Nice find here from Matt Shuham that started from a reader tip. Freshman Rep. Denver Riggleman has been sending out constituent letters claiming he voted to override President Trump’s emergency declaration. Actually he voted to support it.
TPM Reader JB on the impeachment question…
I’ll bet you’ve been inundated with….comments, let’s call them, about your take on Pelosi negative remarks toward impeaching the President we have now.
Impeachment, of course, is a political process. It’s also a process used so infrequently that assessing its political impact cannot be reliably done. Preparing impeachment proceedings would be a considerable undertaking for the House; they would need to rest on findings of several committees now investigating Trump for various things, plus Mueller’s. And there is every reason to think that Senate Republicans, regardless of the facts uncovered or the charges against Trump, will spare no effort to remain loyal to their Leader.
We’ve now heard from one of the 23 Republicans for voted against the anti-semitism, anti-racism, anti-hate bill. Mo Brooks of Alabama says he voted no because the resolution didn’t condemn discrimination against white people and Christians.
There is quite a lot of perplexity and disgruntlement that Nancy Pelosi has apparently ruled out impeachment, saying Trump’s “just not worth it.” This has led to a number of theories. Possibly Pelosi has received some intelligence briefings that touch on the Mueller probe and she knows that the final verdict won’t be strong enough to sustain an impeachment. Perhaps she worries about impeachment spurring an even deeper round of polarization which will hurt the Democrats in the 2020 elections. Perhaps she simply wants to get out ahead of a Mueller Report with a firm line in the sand to prevent a headlong rush to impeaching the President.
I don’t know Pelosi’s character or thinking well enough to know precisely which of these it is. I can’t know what’s motivating her. But her statement yesterday seemed far less momentous or consequential to me than it appears to have seemed to almost everyone else. Read More
President Trump is the most successful, prominent promoter of anti-Semitism in American history. Certainly he is the only president who has ever compiled such a record.
I wanted to put together just a handful of examples of this. I ignored the voluminous examples of avowed anti-Semites promoting and supporting the President as their candidate. I’m not included accounts in books of anti-Semitic smears and comments from Trump. I’m also not including numerous statements about Jews in which he makes American Jews simply an extension of Israel, comments which feed into a long history of anti-Semitic discourse but are at least notionally framed as praising Jews and Israel. I’m referencing things he’s done publicly over the last three plus years. Just a few examples. Read More
The DOJ has asked the Supreme Court to take up all outstanding challenges to the Census citizenship question next month. The Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments next month on the New York state citizenship case. So this would mean adding a California suit in which a federal judge found that the question violated the Enumeration Clause. The deadline for printing the forms is in June. So all recognize there is a premium on having the issue resolved before then.
If you’re Inside member you can watch our briefing and Q&A with the ACLU’s Dale Ho, Tierney Sneed and me, where we go into depth on the issues raised in the case. See all our on-going Census coverage here.
Bennett Bressman was the field director for Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts (R). He is also a hardened white supremacist and anti-Semite. Imagine the worst stuff from sites like Stormfront and the like and basically like that. He also talked about it a lot on white supremacist chat sites and one time mentioned that the state party director asked him to tone down a tweet about Israel and identified himself and his job.
I had flagged attention to reports of this on Twitter. But I hadn’t been able to securely source. Now MoJo appears to have done so. Cindy Yang, the woman at the center of this Mar-a-Lago/massage parlor story, has served on boards of two Chinese advocacy organizations organized and substantially directed by the Chinese communist party. These are Florida branch of the Council for the Promotion of the Peaceful Reunification of China (CPPRC) and the Miami chapter of the American arm of the Chinese Association of Science and Technology. Read More
I’ve been working on a post about the Omar controversy. It’s taken a bit longer than I anticipated. But I just got this note from TPM Reader TB which captures one of the key elements of the controversy, to my mind. Many readers have a hard time really seeing anti-Semitism, recognizing it as real and complex issue in our society, when it runs into conflict with their ordinary sense of who the good guys and the bad guys are in our politics. It can be relegated to a footnote, a secondary concern, when the ‘real’ issue appears to be racism or Islamophobia. And those are very real issues. But it is just as true that the Israeli right and its supporters in the US (who are overwhelmingly evangelical Christians) have reaped the whirlwind by making the Netanyahu government’s meddling in US politics so frequent and expected. It is not only wrong on the merits. It is insanely shortsighted for Israel. It also endangers American Jews.
Here’s TPM Reader TB … Read More
Bill Shine is leaving the White House and joining the 2020 Trump reelection campaign, an operation that has as much as anything served as a slush fund to keep fired Trumpers on the organizational payroll and in check. Maybe we’ll find out there’s some comical or horrifying scandal that triggered this move – find out in six months. But there may be a more straightforward explanation.