This evening I turned on MSNBC and watched Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland express deep concern about whether his Republican colleagues were going to keep an open mind as jurors in the Senate trial of the President. At one point he went as far as to say that Mitch McConnell had “raise[d] serious questions whether he will be objective in carrying out the responsibilities of the Senate or whether he’s going to try to stack the deck in favor of the president.”
My point here is not to pick on Ben Cardin. This is one example of rhetoric you can hear from many Democrats and most Senate Democrats. It’s just the example that is ready at hand. But it is terrible and completely pathetic.
The extremely open (indeed bragging about it) joint impeachment trial planning between the President and Senate Republicans is a good opportunity to restate a point I’ve made several times recently in a slightly different context. The Senate trial is nominally a trial of Donald J. Trump. But in fact, his guilt is obvious, proven by an overwhelming body of evidence. Senate Republicans themselves know this. But this is the point. It’s not really Trump who is on trial. It’s Senate Republicans. The question is whether there is any level of criminal conduct from President Trump they won’t accept. We already know the answer to that. There’s none. Democrats’ trial strategy should be to make this point over and over and over again. It’s as simple as that.
Let me preface this by saying that politics is unpredictable. I don’t know what will happen in next year’s election and I don’t know for a certainty what the political impact of President Trump’s impeachment will be. What I do know is this: for the last twenty years there has been a deep elite press consensus that impeachment carries a big risk of boomeranging on the party that impeaches a President and can actually bolster support for that President. This is flatly wrong. So I want to explain why it is wrong.
The evidence is pretty clear.
My view of yesterday’s UK election is that if your party literally takes no position on the great issue of the day (Brexit, in this case) and has a party leader considered toxic by a significant swath of the electorate, you’re probably going to have a pretty bad election outcome. The fact that Labour was also running significantly to the left of the country as a whole and you have a good recipe for a near catastrophic election result, which is basically what happened.
But what interests me more is that the result makes it highly questionable whether there will even be a United Kingdom in the next five or ten years, at least one with its current borders and constituent nations.
JoinAs impeached rolls forward, Rudy Giuliani rolls out an entirely new Ukraine/Biden/Obama conspiracy theory and Trump and Rudy squeeze Ukraine to get on board.
Here are some observations from an outsider about Labour’s crushing defeat in Britain’s election. There are some lessons here for the American left and liberals in the upcoming American elections.
The Brexit Factor: Labour lost — leave aside the margin for a moment — because leftwing parties cannot deal with secession crises. Leftwing parties base their appeal on class conflict (however ill defined); secession crises create conflicting cleavages around national identity. Those cleavages split Labour’s constituencies and pretty much insured the party’s defeat. Read More
Happy Friday, December 13. After an eleventh-hour recess, the House Judiciary Committee will reconvene to vote Friday morning on the articles of impeachment. Here’s more on that and the other stories we’re watching.
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Over the last three days we’ve witnessed a furious debate over just how and why the Russia probe (“Crossfire Hurricane”) began and whether political “bias” played a role in that decision. You will note that even in his statements and report, Inspector General Michael Horowitz stated that while he found no evidence of political or anti-Trump bias he could not rule out that it had played a role. Meanwhile Bill Barr suggested that Horowitz simply didn’t have the tools or perhaps sufficient aggressiveness to unearth it. Like the force of gravity that remains unseen but clearly forces all matter to fall downward, not finding any visible evidence doesn’t mean it’s not there. But the whole conversation assumes that there is a problem or deficiency that must be explained when in fact that whole premise is simply absurd.
What was eventually proven about the Trump campaign’s actions may remain a matter of controversy. But the idea that there wasn’t enough evidence or “predicate” to start the probe is simply bizarre and only makes any sense in a climate of long-term distortion, gaslighting and organized lying. It is important to shake those off and see the matter in a clear light.
At several moments during Thursday’s impeachment inquiry, Republicans relied on a misleading reading of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report to defend President Trump’s conduct towards Ukraine.
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Happy Thursday, December 12. The House Judiciary Committee is poised to vote the articles of impeachment out of committee today, after which a full House vote will probably take place late next week. Here’s more on that and the other stories we’re watching.
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