Impeachment Inquiry 2: Now It's Official!

[fraurosena]

No bus yet for Giuliani.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I just flipped back to the hearings and Gaetz (R-DUI) is screaming. You know, I'm not a violent person, but I would love to punch his smug, entitled, frat-boy face. He's screeching past his allotted time. I wish Nadler would have hit him on his foot with the gavel.

[fraurosena]

I love Cicciloni's (sp?) response to Gaetz's erroneous claims.

[fraurosena]

Swalwell is destroying Turley's testimony... and Turley's face is priceless.

[fraurosena]

Good grief, the trumplicans are scrambling for a defense of Nunes, by implying that Schiff must have something to hide too. Of course, pushing the Biden conspiracy is part of the overall plan to unduly influence the 2020 elections and fits into Trump's playbook very nicely. And then, to top it all off, let's try and get to the identity of the whistleblower by subpoenaing his lawyer's phone records. 

GOP Rep. asks Sen. Graham to subpoena phone records of Schiff, Bidens and whistleblower's lawyer Zaid

(this links to a live blog of the hearing, but this quote relates to the above named post)

Quote

Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., sent a letter Wednesday to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, calling for him to subpoena AT&T for the phone records of House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., former Vice President Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden and the attorney for the whistleblower Mark Zaid. 

Banks writes that “the public has a right to know with whom Rep. Adam Schiff has coordinated his impeachment effort and if America’s national security is at risk in any way as a result of Schiff’s actions.”

 

@GreyhoundFan, did you catch this doozy? I had him on mute and missed it. 

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

9 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

@GreyhoundFan, did you catch this doozy? I had him on mute and missed it. 

Yes, my eyes rolled so hard it took me several minutes to focus again. I didn't catch Jordan or Gohmert's rants, but I figure I'll read recaps, since I'm sure they just alternated between screaming and whining.

[fraurosena]

Good grief, McClintock is demanding the witnesses say who they voted for, or if they are for Trump or not. As they refuse to do so, he quickly turns to Turley. 

Turley's opinion, though, has been thoroughly undermined by the dems repeatedly already. Social media is not kind to him either. Makes you wonder what he's been paid to defend Trump...

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

 

 

 

[SassyPants]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I just flipped back to the hearings and Gaetz (R-DUI) is screaming. You know, I'm not a violent person, but I would love to punch his smug, entitled, frat-boy face. He's screeching past his allotted time. I wish Nadler would have hit him on his foot with the gavel.

This is the point I exited stage right. That guy is a D*ck. The Rs clearly have nothing other than pontificating and complaining about the process. They bitch and moan about needing more time , information and investigations, but when they have the time to actually ask questions, they refuse to do so, instead opting to grandstand. 

[fraurosena]

 

[Howl]

Just listened to Collins ranting talking points.  The Republicans are defaulting to high dudgeon to convince people that their arguments are compelling. 

Nadler is calmly laying it out. 

Gohmert is trying to insert something at the very end, and Nadler isn't having it.  Gohmert is bitter. 

 

Edited December 5, 2019 by Howl

[GreyhoundFan]

Dana Milbank's take: "No wonder Jonathan Turley’s dog is mad"

Spoiler

The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday entered into democracy’s most sacred ritual, that solemn moment when the people’s representatives assemble to hear testimony about Jonathan Turley’s dog.

For reasons not entirely clear, Republicans decided that Turley, the television pundit and George Washington University law professor, would be the best person in the land to make the legal case against impeachment. But at Wednesday’s kick-off hearing, in which three legal scholars argued that President Trump’s actions met the constitutional definition of high crimes and misdemeanors, Turley countered with a case less constitutional than canine.

“I get it: You are mad,” he testified. “The president is mad. My Democratic friends are mad. My Republican friends are mad. My wife is mad. My kids are mad. Even my dog seems mad — and Luna is a goldendoodle and they don’t get mad. So we’re all mad.”

Damn right we are! But nowhere in the Constitution does it state that a president shall not be impeached if people — or their dogs — are mad.

Turley’s reasons for opposing impeachment were primarily emotional and political: The process needs more “saturation” and “maturation.” He pointed out that Democrats are prevailing in court rulings and advised them to slow down. “You’re going to leave half the country behind,” he said.

That’s a reasonable argument — but not a constitutional one.

It reveals much about the strength of the Republicans’ case that they chose Turley to defend them. As he noted, he didn’t vote for Trump. He testified that Trump’s call “was anything but perfect” and his targeting of the Bidens “highly inappropriate.” He acknowledged that the quid pro quo, “if proven, can be an impeachable offense.” Quoting from “A Man For All Seasons,” he spoke of the need to “give the devil the benefit of the law.”

Do Republicans realize who the devil is in Turley’s scenario?

The opening impeachment hearing was at times high-minded — Louis XIV, Charles II, the Treaty of Dover and Viscount Mordaunt all got mentions — but was unlikely to change minds or even to attract much interest. It served, rather, to present the legal and constitutional underpinnings for what will follow.

“President Trump’s conduct,” said Harvard’s Noah Feldman, “clearly constitutes an impeachable high crimes and misdemeanor.”

“If what we’re talking about is not impeachable, then nothing is impeachable,” added the University of North Carolina’s Michael Gerhardt.

“If we are to keep faith with the Constitution,” Stanford’s Pamela Karlan contributed, “President Trump must be held to account.”

Republicans interrupted the chorus of condemnation with a series of complaints (Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia protested the temperature in the room, the comfort of the seats and the “cute little stickers for our staff”) and procedural delays:

“I reserve the right to object.”

“Parliamentary inquiry.”

“Parliamentary inquiry.”

“I have a motion under Clause 2, Rule 11.”

“Recorded vote.”

“Parliamentary inquiry.”

“Privileged motion.”

“Motion to postpone to a date certain.”

“Recorded vote.”

“Move to subpoena.”

“Recorded vote.”

And they went to the their lone witness, Turley, again and again. He did not disappoint. He said the Democrats had a “wafer thin” case record and the “shortest proceedings” and were treating impeachment like “impulse-buy Nike sneakers.” He alleged that Democrats hadn’t proven bribery, extortion, obstruction or abuse of power. Momentarily forgetting about Luna, he claimed, “I don’t have a dog in this fight.”

But Turley’s position was curiously at odds with his previous defenses of congressional power.

“President Trump will not be our last president,” he argued, saying impeachment would create “a dangerous precedent.”

Funny. He made almost exactly the opposite case against President Barack Obama in a 2013 hearing. “This will not be our last president,” he argued then, saying it would be “very dangerous” to the balance of powers not to hold Obama accountable for assuming powers “very similar” to the “the right of the king to essentially stand above the law.”

Now we have a president soliciting campaign help from a foreign country while withholding military aid, then ignoring duly issued subpoenas — and Turley says Congress would be the entity committing an “abuse of power” if it holds Trump to account. Trump shared that quote on Twitter.

Back in 1998, arguing for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, Turley said there was “no objective basis” to claim that the Framers intended a “restrictive definition of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.’ ” Now Turley argues that the Framers intended a restrictive definition, applying “bribery” only to “money” transactions.

Back in 1998, Turley argued that “impeachment performs the very constitutional function that is sought in a censure.” Now, he instructs lawmakers that “you can’t impeach a president like this.”

No doubt Turley, a clever lawyer, can rationalize the inconsistencies. But his position came across as more provocation than principle.

No wonder Luna the goldendoodle is so mad.

 

[Smash!]

Guys, I need to vent. I just read an article about the impeachment, in a German newspaper, I normally like (for my fellow German speakers it's "Die Zeit"). But the article only focused on the muds-slingling from both parties and painted Turley as rational. No word of what is at stake here, that Trump clearly commited impeachable offenses, and that the GOP backs him no matter what with ridiculous justifications. I just don't get it. I mean Germany should know first hand how it all starts and still they choose to keep silent.
I then commented (something I rarely do but I was so angry) that we see the rise of a dictator before our own eyes and everybody who thinks I'm exaggerating should listen to Sarah Kendziors Gaslit Nation. I deliberately linked someone with a scientific background in authoritarianism and not The Washington Post or NYT because those can be seen as left sided. I then got answers who accused me of spreading conspiracy theories.

When will people wake up and see that a future dictator Trump is a danger for Europe as well and not just for "the stupid Americans who voted him into office"? But yeah, many people underestimated Hitler as well in the beginnings (not saying that Trump is becoming a Hitler tough!).

[fraurosena]

42 minutes ago, Smash! said:

just read an article about the impeachment, in a German newspaper

I've seen some mentions of the impeachment here in the Netherlands, but they don't do much more than explain what the process is. None of them had in depth explanations about what's going on, apart from a single neutral article explaining the positions of the two opposing sides. No reports detailing the possible ramifications for America, let alone Europe and the rest of the world. Everybody is opining about the nitrogen crisis and the impeachment is really not seen as important.

42 minutes ago, Smash! said:

When will people wake up and see that a future dictator Trump is a danger for Europe as well and not just for "the stupid Americans who voted him into office"?

That's what I'm hearing too: "Well, they were stupid enough to vote him into office, so it's their problem. He only won the electoral college and not the popular vote? Their system, so still their problem. Nothing to do with us. Have you seen Rutte and Macron and that Canadian guy laughing at him though?"

42 minutes ago, Smash! said:

(not saying that Trump is becoming a Hitler tough!

He's caging babies. So I most certainly would say that.

Edited December 5, 2019 by fraurosena
I randomly forgot an a

[Smash!]

36 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

That's what I'm hearing too: "Well, they were stupid enough to vote him into office, so it's their problem. He only won the electoral college and not the popular vote? Their system, so still their problem. Nothing to do with us. Have you seen Rutte and Macron and that Canadian guy laughing at him though?"

Exactly. But I can't blame them because as long as the European media isn't covering the situation accordingly how should they know? We can't expect from them reading American newspapers as well. I had an argument with my dad over this topic. He won't believe me that America, the oldest Democracy in the world is on the verge of falling into Authoritarianism. Ok then, I said, I'll give you articles to prove my point. I searched for German articles that describe the subject accordingly but I couldn't find anything. None.

What I find mind boggling is that Europe has seen this exact same scenario less than 100 years ago yet we are turning a blind eye on it. How can a people think Trump is solely Americas problem? Have they forgotten what a treat Putin is to Europe? We need strong allies and a strong NATO and not the most powerful person in the world siding with dictators.

[fraurosena]

"I’m Not Afraid of the Impeachment Questions": Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky

Quote

A year is a long time in politics.

Long enough in the case of Volodymyr Zelensky, the comedian elected President of Ukraine, to go from the set of his sitcom in Kyiv to the biggest political drama in the world, the one in which an American President may wind up getting impeached.

The Democrats have cast Zelensky as the victim of President Donald Trump’s abuse of power, even as Republicans treat him as the witness key to proving Trump’s innocence. Neither role is anywhere close to what Zelensky imagined for himself when he announced his run for the presidency on New Year’s Eve, although he knew the job would be tough if he won, and often very unpleasant. Ukraine has been at war with Russia for the past five years, and his priority as President would be to stop that war from taking any more lives–a toll that is now more than 13,000 and counting.

That task would mean confronting Vladimir Putin, the Russian President who first ordered his troops into Ukraine in 2014. But Zelensky also wondered early on about Trump and the challenges of working with him. “What’s he like?” he asked me when we first met in March, backstage at his comedy show, which he was using to promote his run for Ukraine’s highest office. “Normal guy?” Wedged between the mirror and the costume rack inside his dressing room, the 41-year-old seemed confident, even cocky, in planning to win Trump over with little more than a wisecrack and a smile. “We’ll figure it out,” he told me. “I’m sure we’ll get along.”

Things have turned out rather differently. At the point in its history when Ukraine needs American support the most, Trump has gone out of his way to paint the nation as corrupt, unreliable and opposed to his Administration. Russia has rejoiced at these characterizations. And Ukraine’s key allies in Europe have put on a mask of cool neutrality, voicing support for Zelensky while also seeking deals with Putin. Zelensky cannot even count on outspoken support from the U.S. diplomats and officials who testified so ardently about his country’s strategic and moral import in front of the House Intelligence Committee. Several have quit amid the impeachment saga, others will soon retire, and one tells TIME he is “laying low,” at least until the issue of Ukraine becomes a bit less toxic in Washington.

Zelensky has come to accept that. When we met again in November, he had aged and changed far more than one might expect in the span of eight months. He was not just more tired or more of a realist but seemed to have caught a strain of the political disease he once detested and wanted to cure: cynicism. “I live here,” he said as we sat down in the presidential chambers, looking around at the gilt and the imposing furniture, “like in a fortress that I just want to escape.” One of his closest aides, Serhiy Shefir, who also spent his career in comedy before his friend became the President, could barely remember the time we had met in March at their variety show. “That was a different lifetime,” he told me.

Like many people in Ukraine, Zelensky has followed coverage of the impeachment inquiry unfold in the U.S. Congress. Not closely, he says, but enough to know what the Democratic majority has accused Trump of doing. Nearly every witness who testified before the inquiry confirmed that Trump blocked about $400 million in aid to Ukraine this summer as a way to pressure Zelensky’s government. Trump’s aim, according to these witnesses, was to get Ukraine’s help in his re-election campaign by launching spurious investigations into Trump’s political rivals–in particular, his chief opponent in the 2020 race, former Vice President Joe Biden, whose son Hunter served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. Several key witnesses called this a “quid pro quo,” or a favor for a favor. The Democrats said it was tantamount to bribery. Trump and his allies dismissed the hearings as a witch hunt intent on destroying his presidency.

Zelensky and his aides kept quiet about the hearings, not wanting to get dragged even deeper into the political brawls of their most important ally. So in a roundtable interview with TIME and three other publications on Nov. 30, he addressed not the question at the heart of impeachment–what Trump wanted–but only his own motivations. “Look, I never talked to the President from the position of a quid pro quo. That’s not my thing,” he said. “I don’t want us to look like beggars. But you have to understand. We’re at war. If you’re our strategic partner, then you can’t go blocking anything for us. I think that’s just about fairness. It’s not about a quid pro quo.”

From the start of his tenure, the man Zelensky entrusted to deal with the Americans was Andriy Yermak, who had previously worked for years as a lawyer for the President’s comedy troupe. Tall and imposing, with a booming voice and a habit of pounding the table for emphasis, Yermak had to manage the stream of requests to investigate Trump’s political rivals. At first they came up this spring from Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and later from various U.S. officials and diplomats drawn into the pressure campaign.

For Yermak it meant months of debating these investigations, whether to open them and how to announce them in public. The entire time, he says, he stuck to one principle: “Zelensky and his team will never get mixed up in the internal politics of the United States of America, under any circumstances.” They managed to hold that line long enough for a whistle-blower to raise the alarm about Trump and Giuliani’s conduct over Ukraine. By early September, as news of that complaint made its way to Congress, the package of aid to Ukraine was finally released.

Yermak’s relief did not last long. With the start of the impeachment inquiry in September, his country was again dragged into the center of a partisan brawl in Washington; only this time it was televised. “To be honest, we’re tired of these discussions,” he told me in his office on Dec. 4, the day the House Judiciary Committee took up the inquiry for a fresh round of witness testimony and debate. “The entire time you’ve spent talking about this, we’ve had people dying in the war out east.”

That war began as a Russian response to Ukraine’s revolution, which put the country on a path toward closer alignment with Europe in 2014 and forced the leaders of the old regime to seek refuge among their patrons in Moscow. The Kremlin struck back that February by sending troops to occupy Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. By the spring, the Russian forces had sparked a bigger conflict in the region known as the Donbass, part of Ukraine’s industrial heartland in the east. Millions of people have since fled the fighting. Separatists armed by Moscow have seized control of two major cities in the Donbass. But even as Putin began this year to hand out Russian passports to the locals, he has shown no interest in absorbing these lands into Russia, apparently content to let the conflict fester, a permanent drag on the success of his neighbor, its economy and its chance of integrating with the West.

That’s the main drama Zelensky has tried to focus on, especially as Ukraine gets closer to another chance at peace. On Dec. 9 at the Élysée Palace in Paris, he is due to sit down for the first time with Putin. The encounter pits a onetime TV star barely six months into the job against a KGB veteran in power for two decades, who has fought brutal wars before and won them.

Away from the battlefield, things are also going Russia’s way. The impeachment inquiry has thrown American policy toward Europe into confusion. A handful of the U.S. diplomats with the most clout in the region have quit in protest at Trump’s treatment of Ukraine, given damning testimony against Trump in Congress, or both.

Meanwhile, Trump and his defenders have taken to repeating Putin’s deflective claims that it was Ukrainian politicians rather than Russian spies who meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. This was in flat contradiction to U.S. intelligence, which had concluded long before that Putin ordered his agents to steal and spread the secrets of the Hillary Clinton campaign. But Trump persisted in blaming Ukraine. Putin was elated. “Thank God,” he told a business conference about two weeks before the peace talks in Paris. “Nobody is accusing us anymore of interfering in the U.S. elections. Now they’re accusing Ukraine.”

Zelensky has been left with no choice but to put his faith in the diplomats from Germany and France, who will serve as mediators at the talks in Paris. In an effort to reach these nations, he invited two of their best publications to the roundtable interview on Nov. 30, as well as a reporter from Poland, Ukraine’s most ardent ally in the European Union.

One of them posed a seemingly straightforward question: Do you trust Putin? For Zelensky, it was a perfect chance to vent at his nation’s tormentor and score some easy points at home. But he took it differently. “I don’t trust anyone at all,” he said. “Politics is not an exact science. That’s why in school I loved mathematics. Everything in mathematics was clear to me. You can solve an equation with a variable, with one variable. But here we have all variables.” Even among allies, Zelensky suggested, “Nobody can have any trust. Everybody just has their interests.”

It was hard to fault Zelensky for feeling alone. Two days earlier he had spoken on the phone with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had long held the line when it came to Ukraine, demanding discipline among the Europeans even as some of them called for an end to the sanctions imposed against Russia for its attack against Ukraine. But the German wall around Zelensky thins where German business interests come in.

Even as Merkel prepared for the talks in Paris and called on Putin to participate, she was rushing to complete an energy project with Russia that could potentially cripple Ukraine’s economy next year. Known as Nord Stream 2, the new pipeline would bypass Ukraine by carrying Russian fuel under the Baltic Sea to Germany. The estimated loss for Zelensky’s government would be about $3 billion per year in revenues from the transport of gas to Europe, a sum that dwarfs the $400 million in aid that Trump held up this summer and early fall. “If it’s built, then Ukraine will suffer enormously,” Andriy Kobolyev, the head of Ukraine’s state gas company, tells TIME. “The only way to stop this is U.S. sanctions.”

But that does not seem likely, at least not before the pipeline is due to become operational at the start of 2020. Many of the U.S. officials who led the push against this project–chief among them John Bolton, Trump’s most recently departed National Security Adviser–have left the Administration, and the impeachment inquiry has pushed the issue down on the U.S. agenda in Ukraine. “With the departure of those officials,” says Kobolyev, “we see significantly less people in U.S. who are willing to discuss with us that matter. And that bothers me a lot right now.”

It bothers Zelensky too. But there is not much he can do about it unless the U.S. has his back. Despite a death toll that climbs by the week, with nightly shelling near civilian areas and the persistent threat of sniper fire, the only active war in Europe seldom tops the evening news in Paris, Berlin or London. The Dec. 9 talks will be the first major peace summit in more than three years, a lull in negotiations that saw thousands of Ukrainians killed in their own homeland. Before that, there were hardly any breakthroughs in the conflict, and peace talks would go in circles as if that were their only goal. “People came to these meetings intending for nothing to happen,” Zelensky says.

He doubts this time will be much different. The host of the summit, French President Emmanuel Macron, made some remarks in November that worried the Ukrainians. Russia is no longer an enemy of NATO, Macron said, and should be treated as a partner. In an interview with the Economist, the French leader also suggested that the NATO military alliance, which has guaranteed the security of Europe since the end of World War II, was “experiencing brain death” and may no longer be willing to defend its member states from an attack.

The remarks, which officials in Moscow celebrated, caused a rare clash between Merkel and Macron. During a private dinner in November, the German Chancellor is reported to have told Macron that she was tired of “picking up the pieces” after his disruptive statements. “Over and over, I have to glue together the cups you have broken so that we can then sit down and have a cup of tea together,” Merkel said, according to the New York Times.

Asked about these remarks during our interview, Zelensky looked surprised. “He really said that?” the President marveled, referring to Macron. Zelensky had not been paying much attention to the European squabbles; he has had enough problems to deal with at home. As the peace talks approached, hard-liners and militants inside Ukraine had accused him of capitulating to Russia, and his popularity ratings had gone into free fall. But he refused to yield to their demands to retake the Donbass by force.

“I won’t do it,” he told us. “I cannot send them there. How? How many of them will die? Hundreds of thousands, and then an all-out war will start, an all-out war in Ukraine, and then across Europe.”

As the interview wound down, there was a final chance to ask him about the impeachment inquiry, though the topic suddenly seemed petty compared with the fires Zelensky was fighting. He didn’t brush the issue aside, though he clearly understood how dangerous it was, how high the risk of angering either side in the internal struggles of a superpower. “But I’m not afraid of the impeachment questions,” he said, forcing a smile.

The message he had for the U.S. and other “empires,” he said, was a plea to remember that Ukraine is a nation in its own right, not merely a tool in the games of foreigners. “I would never want Ukraine to be a piece on the map, on the chessboard of big global players, so that someone could toss us around, use us as cover, as part of some bargain.” But if these first six months of his tenure have taught Zelensky anything about the world, it’s that alliances can change as fast as the whims of the world’s decisionmakers. “That’s why,” he said as we stood to say goodbye, “on the question of who I trust, I told you honestly: no one.”

Frankly, I am appalled at the way Ukraine is being treated. Not only by the US, but by Europe as well. 

[fraurosena]

New ethics complaint filed against Devin Nunes after call logs released

Quote

A new ethics complaint was filed Wednesday against Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) after it was revealed he was coordinating with President Donald Trump’s attorney and recently indicted associates to garner “dirt” on former Vice President Joe Biden.

“The House Intelligence Committee’s Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Report dated December 3, 2019 used a subpoena to obtain phone records which plainly demonstrate that ranking member Devin Nunes (R-CA) has an actual conflict of interest with an ongoing impeachment hearing he oversees,” the filed complaint filed by The Democratic Coalition stated. “That is because Rep. Nunes is currently engaged in overseeing an investigation in which it appears he is a fact witness, and which may examine his own activities and meetings with agents and lawyers of the President who solicited foreign election assistance, as well as potentially into his own contacts with foreign government officials.”

The complaint goes on to cite House Rule XXIII (1) which states: “A Member, Delegate, Resident Commissioner, officer, or employee of the House shall behave at all times in a manner that shall reflect creditably on the House.”

During an appearance on Fox News’ Sean Hannity Tuesday, Nunes claimed he didn’t know Parnas but could have spoken to him. In fact, Nunes spoke to Parnas at least four times.

“Under House Intel Committee rules, Rep. Nunes could have known that record production had revealed his phone contacts with the persons under subpoena before the general public was informed with the release of the Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report,” the complaint continues. “Yet, the Congressman never disclosed his potential conflict of interest overseeing the investigation to the public, nor did he recuse himself from any of its activities, including the drafting of an official 120-page HPSCI Minority report.”

Does anyone know what happens next? Who takes up these complaints, and how is it adjudicated?

[fraurosena]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

There are lots of good responses in the thread. I love this one:

[AnywhereButHere]

And here's another congressman. Hyperbole is the go to it seems.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/salem-witches-got-better-deals-than-this-graham-rages-at-pelosis-impeachment-announcement/ar-BBXOn4S?ocid=ientp

Quote

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina slammed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi following her Thursday morning announcement that she would be pursuing articles of impeachment against President Trump.

"Glad to see @SpeakerPelosi is 'keeping her word' to be thoughtful and prayerful about impeachment," Graham tweeted sarcastically. "One day after hearings involving law professors giving their opinions she is directing Articles of Impeachment be drafted. Salem witches got better deals than this."

Because no, I'm pretty sure they didn't. I'm also pretty sure that the bringers of the witchcraft trials share many of the same character traits as today's republican party, so there's that...

[GreyhoundFan]

From Laurence Tribe: "Democrats are debating a dangerous false choice on impeachment"

Spoiler

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

As the House of Representatives moves toward formulating articles of impeachment, it is vital that the options on the table not be misframed. It’s a dangerously false choice to think that the House Judiciary Committee must either adopt a broad, kitchen-sink approach or take a narrow, laser-focused perspective.

Yes, narrow is better than broad for the purposes of focus and public understanding. But narrow mustn’t mean myopic. What makes President Trump uniquely dangerous is not that he has committed a single terrible act that meets the Constitution’s definition of an impeachable offense. Neither Russia-gate nor Ukraine-gate was a one-night stand, and the obstruction of justice that enabled Trump to get away with asking for and benefiting from Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election is of a piece with his defiance of congressional investigations that might enable him to get away with demanding Ukraine’s intervention in 2020.

The impeachment and removal of this president is necessary because Trump has been revealed as a serial abuser of power, whose pattern of behavior — and “pattern” is the key word, as Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.) and House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) emphasized during Wednesday’s hearing — makes clear he will repeat the same sequence again and again.

Today, it’s soliciting the help of Ukraine (and China and, yet again, Russia), both behind the scenes and out in the open, to attack the integrity of the next presidential election. Tomorrow, it could be seeking the help of foreign hackers to wage cyberwar on election machinery.

Nobody who truly cares about the right to vote or who believes we should remain a self-governing constitutional republic free from the whims of a foreign power can afford to ignore the pattern this man has established or gamble that he will suddenly find religion and “go straight,” rather than do whatever it takes to hold onto his office.

To be clear, I am by no means advocating charging Trump with all of his many impeachable offenses. Nor is that in the cards. The House leadership has clearly been parsimonious in leaving behind a boatload of potential impeachable offenses, including blatant violations of the foreign and domestic emoluments clauses, the Constitution’s main anti-corruption clauses; violating election laws as unindicted co-conspirator “Individual 1” in the Stormy Daniels affair; endangering the First Amendment by labeling the press the “enemy of the people”; fomenting racial violence and attacks on critics who include patriotic witnesses; and any number of other things that many have pressed the Judiciary Committee to include in a comprehensive set of impeachment articles. The committee will likely resist those pleas for breadth, and I will applaud it for doing so.

Rather, I am advocating that there be two or, at most, three articles of impeachment together describing a single, continuous course of conduct in which the president placed his personal and political interests above those of the nation. That narrative should include Trump’s attempt to pressure Ukraine into helping his reelection campaign just as the books appeared to close on the investigation into his invitation for illegal help from Russia to become president in the first place. And it should extend to his obstruction of justice to conceal his campaign’s role in taking advantage of that help — a demonstrated pattern of obstruction he has escalated in his unprecedented directive that the entire executive branch refuse to comply with lawful congressional subpoenas.

A president whose Justice Department says he cannot be indicted, whose White House counsel says he cannot even be investigated and whose lawyers say he can block the executive branch from participating in the impeachment process is a president who has become a dictator. None of us can feel safe in such a regime.

Unless the articles of impeachment identify and highlight the pattern the evidence has thus clearly demonstrated, the House will have failed its constitutional responsibility to present the Senate with the strongest possible basis for removing a scofflaw president. To do what some have proposed and, for example, charge the president with one act of soliciting or offering a bribe and be done with it, is to trifle with the awesome responsibility of all who take an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

A good one from Dana Milbank: "This moment was made for Nancy Pelosi"

Spoiler

James Rosen, the longtime Fox News correspondent now with right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group, told me he didn’t like the assignment his editors gave him Thursday morning.

So, he said as we awaited House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s news conference, he decided to come up to Capitol Hill and, as he put it, make his own news.

He proceeded to do just that.

Pelosi had been the very definition of deliberate Thursday, first in a televised statement announcing that lawmakers would draw up articles of impeachment against President Trump, and then in a news conference defending the “heartbreaking” decision.

But as she strode off the stage, Rosen stopped her in her tracks with seven words:

“Do you hate the president, Madam Speaker?”

She turned, pointed a finger at Rosen and walked toward him. “I don’t hate anybody,” she said. “Not anybody in the world.”

She returned to the microphones. She pulled up her sleeve to reveal a bracelet made with a bullet from a shooting survivor.

“I think this president is a coward when it comes to helping our kids who are afraid of gun violence,” she said. “I think he is cruel when he doesn’t deal with helping our ‘dreamers,’ of which we are very proud. I think he’s in denial about the climate crisis.” She made a motion with her hand sweeping all that away. “However, that’s about the election.”

Impeachment, she went on, “is about the Constitution of the United States and the facts that lead to the president’s violation of his oath of office.”

Looking at Rosen again, she said: “And as a Catholic, I resent your using the word ‘hate’ in a sentence that addresses me. I don’t hate anyone. … And I still pray for the president.” She concluded: “So don’t mess with me when it comes to words like that.”

After she left, you could hear the reporters’ exhalations in the silence.

It was raw. It was angry. And it was powerful, in a way her prepared statements on impeachment, full of Founders’ quotes and Latin phrases, were not. She got at the essence of impeachment: This isn’t a personality dispute or a political disagreement, much as Republicans try to make it so. The president abused his office for personal gain — plain and simple.

Trump saw a woman speaking forcefully and attributed it to a medical condition. “Nancy Pelosi just had a nervous fit,” he tweeted. As for Pelosi’s prayers, Trump replied: “I don’t believe her.”

I once doubted that Pelosi, about to turn 80, was the right leader for Democrats against Trump. But she was made for this moment. She uniquely gets under Trump’s skin, routinely beating him in standoffs with her blend of sorrow and bewilderment: “This is a strain of cat that I don’t have the medical credentials to analyze nor the religious credentials to judge,” she told the New Yorker.

Republicans needled her as she resisted the left’s impeachment demands. Now Republicans needle her for rushing impeachment. Yet she pulled off the near-miracle of uniting Democrats, first counseling them to wait for something “overwhelming and bipartisan,” and then, when the Ukraine scandal made clear bipartisanship was impossible no matter how overwhelming the evidence, she struck swiftly.

She began the day reading a statement from a teleprompter announcing impeachment articles would be drawn. She seemed tense — “oath of office” sounded more like “oafuthoaf” — and the language was high 18th century, from Jefferson to Gouverneur Morris to Benjamin Franklin.

A little over an hour later, a more relaxed Pelosi visited the House TV studio, taking the usual shots at the “rogue Senate leader” Mitch McConnell, joking with reporters about impeachment ruining their holidays and batting down concerns about her decision to proceed.

Fox News’s Chad Pergram asked about slowing down.

“We feel comfortable with all of the time that has gone into this, two and a half years since the appointment of [Robert] Mueller, and all that transpired since then.”

CNN’s Manu Raju asked about a potential backlash.

“This has absolutely nothing to do with politics,” she said (a claim that might have been more persuasive if she hadn’t just cited impeachment polling).

Nor, she said, would she wait while Trump, losing in court, exhausts his appeals. “We have our facts, and we will act upon them,” she said, vowing additional actions later.

She could have left it at that, and ignored Rosen’s parting question. The two have a history (she previously dubbed him “Mr. Republican Talking Points”), and he obviously wanted to provoke.

But she made an instinctive decision to get in Rosen’s face with a righteous smackdown of those, such as Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.), who claim Democrats are motivated by hate. The commanding result was one more reminder that, in this moment, you “don’t mess with” Pelosi.

 

[Smash!]

5 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

From Laurence Tribe: "Democrats are debating a dangerous false choice on impeachment"

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A president whose Justice Department says he cannot be indicted, whose White House counsel says he cannot even be investigated and whose lawyers say he can block the executive branch from participating in the impeachment process is a president who has become a dictator. None of us can feel safe in such a regime.

 

Wow Laurence Tribe says the word dictator It's something every damn Democrat should be calling 45 (I refuse to say his name), because he's nothing less.

[Dandruff]

6 hours ago, Smash! said:

Wow Laurence Tribe says the word dictator It's something every damn Democrat should be calling 45 (I refuse to say his name), because he's nothing less.

Democrats, and anyone else willing to see it.