House Democrats are furious at President Donald Trump and are quickly building momentum to move on impeachment of Trump in the next several days -- as soon as the middle of next week.
Facebook and Instagram have banned Donald Trump, and Twitter has frozen his account. Sen Schumer and Speaker Pelosi have called for the 25th Amendment, or failing that, impeachment.
Elaine Chou and Betsy DeVos have resigned (too cowardly to invoke the 25th?). And Donald Trump is sorry as the House moves to impeach.
I woke up furious.
I have received so much anger from old friends at NPR and the NYT for warning them, telling them, and, yes, sometimes publicly tweeting about how their coverage is normalizing Trump and his followers, legitimizing their lies and downplaying the crisis.
Yesterday's crisis was created by Trump and his followers.
And yesterday showed that many journalists are willing to state that some actions by an elected leader are unacceptable.
But they will return to institutional cowardice.
☀️Punchbowl AM — 🚨House Dems are moving rapidly toward impeaching @realDonaldTrump again. It will easily pass the House. Pelosi is furious. Question is will Senate Republicans flip. Noon House Dem call today. pic.twitter.com/3TCY0p4Xuq
“That is the overwhelming sentiment of my caucus,” from her presser yesterday.
Elaine Chao's resignation, and her husband Mitch McConnell's break with Trump bring to mind what Ruth Ben-Ghiat, authoritarian expert, and author of "Strongmen" calls "The phenomenon of elite defection in the end, when their personal safety is in peril."
Internet detectives are identifying scores of pro-Trump rioters at the Capitol. Some have already been fired.
As he strolled past gold-framed portraits of past Congressional leaders, one rioter who stormed the Capitol in a pro-Trump mob on Wednesday wore a red Trump hat, a commemorative sweatshirt from the president’s inauguration and a lanyard around his neck.
When a photo of him went viral, it didn’t take Internet sleuths long to realize that the lanyard held his work badge— clearly identifying him as an employee of Navistar Direct Marketing, a printing company in Frederick, Md.
He’s not alone among the rioters who wreaked havoc in Congress. While police and the FBI work to identify and arrest members of the mob, online detectives are also crowdsourcing information and doxing them — exposing the rioters to criminal prosecution, but also more immediate action from their bosses.
We need to keep saying this: Democracy reform has to be the top priority for 2021. A fascist minority has used our political system to achieve disproportionate influence, powered by zero-sum demonization. This should never happen again.
Invoke the 25th Amendment: Donald Trump forfeited his moral authority to stay in office
Our View: By egging on a deadly insurrection and hailing the rioters, the president's continuance in office poses unacceptable risks to America
This month, time is short, and Trump retains considerable support among congressional Republicans. Shamefully, even after Wednesday’s insurrection, 139 representatives and eight senators backed Trump’s efforts to overturn the will of the voters in Arizona and Pennsylvania.
That leaves the 25th Amendment, which sets out procedures for replacing an unfit president.
That sound you hear isn't just Democrats cheering, it's the air going out of tomorrow's GOP clown show in Congress. The Fools on the Hill have picked the wrong cause and bet on the wrong horse. #GASenateRaces#SeditionCaucus
Biden climate team says it underestimated Trump's damage
Some climate moves can't happen until Biden officials remedy those deficiencies, a senior transition official said, because "those have been very carefully directed budget cuts to the very parts of the [EPA] that are going to be necessary to get rid of [Trump's] outrageous rollbacks."
For instance, the official said, EPA's research laboratories have been hollowed out, and its science advisory boards have been depopulated. At the operational level, each of Trump's rollbacks has shuffled the staff and funding that had been in place to carry out regulations.
The EPA workforce has shrunk by more than 600 people since the beginning of Trump's term, another source familiar with the agency review process said.
That's on top of the agency's moves to restrict the kinds of public health research that EPA can use for regulations, and its watering down of the social cost of carbon, the government's metric for analyzing the benefits of emissions cuts.
Joe Scarborough went off on Capitol police live on MSNBC: “You opened the fucking doors for em!” pic.twitter.com/4Ydd4Au8HN
The discussions occurred in recent weeks, and it was not clear whether he has brought it up since he incited supporters to march on the Capitol, where some stormed the site.
In several conversations since Election Day, Mr. Trump has told advisers that he is considering giving himself a pardon and, in other instances, asked whether he should and what the effect would be on him legally and politically, according to the two people. It was not clear whether he had broached the topic since he incited his supporters on Wednesday to march on the Capitol, where some stormed the building in a mob attack.
Mr. Trump has shown signs that his level of interest in pardoning himself goes beyond idle musings. He has long maintained he has the power to pardon himself, and his polling of aides’ views is typically a sign that he is preparing to follow through on his aims. He has also become increasingly convinced that his perceived enemies will use the levers of law enforcement to target him after he leaves office.
Answer to a q asked by many: It is unclear if acting secretaries count if 25th Amendment is invoked. Best if Pence had a majority of all the Cabinet, incl them, w a majority of confirmed secretaries. Remember, too, Congress can quickly designate another body instead of Cabinet!
In Los Angeles and Beyond, Oxygen Is the Latest Covid Bottleneck
It’s gotten so bad that Los Angeles County officials are warning paramedics to conserve it. Some hospitals are having to delay releasing patients as they don’t have enough oxygen equipment to send home with them.
“Everybody is worried about what’s going to happen in the next week or so,” said Cathy Chidester, director of the L.A. County Emergency Medical Services Agency.
The mastermind behind the implementation of the Muslim Ban has thoughts on how he would stand up to Trump now https://t.co/ntQAWAUU0M
Democrats are drafting new impeachment articles. Inaction is increasingly untenable.
Some Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are circulating drafts of new articles of impeachment directed at President Trump for his role in inciting the violent mob assault on the Capitol, a Democratic aide tells me.
It’s unclear whether these will get a vote, or whether they’re intended to pressure members of Trump’s Cabinet to seriously consider removing Trump via the 25th Amendment. Judiciary Committee Democrats have already signed a letter urging Vice President Pence to proceed with that process.
And Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who will be senate majority leader in the new Congress, has now called for the 25th Amendment to be invoked, adding in a statement: “If the Vice President and the Cabinet refuse to stand up, Congress should reconvene to impeach the president.”
The new articles of impeachment circulating among House Judiciary Democrats argue that Trump committed high crimes and misdemeanors and violated his oath to defend the Constitution and faithfully execute the office of the presidency by inciting Wednesday’s violence.
💯 For those of us who have covered Trump since 2016, it is hard to overstate how utterly inevitable and unsurprising yesterday’s insurrection felt. There was this amazing — disturbing — video we produced of racism and violence at Trump rallies. 👇(1/3) https://t.co/FCUwFmwdmH
Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy have led Republicans to disaster. They must go.
In 2016, Never Trumpers predicted that by nominating an ignorant and egomaniacal bigot, the Republican Party would lead the country and itself to ruin.
The consequences have proved far worse than even President Trump’s opponents could have predicted. Who, after all, could have imagined that more than 360,000 Americans would die during Trump’s last year in office because of his catastrophic mismanagement of a pandemic? Or that the U.S. Capitol would be invaded by a mob of Trump supporters?
But the political consequences for the Republican Party have not been as dire as they should have been. Until now.
Trump seems to have surrendered his ferocious effort to hang onto power after Congress formally accepted Biden's victory but the nation’s government remained in disarray following a mob attack on the Capitol that struck at the heart of American democracy. https://t.co/PFfNX4dE8x
A new poll released in the aftermath of Wednesday's violent coup attempt—incited by President Donald Trump and enabled by Republican lawmakers who questioned the legitimacy of President-elect Joe Biden's victory—shows that nearly half of GOP voters approve of the pro-Trump mob's storming of the U.S. Capitol, findings that observers say are inseparable from how right-wing media outlets are lying about the insurrection.
YouGov Direct conducted the survey on Wednesday night between 5:17 pm and 5:42 pm. A majority (62%) of the 1,397 registered voters who had heard about the day's events told pollsters that they consider the pro-Trump mob's actions a threat to democracy. But while 93% of Democrats and 55% of Independents perceive what happened as a threat to democracy, only 27% of Republicans see it that way.
In fact, a greater percentage of Republicans (45%) actively support the storming of the Capitol than oppose it (43%). Overall, 71% of registered voters are opposed to the coup attempt, including 96% of Democrats and 67% of Independents.
Among voters who erroneously believe that the presidential election was fraudulent enough to affect the outcome, 56% say the invasion of the halls of Congress was justified.
A majority of registered voters (55%), including 90% of Democrats and 51% of Independents, believe "a great deal of the blame" lies with Trump. Yet, in the eyes of GOP voters, President-elect Joe Biden is the biggest culprit, with 52% assigning some degree of blame to Biden compared to 28% attributing the debacle to Trump.
When it comes to removing Trump from office as a result of what happened at the Capitol—an option that is gaining support among federal lawmakers—50% of registered voters, including 83% of Democrats and 47% of Independents, are in favor. Conversely, 85% of Republicans consider immediate removal inappropriate. [...]
“The age of warrior kings and of warrior presidents has passed. The nuclear age calls for a different kind of leadership.... a leadership of intellect, judgment, tolerance and rationality, a leadership committed to human values, to world peace, and to the improvement of the human condition. The attributes upon which we must draw are the human attributes of compassion and common sense, of intellect and creative imagination, and of empathy and understanding between cultures.”~~J. William Fulbright,
At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—Economic Outrage du Jour: Emails Exposed:
Hugh Son at Bloomberg reports that e-mails forced into the light show that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, parts of whose job is supposedly to be curtailing bankers' riskiest impulses, told American International Group to conceal information about its payments to banks while the financial crisis was unfolding:
AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008. The e-mails were obtained by Representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. ...
"It appears that the New York Fed deliberately pressured AIG to restrict and delay the disclosure of important information," said Issa, a California Republican. Taxpayers "deserve full and complete disclosure under our nation’s securities laws, not the withholding of politically inconvenient information.”
You won't hear any applause in this corner for the obstructionist, ultra-wealthy Darrell Issa. His self-funded recall petition encumbered us Californians with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the governorship, a position Issa himself hoped to capture. His support for English-Only laws, right-wing attacks on ACORN, dissing of the 9/11 widows and other antics since his self-funded campaign put him in Congress epitomize the politics progressives are duty-bound to grind into dust.
But, frankly, if the disclosures in those emails are what Bloomberg and Reuters and others are saying, congressional Democrats ought to be on top of this issue. Must we depend on the richest man in Congress to engage in an oligarch vs. oligarch battle to give us the skinny about what's going on?
Monday through Friday you can catch the Kagro in the Morning Show 9 AM ET by dropping in here, or you can download the Stitcher app (found in the app stores or at Stitcher.com), and find a live stream there, by searching for "Netroots Radio.”
President-elect Joe Biden has stayed mum amid calls from Democrats to invoke the 25th Amendment or pursue articles of impeachment to thwart the last two weeks of the Trump presidency.
Democrats and even a smattering of Republicans eyed options Thursday to immediately oust President Trump from office, but they faced the more likely prospect that they will have to live with him through the Jan. 20 change of power.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Charles E. Schumer, the Senate's ...
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her leadership team are considering a lightning-quick impeachment process if Vice President Mike Pence and the Cabinet refuse to take unprecedented steps to remove President Donald Trump from office in less than two weeks' time, according to multiple Democratic sources.
President Trump continued to make false claims about election fraud Thursday as more Democrats called for his impeachment a day after the attacks in Washington D.C. Yamiche Alcindor and Lisa Desjardins join Woodruff to discuss what the final week's of his administration may look like.
