Show Trial

When Trump finally left the White House, I thought Republicans would react to Trump's departure the way the Wicked Witch of the West's soldiers in The Wizard of Oz reacted when the Wicked Witch melted after Dorothy accidentally spilled water on her while trying to put out a fire.  When they told Dorothy she killed her, Dorothy grew very sacred . . . until the witch's soldiers started cheering and celebrating, knowing they didn't have to deal with the mean old broom-rider anymore.

Nothing could have prepared me for how loyal the GOP has remained to Trump since President Biden began his term last week.  With the article of impeachment against Trump for inciting an insurrection having been delivered to the Senate, only five Senate Republicans voted to accept and allow the trial to go forward.  Mitch McConnell, who has made no secret of wanting to find a way to get rid of Trump for good, was not one of them.  The 45 Republican Senators who voted against having a trial said that a trial was unnecessary because Trump is no longer in the White House (not true!), and Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) even called the trial a "stupid" idea.

Trump still scares Republicans who fear a possible Trump comeback in 2024 or, if they vote to convict Trump and then allow a vote to bar him from holding office again, fear being primaried by QAnon/Trumpist candidates in Congress in 2022.  Trump doesn't have access to Twitter any more, but all he has to do is stick his thumb up or down like Nero to send a signal to have his base go after those who cross him.  Even if all of the Republicans in the Senate vote against barring Trump from holding public office again after he's been convicted and let the ban be passed by Democratic votes only, the fact they let it get that far in the first place by enough of them voting to convict would destroy them.  Someone had better figure out how to destroy Trump, or he'll destroy the country.

So the U.S. Senate chamber (below) is going to be the scene of a show trial - nay, a mock trial - that will be all sound and fury but will result in nothing.  Root for the success of New York State Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. in their efforts to prosecute Trump in court.    

One day, someone will pull the curtain back on Senate Republicans and realize there's nothing there.

The Second Time Around

The only thing anyone knows about a trial for Trump following his second impeachment is that there's going to be one.  But no one knows how or when it would be conducted.  All we know for certain is that the Senate trial doesn't start until House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivers the article of impeachment for inciting an insurrection to the Senate, and she ain't saying when she plans to do that.  Should she do so right after President-elect Biden is sworn in, the Senate would have to start the trial immediately, possibly keeping the Senate from confirming Biden's appointees.  Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer (below), soon to become Senate Majority Leader, could decide to bifurcate the Senate schedule to allow both orders of business . . . unless the Senate parliamentarian says you can't do that.  (Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell is AWOL on this one.)

And meanwhile, Trump could issue a whole bunch of pardons today and after, perhaps even one for . . . himself.  Which, I assume would pretty much take care of the Senate trial! (Joke.)

Ad there's a pandemic raging, Biden might have a hard time dealing with it with an impeachment trial and more threats of anti-Biden violence, and Mike Pompeo is continuing to etch bad foreign-policy initiatives in stone with the supposition that Tony Blinken might not get confirmed as successor until late February.

To my readers: Don't you dare wish me a happy new year! 😠 

Impeachment - The Sequel

I just had to use this rebus again - imp + peach + mint - because, a few moments after I started typing this, Donald John Trump got impeached . . . again.

Trump is now the first U.S. President to ever be impeached twice. The vote was 232-197.

Ten Republicans, including Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, joined all of the Democrats to indict Trump for inciting insurrection.  Republicans who voted against the article of impeachment - i.e., most of them - used all sorts of specious arguments to justify their vote, from harassment of Sarah Sanders to complaints about Black Lives Matter inciting riots in various cities (you didn't hear about that? that's because it never happened) to Madonna having threatened to blow up the White House (they actually took the incoherent ramblings of a musically vacuous pop star - especially those of a pop star who used Trumpian methods such as shameless self-promotion and disdain for her detractors - seriously?).  Hunter Biden also figured in there somewhere.  

Trump will likely not be tried and convicted or acquitted before Biden is sworn in as President a week from today.  At worst, it might force President Biden to work with acting Cabinet secretaries for a couple of weeks into his term . At best, Trump can still be tried, and if convicted - not a given yet - it means he will lose his post-presidential benefits and be barred form ever running for public office again.  And Biden and McConnell have been talking in the past few hours, trying to figure out how to go forward once Trump is out of the White House (you can't say he'll be out of office, because he never acted as an officeholder). 

And when they're finished dealing with Trump, they ought to go after Lauren Boebert in the House.  And Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley in the Senate.

Stick a fork in Trump.  He's done. 

U.S. House to Pence: Invoke 25-4!

He won't do it.

Mike Pence won't invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution and remove Trump from office.  He doesn't want to make Trump, who can appeal such an invocation, angrier than he already is.  And that would be reasonable argument if Trump weren't so angry now, having lost business deals and his Twitter account, that there's no way he could be any angrier.   

If Pence doesn't invoke 25-4 per the U.S House's request, the House will have to impeach Trump tomorrow.

And then he'll really be mad. 

Section 4 is the only section of the 25th Amendment that has never been invoked before.

First Lady and Last Men Standing

Melania Trump came out and said she was disturbed by the violence that occurred at the Capitol last week.  But she refused to blame any one actor for it.  Like her husband.

This is the equivalent of her husband saying there were fine people on both sides of the melee in Charlottesville in August 2017.  In fact, she sees herself as a victim in all this!

It's quite obvious that Melania isn't an innocent bystander who got roped into all of this simply by being married to Donald Trump and wanted nothing to do with his corruption.  She's just another grifter, and the only thing she wants nothing to do with is the stability and the integrity of this country.  She's as much a villain as her husband and her stepchildren.

Meanwhile, as reports circulate of planned armed demonstrations at all fifty state capitols and in Washington this coming Sunday, Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf resigned.  A rat we need on the sinking ship is gone.

With Trump all but certain to be impeached, we have days ahead that are going to be more than just difficult.

Summer Reading

Trump had been trying to stop it, but John Bolton's new book is going full tilt boogie, and the bombshells are dropping and detonating like napalm-filled incendiary devices, threatening to defoliate Trump's leadership veneer and expose the emperor as having no clothes. 

My, I'm getting poetic here!

In his book "The Room Where it Happened," Bolton has revealed many embarrassing things about the current White House occupant,  For one thing, he asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to by more soybeans and wheat from American farmers to help him win re-election, and he had no problems with Xi putting the Muslim Uighurs of Sinkiang in northwestern China in concentration camps.  Bolton also says that Trump asked if  Finland was a part of Russia (it was, actually, until 1917) was ignorant of the fact that Great Britain is a nuclear power, and has obstructed of justice as easy as breathing.

The Justice Department's attempts to book the book will likely come to nothing, since much of the most damning information Bolton has on Trump is already out.  But Bolton is hardly a hero; he sat on this information and teased about being able to testify in Trump's impeachment trial but held back so as to ensure that these facts would only come out with his book and enable him to make a ton of money.  In which case, I would recommend checking it out of your local library - assuming it's not closed due to COVID-19.  And even if Bolton does make a lot of money from this, his earnings may likely be confiscated if there is any classified information in his book, as the Justice department claims.   

Bolton's failure to come forward during the impeachment trial still has a lot of Democrats angry, but it's better this information about Trump comes out this way than not at all.  And the Democrats can impeach Trump again and get Bolton to testify - Lord knows Trump has done more than enough since December 2019 to warrant a second congressional indictment.

Impeachment? PAH!

The House impeachment managers have done a very effective job in outlining the case for removing Donald J. Trump from the Presidency.  But who cares?

Look, we know the Senate isn't going to remove Trump from office.  We also know that conviction and removal won't even get a bare majority of 51 votes, though 67 are needed to convict. Not only are Republican senators likely to support blocking further evidence, so are Republican voters.  The impeachment managers have been reduced to showing video clips of past House testimony and past media interviews in lieu of real documents, and despite their strong, forceful prosecution, they might as well have made things up as they went, for all the good it's done them.  (The defense begins its arguments today.)  Republican senators inclined to support Trump - that is,. all of them - are mostly likely passing the time playing cat's cradle, drawing pictures of cowboys, or maybe clipping their toenails.

Adam Schiff and his crew are fighting the good fight, and their arguments might persuade the American people to put Trump at a disadvantage in November.  But if they think they are going to bother the conscience of at least one Republican senator - even Susan Collins - they are sadly mistaken.

Wake me when it's over.  Normally I love watching a comedy where  I know the ending, but . . .  

Impeachment: This and That

Former Giuliani associate Lev Parnas made a lot of news last week implicating Trump, Rudolph Giuliani himself, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, possibly someone else named Mike P., William Barr and Devin Nunes in efforts to get dirt on the Bidens from the Ukrainians by all being heavily involved and pretending to be concerned about corruption in Ukraine, but it's hardly going to matter one iota when the impeachment trial begins tomorrow.  Republicans afraid of reprisals from Trump - who, I must add, could still win the 2020 election in November - will refuse to vote for removal, and the Democrats can't even hope for a simple majority (two-thirds majority is needed for removal) that will at least make him look bad.  And Parnas, because he has been indicted for conspiring to violate bans on donations foreign nationals, will be dismissed as a dubious witness given the trouble he's been in. So far, the only people who look to come out of the losing end of all this are the Democratic senators not named Bernard by their mothers who are campaigning for their party's presidential nomination. And no one of these senators will be a greater loser than Michael Bennet.

Bennet has consistently been the most thoughtful and the least hysterical Democrat running for President in this election cycle.  No theatrics, no identity politics, no flashy slogans that say everything and promise nothing . . . all of which, of course, is detrimental enough to anyone running for President of the United States, but now Bennet has an additional burden.  The impeachment trial comes right at the moment the Colorado senator was beginning to gain traction in New Hampshire, so the trial will, more than anyone else . . . put Bennet in traction.

As a senator from Colorado, a left-of-center pragmatist, a politician with chiseled features, and an accomplished record in local urban politics (he's the former school superintendent of Denver), Bennet is sort of a hybrid of Gary Hart (who once held the Senate seat Bennet now holds) and Hart's protégé Martin O'Malley with the latter's inability to win votes.  But Bennet has one thing O'Malley never achieved in his presidential bid - respect from the press.  He's been given the sort of free media O'Malley never got, and he's made the most of it, expressing the reasons for his candidacy and explaining his policy proposals in clear, concise, mannered terms.  And the media love him for it, as his frequent appearances make obvious.  But to many voters, of course, he's just a boring white guy with a forgettable name - and someone even poked fun at him for spelling his surname with only one "t."  He already had a hard enough task at getting the Democratic presidential nomination without this trial intervening.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders seems to be benefiting from the trial's effect of keeping everything before Iowa and New Hampshire frozen in place, allowing him to coast on his lead in Iowa and New Hampshire and possibly win the Democratic nomination, which could lead the Democrats to their fatal doom.  Joe Biden can benefit by having the campaign trail all to himself for the next couple of weeks, but if he's called as a witness in the impeachment trial, that could cause a change of plans.  But then, if Biden and his son are both called as witnesses, all they have to do is comport themselves in the stand and demonstrate their irrelevance to the case at hand . . . by simply answering the questions they're asked and make the Republicans look awfully silly by having called them in the first place, whether John Bolton embarrasses the Republicans or not.

I could make a guess as to how all of this turns out, but, as someone who was mocked for advocating in 2016 for a presidential candidate no one cared about, I just don't give a twit . . ..  

The Impeachment Trial: More Meh

Now that Her Holy Modal Majesty, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is releasing the articles of impeachment against Trump to the Senate, people are praising her deft move to get pressure on Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell to have fair trial, with key Republican senators demanding a fair process in which to call witnesses and with new information about the Ukraine scandal - including former White House national security adviser John Bolton's willingness to testify on the matter - during the Speaker's imposed interregnum.   

Don't you believe it.  It's more daft than deft.

Pelosi (above) never had any leverage in holding back the articles if impeachment.  McConnell never wanted to receive them anyway, and he has no interest in holding a trial that would, if not remove Trump from the White House, still make him look bad.  There are four to six Republican senators who could join the 47 senators in the Democratic caucus in allowing witnesses to be called who could easily stick with McConnell when it comes to actually calling the witnesses during the trial.  (Except maybe Mitt Romney, who has said he'd like to hear what Bolton has to say.)  If there is a trial; McConnell is seriously considering a dismissal of the trial so he can get back to packing the courts with right-wing judges that will dominate the federal judiciary at least until my generation dies off.  In short, Pelosi's intransigence changed nothing, and it helped not a single Democrat.

Except maybe Joe Biden.  With Senator Bernie Sanders surging in the presidential polls in New Hampshire and in both February caucus states (Iowa and Nevada), House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has opined that Pelosi delayed the submission of the articles of impeachment to ensure that Sanders is stuck in Washington as a juror in the impeachment trial to get him off the campaign trail in the crucial final weeks before Iowa and New Hampshire.  I don't agree entirely with McCarthy's assessment.  I think she did it to get Senator Elizabeth Warren off the presidential campaign trail as well.  Speaker Pelosi is officially neutral in the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination process, but she's already made clear her disdain for Grandpa Bernie's and Aunt Liz's policy positions, such as their support for Medicare for all and the Green New Deal (which went down like an old brown shoe).  The last thing she wants is to have either one of them as the Democratic presidential nominee, and their absence from the campaign trail wild help Biden gain traction in the state primaries and caucuses preceding Super Tuesday and possibly prevent the 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign from going all the way to New Jersey in June.

But Pelosi's gambit is not going to have a detrimental effect on Trump's standing or slow down or retard McConnell's progress in fighting progress.  It would only make sense that her moves are designed to affect the presidential trail more than the presidential trial.

Trail, trial . . . love those anagrams. ;-)           

Impeachment

Get it?

Now that Trump has been impeached, the Democrats have won the battle but have not yet won the war.  The might find the end of this war to be like Waterloo, and not from Wellington's perspective.  They have history and duty on their side, with House leaders Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler convinced they have Trump dead to rights, but the Senate's Republican majority is already trying to figure out how to concoct a show trial that will allow Trump to be acquitted while Trump and his minions on his campaign and at the Republican National Committee figure out how to destroy the Democratic Party once and for all in 2020 and consign it Whig-like extinction.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is already anticipating that, and she's reportedly holding back on referring the indictment to the Senate, where Mitch McConnell is already planning to strike the final blow against the Democratic opposition.  Mitch is already planning how to decimate Amy McGrath, his likely Democratic opponent in Kentucky's Senate election next year, and he must relish the idea of doing the same to Pelosi simultaneously.  The Speaker has been known to outwit many an opponent, but McConnell is not an opponent.  He's a mortal enemy, and in him she may yet meet her match.        

Meanwhile, the Republicans are sure to raise money over the impeachment vote, giving them more  dough than they need.  Democrats are likely to get money from their biggest supporters, which means they'll get checks in figures without a lot of zeroes at the end, thus pointing to a financial disadvantage.  Joe Biden is already campaigning against Trump as if he's already the nominee-in-waiting, not because he's convinced he's going to win the nomination but because he wants to frame the argument against Trump early, whether he's the nominee or not.  Biden is showing how dangerous to democracy and the rule of law Trump is.  That said, how many people will really care if we continue to have a booming stock market and low unemployment, even if the Dow numbers and job statistics are grossly misleading?  This, sadly, is nothing new for the majority of voters in These States, who continue to vote their pocketbooks for leaders who take their oaths on Bibles. :-(  

Impeachment and Investigations

The House of Representatives is preparing two articles of impeachment against Trump - abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.  House Democrats could have considered more articles that they knew moderate Democrats would join Republicans in voting down to help them look independent of the party's liberal leadership, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi decided that it would be better to have two articles that spoke directly to the Ukraine scandal and could be unanimously passed by the Democratic House caucus - because it would allow the public to focus more squarely on Ukraine.  That's a risk, but not as big a risk as House Democrats passing the United States-Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA) on trade - NAFTA Mark Two.  It allows the Democrats to say that they're doing something other than focusing on impeachment, but it gives Trump something to brag about.  However, it faces an uncertain future in the Senate, where a few Republicans could sink the agreement because it gives too many favors to labor interests or makes some products in America too expensive.   Then Trump loses his bragging rights and his ability to take all of the credit for it while Democrats can still say they did their part. 

Meanwhile,an investigation by the Justice Department's Inspector General into Trump's Russia ties during the 2016 presidential campaign - "Crossfire Hurricane," named apparently for a Rolling Stones lyric - shows that the FBI did nothing wrong in the investigation but made some embarrassing mistakes in the process, and that there was no bias against Trump or anyone and no Deep State.  Trump doesn't buy that, of course, and neither does his Attorney General, Bill Barr. Now, under the leadership of its chairman Lindsey Graham, the Senate Judiciary Committee is investigating the FBI further to undermine the IG's report even further and make the FBI look worse.  But making the FBI look bad, considering its past abuses, isn't all that hard to do, given the history of the bureau under J. Edgar Hoover.  And what a coincidence it indeed is that this Senate Judiciary Committee investigation is getting underway just as Clint Eastwood's latest movie as a director about a much more recent case of FBI abuse is opening this weekend.

Richard Jewell.  Yeah, I want to see it . . . you already know what I think about that case.

The Impeachment Inquiry Is Official. Meh.

The House of Representatives officially approved the impeachment inquiry against Trump, but it might as well have passed a resolution declaring November Topaz Jewelry Month (the topaz is the November birthstone).  Not only was it along party lines, but it was never going to satisfy Republicans who, unable to argue the facts, made a strategic argument against the process - which they've already won.  So many depositions in the inquiry have been held behind closed doors that the optics suggested that the Democrats were pushing for impeachment in secret.  Yeah, yeah, I know, the depositions are supposed to be behind closed doors, but while the Democrats may have won in getting badly needed testimony, they've lost the public relations game - like when the Audi 5000 was thought to have an "unintended acceleration" problem when in fact the real problem was that the brake and acceleration pedals were so close and so identical to each other that stupid American drivers couldn't tell the difference between the two.  News flash:  Audi handled the PR over the "scandal" so badly that the brand was almost forced out of the U.S. market. 

At least Audi had a few years to turn things around; the Democrats don't have that long in getting the American people on their side. The primary/caucus season begins in February, and the Democrats still have closed door depositions to take before they can open up the doors and let the sunshine in.  It probably won't happen until the dawning of the age of Aquarius - January 20 at the earliest.  The later it takes to have public hearings on impeachment, the more difficult it will be for them to pick a candidate who can beat Trump.  And the Democrats already have a disadvantage in that they historically are blessed with an easy Republican candidate to beat but cursed with an incredible knack for nominating someone whose election is even more unthinkable.  As far as I'm concerned, today's Democrats could lose an election to the Wicked Queen.      

Biden Time and Warren Warning

Donald Trump keeps producing more evidence that he used his office to collude with the Ukrainian government to have Joe Biden and his son investigated.  Former special Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker just gave Congress a whole record of White House electronic correspondence on the need to get the Ukrainians to investigate Hunter Biden's business dealings in Ukraine in exchange for weapons.  Given the younger Biden's business dealings in China, Trump has publicly called for the Chinese to investigate him as well.  This means Trump is asking two foreign governments to intervene in the 2020 presidential election.  Trump is in deep trouble.

So why do I think he's going to get re-elected in 2020?

Two reasons - Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren.  Biden was reluctant for too long to address the question of his son's business ventures - none of which have proven to be crooked - and when he finally did,  he didn't satisfy a single pundit or primary voter despite his forcefulness.  Biden was the strongest candidate the Democrats had to go against Trump, but Trump's needling of Hunter Biden's business deals in Ukraine and his conflation of that with the former Vice President's efforts to get a Ukrainian prosecutor fired - because of corruption charges against the prosecutor! - have rendered Biden damaged goods.  Trump could then whip him after getting acquitted by the Republican Senate following his impeachment.  The needling . . . and the damage done.

Elizabeth Warren, who now leads in the Democratic primary polls, has no chance of getting elected President because . . . she's a woman.  There, I said it.  But there's another reason she can't get elected - she's a liberal.  You see, a lot of people who would ordinarily not vote for Trump will gladly do so if Warren is his opponent because of her European-style social democratic politics.  She wants Medicare for all!  She wants to tax hedge fund managers!  She wants free college for poor kids!  She may even want  to . . . impose fuel economy standards that will force Americans to give up their F-150s and drive small hatchbacks!  (And make us eat muesli for breakfast.)   You know - she wants us to be like the French.

Trump has neutralized Biden and will encourage the Democrats to nominate Warren the same way Nixon's henchmen neutralized Edmund Muskie in 1972 and got the Democrats to nominate George McGovern, who only carried one state - Massachusetts - in the general election.  A Warren nomination would probably lead to the same result - the Democrats would only carry Massachusetts.  And being liberal is more toxic than being a woman.  If Warren, whose original last name is Herring, were a man named Warren Herring . . . with the same progressive politics . . . and were the 2020 Democratic nominee for President, she/he would still lose. A liberal Democrat named Warren Herring would lose the White House in 2020 as sure as a conservative Republican named Warren Harding won it in 1920.

Did I happen to mention that Warren is from Massachusetts? 

This Is Big!

U.S. Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, is going ahead with an impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump.

Nadler, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, confirmed that, despite what Nancy Pelosi says, his committee is looking into evidence and information regarding Trump's finances and his possible (likely?) ties with Russia to see if any articles of impeachment ought to be brought to the House floor.

"This is formal impeachment proceedings," Nadler told CNN.  "We are investigating all the evidence, we're gathering the evidence. And we will at the conclusion of this - hopefully by the end of the year - vote to vote articles of impeachment to the House floor. Or we won't. That’s a decision that we'll have to make. But that's exactly the process we're in right now."

And the House Judiciary Committee already has access to some of Trump's financial records, despite Trump's attempt to keep them under lock and key.  Further information could come from testimony from former White House counsel Don McGahn, whom the House Judiciary Committee is aggressively pursuing for an appearance to answer questions.  Nadler has made it clear that his probe may not lead to a recommendation of impeachment, but with a majority of House Democrats favoring impeachment and with unforeseen information on Trump yet to come out, don't count on Trump getting off scot-free.  Something has to give.