Category Elections

A peek of sun

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

This is a miserable day: there’s a small hurricane a few hundred miles to the south that is shooting enough rain over my area that the golf course has actually closed, and they rarely do that; I’m finishing four months mostly stuck at home doing my tiny part to stifle the spread of COVID-19, which has a renewed outbreak here in southeast Texas thanks mostly to simple impatience encouraged by misguided state and national political leadership; and while the Major League Baseball season finally began in Houston last night I found from watching just a bit of it on television that the lack of fan excitement in the ballpark compounded my disinterest arising from the off-season report that my team cheated.

But there is good news: support for Donald Trump among Republicans is starting to crack!  Finally.

I do not understand—have never understood—the attraction of Donald Trump to the American people, beyond the fact that he is not Hillary Clinton and that was enough for many.  Trump has no guiding philosophical principles (beyond self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement) that might attract like-minded people, and even if he did, you’d think the cold, clear reality that Trump lies (about everything) should be enough to persuade those people that he cannot be trusted in anything that he says.  Even his TV catchphrase “You’re fired” was misleading, in that we’ve now seen that he doesn’t have the courage to fire anyone to their face, no matter how much they may deserve it.  He’s a con man; a fraud.  He’s also an incredible whiner, obsessed with whether people have been “fair” and “nice” to him—why didn’t he ever learn that life is not fair, and people are not always nice?  (Has he looked in a mirror?)

He’s also proven himself to be conspicuously susceptible to praise—he thrives on having others tell him how great he is.  Don’t think the leaders of Russia, China and North Korea haven’t noticed.  I’ve never seen anything as demeaning as those Cabinet meetings and other gatherings at which Trump kicks it off by going around the table “giving” everyone the chance to open up their Roget’s and find new ways to kiss his ass—in public!  Like they had a choice…I do not understand why, after the first one of those, the people around that table ever came back.

Actually, I think I do understand, at least to an extent: leaders of the Republican Party in and out of government are willing to put up with all the hideous and despicable behaviors of Trump because that’s the price to pay for getting what they want from having their party in power.  What other reason could there be for men and women who have demonstrated their skill in the system and risen to these positions of power to now debase themselves without public complaint to the same man most of them strongly dismissed and ridiculed right up to the minute he secured their party’s nomination?

The “what” of “what do they want?” from Trump differs, of course.  It could be as simple as political spoils, personal appointments or government contracts.  It could be as clear as being part of the plan to advance a philosophical agenda, either by, for example, enabling racists to control the levers of power, or by installing a generation of judges to lifetime appointments to influence the nation’s laws.  But in supporting him as president, they have also enabled all that we get from Trump: the disinterest in properly handling the government’s response to a pandemic, the misguided policy priorities, the self-inflicted trade wars, the attempts to use the government to enrich himself and to punish his enemies, the damage to relations with our allies as well as our enemies, including the attempt to blackmail a foreign leader for his personal and political gain that led to his impeachment.  (Don’t forget impeachment!)  And despite all that, the polls have been showing that Republicans still support him.

But if you look carefully, as Greg Sargent did in the Washington Post this week, you can see some cracks in that wall of support.

https://twitter.com/ThePlumLineGS/status/1286674902276243458

In a revealing aside, President Trump told chief propagandist Sean Hannity on Thursday night that he traces much of the overwhelming enthusiasm for his reelection now sweeping the country back to his Mount Rushmore speech commemorating Independence Day.

“Since that time, it’s been really something,” Trump told Hannity, before raging that fake polls are deliberately obscuring the mighty depth and reach of his support.

In that speech, Trump offered his canonical statement on the unleashing of federal law enforcement into cities, conflating protests against police brutality and systemic racism with a “far-left fascism” out to “take” our “national heritage” away from the “American people.”

At around the time Trump appeared on “Hannity,” all four Major League Baseball teams playing Opening Day games took a knee in solidarity with Black Lives Matter before the national anthem, flatly defying Trump’s relentless disparaging of the protests, and more broadly, the vision outlined in that speech.

In all kinds of ways, Trump’s depiction of this national moment, as enshrined in that speech, is losing its grip on the country. In some cases, Trump’s own officials are defying his efforts to carry that depiction to the authoritarian climax he so craves.

Meanwhile, Trump’s sinking popularity — which is linked to that loosening grip, as his efforts to impose that understanding on us are surely helping drive his numbers down — is leading to open defiance among his own party.

Players taking a knee in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, Republicans standing up to Trump on Confederacy issues and on vote by mail: Sargent cites these among seven examples where, across the country and including Republicans, people may finally be getting so tired of Trump and his constant drama that they are ready to tell him to shove it.  I hope he’s right.

Another example: Republican Congressional candidates in the Houston area who recently won their party primary runoffs by trumpeting their support of Trump are kicking off the general election campaign by…toning it down.  A lot.

Of course, I wonder why it’s taken so long, especially for elected officials who generally consider themselves, each and every one of them, the bright center of the universe around which all else revolves.  After swallowing their pride and kowtowing to this spoiled child for so long, they would not be abandoning ship now if they thought he was going to win in November.  Maybe they’ve finally seen the light and are doing what’s right for it’s own sake.  (Right.)  You decide.

Now.  For.  The.  Twitter.  Fun.

https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1286687854823903232

https://twitter.com/ecasco424/status/1286446541171863552

https://twitter.com/Timodc/status/1286382009909039104

Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV!

A few thoughts on the events of the day

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Though there is no doubt that he did it—even he admits it—I was not surprised that the United States Senate declined to convict President Trump on the articles of impeachment today.  Disappointed, yes; and still unable to really understand all the whys and hows behind the decisions of the senators, yet not surprised.  Such is the cognitive fog many fight through trying to make sense of things these days, and I am one of them.

The conventional wisdom was right, of course: no way would enough Republican senators go against their party and vote to remove this Republican president from office, even as they acknowledged Trump should not have withheld Congressionally-approved American foreign aid from Ukraine to try to coerce that country to take action designed to help Trump’s re-election effort.  And they wouldn’t vote to remove him even over his open and clear obstruction of Congress’ investigation of the administration, symbolically raising their arms to shrug “but what can we do?” in response to Trump’s refusal to provide any documents to investigators and his order to most government officials not to cooperate—a figurative flipping the bird at the quaint concept of co-equal branches of government and of Congressional oversight of the Executive.

There wasn’t any foreshadowing in the early chapters of this story to signal that a tidy resolution was coming, but the happily-ever-after in me was still waiting for the big surprise in the final act: for all the patriots to stand up and be counted, for the Never Trumpers and the whole Republican caucus to realize that if they would just all act together they could get rid of this troublesome interloper now, then execute a campaign (they’d have to have one, right?) to strategically release inside information that would make the MAGA crowd see the truth.  Sponsoring tens off thousands of screenings of “A Face in the Crowd” would be a good start.

But that didn’t happen: Mitt Romney was the only Republican senator to vote to convict on abuse of power (but not obstruction of Congress).  Not even the members who are retiring at the end of this year, and who agreed that the House managers proved the accusations, could be persuaded to speak truth to power.  The most persuasive reason I’ve heard offered to explain that: they want to avoid having their retirement spoiled by threats from strangers, or retaliation from a former president who never forgets a slight and can’t even imagine, apparently, that everyone doesn’t share his own high opinion of His Huuuugeness.  Really?  Don’t they fear the ruin of their reputation in history for pretending that the emperor does have clothes?

What’s next?   Well, there’s the election.  Trump defenders argued that it’s too close to the 2020 election to remove a president via impeachment, that it was more proper to simply let the voters pass judgement at the polls.  And so we shall.  Remember, though, Adam Schiff warned that we’re dealing with a candidate who seems OK with bringing on foreign governments to influence the outcome of our elections, and I find that argument persuasive.  (Dear Democrats, please don’t screw the pooch on this like last time and nominate a candidate who will inspire who-knows-how-many voters to decide “anybody but HIM!”)

More House impeachment proceedings?  Sure, why not.  There’s no rule against it, the Democrats still control the chamber, and there’s plenty of material for them to work with…you could start with all the tidy piles of evidence just sitting there in the Mueller Report, plus don’t forget the easy-to-understand illegally profiting from public office offenses—that stuff gets mayors and county commissioners booted out all the time.  There will probably be more inside information pretty soon: think John Bolton’s book might have some pertinent truths?  Might other former insiders also decide, finally, to tell what they know?  Jim Mattis; Rex Tillerson; John Kelly; others whose names we don’t even know—yeah, I’m talking to you.

There’s one more source of information, and inspiration, on this subject that shouldn’t be discounted: Trump himself.  Because you just know that the big fella is feeling pretty confident right about now, thinking he’s got the green light to do whatever he wants since he thinks the Constitution says a president can do whatever he wants to do (it doesn’t say that, of course) and he finally found an attorney general who acts like the Don’s consigliere rather than the chief law enforcement officer of the United States.  I have high confidence that new impeachable conduct is right around the corner, if not back there just a block or two.  Probably both.

My high school biology teacher was also our football coach.  On Mondays in the fall he started every class by offering everyone a chance to comment “on the events of last weekend” before we moved on with new business.  I didn’t understood the value of that offer back then as much as I do today…the comments are open.

For those who are fighting the feeling

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

The genius of Donald Trump—or maybe just the effect of his incredible self-absorption, I’m not sure—is that he just won’t shut up.  He talks and prattles and chirps and rants and rages and scolds and belittles and Tweets and goes on and on and on, perhaps not as smoothly as he once did but still at a rate that’s frustratingly hard to keep up with, because so much of it is just plain nonsense.  Since he took office as president, journalists have compiled the lists of his lies into the many thousands, but there’s so damn much that it’s hard to remember it all, hard to keep straight in your head all the outrageous and patently false, and dangerous, and self-serving things he has said.

That’s where the impeachment process finds itself this week as it enters a new phase—the beginning of public testimony before House committees—which I believe will accelerate the American public’s growing realization and understanding that Donald Trump is not fit to hold office, and that he deserves to be tried in the United States Senate and removed from office.

The evidence of impeachable acts and lack of proper temperament for this job has been out there all along, like a scattering of bread crumbs, leading to an inescapable conclusion for those who are willing to honestly review the evidence.  A whistleblower complaint in September led us all to the now-famous July phone call between Trump and the president of Ukraine that kick-started the impeachment process in the House of Representatives, which has turned up a growing number of people within the government who have given depositions with information supporting the accusations against the president.  That includes information supplied by the White House itself, albeit as it feigns innocence and asks, incredulously, what’s so wrong with that?  The polls indicate the start of a swing in public opinion in favor of investigation, and impeachment, and a Senate trial.

But now we won’t have to read the transcripts of depositions.  With televised public testimony from witnesses, we will all be able to see and hear the stories of what happened, and judge their credibility, for ourselves.  (We will also be able to judge the credibility of the House questioners; I hope they get that.)  I expect the volume of testimony, coming from people who joined Trump’s government out of patriotism and the desire to part of an effort they supported, and who have no ax to grind and no reason to lie, will persuade many of those who are leaning against Trump, but have been thinking this was all being blown out of proportion by his political rivals and should just go away, to understand that this is all real and must be addressed.

We have all been in their position at one time or another in our lives.  We have all supported a candidate or an officeholder, a coworker or a business associate, a family member or a friend, who turns out not to have lived up to their promises or our expectations; who has lied to or stolen from us; who has disappointed us in some unimaginable way.  It can be hard to admit to ourselves that we made a mistake, that we were taken advantage of, that our trust was abused.  It can look like we’re fighting like hell to give that person the benefit of the doubt, when we’re really fighting to keep from admitting that we got played.  It’s a natural feeling, and I empathize with those who are fighting the feeling right now.  Listening to the testimony changed minds when Congress did an impeachment investigation of Richard Nixon, and I bet the same will happen here.

On a related note, for those who couldn’t push through a reading of the Mueller Report and thus aren’t armed with an understanding of its real findings, may I suggest you listen to the Lawfare podcast The Report.  In fifteen episodes it lays out the allegations in the Mueller Report in a way that helps people get it; if you want to just lay still and let the investigated truth wash over you, take a listen.

https://twitter.com/robreiner/status/1193669772694568960

In which the President of the United States makes plain that he really doesn’t get it

Pat Ryan 4 Comments

Wait, what?

It’s not the “Ukraine” part that makes it an impeachable offense, you know.

I’ll set the over/under at two on the number of Republican members of Congress who by the end of the weekend will finally wake up, ask “what died in here?” and bravely come out in favor of the impeachment investigation. Baby steps.

The right choice; the only right choice

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

This isn’t the New York Times or the Washington Post or CNN, or any of Donald Trump’s other favorite targets.  This is the Wall Street Journal, fer cryin’ out loud, adding its credibility to that of many other outlets in reporting the story that seems to have shaken loose the impeachment process in Washington, D.C.: “President Trump in a July phone call repeatedly pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden’s son, according to people familiar with the matter, urging Volodymyr Zelensky about eight times to work with Rudy Giuliani on a probe that could hamper Mr. Trump’s potential 2020 opponent.”

To summarize: the president is accused of using his official position, by withholding and threatening to withhold American military aid to another country, to pressure that country’s leader into conducting an investigation meant to damage the political career of one of his potential political rivals in advance of the 2020 election.

And this came after the report last week that someone inside the intelligence community had filed an official whistleblower complaint about Trump making a commitment to a foreign leader, which the inspector general for the intelligence community determined was legitimate and an urgent matter that should, by law, have been forwarded to Congressional committees.  But it wasn’t—still hasn’t been—because the acting director of national intelligence blocked it.  A Trump appointee who was never confirmed by the Senate, made that decision in conjunction with Bill Barr’s Justice Department.

Today Trump insisted there was nothing untoward in his conversation with the president of Ukraine, and later said he would release a transcript of that phone call…tomorrow.  We have some idea of how reliable a document that might be.  But in the meantime, these developments led House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to change her mind and announce a formal impeachment inquiry.  At last.  It’s about time.

(Earlier today, prior to the Democratic caucus and Pelosi’s announcement, Slate restarted the Impeach-O-Meter as a “(still wildly subjective and speculative) estimate of the likelihood that the House votes to impeach Trump before the end of his first term” and which I intend to try to keep up with, and late this afternoon published a helpful refresher guide on How to Impeach a President.  Neat.)

Go online and search “Trump’s impeachable offenses”  to refresh your recollection if you need to.  Since inauguration day this president has repeatedly and unashamedly shown his disdain for the Constitution and the law, for tradition, for the separation of powers, and for the intelligence of the American people—especially, I think, for the ones who supported him out of a misplaced belief in his promises about…everything!

https://twitter.com/Malinowski/status/1175412930705338369

https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1174783959403810817

https://twitter.com/EJDionne/status/1174736961690636289

https://twitter.com/willwilkinson/status/1175066479416500235

https://twitter.com/OrinKerr/status/1175302908042047490

https://twitter.com/OhNoSheTwitnt/status/1175395473919795200

(Those are just from the past week.)

It’s past time that our Congress took the action the Constitution provides for in a case like this—this is what impeachment is there for, dammit.  Up to now the Republicans in Congress have proven themselves unable to undrink the Trump-aid, and there’s no real doubt that the Senate would never convict Trump of any accusations brought by the House.  But the Democrats simply cannot abdicate their responsibility to their constituents, and to history, to do what they can.

For so many of his actions as president, Trump deserves impeachment by the House.  He deserves to be condemned to that short short list of impeached presidents, right next to Hillary’s husband, even if he’s not removed from office by the Senate.  As a more practical matter, Adam Jentleson, a staffer for former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, argues that the impeachment process itself will hurt Trump politically, and that not moving ahead with impeachment opens the door for Trump to insist that he was fully exonerated of all wrongdoing.  You want to listen to that for the rest of your life?

There are two lessons here for House Democrats as they debate whether to open an impeachment inquiry into President Trump.

First, polling can change.

I don’t know how else to say this: getting impeached is bad. It is not something you want to happen to you, especially if you’re president. You do not want to go down as one of only four [sic] presidents in history to be impeached. This is a bad thing. Only Democrats, bless our hearts, could convince ourselves that it is good for a president to be impeached.

Richard Nixon’s approval rating was at 65 percent when his impeachment process began and only 19 percent of the public supported his impeachment. By the end, the numbers had flipped: his approval was 24 percent and support for impeachment was 57 percent.

(snip)

The second lesson from the [Merrick] Garland experience is that like nature, power abhors a vacuum. The decision not to impeach is not a decision to focus on other things, it is a decision to cede power, control, and legitimacy to Trump. Trump is not a master chess player, he just bluffs his opponents into forfeiting their moves—and that is exactly what he is doing to House Democrats.

For their part, House Democrats have argued that by foregoing impeachment they can shift the conversation to topics their consultants tell them are safer ground, like health care. That’s not going to happen. Reporters cover news, and only events that drive news can shift the message.

(snip)

Impeachment is a long process that will highlight Trump’s crimes, which according to (literally) one thousand former federal prosecutors, include “multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.” Imagine the Michael Cohen, James Comey, or William Barr hearings but on steroids, for many weeks. Anything can happen and hearings can go haywire, but the odds of making a convincing public case against Trump are stacked strongly in Democrats’ favor. Trump’s crimes are serious and laid out in meticulous detail by an unimpeachable source. The public already believes he committed serious crimes by a margin of two to one. There is already a loud chorus decrying Trump’s crimes and arguing that he should be impeached, ranging from Kellyanne Conway’s husband to a sitting Republican Congressman. In this case, the impeachment process is like one of those meals where all the ingredients come in a box: you have to boil some water and maybe crack an egg, but it’s basically idiot-proof.

If and when the House votes to impeach, the ball goes to the Senate. The Senate can ignore it, which means the House’s impeachment is the last word. That would be fine. But McConnell would be under enormous pressure from Trump and the entire right-wing echosphere to call a Kangaroo court into session for the purpose of letting Trump off. If the Senate conducts a trial, Senate Republicans up for reelection in 2020—like Maine’s Susan Collins and Colorado’s Cory Gardner—will have to decide whether to vote to remove from office a President who has been shown to have committed serious crimes, or protect him. They will likely vote to protect Trump and it will cost them: they will have to explain which of Trump’s many crimes they think are no big deal, why they disagree with the many voices from their own party saying his crimes make him unfit, and why a criminal president should be allowed to continue in office.

More importantly, if the public believes Trump is guilty but the Senate lets him off anyway, he won’t ever be truly exonerated—he’ll be O.J. Simpson, assumed guilty but sprung by allies and circumstance. Some Democrats have argued that we should skip impeachment and vote Trump out instead. But if the House impeaches Trump and Senate Republicans fall in line to protect him, the argument that the ballot is the only way to remove him will be supercharged.

By contrast, declining to impeach Trump validates his claim that Mueller exonerated him.

(snip)

Even more ominously, Trump’s weaponized Department of Justice under Barr, who has shown himself to be Trump’s eager and obedient partner in abusing the power of the state to advance the president’s political interests, will inevitably invent a pretext for investigating the Democratic nominee. Democrats should consider whether they’d rather engage that fight against a president who has been impeached for serious crimes, or against a president strengthened by the de facto exoneration bestowed when his opponents declined to pursue the evidence against him.

https://twitter.com/tonyschwartz/status/1175403260590657536

And remember this:

https://twitter.com/themaxburns/status/1175783058215247873

https://twitter.com/DavidJollyFL/status/1176137386956394496

https://twitter.com/Susan_Hennessey/status/1176322428148097025

I can always count on Dahlia Lithwick to see through to the crux of the matter: “The integrity of our democracy isn’t threatened when a president breaks the law. It’s threatened when we do nothing about it.”

It defies logic for House Democrats to insist that their sole hope for salvation will be found in the 2020 election, when the 2020 election is subject to the same acts of foreign interference that poisoned 2016; when indeed they are failing to respond to the admitted acts of interference that happen before their eyes. By refusing to hold the president and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell responsible for any of that interference—indeed by pretending it was very, very bad but let’s look forward and not backward, House leadership is inviting even more abuse. And in the face of it, Democrats continue to insist that the long game is what matters, even as the short game is making the long game increasingly unwinnable.

The net outcome of doing nothing is not politically or morally neutral. The net outcome is future loss after future loss.

When Corey Lewandowski puts on a clinic about contempt of Congress and nothing is done by the only body capable of doing something, that sends a powerful signal that all such future contempt will be welcome and effective. And when Robert Mueller says plainly and unequivocally that the next election is already in the process of being stolen, and nobody acts to secure it, that sends a powerful signal that all such interference is welcome and effective. To be sure, Democrats have very limited power at present and nobody doubts that the Senate will cower, whatever the results of an impeachment probe may be, and fail to convict. But by sitting on that limited power, fretting about how sad and mad they are, House Democrats are in point of fact giving over those limited powers to the other side.

By seemingly forgiving and forgetting the past, House Democrats are implying that they’ll also forfeit their chance at oversight in the future. In failing to say that the last worst thing was the impassable red line, they imply time and again that they are waiting for the next worst thing, which may really be the red line. But the implication that everyone’s waiting for the “big one” ignores the fact that the big one happened when this president endangered spies in a casual conversation in the Oval Office, when he took Vladimir Putin’s side over his own security advisers in Helsinki, when he tried to have Jeff Sessions fired, and when he conditioned foreign aid on helping to bury a political adversary.