Tag Archives: Trump

Approaching A Major Crisis

Donald Trump is refusing to produce documents demanded–subpoenaed–by Congress, and has instructed members of his administration not to comply with orders to testify to Congressional committees.

If this isn’t a constitutional crisis, the term has no meaning.

As several sources have reminded us, Article 3 of the Articles of Impeachment against Nixon asserted that the President

… has failed without lawful cause or excuse to produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas issued by the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives on April 11, 1974, May 15, 1974, May 30, 1974, and June 24, 1974, and willfully disobeyed such subpoenas. The subpoenaed papers and things were deemed necessary by the Committee in order to resolve by direct evidence fundamental, factual questions relating to Presidential direction, knowledge or approval of actions demonstrated by other evidence to be substantial grounds for impeachment of the President. In refusing to produce these papers and things Richard M. Nixon, substituting his judgment as to what materials were necessary for the inquiry, interposed the powers of the Presidency against the the lawful subpoenas of the House of Representatives, thereby assuming to himself functions and judgments necessary to the exercise of the sole power of impeachment vested by the Constitution in the House of Representatives.

As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo reports,

The White House isn’t doing the standard tussling with Congress about oversight: some stonewalling, some negotiation, taking some questions of privilege to court. It’s more accurately characterized as massive resistance. The Congress has a constitutionally mandated responsibility to oversee the executive branch. They are flatly refusing to comply with ordinary document production and testimonial requests across the board. It’s not a difference of degree but of kind. In itself it is an impeachment worthy refusal to follow the constitutionally mandated framework of American government. It’s up to Democrats to make this clear.

Here’s the very simple bottom line: If a President can refuse to comply with the demands of a Congressional oversight committee–part of a co-equal branch of government– America no longer has checks and balances or the rule of law.

Checks and balances and the rule of law are the very foundation of the American constitution. Governmental legitimacy is defined as adherence to that government’s legal framework–in our case, the constitution. Trump’s defiance is thus evidence of his administration’s lack of legitimacy.

If the Senate, under the control of Mitch McConnell (aka the most evil man in America), fails to stand up for the prerogatives of the Congress, history–assuming we survive to have a history–will brand them traitors. Their first duty is to protect the Constitution and the Separation of Powers; the crisis Trump is precipitating requires them to stop cowering in fear of Trump’s ignorant, rabid base and discharge their obligation to protect America.

(Speaking of ignorance, Trump has said he’ll fight any effort to impeach him by taking the matter to his buddies on the Supreme Court–once again demonstrating his utter cluelessness about constitutional processes and American governance.)

It’s hard to argue with Josh Marshall’s analysis of the current impasse.

But as much as anything else this is a political conflict: how to bring to heel a lawless President. The big error I see so far is that these joustings are being treated as legitimate legal processes which must be allowed to work their way through conventional processes and the courts. That’s not right and it gives the President free rein to try to run out the clock on any sort of oversight. Democrats need to find a language for the political debate that makes clear these are not tedious legal processes which will run their course. They are active cover-ups and law breaking, ones that confirm the President’s bad acting status and add to his and his top advisors legal vulnerability.

There is no hope for Trump; the man is aggressively stupid, proudly ignorant and quite obviously mentally ill (and those are his better qualities!) He is a perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

The only question that still remains open is: how many Republican Senators are genuine patriots and how many are self-serving cowards? We’re about to find out.

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Mayor Pete

I have never voted for a candidate with whom I agreed 100% on specific policies.

Instead, I think I do what most people do; we vote for candidates who share our values, candidates we feel we can trust, who possess personal characteristics we deem admirable. If the Trump presidency has taught us anything, it is the supreme importance of those characteristics–sound judgment, integrity, intellect, diligence, respect for the institutions of government and the rule of law, and a genuine desire to work for the common good. A little humility helps a lot.

Trump possesses none of those qualities– I doubt he is even able to recognize them.

Character does count, and it counts far more than this or that specific policy prescription. (Which is  why Democrats’ predictable “circular firing squads” and insistence on total purity drives me nuts.)

There are a lot of talented people running for the Democratic Presidential nomination. I like several of them, dislike others, and worry that still others would not be as competitive as necessary. That said, I will obviously vote for anyone who emerges as the party’s choice. (Hell, I’d probably vote for Beelzebub if he was running against Trump and his cabal.)

But my top choice so far is Mayor Pete, for a number of reasons.

As I have previously written, I am convinced that it is time for younger leadership. Mayor Pete’s performance thus far–and his rise from obscurity to third place in national polls in a matter of months–bodes well for a general election. His obvious intellect, extensive knowledge and thoughtful demeanor are all reassuring and would be a welcome change from the embarrassing ignorance bloviating daily from Trump’s White House.

Above all, I appreciate his authenticity; everything I’ve seen or read, and everyone from South Bend I’ve talked with, says this guy is the “real deal.”

I think a recent article by Ezra Klein at Vox best captures why Pete’s message so attracts me. 

Some excerpts:

There was a word missing from the speech Pete Buttigieg gave in South Bend, Indiana, announcing his presidential campaign. It’s a word you heard twice in Bernie Sanders’s and Beto O’Rourke’s announcement speeches, nine times in Cory Booker’s, 21 times in Kirsten Gillibrand’s, 23 times in Kamala Harris’s, and 25 times in Elizabeth Warren’s.

That word? “Fight.”

Instead, Buttigieg returned to a word those speeches shied away from, a word whose relative absence from the Democratic primary is all the stranger given its potency in past Democratic campaigns.

That word? “Hope,” which Buttigieg said eight times, Gillibrand said three times, O’Rourke uttered once, and Sanders, Harris, Warren, and Booker avoided entirely.

Klein cites to 70 years of research confirming that fear motivates conservatives and hope motivates liberals.

At the core of this worldview divide is hope, in its most basic, literal form. Are you hopeful about new things, new people, new places? Does change excite you? Does difference? If it does, you are more likely to be liberal. If you look at the new, the different, and feel a spike of fear, you’re more likely to be a conservative….

Obama and Trump, in their respective campaigns, took this subtext of American politics and made it into bumper stickers. A black man with a strange name won the presidency tying together the words “change” and “hope.” He was succeeded by a white man who won the presidency promising to turn back the clock, who built a campaign around the word “again.”…

A lot of liberals, temperamentally and psychologically, don’t want a fight. They don’t want politics to be an endless war; they believe that mutual understanding is possible, that the country will respond to someone willing to believe and call forth the best of it. That’s not just their view of politics; it’s their view of life. It’s the view that Obama spoke to in the speech that made him a star:

Even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.

Klein compared aspects of Buttigieg’s announcement speech to Obama’s messaging, and then quoted Pete saying :“It’s time to walk away from the politics of the past and toward something totally different.”

I don’t know about other people, but I am so ready for something totally different. I am so ready to hope again.

There’s an old political maxim to the effect that Republicans fall in line and Democrats fall in love. I think I’m in love.

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Who’s Really Playing The Race Card?

Whenever a member of the African-American community objects to an injustice, or points out that a public figure has made a racially-insensitive (or worse) remark, Right-wingers immediately respond by accusing the person voicing the protest of “playing the race card.”

Evidently, it’s just not polite to call out racism.

Similarly, those of us who have called attention to the numerous studies concluding that “racial resentment” was the characteristic most predictive of a 2016 vote for Donald Trump have been dismissed as “partisan” and worse.

Well, they need to polish their invective once more, because there’s additional research confirming the proposition.

Following the attacks on New Zealand mosques, the Washington Post reported on the effects of Trump’s rallies–and those effects are neither ambiguous nor pretty. Counties that hosted such rallies in 2016 saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes.

During an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” this past Sunday, Sen. Tim Kaine(D-Va.) lambasted President Trump for emboldening white nationalism after a young man killed at least 50 people at two New Zealand mosques. Kaine was referring to Trump’s answer after a reporter asked whether he sees “today that white nationalism is a rising threat around the world?” Trump responded, “I don’t really.”

This is not the first time Trump has been accused of catering to white nationalists after a terrorist attack. At an August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, a young white man rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer. Afterward, Trump insisted that “there’s blame on both sides” for the violence.

Then in October 2018, a gunman killed 11 congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. When Trump announced plans to visit the synagogue, many people in Squirrel Hill, the city’s predominantly Jewish neighborhood, took to the streets demanding first that Trump renounce white nationalism before paying his respects to the victims.

Trump, of course, has pooh-poohed any suggestion that his rhetoric might be encouraging these horrific events. Those denials prompted a study to determine whether Trump’s behavior and language has emboldened white nationalists. (It is worth noting that white nationalist leaders– including Richard Spencer and David Duke– have publicly supported Trump’s candidacy and presidency, and the New Zealand shooter even referred to Trump as a “renewed symbol of white identity.”)

To test the effect of Trump’s rallies, the study aggregated hate-crime incident data and Trump rally data to the county level and then used statistical tools to estimate a rally’s impact, including controls for factors such as the county’s crime rates, its number of active hate groups, its minority populations, its percentage with college educations, its location in the country and the month when the rallies occurred.

The result?

We found that counties that had hosted a 2016 Trump campaign rally saw a 226 percent increase in reported hate crimes over comparable counties that did not host such a rally…

Additionally, it is hard to discount a “Trump effect” when a considerable number of these reported hate crimes reference Trump. According to the ADL’s 2016 data, these incidents included vandalism, intimidation and assault.

What’s more, according to the FBI’s Universal Crime report in 2017, reported hate crimes increased 17 percent over 2016. Recent research also shows that reading or hearing Trump’s statements of bias against particular groups makes people more likely to write offensive things about the groups he targets.

It’s pretty obvious–and obviously dangerous–that Trump and his base are actually the ones playing the race card.

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The Problem With Selective “Liberty”

Michael Gerson has a way with words.

His descriptions of Donald Trump are dead-on; in a recent column in the Washington Post, for example, he considered Trump’s recent attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who came to the United States as a Somali refugee, using the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers and an out-of-context quotation.

It is cruel because Trump essentially delivered his political rant while standing on desecrated graves. The images he employed not only included burning buildings but burning human beings, drafted into a sad and sordid political ploy. Is nothing sacred to Trump? When said aloud, the question sounds like an absurdity. Trump has never given the slightest indication of propriety, respect or reverence. His narcissism leaves no room to honor other people or to honor other gods. Both the living and the dead matter only as servants to the cause of Trump himself.

In the remainder of the column, Gerson documents what we all know–Trump is an anti-Muslim bigot. (Not that his hatred of Islam is exclusive–like all White Nationalists, he also manages to find room for racism and anti-Semitism.)

Gerson goes through the ugly characterizations, the anti-Muslim rants.

Trump has a long history of animus — raw animus — against one of the Abrahamic faiths. He has said, “We’re having problems with the Muslims.” And: “There is a Muslim problem in the world.” And: “The United Kingdom is trying hard to disguisetheir massive Muslim problem.” And: “Islam hates us.”

The Koran, in Trump’s scholarly opinion, “teaches some very negative vibe.” He has claimed: “You have people coming out of mosques with hatred and death in their eyes.” He once called for a “total and complete shutdownof Muslims entering the United States.” He has variously and publicly considered the closing of mosques, warrantless searches and the creation of a national database to track Muslims. In Trump’s view, “We’re going to have to do things that we never did before.”

Then Gerson gets to the point: liberty is all or nothing, and Trump’s version of liberty as  “freedom only for the faiths he prefers” threatens every religion. When government has the power to “award” liberty to some and deny it to others, the people who are favored aren’t free; they simply have been granted privileges that the government may choose at some future point to withdraw. That isn’t genuine liberty.

As Gerson writes,

Religious freedom is either rigorously equal, or it becomes an instrument of those in power to favor or disfavor religions of their choice. And those believers who are currently in favor may someday discover what disfavor is like.

As a wise person once told me, poison gas is a great weapon until the wind shifts.

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Can A “Root Vegetable” Collude?

Granted, Bob Barr’s performance yesterday was PR, not a dispassionate description of the contents of the Mueller Report, but there are actually a number of reasons why I don’t believe Donald Trump colluded with Russia.

Although Russia obviously wanted Trump to win, and just as obviously interfered with the election in order to help him (as even Barr conceded), it is also abundantly clear that Trump is too stupid (and even more importantly, from Russia’s perspective, too unpredictable and unstable) to effectively collude with anyone.

My favorite recent evaluation of Trump’s intellectual deficit came from CNN’s Ana Navarro, in a tweet praising Mayor Pete:

Today, I saw a video clip of @PeteButtigieg playing classical piano. Another where he speaks in Spanish. And this one, where he tells Parisians he shares their pain -in French. Just imagine having a President whose intellect exceeds that of a root vegetable…for a change.

Not even Barr disputes that Trump was the intended beneficiary of Russia’s interference, in all likelihood because he is deeply indebted to the Russian oligarchs close to Putin who–according to both Donald Junior and Eric–stepped in to finance his projects after American banks no longer would do so. (Fleece me once, shame on you…) That indebtedness makes him oh so malleable, as we’ve seen.

There is another reason I never thought Trump actually colluded in Russia’s efforts: he neither wanted nor expected to win.

There is ample evidence that he undertook the campaign because he thought it would elevate his “brand,” and was shocked when the Electoral College handed him the victory. Since assuming office, he has clearly relished the Presidency’s ceremonial aspects and the added power to hurt people he dislikes, but that enjoyment came after the fact. (I have a sneaking suspicion that his campaign for a second term is an effort to run out the clock on  statutes of limitations for the various criminal matters being vigorously pursued by the Southern District of New York.)

What about obstruction of justice? There, I think Congress and the public need to understand exactly what Mueller had to say, and why.

As many observers have commented, Trump certainly acted like a man who was guilty and trying to derail the investigation that would prove it. How much of his improper behavior was simply the outgrowth of his raging insecurity, how much because he didn’t know what “collusion” entailed and was afraid he’d engaged in it, and how much because he was worried that the investigation would uncover his numerous other illegal activities, especially with Russia? We may never know.

The evidence for obstruction may fall short of the legal standard necessary for criminal prosecution, but Trump’s hysteria over the investigation played out publicly, allowing the whole country to see his behavior and draw conclusions from that behavior.

Bottom line, even if the unredacted Mueller report really exonerated him of a crime, even if the report’s documentation of “high crimes and misdemeanors” for Constitutional purposes won’t cause the GOP sycophants in the Senate to impeach him, every day brings ample evidence that Trump’s entire Presidency has been an unmitigated disaster.

A majority of Americans reacted to that disaster in the midterm elections, and voters need to send an even more emphatic message in 2020.

It is depressing that a significant percentage of America’s citizens will continue to support a root vegetable so long as he hates the same people they do. In 2020, we need to demonstrate convincingly that those people do not represent America.

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