The first votes of 2020 will be cast Monday in Iowa. Meanwhile, voting rights advocates are warning that this could be a banner year for voter suppression, and after 2016, concerns abound that we could see new efforts by foreign powers to interfere in the election.
One of the top election experts in the country, Rick Hasen, will join us Friday to discuss threats to elections — the real ones and the imagined ones — that we’re likely to see in 2020. Hasen is the Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine and a frequent source for TPM reporters. We’ll also discuss attempts by the Trump administration and its allies to perpetuate the “voter fraud” myth.
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Much of the commentary about the witnesses question has assumed that there are a half dozen or so so-called Republican moderates up for reelection in November and that the outcome of the trial will be determined by whether members of that group break ranks and call for witnesses. But new reporting suggests that just the opposite is closer to the case.
The argument given a few moments ago about quid pro quos from Alan Dershowitz was so disingenuous and willfully bamboozling that I think it’s important to briefly unpack it. Dershowitz argued that with many foreign policy decisions a President is both advancing the national interest and also looking to his personal political fortunes. That cannot be an impeachable offense, he argues.
We’ve just had breaking news in an announcement from House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eliot Engel. He says that on Sept. 23, he spoke to John Bolton and Bolton “suggest[ed] to me — unprompted — that the committee look into the recall of Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.” This was just as the original Ukraine story was breaking and shortly after Bolton was either fired or resigned his position on Sept. 10. This obviously adds to the drama over Bolton’s potential testimony and upcoming book. But it’s not the most important part of this.
In the Trump world, it’s hard to keep up with who the President’s latest enemy is, even for his staunchest defenders. And the uprising against John Bolton this week has been no different.
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Before we move on I wanted to say a few words about this spectacularly self-regarding man, Alan Dershowitz, and his argument about the constitutional, rather than factual, insufficiency of the impeachment charges brought against President Trump. It is no exaggeration to say that the overwhelming bordering on universal weight of scholarly and historical opinion is that Dershowitz is wrong. But mine isn’t an argument to authority. It’s an overwhelming consensus because it is almost certainly correct. To note just one example, literally during the months in which the Constitution was being written Britain was roiled by an extremely high profile campaign for an impeachment which was on the basis not of statutory crimes but corruption and misrule.
President Trump’s impeachment defense team has been all over the place, deploying an at-times unhinged, but transparent string of defenses since they took over the Senate trial on Saturday.
Before the trial wrapped up for the evening on Monday, Trump attorney Alan Dershowitz took to the floor to lay out a constitutional case against impeaching the President, resurrecting the former President Andrew Johnson-era defense that an act has to be criminal to be impeachable. I spoke to one of our on-call experts about why this argument is dizzying.
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After three days of presentations by the House, followed by three days of presentations by the President’s legal team, the Senate impeachment trial is set to move to a more dynamic phase with a period of questions for each side, submitted by the senators.
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Last night White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham appeared on the Trump administration-friendly Fox Business show “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” when she suggested that former National Security Adviser John Bolton was shamelessly selling his former administration access in his new book.
“How much does it cost to sell out potential national security in your country?” Grisham asked.
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The second week of the Senate impeachment trial kicked off with two major developments: John Bolton’s claim of a Trump conversation where the President linked hold on Ukraine aid to investigation demands; and the President’s attorneys going all in on the Biden smear job.
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