Editor’s Blog
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Once again we’re back to this nonsense about the 25th Amendment. Alan Dershowitz claims that invoking it would amount to a coup d’etat, which is nonsensical since it is literally and expressly authorized by the constitution. But the 25th amendment actually doesn’t do jack. And yes, that’s the technical term. People still seem to think that it gives a majority of the cabinet the ability to remove the President.
It definitely does not. Read More
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Today is a really bad day for the country. But it also reminds me – it should remind you – that authoritarianism is most often born of incompetence and mismanagement. It seems like a paradox or a disconnect. But it’s not. They generally go together, as they do here.
Early in his administration Democrats were willing to vote to okay tens of billions of dollars for Trump’s vanity project wall. The price of that was little more than confirming in law what was already the case in practice, DACA protections. Trump rejected that, negotiated his way down to about one billion dollars for the kinds of border barriers the US was building before Trump ever proposed his wall. Now he’s trying to seize about a 10th of those funds – the original $50 billion offer – to build his signature wall. Read More
State Senator Lynn Hutchings (R) of Wyoming explaining her decision to vote against abolishing the death penalty: “The greatest man who ever lived died via the death penalty for you and me. I’m grateful to him for our future hope because of this. Governments were instituted to execute justice. If it wasn’t for Jesus dying via the death penalty, we would all have no hope.”
Wyoming is currently debating a bill that would abolish the state’s death penalty. The state’s last execution was in 1992.
(Credit to Radley Balko.)
I’m very curious about this David Ignatius column. It’s written with great drama and portent. But on its face, it contains not too much more than another version of Chairman Adam Schiff’s announcement that he’s planning a vastly expanded Russia probe that will reach much further into the President’s business and personal finances. The thing is that Ignatius is one of the most wired people in Washington when it comes to the nexus of international spycraft and US politics. His columns are frequently based on more than he can or chooses to explicitly reveal. Read More
Here’s John Brennan’s answer …
John Brennan on whether President Trump is a "Russian asset." pic.twitter.com/aQvz2zas6r
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 14, 2019
Remember that bogus report from the Texas state government last month about 95,000 non-citizens on the voting rolls? That was three weeks ago and now the state official responsible, Secretary of State David Whitley, is having to apologize for it to the state’s Republican-dominated Senate.
I’m not sure about the legalities of this. But it seems kind of remarkable. Federal Labor Relations Authority Chairwoman Colleen Duffy Kiko has announced that she’s decertifying the authority’s own union. In other words, she’s firing the agency’s union. Read More
A Minnesota Sheriff has been forced to intervene so no one gets hurt or killed in yet another Trumper-driven conspiracy theory, sort of a rural Pizzagate. Social media sites picked up news that a dog named “Donald Trump” had been shot and killed and decided it was a political statement against the President, with suspicions focused on a neighbor who the folks on social media decided was a Democrat. There have apparently been multiple threats of violence on various social media sites against imagined perpetrators, even though a law enforcement investigation concluded that the dog was shot by someone “legally protecting their livestock” on private property. Here’s the story. Read More
Manafort-connected super PAC that’s caught up in two different aspects of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe didn’t report to the FEC a $1 million contribution until more than two years after the 2016 election. Josh Kovensky and Allegra Kirkland report.
Documents unsealed today shed new light on a battle over what can be revealed of the inner-workings of the Mueller grand jury.
Before more time goes by I want to make sure you saw this piece by Josh Kovensky from last week: a secret meeting where at least part of the Trump/Russia collusion probably happened. Read it.
Trump’s President. He can shut down the government. Some compromises are necessary. But these are points well-taken. From TPM Reader JB …
Without quarreling with those who are arguing today that the leadership deal to fund government agencies is a humiliating defeat for Trump, I think we ought to remember a few things.
One, several hundred million taxpayer dollars wasted on ornamental fencing and barriers that will rip up land in the lower Rio Grande Valley is to be the price of saving a little face for Trump and his anti-immigrant supporters in Congress.
In a bracingly candid comment, Trump confidante Tom Barrack said the murder of Jamal Khashoggi was basically fine and not nearly as bad as things America does. He also has this interesting line: “The atrocities in any autocratic country are dictated by the rule of law.”
As a number of people have noted, it’s not at all clear to me how President Trump can agree to this new bipartisan DHS border funding compromise without a humiliating climbdown. Democrats insisted that the limited funding for reinforcing the southern border can only be in the form of more of the fences that were approved and built before Trump’s presidency. That means we’re back to Mitch McConnell who is really the key person in this situation. Read More
Congressional negotiators say they have a deal to prevent a second government shutdown.
Now we have the AP confirming that Bezos investigators have confirmed that Michael Sanchez, brother and manager of Bezos’s girlfriend Lauren Sanchez, is the one who gave texts and pictures to The National Enquirer.
I urge you to read Josh Kovensky’s account of how Robert Mueller’s team came to suspect Paul Manafort was not living up to his plea agreement but was instead playing for a pardon from President Trump.
I addressed this on Twitter. Let me try to address it here. Yesterday, freshman member of Congress Ilhan Omar riffed on a tweet by Glenn Greenwald about Kevin McCarthy and pro-Israel politics in Congress.
She responded and here was my response to hers …
McCarthy’s a fool who has no power to punish anyone. Criticism of Israel doesn’t equal anti-Semitism. And this is a very unfortunate tweet. https://t.co/WaCjbr2yNp
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 11, 2019