Let me point your attention to Sen. Schumer’s letter and proposal to Sen. McConnell about the upcoming Senate trial. In essence, he proposes the Senate adopt the trial rules adopted unanimously for Bill Clinton’s trial in 1999. Note that in 1999, Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. So they had a fairly free hand to run things as they chose. Not to be snarky but those rules really amount to no more than holding a trial – equal time for both sides to present a case, a reasonable time limits on prosecution and defense, ability to call witnesses, etc.

Good morning and happy Monday, December 16. The House Judiciary Committee filed its impeachment report early Monday morning, outlining its justification for the two articles of impeachment against President Trump — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Here’s more on that and other stories we’re following. 

There are a bunch of polls out today about impeachment. One that is getting a lot of attention is the Fox News poll that shows 50% support for impeachment and removal versus 41% who oppose impeachment. The fact that it’s Fox gets a lot of attention. But as we’ve discussed before, the Fox News poll — as opposed to Fox News — is a rightly respected poll. We should see it as separate from Fox News.

The real story is that support and opposition to impeachment remain remarkably, remarkably stable.

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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.

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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.

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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.

As 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.