House of Representatives: Democrats in da house!

[47of74]

Rep Tlaib called out some of the scumbags who threatened her.

Quote

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) teared up during a hearing Tuesday as she read death threats that her office has received since she entered Congress.

The freshman lawmaker, who is Muslim, choked up as she read an excerpt from one message that praised the New Zealand mosque attack and wished for another attack in the United States.

"'This is a great start, let's hope and pray it continues here in the good old U.S.A. The only good Muslim is a dead one,'" Tlaib said, choking up as she read the message.

Tlaib read the threats amid calls from fellow Democrats for a greater federal focus on combating white supremacy and potential domestic terrorism.

 

[fraurosena]

Success! 

 

[fraurosena]

 

The Political Costs of Not Impeaching Trump

Quote

On February 13, 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia died. Before his body was in the ground, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced he would block anyone President Barack Obama nominated to fill Scalia’s seat. The next week, Jeb Bush dropped out of the Republican primary, quickly followed by Marco Rubio, and eventually Ted Cruz, leaving Donald Trump as the presumptive nominee. Polls showed Hillary Clinton beating Trump by solid margins, with forecasters pegging her chances of victory from 71 to 85 percent, and Democrats favored to take back the Senate.

I was working for Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid at the time. Being in the minority limited our options for overcoming McConnell’s blockade. But whenever we started to contemplate more aggressive tactics, they were dismissed on the theory that the upcoming election would sort everything out. Why rock the boat, we told ourselves. We’re on a glide path to victory in November, and then President Clinton will submit her Supreme Court nominee to be confirmed by a Democratic Senate.

The rest is history. McConnell’s decision to block Garland consolidated Republican support behind Trump and helped him pull off a narrow victory. Instead of a Democratic president appointing a liberal justice to tilt the balance of the Supreme Court, Trump has appointed two justices to entrench a conservative majority for a generation.

Republicans wielded their power while we hoped for the best. And the course of history was altered forever.

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 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. Former president Bill Clinton survived because he was popular and the man pursuing him, Independent Counsel Ken Starr, was not. The public rightly thought Starr was on a fishing expedition. By contrast, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is popular and the public thinks he is fair, while Trump is historically unpopular. Even though Clinton survived, his heir apparent lost the next election—which he had been heavily favored to win—while Republicans gained seats in Congress.

The second lesson from the 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. House Democrats are understandably proud of having run and won on health care in the 2018 midterms. But their campaign messages were buoyed by a constant flood of major health care news coming out of Washington, DC, driven by the very real threat that Republicans would repeal or replace the Affordable Care Act. But since Democrats took back the House, that’s not going to happen. This is a good thing, but it severely limits Democrats’ ability to drive news on health care. Passing bills in the House that are guaranteed to go nowhere in McConnell’s Senate, as House Democrats recently did with bills to strengthen Obamacare and lower drug prices, will not drive a message.

The void that House Democrats are ceding to Trump is the space between now and election day. Filling that space with easy messages like health care is not a viable option. And a good rule of thumb of politics is that if you have the power to do something that hurts your opponent, you should do it.

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. At a Grand Rapids town hall held by Michigan’s Justin Amash, the lone Republican Congressman who has come out for impeachment, an attendee was confused by Amash’s position until hearing him lay out the case for an inquiry. “I was surprised to hear there was anything negative in the Mueller report at all about President Trump. I hadn’t heard that before," she told NBC. "I’ve mainly listened to conservative news and I hadn’t heard anything negative about that report and President Trump has been exonerated." People will not know what Trump did wrong if Democrats don’t tell them.

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.

It is a long way from June 2019 to November 2020. And as they say in Boston, you can’t get there from here. Hoping everything turns out well while giving Trump free space to wield his power is unlikely to end well.

The fight will be hard for House Democrats and the appeal of dodging it is strong. But like the monsters in “It Follows,” this fight will find you. It already has.

There is no way over, under, or around impeachment—only through.

There is one more effect I would like to add to the convincing arguments in this article: if Democrats don't impeach, the incentive for voters who want to get rid of Trump to vote for Democrats will diminish significantly. Why would they vote at all? Nothing happens either way. The disappointment in politicians and politics will drive voters away. 

[fraurosena]

I just love the way these Reps in the House call out all the BS.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Impeach Trump. But don’t necessarily try him in the Senate."

Spoiler

Laurence H. Tribe is the University Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard and the coauthor, most recently, of “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment.”

It is possible to argue that impeaching President Trump and removing him from office before the 2020 election would be unwise, even if he did cheat his way into office, and even if he is abusing the powers of that office to enrich himself, cover up his crimes and leave our national security vulnerable to repeated foreign attacks. Those who make this argument rest their case either on the proposition that impeachment would be dangerously divisive in a nation as politically broken as ours, or on the notion that it would be undemocratic to get rid of a president whose flaws were obvious before he was elected.

Rightly or wrongly — I think rightly — much of the House Democratic caucus, at least one Republican member of that chamber (Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan) and more than a third of the nation’s voters disagree. They treat the impeachment power as a vital constitutional safeguard against a potentially dangerous and fundamentally tyrannical president and view it as a power that would be all but ripped out of the Constitution if it were deemed unavailable against even this president.

That is my view, as well.

Still, there exists concern that impeachment accomplishes nothing concrete, especially if the Senate is poised to quickly kill whatever articles of impeachment the House presents. This apprehension is built on an assumption that impeachment by the House and trial in the Senate are analogous to indictment by a grand jury and trial by a petit jury: Just as a prosecutor might hesitate to ask a grand jury to indict even an obviously guilty defendant if it appeared that no jury is likely to convict, so, it is said, the House of Representatives might properly decline to impeach even an obviously guilty president — and would be wise to do so — if it appeared the Senate was dead-set against convicting him.

But to think of the House of Representatives as akin to a prosecutor or grand jury is misguided. The Constitution’s design suggests a quite different allocation of functions: The Senate, unlike any petit (or trial) jury, is legally free to engage in politics in arriving at its verdict. And the House, unlike any grand jury, can conduct an impeachment inquiry that ends with a verdict and not just a referral to the Senate for trial — an inquiry in which the target is afforded an opportunity to participate and mount a full defense.

Take, for instance, the 1974 investigation of President Richard M. Nixon when the House gave the president the opportunity to refute the charges against him either personally or through counsel and with additional fact witnesses. (Nixon chose to appear only through his attorney, James D. St. Clair.) Following its impeachment proceedings, the House Judiciary Committee drafted particularized findings less in the nature of accusations to be assessed by the Senate — which of course never weighed in, given Nixon’s resignation — than in the nature of determinations of fact and law and verdicts of guilt to be delivered by the House itself, expressly stating that the president was indeed guilty as charged.

It seems fair to surmise, then, that an impeachment inquiry conducted with ample opportunity for the accused to defend himself before a vote by the full House would be at least substantially protected, even if not entirely bullet-proofed, against a Senate whitewash.

The House, assuming an impeachment inquiry leads to a conclusion of Trump’s guilt, could choose between presenting articles of impeachment even to a Senate pre-committed to burying them and dispensing with impeachment as such while embodying its conclusions of criminality or other grave wrongdoing in a condemnatory “Sense of the House” resolution far stronger than a mere censure. The resolution, expressly and formally proclaiming the president impeachable but declining to play the Senate’s corrupt game, is one that even a president accustomed to treating everything as a victory would be hard-pressed to characterize as a vindication. (A House resolution finding the president “impeachable” but imposing no actual legal penalty would avoid the Constitution’s ban on Bills of Attainder, despite its deliberately stigmatizing character as a “Scarlet ‘I’ ” that Trump would have to take with him into his reelection campaign.)

The point would not be to take old-school House impeachment leading to possible Senate removal off the table at the outset. Instead, the idea would be to build into the very design of this particular inquiry an offramp that would make bypassing the Senate an option while also nourishing the hope that a public fully educated about what this president did would make even a Senate beholden to this president and manifestly lacking in political courage willing to bite the bullet and remove him.

By resolving now to pursue such a path, always keeping open the possibility that its inquiry would unexpectedly lead to the president’s exoneration, the House would be doing the right thing as a constitutional matter. It would be acting consistent with its overriding obligation to establish that no president is above the law, all the while keeping an eye on the balance of political considerations without setting the dangerous precedent that there are no limits to what a corrupt president can get away with as long as he has a compliant Senate to back him. And pursuing this course would preserve for all time the tale of this uniquely troubled presidency.

Mr. Tribe presents a compelling argument.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[fraurosena]

It's good to see that the language coming from the House is no longer covered in niceties and finally shows true fighting spirit.

[GreyhoundFan]

I'm just petty enough that this gave me a laugh or three: "Steve King not allowed on Air Force One for Trump's trip to Iowa Tuesday"

Spoiler

Des Moines, Iowa (CNN)Rep. Steve King, the Iowa Republican who was stripped of his congressional committee assignments earlier this year, was not allowed to fly aboard Air Force One on Tuesday as President Donald Trump traveled to Iowa, two GOP officials say.

King, who represents the state's 4th District in Western Iowa, asked the White House to join the President's entourage, but administration officials rejected the request, two officials familiar with the matter told CNN.

Republican Sens. Joni Ernst of Iowa and Deb Fischer of Nebraska joined Trump aboard Air Force One. Ernst had not been planning to travel with the President, citing her voting schedule, but ended up flying to Iowa with Trump.

King declined to comment about the snub, telling CNN on Wednesday morning that he had nothing to say about the matter.

Instead of cruising back to Washington on Air Force One, King buckled himself into seat 1A and sipped a cup of coffee on an American Airlines flight back to the nation's capital.

He attended the Republican Party of Iowa's fundraising dinner in West Des Moines on Tuesday evening. He faces a primary challenge in his re-election bid next year.

While King has a history of making incendiary remarks around race and immigration, King was removed from his committee assignments and rebuked by members of his own party after giving an interview with The New York Times in January in which he made racist comments. In the article, King, as part of a defense of what he said was the "culture of America," asked how certain terms had become controversial in modern discourse.

"White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?" he told the Times. "Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?"

King said on the House floor in January that he rejected the ideology of white nationalism and he maintains that his comments were misinterpreted. The House Republican Steering Committee removed King from his committee posts shortly after the comments were publicized in January.

Despite the controversy, King refused to step aside from his post in Congress and announced in February he'll run for re-election in 2020. He won his race in 2018 by 3.6 percentage points.

Of course he flew first class, I'm sure it was on the taxpayers' dime.

[GreyhoundFan]

OMG, @47of74, did you see this? "Steve King’s proof he’s not racist? Diamond and Silk."

Spoiler

It has been five months since Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) lost his committee assignments over his support for white supremacy, and on Wednesday he took a step toward rehabilitation.

He gave a news conference on the Capitol grounds — with two real, live, actual black people!

Not African Americans, mind you. “You ain’t gotta call me African American ’cause I ain’t never been to Africa,” explained Lynette Hardaway. “You can call me black.”

Hardaway and her sister, Rochelle Richardson, form the “Diamond and Silk” YouTube sensation, a duo whose outrageous conservative commentary has won them frequent airtime on Fox News and promotion from President Trump.

King had recruited Diamond and Silk ostensibly to help launch a new piece of legislation, the so-called Diamond and Silk Act — designed to shift funds from sanctuary cities to homeless veterans — but really King needed them to inoculate him from the whole racism thing.

“You’ve been stripped of your committee assignments. What makes you think Republican colleagues will even entertain this?” asked the first questioner.

Before King could speak, Diamond broke in. “Can I answer this?”

“Sure,” a delighted King replied.

She launched into an angry diatribe about members of Congress living in mansions, concluding: “So this ain’t about no Steve King. This is about our homeless, our veterans and Americans.”

King had nothing to add. “I think they’ve answered it adequately.”

So, if this isn’t about King, why is he giving a news conference?

Diamond’s answer included an extensive complaint about attempts to phase out plastic drinking straws.

When a third reporter asked Diamond and Silk what they thought of King retweeting white supremacists, the entertainers erupted:

“What is the definition of white supremacist?”

“You don’t know, do you?”

“Why would you talk that?”

“I’m tired of you all playing the race card.”

“Stop calling everybody a racist.”

King, a slight man, stood hidden behind the sisters, while they angrily quarreled with the notion that white supremacists are white supremacists.

It was perhaps the most brazen attempt by a white man to shield himself from racial criticism since Trump told a sea of white faces at a campaign rally to “look at my African American over here.” (Diamond vouched for Trump, too, saying he’s “not a racist — he’s a realist.”)

The women, arguably the white nationalists’ favorite black people, are perhaps not the best character references on such matters. Fox News recently had to retract their on-air claim that Speaker Nancy Pelosi is “a nonfunctioning alcoholic and she slurs her words” (this was based on a doctored video). Diamond and Silk previously called Hillary Clinton a “slave master,” said she was responsible for Russia acquiring nuclear weapons (which happened 70 years ago) and falsely stated under oath that they hadn’t been paid by the Trump campaign.

But King is not in a position to be picky. The statement to the New York Times that cost him his committee assignments (“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”) was just one of his many incendiary remarks over the years. So low is his standing that the White House wouldn’t let him fly on Air Force One this week to his home state of Iowa. (He attended Trump’s event anyway.) His website sidesteps his loss of committee assignments, saying he “has” served on three.

When reporters inevitably peppered him at Wednesday’s event about his white-nationalism flirtations, King protested that he was “misquoted” by the Times and in similar remarks in the Congressional Record.

“That’s my final word on the topic,” he proposed.

No dice.

A reporter invited him to explain what he actually meant about “Western civilization.”

“I said that’s my final word on that topic,” he repeated.

Would he ever get back on his committees?

“Let’s just stick on topic here today.”

Why was he barred from Air Force One?

“I can’t hear you,” he replied.

But everybody within a quarter mile could hear the shouts of Diamond and Silk. They attacked Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar (Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.). They attacked Joe Biden for remarks in 1993 that “echo the sentiments of bigotry and racism.”

They went wherever their thoughts took them. They proffered their views on homeless encampments (“looks like a full toilet, you’ve got to be stepping across sugar honey iced tea”); on churches and charities that work with the homeless (“Organizations don’t do nothing but steal from the top . . . kickbacks and paddy-wacks”); and on sanctuary cities (“It isn’t legal to aid and [abet] illegal aliens”).

Of course, they also demanded that King be given back his committee assignments, asking, “You’re going to make this man act like he’s racist?”

He does that well enough without assistance.

I shared one of Diamond and Silk's diatribes with a friend. His initial response was, "what is wrong with them?"

[fraurosena]

It looks like Hope Hicks was not cooperative or forthcoming in her testimony today.

Her unwillingness to speak actually devolved into the ridiculous.

 

[fraurosena]

Good grief.

 

[fraurosena]

This is a transcript of Hope Hicks' testimony the other day. Not that she said much. Although... she did reveal that the pee-tapes are real. So there's that. 

I'm also wondering if this particular 'error' from Nadler was intentional or not. ?

 

[GreyhoundFan]

If I had to guess, it would be all the reporters. And I assume most of his colleagues despise him. At least the ones with at least a shred of conscience or sense.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[fraurosena]

Justin Amash is leaving the GOP.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I’ve seen speculation that Amash May try a run for the presidency as either an independent or libertarian. If that happens, it could split the republican vote, which would help the Dems.

[fraurosena]

Amash's news got to Trump.

 

[WiseGirl]

8 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Amash's news got to Trump.

Hmm to tweet = it bothers him. I'm all for that!

[milkteeth]

 

It would be really amazing if Nancy put even half of the energy she spends fighting women of color in her own party towards fighting Trump. I was under the impression that’s why voters came out to give Democrats the majority I’m the House.

 

[SilverBeach]

Nancy Pelosi has truly disappointed me, as have all the Democrats with their refusal to all a spade a spade and impeach Trump. His bullying tactics win out again. 

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, SilverBeach said:

Nancy Pelosi has truly disappointed me, as have all the Democrats with their refusal to all a spade a spade and impeach Trump. His bullying tactics win out again. 

It looks like Pelosi is using old guard Dem political strategy. But those old strategies won't work in the current political climate. It seems like she's an old dog that can't learn new tricks.

The danger of the Repugliklans grabbing election results with help from Russia and other foreign and domestic hackers is so great, that if it's true she's relying on winning the elections next year and thus ousting Trump, she is skating on very thin ice indeed.

Then again, it could well be that she has a hidden strategy that is playing out behind the scenes. She is a wily old dog after all. So who knows? 

[fraurosena]

Yes!! 

Not that Kushner will heed the subpoena, but still...

[Cleopatra7]

On 7/8/2019 at 4:20 PM, milkteeth said:

 

It would be really amazing if Nancy put even half of the energy she spends fighting women of color in her own party towards fighting Trump. I was under the impression that’s why voters came out to give Democrats the majority I’m the House.

 

This is one reason why so many people of color see voting as pointless. Nancy Pelosi et al aren’t going to fight for people of color, because they’re still pining for the “Solid South” white voters who defected to the GOP after LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act. I hate read Daily Kos and it seems like at least 75 percent of the posts and the comments are, “Hey, we should do something proactive about healthcare/migrant rights/black lives/reproductive justice/the prison industrial complex” which are in turn followed by, “Eh, can’t alienate those white suburban centrists, so let’s just do nothing.” At least the GOP make it obvious that they have nothing to offer but contempt for people of color, whereas the Democrats smile and nod like they care as they throw you under the bus.

[formergothardite]

3 hours ago, Cleopatra7 said:

Nancy Pelosi et al aren’t going to fight for people of color, because they’re still pining for the “Solid South” white voters who defected to the GOP after LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act. I

It is time for these people to be voted out. They really aren't accomplishing much and they end up losing what power they have because they invest too much time in catering to the white republican voters who aren't going to vote for them anyway. 

In the last election a lot of young, women who are minorities were elected. I really hope this trend continues because that is what this country needs.