise, officeholders could commit high crimes and misdemeanors and then promptly resign, putting themselves beyond reach of impeachment.

“It’s an invitation to the president to take his best shot at anything he may want to do on his way out the door, including using violent means to lock that door to hang on the Oval Office at all costs and to block the peaceful transfer of power,” Raskin said. “In other words, the January exception is an invitation to our Founders’ worst nightmare. And if we buy this radical argument… we risk allowing January 6 to become our future.”

What would that look like? Raskin answered his own question with a thirteen-minute video that revisited exactly what happened on January 6. Using footage and tweets from the attack on the Capitol, the video laid out the direct relationship between Trump’s speech at his rally that day and his supporters’ attack on Congress. It was devastating. Seeing the events of the day laid out in chronological order, with Trump’s words echoing from the mouths of furious insurrectionists attacking the Capitol, was even worse than seeing it happen in real time on January 6.

After the video, Raskin and the impeachment manager who followed him, Representative Joseph Neguse (D-CO) laid out, in historical detail, that the Framers certainly intended for impeachment to include officials who had already left office. They pointed both to a case that was underway in Britain when the Framers were including impeachment in the Constitution and to the case of Secretary of War William Belknap, who was impeached in 1876 after he resigned from office in the midst of a scandal.

The goal behind impeachment, Neguse said, is to guarantee accountability and stop corruption. There is, he said, no merit to Trump’s claim that he can incite an insurrection and then insist weeks later that the Senate lacks power to hold a trial.  

Like Raskin and Neguse, Representative David Cicilline (D-RI) emphasized that there is no “January exception” to the Constitution. He pointed out that Trump committed a terrible constitutional offense when he incited an armed angry mob to riot in the Capitol.

Cicilline also pointed out that Trump did not back down. At the end of that fateful day, he tweeted: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!” It is no wonder Trump’s lawyers want to talk about jurisdiction rather than facts, he said.

After their presentations, Raskin gave an emotional plea to senators to defend American democracy.

After a recess, it was Trump’s lawyers’ turn. It didn’t go well.

The two men, Bruce Castor and David Schoen, only joined the defense team a little over a week ago, after Trump’s original team leaders all quit, and so have had little time to prepare. They were also apparently surprised by the quality of the prosecution’s presentation today, and so tried to change their own presentations on the fly.

Castor spoke first, coming across as condescending and meandering—Schoen later defended him by saying Castor had not known he would be speaking today. Even Trump supporter Alan Dershowitz, who defended Trump in his first impeachment trial, seemed put off. “I have no idea what he’s doing,” Dershowitz told Newsmax.

Next up was Schoen, who insisted that the Trump voters whose candidate lost the election must be heard. He appeared to threaten the senators with civil war. “This trial will tear the country apart, perhaps like we’ve only ever seen once in history.”

The two men seemed badly outmatched, rambling and unprepared. While the Democrats’ presentations were clear, organized, and illustrated with slick videos and graphics, the defense had none of that. Watching from Florida, the former president was allegedly irate. The goal for the defense today was simply to give cover to Republicans who wanted to avoid voting on the merits of the case by giving them room to dismiss the case on the grounds it was unconstitutional. Castor and Schoen did not give them that cover.

At the end of the presentations, the Senate voted that it was constitutional to proceed with the trial by a vote of 56 to 44. Six Republicans, one more than had voted yes on a similar vote in Congress, joined the Democratic majority. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) said the defense lawyers had not provided a convincing argument that such a trial was unconstitutional. When pressed by reporters about why he thought the defense was poor, he said: “Did you listen to it? It was disorganized, random—they talked about many things, but they didn’t talk about the issue at hand.”

The defense lawyers’ problem, of course, is that they are being asked to defend the indefensible. They know it; we know it; Republican senators who have been defending Trump know it. During the video of the insurrection, Trump supporters Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Tom Cotton (R-AR) looked at papers on their desks, Rick Scott (R-FL) looked at papers on his lap, and Rand Paul (R-KY) doodled.

Republican Senators willing to excuse Trump for his incitement of an insurrection that attacked our peaceful transfer of power are tying the Republican party to the former president and to an ideology that would end our democracy.

What led the rioters on January 6, 2021, to try to hurt our elected officials and overturn the legal results of the 2020 election was Trump’s long-time assertion that he won in a landslide and the presidency had been stolen from him.

This big lie, as observers are calling it, is not one of Trump’s many and random lies, it is the rallying cry for a movement to destroy American democracy. He is building a movement based on the idea that his supporters are the only ones truly defending the nation, because they—not the people who certified the 2020 election—are the ones who know the true outcome of the election. He is creating a narrative in which he is the only legitimate leader of the nation and anyone who disagrees is a traitor to the Constitution.

As Cicilline noted, even after the riot Trump refused to repudiate that big lie. And now, even in the face of impeachment he has not repudiated it. Indeed, he has doubled down on it, refusing to admit he is a “former” president. His supporters haven’t admitted it, either, including his supporters who sit in Congress. None of those who challenged the counting of the electoral votes on January 6 and 7 has admitted it was a political stunt. Now, they are arguing that impeachment is a partisan attack on the part of Democrats.

If Republican senators permit Trump to get away with the big lie, it must, logically, take over the Republican Party. It’s no wonder that he lost his first defense team because he insisted they use their media time to argue that he had won the election in a landslide. Trump is not trying to win just this trial: he is trying to win control of the Republican Party and, through it, the country.

Tomorrow, the House impeachment managers will begin to argue their case.

brianlux

Excellent as always... maybe even better than usual this one!

mickeyrat

 February 10, 2021 (Wednesday)

“This case is much worse than someone who falsely shouts fire in a crowded theater. It’s more like a case where the town fire chief, who’s paid to put out fires, sends a mob not to yell fire in a crowded theater, but to actually set the theater on fire.”

This was how lead House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin (D-MD) explained Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection to the senators trying the former president Trump for inciting that insurrection.

Over the course of today, the House impeachment managers laid out a devastating timeline of the former president’s effort, beginning even before the 2020 election, to prime his supporters to believe the only way he could lose was if the Democrats cheated. Manager Joseph Neguse (D-CO) used the rioters’ own words to show that they were responding to Trump’s calls to fight for his reelection. Manager Eric Swalwell (D-CA) pointed out that the Trump camp spent $50 million on national “STOP THE STEAL!” ads that ran until the planned “big protest” on January 6. That presentation alone was powerful, as the managers put videos of rally speeches and tweets together to let the story tell itself.

But the tale grew riveting when impeachment manager Stacey Plaskett, a Democratic delegate from the U.S. Virgin Islands, took the story into the Capitol building itself. She followed the rioters using footage from their own cellphones and the cameras of journalists who recorded their actions. But she had more than those videos. Plaskett used previously unseen video from security cameras to illustrate just how close the rioters came to capturing Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, both of whom they were searching for specifically, as well as lawmakers in general. In some cases, the congress members and their staffs were within seconds of being caught.

The mocking, singsong, drawn out calls for “Nancy” from a rioter searching for the House Speaker as if he were a monster stalking a victim in a horror movie, and the angry chants to “Hang Mike Pence!” from rioters who had hung a noose from a gallows they constructed outside the Capitol, left little doubt the rioters were deadly. Richard Barnett, the man photographed with his feet on Pelosi’s desk, carried a 950,000-volt stun gun.  

Impeachment manager David Cicilline (D-RI) took the baton from Plaskett, hammering home that Trump had continued to stoke the crowd’s anger against Pence even as the vice president was in lockdown at the Capitol, and that he refused to stop the riot despite pleading from his aides and allies. Manager Joaquin Castro (D-TX) brought the argument home: “On January 6, President Trump left everyone in this Capitol for dead.”

It was a riveting, damning presentation, showing just how close we came to an event even worse than the day turned out to be. In one particularly dramatic new scene from the security cameras, we saw Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, who later lured the rioters away from the Senate chamber to give the lawmakers enough time—barely—to get to safety, prevent Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) from walking into the mob, likely saving his life.

The story the managers told set out quite clearly that the insurrection was not only planned, it was timed to disrupt the counting of the electoral votes that would make Joe Biden president. As impeachment manager Ted Lieu (D-CA) put it, Trump “ran out of nonviolent options to maintain power…. What you saw was a man so desperate to try to cling to power that he tried everything he could to keep it, and when he ran out of nonviolent measures, he turned to the violent mob that attacked your Senate chamber on January 6.”

The House managers tried to make it possible for Republican senators to convict Trump. They focused on him alone, leaving untouched the fact that some of the senators in the chamber had themselves spread the lie that the election had been marred by massive fraud. (The one apparently in deepest, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, refused to watch the presentation.)

They held up Vice President Pence as a principled leader attacked while trying to do his constitutional duty, offering Republican senators a choice not between their party and the Democrats, but rather between Trump and Pence, Republicans both. They also detailed the attack on Capitol police officers, offering the chance for Republicans to side against Trump and with the officers.

In their defense of Pence, the impeachment managers made clear a curious thing: the popular anger at Pence was entirely manufactured. Pence’s role on January 6 was largely ceremonial; he could not challenge the counting of the electoral votes, and he said so, both in person and in writing, as Trump continued to pressure him to. Trump’s deliberate stoking of fury at the vice president meant the crowd was actively hunting for Vice President Pence and House Speaker Pelosi, the next two people in line for the presidency should Trump be removed from office.

And yet, there are signs that none of this matters to the Republican senators who have already decided to acquit the president. On Twitter, Senator Lindsey Graham tonight called the day’s presentation “offensive and absurd.”
 
Still others say that, even if what happened is horrific, the trial is unconstitutional because Trump is no longer president, although the fact the Senate voted that it is constitutional should mean that point is settled. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) told CNN correspondent Ryan Nobles, “I’m learning things. But, again, my basic point is we shouldn’t have having this trial.”

It seems likely that they are contemplating the experience of Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), whose state Republican Party pounced on his vote yesterday in favor of the constitutionality of the trial, saying it was “profoundly disappointed.”

But those doubling down on Trump’s leadership of the party have their own troubles. In the 25 states that have accessible data, nearly 140,000 Republicans have left the party since January 6, and tonight, Reuters broke the story that “former elected Republicans, former officials in the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Trump, ex-Republican ambassadors and Republican strategists,” are in talks to form a new center-right political party. While Trump spokesman Jason Miller called the people involved “losers,” they are savvy enough at political strategy to plan to make their influence felt not necessarily by running third-party candidates, but by endorsing the non-Trump candidate in a race, regardless of party.

While almost all eyes are on the Senate impeachment trial, Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill is working its way through the relevant House committees. Today, by a party-line vote, the House Education and Labor Committee moved its portion along with a provision to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025.

At the White House, Biden spoke on the telephone for the first time with Chinese President Xi Jinping, whom he knows from his days as vice president. The two discussed areas of shared interest, such as the pandemic, global health, and climate change. Biden also called the Chinese leader out for “coercive and unfair economic practices,” as well as the anti-democratic crackdown in Hong Kong and, in Xinjiang, human rights abuses.

mickeyrat

 February 11, 2021 (Thursday)

Today the House impeachment managers wrapped their case against former president Donald Trump. Using the words of the insurgents themselves, the managers argued that he incited the insurrection of January 6, spurring an armed and violent mob to storm the Capitol while Congress was counting the certified electoral votes that awarded the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.

After yesterday’s dramatic illustrated timeline of the insurrection itself, the managers used their time today establishing that Trump was responsible for sparking that insurrection. They showed the insurrectionists repeating his words—one man read one of his tweets through a bullhorn at the Capitol riot—and insisting that they were acting according to the former president’s instructions.

The managers’ case was reinforced by the fact that the Department of Justice this morning filed a memorandum establishing that Jessica Watkins, a member of the right-wing Oath Keepers paramilitary group, delayed her planned assault on Washington, D.C., until she was certain Trump was behind it. “I am concerned this is an elaborate trap,” she texted on November 9, 2020. “Unless the POTUS himself activates us, it’s not legit. The POTUS has the right to activate units too. If Trump asks me to come, I will. Otherwise, I can’t trust it.”  

Again and again, the managers tried to distinguish between Trump and his violent supporters, on the one hand, and the lawmakers of both parties who were their prey, on the other. Again and again, they focused on Trump as the perpetrator of the big lie that the election had been rigged and that he, not Biden, was the rightful victor.

They warned that Trump’s attack on our democracy is not over. Even after all that has happened, he has still not conceded that he lost the election. This refusal to abandon the big lie keeps it potent, enabling him to rally supporters with the argument that fighting for Trump means defending American democracy. It is a deadly inversion of reality.

The House impeachment managers have given Republican senators multiple ways to justify a vote for conviction to their constituents. They have shown how Trump began to incite violence even before the election, in plain sight, and how that led to an assault on the Capitol that came close to costing the lives of our elected officials, including Vice President Mike Pence—a Republican—and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the two people next in line for the presidency if Trump were to be removed from office.

The riot threatened the representatives and senators—including them!—their staffers, and many of their family members who were at the Capitol that day. And yet, even as lawmakers begged Trump to call the rioters off, he did the opposite. He attacked Pence in a tweet even as the vice president was being rushed to safety from the mob.

The managers focused, too, on the terrible toll the attack took on Capitol police. Three of them are now dead, with more than 100 wounded physically and others wounded mentally. Senators could vote to convict out of a determination to protect law enforcement officers, something their constituents say is important to them.

Today, the managers emphasized the many Republican lawmakers who condemned Trump in the wake of the insurrection, including the Cabinet members who resigned their posts, the state governors who called him out, and fellow lawmakers who expressed dismay at his incitement of the rioters.

Finally, the managers warned that, unless Trump is stopped, he will absolutely do such a thing again. They pointed out that the riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, after which the president condoned the white supremacists who killed Heather Heyer, was a rehearsal for the attack on the Michigan state house this summer. That, in turn, was a rehearsal for the attack on the Capitol. As manager Diana DeGette (D-CO) said: “In 2017, it was unfathomable to most of us to think that Charlottesville could happen, just as it was unfathomable to most of us that the Capitol could have been breached on January 6…. Frankly, what unfathomable horrors await us if we do not stand up now and say, no, this is not America.”

Senators were apparently shocked to see how close they came to falling into the hands of the rioters, and yet, although many Republican senators concede that the House managers mounted a compelling case, they continue to say that they do not believe they have the power to convict a former president. This suggests they are looking for an excuse, since the Senate’s vote on this question, which should be definitive, passed on Tuesday by a vote of 56-44. At one point today, at least 18 Republican senators were absent from their desks as the managers were making their case.

It’s unlikely that any of the senators want to acquit Trump because they want him to stay in the political scene. Some of them want his voters, but that itself cuts against wanting him to stay around: they want his voters to elect them, not to reelect him or elect his chosen successor. It’s likely they simply hoped he would fade away as he lost his social media presence and became occupied with the financial and legal troubles that are already piling up.

After all, bankers have distanced themselves from the former president, his businesses appear to be losing money, and a $100 million tax dispute with the IRS is now likely to come to a conclusion after being put on hold for four years. Yesterday, District Attorney Fani Willis, Fulton County, Georgia’s top prosecutor, announced that she is launching a wide-ranging criminal investigation into Trump’s January 2 phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a call that lawyers have suggested broke election laws.

But the Senate trial has shown that maybe he’s not going to fade away. The House impeachment managers have laid out a damning case. The scenes from the insurrection were shocking, and they established a pretty strong sense that Trump is deeply involved in an ongoing attempt to overturn our democracy. It looks possible that the Department of Justice might, in fact, go after the former president and perhaps others with the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.

After the past two days, senators who were planning to let Trump off the hook might be worrying they will have to answer to constituents furious that they didn’t do their jobs and instead associated the entire party with a criminal president and the rioters that attacked the Capitol. Already the editorial board of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has lambasted Missouri Senators Josh Hawley and Roy Blunt: “There is no way to credibly argue that Trump protected and defended the Constitution when video evidence shows him directing a mob to storm the Capitol and interrupt constitutionally mandated proceedings to certify the Electoral College result.”

The senators need Trump’s lawyers to do a good enough job tomorrow to give them cover to acquit, and it seems likely those lawyers are not skilled enough to do so. Tonight, Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) visited Trump’s defense team. Cruz said they were “sharing our thoughts” about their legal strategy: it is of note that Cruz was the Solicitor General of Texas before being elected to the Senate, and Lee was an assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Utah. Also a lawyer, Graham is the former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The Republican senators who will vote either to convict or acquit the former president must do so knowing that trials associated with the insurrection between now and the next election will keep the story in the news. The question is whether the American people will interpret the story as the impeachment team has framed it, or whether Trump’s lawyers and later Trump himself, if he regains a political foothold, can somehow knock that interpretation aside.

Lead impeachment manager Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who was a constitutional law professor before he went to Congress, seems to understand their dilemma. “Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered,” he told the senators today, quoting political theorist Thomas Paine, “but we have this saving consolation: The more difficult the struggle, the more glorious ... our victory.”

He told them, “Good luck in your deliberations.”

mickeyrat

 February 12, 2021 (Friday)

Today was the the fourth day of former president Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial. The president’s legal team attempted to answer the arguments of the House impeachment managers, who outlined the horrific events of January 6, 2021, when a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol while a joint session of Congress was counting the certified electoral votes to make Democrat Joe Biden president and blamed the former president for inciting the insurrectionists.

The House impeachment managers had put together a damning presentation over the past two days, leaving Trump’s lawyers with the goal simply of providing enough cover for Republican senators to vote to acquit. They had 16 hours to present their case.

They took less than four.

Led by a new spokesman, Michael van der Veen, a former personal injury lawyer from Philadelphia, Trump’s lawyers brought to the floor of the Senate the same tactics the former president used for his four years in office. Rather than engaging in substantive discussion of the merits of the case—which, in fairness, ran pretty heavily against them—they delivered sound bites for right-wing media. They lied about facts, insisted that Trump’s language leading to the riot was the same sort of rhetoric all politicians use, insulted and talked back to the senators, and claimed Trump was the victim of years of witch hunts by Democrats who hate him.

This approach had been enough to make one of his lawyers, David Schoen, quit briefly, but Trump allegedly “loved” it. He had been angry at his lawyers’ meandering defense earlier in the week, but this was more his style. “His base will be pleased,” a former aide told Meridith McGraw and Gabby Orr of Politico. “[H]e had four hours of free television to pitch [to the public].” Defending the former president, his team even reached back to defend his embrace of the white supremacist rioters at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. “Charlottesville was shown because it gave free airtime to explain it. Previously nobody in media would run with the excuse. Now it’s out there,” said the former aide.

After the presentation, though, the senators questioned the former president’s lawyers, and revealed two key pieces of information.

First, Trump’s lawyers refused to say that he lost the election. Trump’s big lie, the lie that has driven his attack on our democracy, is that the outcome of the 2020 election was rigged and that, in reality, he won it in a landslide. There is no merit to this argument. It has been dismissed by state election boards across the country and by our courts, including the Supreme Court. But he continues to refuse to concede the election, fueling a movement that threatens to create a long-term domestic insurgency. His lawyers today endorsed that position.

The other key information centered on what Trump did during the attack on the Capitol.

Senators Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) asked: “Exactly when did President Trump learn of the breach of the Capitol? And what specific actions did he take to bring the rioting to an end? And when did he take them? Please be as detailed as possible.”

Van der Veen responded by blaming the House managers for not answering that question although, of course, it is his client who knows the answer and who refused to testify.

Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) then joined Collins in asking whether Trump knew Pence was in danger when he sent a tweet saying: "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!"

Van der Veen said definitively, “The answer is no, at no point was the President informed the vice president was in any danger.” He then turned back to blaming the House managers for the lack of information.

But Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) noted that, according to Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Trump had been on the phone with him just before he sent the tweet, and Tuberville had told Trump that Pence had been evacuated. “The tweet and lack of response suggest that President Trump did not care that Vice President Pence was endangered, or that law enforcement was overwhelmed,” Cassidy noted. “Does this show that President Trump was tolerant of the intimidation of Vice President Pence?”

Van der Veen disagreed with Tuberville’s statement, and pivoted again to the House managers’ lack of an investigation.

At the end of the day, it was clear a number of Republican senators were troubled by the lawyers’ refusal to engage with the facts of the case or with the House managers’ argument, but it seemed as if Trump’s lawyers had provided enough cover for them to be able to vote to acquit.

And then someone threw a spanner in the works.

Just after the Senate adjourned for the day, CNN broke the story that gave details about a phone call between House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Trump as the rioters were breaching the Capitol. As McCarthy begged the then-president to call off his supporters, who were at that point breaking into his office, Trump allegedly said, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.” The two men began to shout at each other, with McCarthy demanding: “Who the f*ck do you think you are talking to?”

Trump did not call off the rioters for several more hours.

The story is explosive, showing that Trump did indeed know of the lawmakers’ danger and that he refused to help them.
 
Also interesting, though, is that this story came from “multiple” Republican lawmakers, who provided detailed information to the journalists at this crucial moment. They said that Trump had no intention of stopping the riot. “He is not a blameless observer,” one said, “he was rooting for them.” One of the sources named in the story, Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA), said, "That line right there demonstrates to me that either he didn't care, which is impeachable, because you cannot allow an attack on your soil, or he wanted it to happen and was OK with it, which makes me so angry."

Another source, Representative Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH) said, “He was not sorry to see his unyieldingly loyal vice president or the Congress under attack by the mob he inspired. In fact, it seems he was happy about it or at the least enjoyed the scenes that were horrifying to most Americans across the country."

Herrera Beutler had shared the details of the story before, but it had not gotten traction. Now, apparently, a number of Republicans are so concerned that the Senate will vote to acquit the former president they have gone to the press.

And then someone from Pence’s team told reporters that van der Veen was lying when he said the president did not know about Pence’s danger.

So, as Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) wrote tonight, “Tomorrow just got a lot more interesting.”

mickeyrat

 February 13, 2021 (Saturday)

Today the Senate acquitted former president Donald Trump of the charge of inciting an insurrection. Fifty-seven senators said he was guilty; 43 said he was not guilty. An impeachment conviction requires a two-thirds majority of the Senate, so he was acquitted, but not before seven members of his own party voted to convict him.

The only real surprise today was this morning, when five Republicans joined 50 Democrats to vote in favor of calling witnesses.

That vote came after Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA) last night released a statement recounting an angry conversation between House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Trump during the violence, in which Trump refused to call off the rioters and appeared to taunt McCarthy by telling him that the rioters were “more upset about the election than you are.” Herrera Beutler’s statement suggested that Trump had deliberately abandoned Vice President Mike Pence and the lawmakers to the insurrectionists, although Trump’s lawyer had definitively declared during the trial that Trump had not been told that Vice President Mike Pence was in danger.

The vote to hear witnesses threw the Senate into confusion as senators were so convinced the trial would end today that many had already booked flights home. The House impeachment managers said they wanted to call Herrera Beutler to testify; Republican supporters of Trump warned they would call more than 300 witnesses, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris.

After the two sides conferred, the House managers gave up demands for witnesses in exchange for reading Herrera Beutler’s statement into the record as evidence. While there was a widespread outcry at what seemed to be a Democratic capitulation, there were reasons the Democrats cut this deal. Witnesses to Trump’s behavior, like McCarthy, did not want to testify and would have been difficult. The Republicans as a group would have dragged the process on well into the spring, muddying the very clear story the impeachment managers told. They allegedly said that if the Democrats called witnesses, they would use the filibuster to block all Democratic nominees and legislation.

So much pundits have noted.

But today was not just about Trump; it was part of a longer struggle for the future of the country.

Trump’s lawyers proceeded in the impeachment trial with the same rhetorical technique Trump and his supporters use: they flat-out lied. Clearly, they were not trying to get at the truth but were instead trying to create sound bites for right-wing media, the same way Trump and the rest of his cabal convinced supporters of the big lie that he had won, rather than lost, the 2020 election. In that case, they lied consistently in front of the media, but could not make anything stick in a courtroom, where there are penalties for not telling the truth.

In the first impeachment hearings, Trump supporters did the same thing, shouting and lying to create sound bites, and while the sworn testimony was crystal clear, their antics left many Americans convinced not of the facts but that then-President Trump was being persecuted by Democrats who were trying to protect Hunter Biden. So, while it’s reasonable to imagine that witnesses would illustrate Trump’s depravity, it seems entirely likely that, as Trump’s lawyers continued simply to lie and their lies got spread through right-wing media as truth, Americans would have learned the opposite of what they should have.

Instead, the issue of Trump’s guilt on January 6 will play out in a courtroom, where there are actual rules about telling the truth. Trump’s own lawyers suggested he should answer for his actions in a court of law, and in a fiery speech after the vote, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell set up the same idea. But even if that does not happen, the Capitol rioters will be in court, keeping in front of Americans both the horrific events of January 6 and their contention that they showed up to fight because their president asked them to.

The constant refrain of the January 6 insurrection mirrors the Republicans’ use of sham investigations to convince people that Democrats are criminals—think, for example, of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails—except, this time, the cases are real. This should address the problem of manufactured sound bites, and should benefit the Democrats with voters, especially as Republicans are now openly the Party of Trump.

McConnell tried to address the party’s capitulation immediately after the vote with a speech blaming Trump for the insurrection and saying that his own vote to acquit was because he does not think the Senate can try a former president. This is posturing, of course; McConnell made sure the Senate did not take up the House’s article of impeachment while Trump was still in office, and now says that, because it did not do so, it does not have jurisdiction.

McConnell is trying to have it both ways. He has made it clear he wants to free the Republican Party from its thralldom to Trump, and he needs to do so in order to regain both voters and the major donors who have distanced themselves from party members who support the big lie. But he needs to keep Trump voters in the party. So he has bowed to the Trump wing in the short term, hoping to retain its goodwill, and then, immediately after the vote, gave a speech condemning Trump to reassure donors that he and the party are still sane. He likely hopes that, as the months go by and the Republicans block President Biden’s plans, alienated voters and donors will come back around to the party. From this perspective, the seven Republican votes to convict Trump provide excellent cover.

It’s a cynical strategy and probably the best he can do, but it’s a long shot that it alone will enable the Republicans to regain control of the House and the Senate in 2022. For that, the Republicans need to get rid of Democratic votes.

That need was part of what was behind the party’s support for Trump’s big lie. The essence of that lie was that Trump won the 2020 election because the votes of Democrats, especially people of color, were illegitimate. Republican lawmakers were happy to sign on to that big lie: it is a grander version of their position since 1986. Even now, those Republicans who backed the big lie have not admitted it was false. Instead, they are using the myth of fraudulent Democratic votes to push a massive attack on voting rights before the 2022 election.

But they are no longer setting the terms of the country’s politics. By refusing to engage with the impeachment trial, Biden and his team escaped the trap of letting Trump continue to drive the national narrative. Instead, they are making it a priority to protect voting rights. At the same time, they are pushing back against the Republican justification for voter suppression: that widespread voting leads to Black and Brown voter fraud that elects “socialists” who redistribute money from “makers” to “takers.” Biden’s team is using the government in ways that are popular with voters across the board: right now, for example, 79% of Americans either like Biden’s coronavirus relief package or think it is too small.

It was disheartening today to see that even trying to destroy the American government was not enough to get more than seven Republican senators to convict the former president. But it is not at all clear that tying their party to Trump is a winning strategy.

mickeyrat

 February 14, 2021 (Sunday)

I took this photo on a hot summer day, hiking on a Maine island with my daughter, my nephews and their friends, and one of my besties, as we explored an old cemetery, complete with the nineteenth-century grave of a man who, according to his headstone, dropped dead shortly after preaching a sermon.

This world is a funny place, but there is love here, even in the oddest places.

Taking the night off. Will pick it all up tomorrow.

H.

mickeyrat

 February 15, 2021 (Monday)

Monday federal holidays generally mean that not much gets done. Today was a bit of an exception, since we are dealing with the fallout from the Senate’s refusal to convict former president Trump for the January 6 insurrection.

For the Republicans, that acquittal simply makes the split in the party worse. First of all, it puts the Republicans at odds with the majority of Americans. According to a new ABC/Ipsos poll, 58% of us think Trump should have been convicted, and more than three-quarters of us—77%-- think the senators’ votes reflected partisanship rather than the facts.

But Republicans disagree. Trump packed state Republican positions with his supporters because he was afraid he would face primary challengers in 2020, and those loyalists are now defending him. State Republican parties have censured a number of the House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump; of the seven Republican senators who voted to convict, Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Richard Burr (R-NC) have already been censured, and a censure effort is underway against Susan Collins (R-ME), Ben Sasse (R-NE), and Pat Toomey (R-PA). According to a new Quinnipiac poll, 75% of Republicans want Trump to continue to lead the party.

But 21% don’t, and between 24% and 28% blame him for the January 6 riot.

That split means the Republican Party, which was already losing members over the insurrection, stands to lose even more of its members if it continues to defer to the former president. Already, the Democratic National Committee has prepared a video advertisement to circulate on digital platforms, highlighting Republicans leaving their party. It includes a clip from former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele saying that “when you’re losing Republican members and you’re left with QAnon and Proud Boys, you’ve got to reassess whether or not you are even close to being a viable party.” The video ends with Biden urging Americans to come together and to “help us unite America and build back better.”

For Democrats, the Senate trial put on display for the American public an impressive group. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) gave the lead impeachment manager from Trump’s first Senate trial, Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) a run for his money as a model for brains and morals. But Raskin was not alone. Delegate Stacey Plaskett (D-US Virgin Islands) and Representative Joseph Neguse (D-CO), relatively unknown outside of their home districts, got significant positive national attention during the trial, suddenly becoming household names. The entire Democratic team shone and indicated that the young Democrats have quite a deep bench of talent, especially in contrast to the younger Republicans, who seem to excel in media appearances more than in policy.

Democrats recognize that the Senate acquittal means there is considerable interest in an actual accounting of what happened in the insurrection. Today, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she will urge the House to establish an independent commission, like the one that investigated the 9/11 attacks, to study what led to the storming of the Capitol on January 6. Members of both parties have asked for such a commission.

The Senate trial also gave powerful proof of just how undemocratic the Senate has become. Voting rights journalist Ari Berman noted that the “57 senators who voted to convict Trump represent 76.7 MILLION more Americans than 43 senators who voted to acquit.”

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne noted that the adherence of all but seven senators to Trump “should end the absurd talk that there is a burden on President Biden to achieve a bipartisan nirvana in Washington. If most Republicans can’t even admit that what Trump did is worthy of impeachment, how can anyone imagine that they would be willing and trustworthy governing partners?”

Dionne added that the acquittal made an overwhelming case for getting rid of the filibuster, which in its current incarnation effectively means that no legislation can pass without support from 60 senators. Thanks to the 50-50 split in the Senate, getting to 60 means getting 10 Republican votes. This is impossible, Dionne says, because clearly “There are not 10 Republican Senate votes to be had on anything that really matters.”

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden is simply working around Republican lawmakers, starting with the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package. Republicans in Congress overwhelmingly stand against the bill, in part because it calls for $350 billion to provide aid to states and cities. But Republican governors and mayors are desperate for the assistance. Republican voters like it, too.

Last Friday, Biden invited governors and mayors from both parties to the White House to ask them what they needed most. The Republican mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez, told reporters that he had had more contact with Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in the first weeks of their administration “than I had spoken to the prior administration in the entirety.”

Biden is about to hit the road to try to convince Senate Republicans to support the relief package, going directly to the people to sell his ideas.

The Democrats also have another trick to lay on the table to get Republican support. Today, Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, and Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, announced they would back the return of a new version of so-called “earmarks,” more formally known as “member-directed spending,” in legislation.

These “Community-Focused Grants,” as the new lingo calls them, are funds that individual congress members can direct toward their districts. In the past, earmarks were made by lawmakers and were occasionally havens for corruption—which is what people remember—but even at their worst, they made up less than 1.1% of federal spending and tended to actually produce things that districts needed.

Democrats cleaned the system up before then-House Speaker John Boehner declared a moratorium on it in 2011. After the ban, the government still targeted federal money to get votes, but the power to make those calls shifted to the executive branch rather than Congress. For much federal spending, Congress appropriates the amounts but the executive branch decides where to spend it. A 2020 congressional study established that presidents use that money “to influence policy and support their preferred projects without receiving approval from Congress.” To that, we can add that a president targeted federal money to try to buy reelection.  

In the past, congressional earmarks were a key feature in bipartisanship: they gave reluctant lawmakers a reason to support legislation they might otherwise hesitate about. The new rules will likely be different than the old ones in that they apparently will be targeted to public entities that ask for a grant. They will provide a challenge for Republicans—who actually like these grants, normally—because they will undercut Republicans’ stance against appropriation bills. They might also swing some Republicans behind the coronavirus bill.

Biden demonstrated national unity yesterday when he issued a Federal Emergency Declaration for Texas in response to a request from Republican Governor Greg Abbott. Such a declaration frees up the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and federal funds to provide help to the region, which is suffering from bitter cold temperatures that have shut down power and left residents without electricity in unheated homes—a dangerous and potentially deadly situation. Biden’s quick response recalls the way presidents have traditionally responded to state crises, and the governor of the state in which Trump supporters tried to run Biden’s campaign bus off the road acknowledged Biden’s response.

“I thank President Biden for quickly issuing a Federal Emergency Declaration for Texas as we continue to respond to severe winter weather conditions throughout the state,” Abbott’s press release stated.