Tag: The Hill

E pluribus unity

After two days of consideration, and some moping, I’ve determined that I am disappointed with the final vote by the Senate in Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, especially since they were so close to calling witnesses who might have provided evidence that could have won over enough votes to convict him of the charges.

I got up early (for a Saturday) to watch the closing arguments, and even though Mitch McConnell had emailed that he would vote to acquit I was happy to learn that there was a chance that witnesses would be called to testify.  As someone who believes Trump’s illegal and un-American behavior deserves whatever punishment is available, I began dreaming—calling witnesses was going to increase the chances that something would happen that would persuade more senators to convict Trump.  It might be the only way to get Republicans who were hell bent on protecting Trump—or who at least wanted to look like they were protecting Trump, in order to insulate themselves from the anger of Trump nation—into a position in which they could vote their real conscience.  Deep down, where everyone knows that Trump is a menace.  Even Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz.

Although disappointed in the verdict, I am not surprised by it.  Because this is not a movie.  In fiction, without a doubt, there would have been a surprise speech from some Republican senator that clearly and persuasively and emotionally laid the blame for inciting the attack on Congress on Trump, not just for his speech on the Ellipse that day but for the months of blatant lies inflaming his supporters into thinking a nefarious force was stealing the election.  Something like this, right up until the “but…”

Of course, there was a nefarious force at work…it was Trump.

I can’t comprehend how or why people believed Trump’s warning that an election that had not yet happened had already been rigged.  Not that Trump doesn’t have a high enough opinion of himself to make the claim that the only way he could lose would be through theft, but I still don’t get how so many Americans would accept this transparently self-serving claim as true—before the first vote was even cast, and with no offer of proof for how it would happen.  After all the opposition to Trump’s policies and his actions that had developed over the years, why was it hard to believe that a lot of people wouldn’t want him to be president any more?  You didn’t have to agree with those people to be honest enough with yourself to see that they were there, and they were going to vote for someone else.

The election came, and he did lose, and he bored right in with the lie.  There was no evidence of widespread fraud.  Court after court after court (after court) rejected literally dozens of legal claims.  Right through the recounts and the canvasses in state after state, right through the certification of electoral votes in all fifty states, the lying persisted.  These men and women who believed themselves patriots—the only real Americans left—convinced themselves that Trump was right, that taking up arms against their own government was the patriotic thing to do.  They were so entrenched in the delusion that they even photo-documented themselves committing the crime, unburdened by any concern for their own legal culpability.  Hundreds of them are now aware of just what a mistake that was.

The case against Trump presented by the House managers left any honest audience little wiggle room in concluding that Trump committed an impeachable offense: encouraging an armed assault against the United States Capitol and its defenders, the members of the legislative branch of government, and his own vice president.  The smoking gun was right there in Trump’s tiny hand: even if you accept the argument that he meant it when told his supporters that day to make a peaceful protest, you have to explain why, for hours after the violence began, he did nothing to try to stop it.  Didn’t get on TV and call on them to stop.  Didn’t Tweet at them, telling them to stop.  Didn’t call in the National Guard, or any other law enforcement to assist the Capitol police.  Did nothing to restore law and order. *

A majority of the U.S. Senate voted that Trump is guilty of the charge, but not the two-thirds of members present that the Constitution requires.  Today the Houston Chronicle editorial board praised those seven Republicans senators who braved the backlash sure to come by voting to convict based on the compelling evidence presented in the trial.  As for the others:

Their colleagues who voted to acquit either averted their eyes from the glaring evidence or cowered behind strained legal arguments. History will judge them, but the American people need not wait. We bore witness to the assault on our nation’s Capitol and the evidence presented in trial.

We will not forget Trump’s crimes or the failure of most in his party to hold him accountable. Senators failed to show the same kind of courage that Republican state officials did as they resisted the former president’s pressure to overturn an election.

They failed to put their duty to safeguard democracy above partisan allegiance. They took no strength from former Vice President Mike Pence, who rebuffed calls to interfere in the Electoral College certification process, or from former Attorney General Bill Barr, who investigated allegations of voter fraud and, finding no evidence, chose to resign rather than perpetuate Trump’s false claims.

They failed to honor the bravery of the officers who risked their lives to prevent further carnage, including Capitol officer Brian D. Sicknick who was killed and the almost 140 officers who were bruised, bloodied and bashed by a mob wielding bats and flag poles.

Perhaps the starkest profile in cowardice belongs to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for voting to acquit and then delivering a damning speech proving he knew better. McConnell declared Trump “practically and morally” responsible for the Capitol riot but relied on a questionable legal interpretation to claim the Senate lacked the power to hold a former president accountable. Then he tried to pass blame on the House for delays when he himself blocked the Senate from starting the trial while Trump was still in office.

Such excuses, including Texas Sen. John Cornyn’s claim that Democrats were being “unnecessarily vindictive” in pursuing impeachment, aren’t fooling anybody who’s been paying attention.

So, disappointed…but not discouraged.  Not yet.  The verdict of the U.S. Senate does not protect Trump from the criminal justice system, which can still prosecute him for his actions in regard to the attack on the Capitol just as it can for his attempts in Georgia and elsewhere to pressure local officials to commit election fraud.  Not to mention the civil and criminal investigations in New York and elsewhere, which get the feel of being too much to remember, so thanks to George Conway for bothering to write it down.

In the meantime I intend to try to follow the advice offered by E.J. Dionne yesterday: think about how the good that came out of this trial can be the foundation for the future:

…a diverse and able group of prosecutors laid out an indelible record not only of what happened on Jan. 6 and why, but also Trump’s irresponsibility throughout his term of office: his courting of the violent far right; his celebration of violence; his habit of privileging himself and his own interests over everything and everyone else, including his unrequitedly loyal vice president.

This record matters. We often like to pretend that we can move on and forget the past. But our judgments about the past inevitably shape our future. Every political era is, in part, a reaction to the failures — perceived and real — of the previous one. The Hoover-Coolidge Republicans loomed large for two generations of Democrats. Ronald Reagan built a thriving movement by calling out what he successfully cast as the sins of liberalism.

By tying themselves to Trump with their votes, most House and Senate Republicans made themselves complicit in his behavior. And Trump will prove to be even more of an albatross than Hoover, who, after all, had a moral core.

(snip)

It’s a sign of how far and how fast the ex-president has fallen that opponents of impeachment rationalized their votes by saying, as McConnell did, that Trump must still confront the “criminal justice system” and “civil litigation.” You’re in trouble when your would-be friends are saying you should be prosecuted rather than impeached.

All of which strengthens the hand of a president whose central campaign theme was a warning against the threat that Trump posed to democracy itself. A bipartisan majority of 57 senators and 232 House members has now declared that Joe Biden was right.

Here’s some of what Joe Biden had to say, standing in front of the Capitol two weeks after Trump’s mob tried to steal an election and subvert our system of government.

Few periods in our nation’s history have been more challenging or difficult than the one we’re in now.  A once-in-a-century virus silently stalks the country.  It’s taken as many lives in one year as America lost in all of World War II.  Millions of jobs have been lost.  Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed.  A cry for racial justice some 400 years in the making moves us.  The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer.  A cry for survival comes from the planet itself.  A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear.  And now, a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.

To overcome these challenges – to restore the soul and to secure the future of America – requires more than words.  It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy:  Unity.

(snip)

I ask every American to join me in this cause.

Uniting to fight the common foes we face: Anger, resentment, hatred.  Extremism, lawlessness, violence.  Disease, joblessness, hopelessness.  With unity we can do great things.  Important things.  We can right wrongs.  We can put people to work in good jobs.  We can teach our children in safe schools.  We can overcome this deadly virus.  We can reward work, rebuild the middle class, and make health care secure for all.  We can deliver racial justice.  We can make America, once again, the leading force for good in the world.

(snip)

Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal that we are all created equal and the harsh, ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, and demonization have long torn us apart.  The battle is perennial.  Victory is never assured.

Through the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War, 9/11, through struggle, sacrifice, and setbacks, our “better angels” have always prevailed.  In each of these moments, enough of us came together to carry all of us forward.  And, we can do so now.  History, faith, and reason show the way, the way of unity.

(snip)

And so today, at this time and in this place, let us start afresh.  All of us.  Let us listen to one another.  Hear one another.  See one another.  Show respect to one another.  Politics need not be a raging fire destroying everything in its path.  Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war.  And, we must reject a culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.

My fellow Americans, we have to be different than this.  America has to be better than this.  And, I believe America is better than this.

(snip)

This is a time of testing.  We face an attack on democracy and on truth.  A raging virus.  Growing inequity.  The sting of systemic racism.  A climate in crisis.  America’s role in the world.  Any one of these would be enough to challenge us in profound ways.  But the fact is we face them all at once, presenting this nation with the gravest of responsibilities.  Now we must step up.  All of us.

* EDITOR’S NOTE: This post has been updated to remove a referenced Tweet which claimed Trump and his family watched the attack on the Capitol from a party tent on the White House lawn.  That was not correct; the Poynter Tweet below explains the error.  HIPRB regrets the error.

Telework Journal: Irrational exuberance

Another week working from home kicks off with a few changes.  My wife is also working remotely but is spending this week helping her mother who just got out of the hospital, so I am working from the house by myself, unless you count the two dogs.  They are not working at all, except for pouting because I won’t feed them treats all day long.

The “new” in the “news” is coming from here in Texas and other locations where people are ignoring stay-at-home warnings and social distancing recommendations to express their…their what, their unhappiness with the pandemic, I guess.  I don’t know anyone who’s pleased with the situation, but some folks are taking a threatening stance to “demonstrate” their desire that government officials ease restrictions that have—no doubt about it—cost millions of Americans their jobs and others their businesses, in an effort to fight the spread of a deadly disease for which we don’t have another effective weapon.

Let me get this straight.  There have been some 42,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the United States to this point, out of almost 800,000 confirmed cases.  When the medical experts called for social distancing and self quarantine to fight the spread of the novel coronavirus, they warned that if we didn’t take these drastic steps there could be deaths in the hundreds of thousands.  Right now it seems there will be far less than that…emphasis on “seems,” since nothing’s for sure.

And people are taking to the streets, wearing their camouflage and carrying long guns, making the argument that the relatively few deaths suffered so far, an amount comparable to a season of the flu, are prima facie evidence that the dramatic actions taken to curtail COVID-19 are not needed?

No.  It’s because of those actions—the social distancing, the restaurants and bars and all manner of places of business shut down to prevent us from infecting each other with a virus for which we have no vaccine and no immunity—that we have not had the hundreds of thousands of deaths that had been predicted.  They are arguing that the results of the preventative actions they oppose are evidence that those actions are no longer needed (if they ever were), but it’s the opposite: the results of the actions they’re protesting are pretty clear proof that the actions were successful, were necessary, based on the best medical evidence as interpreted by the medical experts.  The same experts who are warning us that if we’re not patient, if break this quarantine too soon, the virus will surge through the population.  Listen to the doctors, not the other dopes.

Trump is angry that “he wasn’t told” there was a problem?  No one mentioned the pandemic, huh?  Is that the same pandemic that he told us he knew all about even before everyone else did?  That pandemic?  Jeez…

Our elections are under attack and Trump doesn’t much care

Yes, Adam Schiff is a Democrat, but Robert Mueller is a Republican.  If you can’t conceive of a world in which someone not of your political party can be telling the truth even when it is not supportive of your party or school of thought, save yourself some time and trouble and stop reading right here.  Because this is about how Russians are attacking American elections and the Trump Administration isn’t doing anything about it.

Dahlia Lithwick in Slate last week reminded us that the special counsel’s investigation—which became necessary only because the president’s attorney general had to recuse himself from the whole matter because he had been part of the campaign—was originated to look into Russian interference in the election, not into crimes by Donald Trump or any other American.

Robert Mueller was originally charged with investigating Russian efforts to influence the outcome of the 2016 election and that only secondarily was he tasked with figuring out whether the president had obstructed justice by impeding that investigation. The whole point of this sad affair—lost entirely on a Law & Order nation intent on seeing the Mueller investigation end with Trump in handcuffs on the White House lawn—was that Russia hacked an election, that it is right now hacking the next election, and that this is a threat to national security and the long-standing American experiment in representative democracy. On this one point, Mueller was emphatic: “They’re doing it as we sit here, and they expect to do it in the next campaign,” Mueller told the House Intelligence Committee. Indeed that, and not the commission of specified crimes, was always meant to be the special counsel’s yardstick.

Rep. Adam Schiff, who chairs the House Intel Committee, has been making this argument for more than a year, trying to remind the American people that criminality is not the baseline; criminality is a side dish. Congress is meant to be overseeing and investigating something far more important and also something far less quantifiable—not just whether Donald Trump committed crimes (Mueller functionally tagged him for that regardless)—but whether Donald Trump sold out, devalued, shilled for, and grifted around American democracy over the course of the 2016 election. The question for Mueller has always been whether Russia interfered in an election (it did), whether Trump benefited (he did), and whether he tried to stymie the investigation into this concern (he did). All of that was laid bare on Wednesday for anyone who was listening. Trump campaign members were exchanging polling data with Russian intelligence operatives and hosting meetings at Trump Tower in order to obtain “dirt” on Hillary  Clinton’s campaign. Trump was lying about all the Russia contacts before he was even caught lying about it. This is not in dispute, even as all the screaming over the origins of the Steele dossier attempts to distract from these facts.

(snip)

Donald Trump prioritized his brand over American national security during the election, and he gave foreign interests ample opportunity to exploit and capitalize on those actions, both during the campaign and after. His campaign prized winning and, if he did not win, his ability to still build a hotel in Russia over American interests. Nobody disputes any of this. Republicans in Congress admire it. Half of the American electorate forgives it, sold on the dream that to be “successful,” i.e., to make money freely, is the ultimate expression of American aspiration. The Trump campaign exposed and continues to expose the country to foreign meddling, and it continues to make itself vulnerable to foreign blackmail. And the GOP is unbothered, because it is prioritizing party over patriotism, and party over national election security.

This president spends a lot of time criticizing people who oppose him by asserting that they don’t love this country.  (Merely opposing what a president—any president—says or does or wants to do is not evidence of lack of love for America; you can make the argument that it is the quintessentially American thing to do, that speaking out for what you think is best for America is clear evidence of love of country.  Trump himself has been doing it for years!)   Yet we are to believe that Donald Trump loves his country although, in the face of clear evidence that Russia is attacking us by interfering in our elections, he’s taken no action to punish the attackers or to protect us from future attack?  When he, in fact, makes repeated public and oleaginous displays of cozying up to the leader of the country that is attacking us?

Mueller’s testimony before two House committees last week has been criticized for not being a good enough “show.”  That’s not the point, or shouldn’t be.   There are two points, actually: the fact that the Russians are attacking us, and the fact of what Mueller’s investigation found about President Trump’s actions while investigating those attacks.  As reported in The Nation, Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler narrowed the focus:

NADLER: Director Mueller, the president has repeatedly claimed your report found there was no obstruction and completely and totally exonerated him. That is not what your report said, is it?

MUELLER: Correct, not what the report said.

NADLER: You wrote: “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are not able to reach that judgment.” Does that say there was no obstruction?

MUELLER: No.

Nadler pursued the matter further, asking, “Can you explain what that finding means so the American people can understand?” Mueller replied, “The finding indicates that the president was not exonerated for the act he allegedly committed.”

That may not have been a revelation for Americans who read the Mueller report. But it was a conclusion that was so jarring, when stated by a veteran investigator and prosecutor, that Nadler sought a final confirmation of the special counsel’s determination. “In fact,” said Nadler, “you were talking about incidents in which the president sought to use this official power outside of usual channels to exert undue influence over your investigations. Is that right?”

“Correct,” replied Mueller.

I found a couple more things I’d like to share, starting with concerns about proceeding on impeachment when there’s a good chance the Republicans controlling the Senate would do anything to protect the president of their party:

rdi96EyD

Thanks Tom the Dancing Bug/gocomics.com

The post that wasn’t because of the news that is

At first I had great plans for a post called “Fecklessness, thy name is Mitch McConnell” in which I would elegantly make the simple point that Republicans in the U.S. Senate are refusing their constitutional duty to be a check and/or balance on the president of the United States.  The Senate that last month unanimously passed a bill to fund the government while the president was on record promising to sign such a bill should not now be refusing to even consider passing the same bill because the president has said he won’t sign it.  (This is, of course, precisely what is happening.)  The job of the Senate is not to pass only those bills which the president has indicated with a wave of his hand that he will deign to accept.  If you think the bill deserves passage, as you did a few weeks ago, pass it; if the president vetoes it, override the damn veto if you can.  (Hint: you can.)  Mitch, it’s not your fault that the president’s word can’t be trusted (about anything), or that he went back on his promise because a couple of women on Fox News effectively called him a thing that can be grabbed by stars without the stars even asking permission, which they did because he hasn’t made good on his campaign promise to build a wall on our country’s southern border, even when his party controlled the House and the Senate and the White House.  It is your fault if you keep deferring to the president and the leader of your political party when you know full well he’s a lying hypocrite who not only doesn’t have the best interests of this country at heart but is using his office for personal enrichment.  And maybe working for the Russians.

It’s that working-for-the-Russians part that made me change my mind about what to write about, because—did you see this in the New York Times:

In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.

The inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.

That’s the same president who’s now in the fourth week of a Fox News-inspired temper tantrum over funding of his request for more than $5 billion to support construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border to fight illegal immigration, which has caused a portion of the federal government to suspend operations and more than three-quarters of a million federal employees to miss their paychecks, and who has reportedly thought about seizing federal funds allocated for Hurricane Harvey recovery and future flood control efforts in the Gulf Coast region of Texas but not yet committed to specific projects and spending it on border wall construction under a theorized declaration of national emergency.  But this is even more outrageous, I think.

I’ll offer two of the many analyses of the Times story floating around out there today.  First, in The Hill Jonathan Turley suggests “this is likely the only time in history that the FBI has investigated whether a sitting president was either a knowing or unknowing agent of a foreign power” and in the next breath wonders if this investigation explains everything away innocently: “What if there were no collusion or conspiracy but simple cognitive bias on both sides, where the actions of one seemed to confirm precisely the suspicions of the other?”  Seems unlikely, but it’s an interesting read.

Even more so is this one in Esquire by Charles P. Pierce, who everyone should be reading anyway all the time just because.  He thinks that one word in the story is a clue left by the Times reporters that today’s bombshell isn’t the end of the story.

The word is tucked into a sentence that, at first glance, seems to be a perfectly anodyne statement of the current facts. Indeed, it’s tucked into a sentence that would be an unremarkable bit of knee-jerk newspaper balance if this explosive charge of a word weren’t placed right the in the middle of it. That word is “publicly,” as in: No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials.

(snip)

This is not a word chosen idly, not in a piece as judiciously written as this one. Clearly, the Times printed pretty much all it was given by its sources, but the implication of that “publicly” is that investigators likely know far more than what appeared in the newspaper.

More to come?  Yeah, I bet there is.