8:52 PM: Good on Buttigieg for not getting goaded into saying he would have ordered the assassination of Soleimani. The ABC guy definitely tried.
8:48 PM: Bernie is 100% right. Reliving, relitigating 2016 is a disaster.
8:27 PM: Biden: “The politics of the past I think was not all that bad. … I don’t know what about the past of Barack Obama and Joe Biden was so bad.”
8:21 PM: One thing I keep thinking about in these health care debates is, can someone make the point that President Trump is trying to get rid of the ACA and eliminate protections for pre-existing conditions? I’m not saying that’s all that matters. We need to build on the ACA. But politically speaking, you just can’t never mention that.
8:16 PM: I respect Sanders for saying unprompted that everyone on the stage is going to support the nominee. I don’t doubt he means it. But that’s not what’s happening with his supporters. Not most of them, but many of the most vocal. That’s a big problem for all Democrats.
8:10 PM: Good follow-ups by Stephanopoulos. Bernie constantly talks about game-changing turnout, reshaping the electorate. But his own campaigns show little evidence of that.
8:08 PM: This is a rough display. I think Biden is right that both of the current frontrunners – Sanders and Buttigieg – are big big risks as the Democratic nominee. But Sanders is just more dynamic and coherent making his case than Biden is, in this specific exchange.
President Trump appears to be in the midst of firing some or all of the government appointees and career officials who appeared before Congress under subpoena. Lt. Col. Vindman and his brother Eugene, who works as a lawyer at the White House, were both escorted out of the White House today without notice. And just a short time ago EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland announced that he has been notified that he has been fired effective immediately.
Through the Ukraine scandal, there’s been a persistent question about the rush to get Zelensky to play ball and whether similar efforts occurred before Zelensky took office. Josh Kovensky has unearthed new evidence that confirms just that.
I had thought the intra-Democratic divisions this year couldn’t help but be less than 2016. Divisions usually come more to the surface when a party has had a decent run in power. They’re not as hungry for the presidency. The risks of its loss are less palpable. There’s more focus on reordering who the dominant party faction is. The crisis of President Trump you would think would concentrate people’s minds. And indeed poll after poll shows just that: overwhelmingly Democrats want whoever can beat Trump.
But that’s not how it’s looking.
Join
President Trump was never going to just roll over and take solace in his acquittal.
And after yesterday’s dark and blatantly bonkers speech from the White House celebrating his acquittal, it’s no surprise that he and his allies are already retaliating against those who wronged the President. As an image-obsessed leader who demands nothing short of cult-like loyalty from all who have access to him, it’s easy to believe new reports from Bloomberg News and the Washington Post that the White House is planning to reassign Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman back to the Department of Defense.
Join
We’re in a pretty dramatically different situation in the Democratic primaries than we were a week ago. Everything could change on Tuesday. But for now it looks much more likely that Bernie Sanders will be the nominee than it did a week ago or certainly a month or two ago. With that in mind, I wanted to flag a set of facts that tie back to what I discussed earlier this afternoon about Trump’s even more blatant post-impeachment abuses of power.
Most of these facts have been rattling around my head for the last six months but a reader from the Bernie world flagged an article to mention this evening which renewed my attention.
Back in 2016 and then again into 2017 a series of press reports raised questions about Sanders’ wife Jane Sanders and her time as President of Burlington College. The college underwent a dramatic expansion under Sanders’ leadership and then closed in 2016 under a mountain of debt. Press reports and political critics suggested that Jane Sanders and Senator Sanders’ Senate office had pressured People’s United Bank to make a $6.7 million loan to the bank which underwrote the expansion.
President Trump has made clear repeatedly over the last week that he is not only vindicated but wants payback meted out against his political opponents. Susan Collins lamely claimed Trump had learned his lesson by being impeached. Even she had to take that back and say she hoped he had. Numerous press reports from news organizations with strong sourcing inside the White House say that Trump not only feels vindicated and wants payback but feels something like invincible. All the ‘adults in the room’ told him not to do this and not to do that. He did all of it and more and what happened? He’s still President. He’s even reasonably well positioned for reelection. So, he reasons, he was right all along and he can in fact do anything he wants.
Along those lines I want to point out just two things we’ve learned in the last forty-eight hours.
Join
Exactly 21 years and six days ago, former President Bill Clinton took to the podium in the White House Rose Garden and delivered a stone-faced apology to the American people for “what I said and did.”
Join
Starting in December of 2004 and into the early months of 2005 TPM turned itself almost exclusively over to a focus on President Bush’s eventually failed effort to partially phase out Social Security and replace it with a system of private investment accounts. This got the attention of a Harvard Law Professor named Elizabeth Warren and her students and alerted them to the potential of online advocacy about key public policy issues affecting ordinary Americans’ lives. Warren and her students reached out to me and this led to our setting up a short-run blog exclusively focused on the federal bankruptcy bill then moving through Congress. Around the time that legislative battle had run its course we were launching TPMCafe. We decided to make that short-term effort permanent with Warren Reports, one of five sections of the original TPMCafe.
In 2005 Warren was far from an unknown figure. She had published widely read books on middle class squeeze and consumer debt issues and her public profile was growing. But she wasn’t an elected politician and I suspect (though obviously I can’t know) had little expectation of becoming one. Certainly she was far less well known than she is today and has been for going on a decade.
So today we’re republishing the posts she wrote for the TPM Bankruptcy Bill Blog (read them here) and Warren Reports (read them here) from mid-2005 through 2008, after which she went into the Obama administration.
If the President’s press secretary is to be believed the President’s post-impeachment ‘victory’ speech today will be a sort of weaponized Festivus, a mix of grievances, complaints and calls for vengeance against his political foes.
Trump's "going to talk about just how horribly he was treated and that may be people should pay for that." pic.twitter.com/8uUIqGbFck
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 6, 2020