Trump’s impeachment trial will also be an indictment of Republican lawmakers—and they know it

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

The Republican Party, which has now firmly staked its claim as a “big” tinfoil tent, is deploying some of the very same lawmakers who perpetrated a giant election fraud lie to assure the nation that impeaching Donald Trump is unwarranted, unfair, and unconstitutional.

“I mean, the House is impeaching him under the theory that his speech created a riot,” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told Face The Nation Sunday despite being directly involved himself with pushing the very lie that fueled the deadly riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6. At one point, Graham even pressured Georgia officials to commit fraud themselves in order to overturn the election. 

But that's where the Senate GOP is: pushing out liars who lied to poke holes in the impeachment case assembled by House Democrats. Please proceed, senators, because the impeachment presentation Democrats are getting ready to make starting on Tuesday is going to be a doozy.

“The story of the president’s actions is both riveting and horrifying,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and the lead prosecutor, told The New York Times. “We think that every American should be aware of what happened — that the reason he was impeached by the House and the reason he should be convicted and disqualified from holding future federal office is to make sure that such an attack on our democracy and Constitution never happens again.”

The Democrats' case will rely heavily on a video recreation of the violent siege, viscerally reminding both lawmakers and citizens alike of the trauma Trump inflicted on the nation that day. Since Democrats will need the votes of at least 17 GOP senators to convict Trump and only five have signaled a willingness to consider the arguments on their merits, winning a Senate conviction seems unlikely. But convicting Trump and his GOP enablers in the court of public opinion is clearly worth the energy—particularly as Republicans spend the next couple years whining about President Biden sidelining them in his effort address the country's urgent needs. Congressional Republicans spent four years helping Trump shred the U.S. Constitution in pursuit of stealing another election. Now they think they deserve to be equal players in a presidency they sought to nullify by overturning the will of the people. Democrats are going to remind The People that Trump engineered an attack on the homeland specifically to disenfranchise them and the Republican Party aided and abetted that effort.

Republicans' chief argument against convicting Trump is that it's unconstitutional since he's no longer in office. But remember—Sen. Mitch McConnell stalled the Senate trial until Trump was safely out of office. As luck would have it, Senate Republicans are now basing their key defense strategy on a loophole McConnell created.

But it's not only a phony loophole, it’s also a weak loophole at that. The notion that presidents can't be held to account for their conduct during the entirety of their tenure is ludicrous. As the House impeachment managers wrote in their brief, "There is no 'January Exception' to impeachment or any other provision of the Constitution." 

Even conservative stalwart and constitutional law expert Charles Cooper is calling BS on the notion that a president can't be held accountable for their actions in office merely because they are no longer in office. Specifically because the Senate has the constitutional authority to bar people from holding office in the future, Cooper argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “it defies logic to suggest that the Senate is prohibited from trying and convicting former officeholders.”

So GOP efforts to discredit the impeachment trial come down to sending out a bunch of discredited Republican lawmakers to make a preposterous constitutional argument based on circumstances that they themselves manufactured.

Sounds totally reasonable, said nobody who was sane enough to vote for Biden in the first place. And just maybe a few people who voted for Trump but were repulsed by the lethal Jan. 6 riot—or who had hoped the Republican Party would redeem itself in a post-Trump era—will find the Republican posture equally as revolting. The Capitol siege already set in motion a wave of conservative voters who are fleeing the party. The sentiment fueling those defections is only likely to gain steam as Americans watch the impeachment trial and the GOP’s bogus defense of Trump and, by extension, themselves.

Republicans ‘big’ tinfoil tent transformation is the gift that will keep on giving to Democrats

Posted on (Updated by Kerry Eleveld

"I've been freed," bragged QAnon Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on Friday, the day after House Democrats forced a vote to strip the reality-adjacent, pugnacious provocateur of her committee assignments because her GOP counterparts refused to do so.

Greene—whose momentary show of near-contrition Thursday melted away by Friday—blasted Democrats as "morons" for elevating her platform, or giving her "free time," as she put it in a tweet. "Oh this is going to be fun!" Greene declared—an apparent threat, now that the shackles of decency are off and she's done pretending she's anything other than a menace to society, not to mention the republic itself.

But Greene isn't the only one who has been freed. After nearly two months of witnessing Republicans spit in the face of democracy, Democrats watched the GOP's depravity sink to a new low this week. Not only are Republicans the party of sedition, by circling the wagons around Greene they have refashioned their so-called "big tent" to include everyone from traditional fiscal conservatives to loathsome Nazis and white supremacists, fanatical militia members and extremists, and wackadoodle conspiracy theorists. In short, the GOP is now a big tinfoil tent—an explosive experiment that could detonate at any moment. 

And guess what—many of those traditional fiscal conservatives are fleeing the tent as fast as humanly possible. In fact, ever since the November election, tens of thousands of conservative voters across the country have been defecting from the Republican Party, a trend that spiked in the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. In Colorado, for instance, the GOP lost about a half a percent of its registered voters in the single week following the riot, according to NPR. Similar trends are taking place in multiple states, including some that will be central to the 2022 battle for control of the Senate, such as Arizona, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania—where nearly 10,000 Keystone State voters dropped out of the Republican Party in the first 25 days of the year, according to The Hill.

The House Democratic campaign arm is already on it, moving aggressively to rebrand House Republicans as the Q-caucus. As Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, the new chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told POLITICO, Republicans "can do QAnon, or they can do college-educated voters. They cannot do both."

But as Republicans transform into a tinfoil tent community, Democrats are experiencing an equal and opposite reaction of sorts—an unrestrained clarity of vision and purpose. After all, why bother listening to a party so toxic it just rallied around someone calling for executions of your own members? Not only did House Democrats move without equivocation to strip Greene of her power, House impeachment managers put Donald Trump on the spot by inviting him to testify under oath for his impeachment trial. Trump, ever the coward, quickly declined, but that conversation may not be over, since the Senate could potentially subpoena him. 

And as long as we're on the subject of Trump, President Joe Biden told CBS News he thinks Trump should be stripped of his intelligence briefings, citing his “erratic” behavior. "What value is giving him an intelligence briefing?" Biden said. "What impact does he have at all, other than the fact he might slip and say something?"

Democrats also greased the legislative skids this week for passage of President Biden's American Rescue Plan by a simple majority vote in the Senate, sidelining the necessity of winning GOP votes. Democrats might still lamentably trim back who is eligible for the $1,400 direct payments, but overall, this is the relief package Biden and Democrats promised on the campaign trail. And despite an incessant drumbeat of questions from reporters about the quaint notion of bipartisanship, Biden hasn't blinked.

"If I have to choose between getting help right now to Americans," Biden said Friday, "and getting bogged down in a lengthy negotiation or compromising on a bill that's up to the crisis, that's an easy choice. I'm going to help the American people who are hurting now." Biden also invoked the Defense Production Act and mobilized more than 1,000 active duty troops to help increase the rate of vaccinations and make 61 million more coronavirus tests available by summer. 

Overall, Biden's White House and Congressional Democrats have taken a muscular no-nonsense approach to getting the nation back on its feet and providing quick relief to the Americans who need it most.

In some ways, progressives owe a debt of gratitude to Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell, who burned the bridge of good will beyond recognition in the last Democratic administration, and Kevin McCarthy, who has turned the GOP into a haven for the dangerous and unmoored. Democrats will spend the next several weeks making that transformation abundantly clear to the American people during a vivid recreation of the deadly Capitol riot that was inspired by Trump and underwritten by his GOP enablers. 

And just as soon as Trump’s Senate impeachment trial concludes, Democrats will likely be in position to punctuate the differences between the two parties by delivering a desperately needed relief bill to the American people.

It's a promising start—a foundation from which to build. Success begets success. But the stickier issues are yet to come. Even Biden admitted to CBS that he doesn't think his $15 minimum wage proposal will "survive" in the rescue package given the Senate rules on reconciliation. At some point, the rubber is going to have to meet the road on eliminating the filibuster so Democrats can continue delivering results at a time when Americans need their government to go to bat for them. But building momentum is at least a good place for Democrats to start. 

House Republicans became the Party of Q this week. Democrats won’t let voters forget it in 2022

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

The word "nightmare" is trending in Republican circles lately. Thursday Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina characterized the idea of Donald Trump testifying at his impeachment trial as "a nightmare for the country." Or as a Politico headline put it, "Trump's allies fear the impeachment trial could be a PR nightmare"—which is what Graham really meant.  

Democrats agree, and the House Democratic campaign arm is moving quickly to bring that nightmare home to the House GOP, which officially declared itself the QAnon caucus this week when 199 of its 211 members voted against stripping its chief Q adherent, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, of her committee assignments. 

In its opening salvo in the 2022 battle for control of the House, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released a campaign ad indicting House Republicans for standing "with Q not you." The ad places the conspiracy cult at the center of the deadly Jan. 6 riot, saying that QAnon "with Donald Trump, incited a mob that attacked the Capitol and murdered a cop."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi previewed the strategy this week when she referred to GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy as "Qevin McCarthy, Q-CA" in a tweet. McCarthy helpfully lived up to the moniker by refusing to remove Greene from her committee assignments and forcing his caucus to go on record in support of someone who not only espouses QAnon, but has also endorsed the execution of Pelosi and other Democrats and has verbally assaulted survivors of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. And frankly, that's just a small taste of Greene's abhorrent quackery.

House Democrats are betting that won't play well in the very districts that will likely decide control of the House for the second half of President Joe Biden's term.

"If Kevin McCarthy wants to take his party to ‘crazy town’ and follow these dangerous ideas, he shouldn't expect to do well in the next election,” Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, the new chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told Politico. "They can do QAnon, or they can do college-educated voters. They cannot do both."

According to Politico, the DCCC's $500,000 TV and digital ad campaign will run in the districts of seven vulnerable Republicans: Reps. Mike Garcia, Young Kim and Michelle Steel of California; Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida; Don Bacon of Nebraska; Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania; and Beth Van Duyne of Texas.

Democrats' early decision to nationalize the race is a notable departure from their strategy in 2018, when they deployed a hyper-localized message around health care that ultimately netted them an historic 41 seats. Of course, the backdrop to that strategy was the GOP's repeated efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would have stripped millions of Americans of their coverage.

The backdrop to this decision were the horrific events of Jan. 6, an insurrection at the Capitol that Americans couldn’t have even imagined before they watched in horror as it played out in real time on screens across the country. A Yahoo News/YouGuv survey released this week found that 81% of Americans said the attack wasn't justified. And more than 9 in 10 Americans expressed revulsion about the attack, saying it made them feel “angry,” “ashamed” or “fearful.” 

Democrats will now have several weeks worth of a Senate trial to remind people of that revulsion and how the GOP underwrote that deadly attack before, during, and after it took place through its unyielding support of Trump's lies and its embrace of extremist groups like QAnon.

Democrats’ bet is that after they deliver results on COVID-19 relief, they will be able to head into 2022 saying that Democrats stood with the American people while Republicans stood with QAnon.

‘Like a loaded cannon’: House Democrats argue Trump trained murderous mob on U.S. Capitol

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

House Democrats didn't mince words in the 77-page brief they filed Tuesday arguing for the conviction of Donald Trump on impeachment charges. "He summoned a mob to Washington, exhorted them into a frenzy, and aimed them like a loaded cannon down Pennsylvania Avenue,” wrote the nine Democratic impeachment managers led by Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland.

Trump's actions on Jan. 6, they said, endangered the lives of lawmakers, threatened the peaceful transition of power and line of succession, and damaged U.S. national security. Democrats called those actions a "grievous betrayal of his Oath of Office" that should clearly preclude Trump from ever holding office again.

"To protect our democracy and national security—and to deter any future President who would consider provoking violence in pursuit of power—the Senate should convict President Trump and disqualify him from future federal officeholding," they wrote.

The brief is intended to rebut several arguments Trump's defense team might employ, including the notion that impeachment would violate Trump’s First Amendment rights or that it would be unconstitutional or simply unnecessary to impeach him now that he is no longer in office. 

"The Constitution governs the first day of the President’s term, the last day, and every moment in between. Presidents do not get a free pass to commit high crimes and misdemeanors near the end of their term," write the impeachment managers. Later, they add, "There is no 'January Exception' to impeachment or any other provision of the Constitution."

Democrats also used the characterizations of prominent Republicans to buttress their case, noting that Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney said no president had ever committed a "greater betrayal" of their oath to the Constitution and Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said the mob "was fed lies" and had been "provoked by the president."

The brief also calls upon the words of the rioters themselves to indict Trump. 

Provoked by President Trump’s statements at the rally, many insurrectionists who assaulted the Capitol proudly proclaimed that they were doing President Trump’s bidding. One told police officers that he came as part of a group of “patriots” “at the request of the President." In a livestreamed video from inside the Capitol, another declared that “[o]ur president wants us here. … We wait and take orders from our president." Yet another rioter yelled at police officers, “[w]e were invited here … by the President of the United States!”

The brief lays out a timeline demonstrating how long Trump allowed the murderous siege to go on before addressing his supporters and encouraging them to leave the Capitol. Even within that scripted video address, Democrats note, Trump continued his incitement, saying the election was "stolen from us" and telling the violent insurrectionists, "We love you, you're very special."

"President Trump’s incitement of insurrection requires his conviction and disqualification from future federal officeholding," the Democrats conclude. "This is not a case where elections alone are a sufficient safeguard against future abuse; it is the electoral process itself that President Trump attacked and that must be protected from him and anyone else who would seek to mimic his behavior."

Failure to convict, they add, would only "embolden" future leaders to retain power by any means possible and "suggest that there is not a line a President cannot cross."

Lawyers for Trump were also expected to file a brief Tuesday that will likely steer clear of Trump’s election fraud claims, according to the New York Times.

UPDATE: Trump’s impeachment response has been released. CNN’s Jim Acosta says, “It argues constitution ‘requires that a person actually hold office to be impeached’ and that Trump was exercising his First Amendment right to question election results.”

After exhibiting signs of integrity, Trump’s impeachment lawyers simply had to go

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

Donald Trump repels integrity of any kind. Anyone who exhibits even a smidge of it must be immediately stricken from his presence, which is exactly what happened this weekend with Trump's top impeachment lawyers.

Trump has been insisting that his impeachment defense center around the big lie that he won the election and it was stolen from him. Karl "Butch" Bowers Jr. and four other lawyers on Trump's defense team abruptly quit over the weekend because they refused to mount his defense on a gigantic lie, according to The Washington Post. Instead, they had pushed to make the case that trying a president who was no longer in office was unconstitutional, reinforcing an argument that most mainstream legal scholars reject but that was nonetheless embraced last week by the 45 GOP senators who voted against proceeding with the trial.

But the situation was clearly untenable. Trump simply can't function in a world where the reality is that he's a big loser. So any legal team that insists on a reality-based approach that instead focuses on constitutional arguments is automatically disqualified. Trump repels integrity. Always. 

"The former president repeatedly said he wanted to litigate the voter fraud allegations and the 2020 race — and was seeking a more public defense of his actions. Bowers told Trump he couldn’t mount the defense that Trump wanted," writes the Post.

That left Trump—who had struggled for weeks to find lawyers willing to defend him—without a defense team just over a week before his impeachment trial is set to begin on Feb. 9.

On Sunday evening, Trump's office announced two new lawyers as his defense team: Atlanta-based trial attorney David Schoen and Bruce Castor Jr., a former district attorney in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Schoen recently represented Trump bestie Roger Stone as he appealed his conviction for lying and obstructing a congressional investigation into 2016 election interference. The Post reports that Schoen was also in talks to represent convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who was facing sex trafficking charges just before his death inside a jail cell in 2019, so that gives us an idea of Schoen's typical clientele. It only makes sense that he would take on Trump, who has lived his life palling around with people like Stone and Epstein. Castor seems to be of a piece too. NBC reports that in 2005 Castor declined to pursue charges against Bill Cosby for a sexual encounter in 2004 that ultimately became the basis for Cosby's 2018 sexual assault conviction when a different prosecutor tried the case.

Only the best from Trump, who is clearly cooking up yet another lesson in depravity for America. 

Meanwhile, House Democrats have been working "round-the-clock" on an impeachment presentation designed to provide a gripping presentation of how Trump’s words and actions directly incited the Jan. 6 mob to action at the Capitol.

Yes, the Republican Party is aiding and abetting terrorism. It’s worse than you think

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

GOP House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy jetted to Florida this week to kiss the ring of the man who tried to get him and his congressional colleagues killed at the Capitol on Jan. 6. McCarthy, who is now groveling at Donald Trump's feet after admitting he "bears responsibility" for the violent siege, was there to enlist Trump's help in retaking the House majority in the midterms. "United and ready to win in '22," McCarthy tweeted following his unconditional surrender to Trump, as the Trump campaign circulated a garish photo of the two making nice.

And after letting reports flourish earlier this month that he believed Trump had committed impeachable offenses, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell joined 44 of his GOP colleagues in casting a vote to discredit Trump's impeachment trial before it even starts. McConnell, who ensured Trump's trial wouldn't begin until he had already left office, provided his caucus the escape hatch of claiming the trial is unconstitutional precisely because Trump has left office. Right on cue, McConnell's lieutenants have piped up to tell us why they don't have to lift a finger to hold Trump accountable. "I think he's been held accountable in the court of public opinion already,” Sen. John Cornyn of Texas told CNN.

But more importantly, McConnell, who was straddling the fence between truth telling and sedition abetting, has come down squarely on the side of the seditionists. 

Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the only GOP congressional leader who has unequivocally told the truth about Trump's "betrayal" of the nation without going squishy, has now found herself the subject of a targeted revenge campaign by Trump and his henchmen. The lion's share of Cheney's time over the next two years will be consumed with an existential battle to retain her leadership post, survive a Republican primary for her seat, and, well, just plain survive.

In the meantime, federal agents at FBI headquarters are likely drawing links between at least a handful of Republican lawmakers and right-wing extremist groups in spoke-and-wheel analysis charts—a proposition former FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi marveled over on MSNBC. "To think that the images of U.S. members of Congress are now on those connected-dots charts inside some office at FBI headquarters is unbelievable to me," he said on Friday. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rather bluntly referred to a group of radical GOP lawmakers this week as the enemy “within,” as her Democratic members lobby for increased personal protection from their Republican counterparts.

But as damning as the extremest links of GOP representatives like Arizona's Paul Gosar and Georgia's Marjorie Taylor Greene are, it's the election fraud lies Republican leaders continue to stoke that present the gravest long-term threat to our democracy. Left to fester unchecked among the masses, those lies will lead to violence, mass destruction, and even systemic abuse of innocent Americans by the U.S. government if an autocrat-in-waiting rises to power. And plenty of those autocrat wannabes are waiting in the wings to capitalize on the unrest alongside Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas. 

Just this week, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who has led particularly lethal nonresponse to the pandemic, refused to answer whether Biden's 2020 victory was the result of a free and fair election. In November, Noem claimed the election was "rigged," and she clearly wants that characterization to remain her most decisive declaration about Trump's loss.

And Fox News host Tucker Carlson is weaponizing the federal government's new effort to crack down on fringe white supremacist and domestic terror groups. After playing a clip this week of Rep. Adam Schiff of California saying federal law enforcement officials should retool in order to combat domestic extremism “just as we did after 9/11 to the threat from international terrorism,” Carlson twisted the sentiment into an ad hominem attack on all GOP voters. 

“Got that? Vote the wrong way, and you are a jihadi," Carlson said. “You thought you were an American citizen with rights and just a different view, but no, you’re a jihadi, and we’re going to treat you the way we treated those radicals after 9/11, the way we treated bin Laden. Get in line, pal. This is a war on terror."

No, it's not a war on Republican voters, it's a battle against right-wing groups and individuals who resort to violence as a means of achieving political ends. But what we must now accept as Americans is that one of the parties in our two-party system is helping to radicalize domestic terrorists in the homeland. In other words, it is functionally working as a domestic terrorist organization, or House Speaker Na By failing to tell Republican voters the truth about Trump's bogus election fraud lie or, worse yet, selling the dangerous notion that GOP voters are being targeted simply for their views, Republican leaders are fueling a sense of helplessness that leads people to believe their only option is to upend the system.

"When those individuals embrace the former president's rhetoric... when they embrace the extremist rhetoric that the democratic process is broken and the election was stolen, they put people in this mindset that their only recourse is violence and no longer through the political process," explained Miles Taylor, the person who once penned the dubious "Anonymous" op-ed in the New York Times, but who nonetheless has a window into domestic terrorism and the Trump administration's efforts to cover up the threat. Speaking with MSNBC on Thursday, Taylor called the GOP's posture "extraordinarily dangerous," adding that "we've never seen anything like it" in modern American times. 

To be clear, our current political picture is one of democracy in retreat, and the Republican party is actively fueling that destabilization. Violence of the kind we saw on Jan. 6 is only the tip of the iceberg, and the vast majority of GOP officials are either afraid of the monster now devouring their party (e.g. Ohio Sen. Rob Portman retiring) or hideously trying to figure out how to capitalize on the outrage to their own political benefit. 

But as Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank observed, "Democracy can’t function at the point of a gun." 

No, it cannot. Any normal column would end about now, but the question clearly is: What do we about all this to save our democracy? And while I don't have all the answers, I'll offer a few brief insights, most of which were inspired by the Throughline podcast on The anatomy of tyranny with historian Timothy Snyder (I highly recommend a listen and see the follow up episode with Russian-born journalist Masha Gessen has also dropped).

In brief, we need a dual short-term and long-term approach. In the short term, Democrats need to keep winning elections. Period. But on top of that, we must actually deliver on making people's lives better and more stable through providing decent jobs, dependable health care, and particularly right now, immediate economic relief. As Snyder noted, chaos and instability only feed the beast by making people feel more helpless and resentful. In order for people to have the bandwidth to listen to each other in a democracy, they must have some measure of stability and the prospect of opportunity in their lives.

Longer term, we absolutely must hold Trump accountable in order to knock him down from his demigod status among Trumpers and also keep him from creating a shadow presidency (for which he is clearly already in the process of consolidating power). The FBI must rigorously be monitoring extremists and prosecuting them, which sounds obvious. But the people who attacked the Capitol must be clearly marked as having participated in a crime against the state. And more federal resources must be devoted to the effort to root out domestic terrorism.

But the bigger goal here is to do everything we possibly can to keep Trump's "big lie" about election fraud and, more broadly, disenfranchisement from living on unchallenged in such a way that it gains steam over a period of years. Snyder, the author of On Tyranny, told Throughline it's the type of lie that many German's believed about Jews that Hitler helped fuel and then capitalized on to seize and consolidate power. Here's Snyder on a separate NPR piece: 

A big lie has singular potency, says Timothy Snyder, the Levin Professor of History at Yale University, whose books include studies of Hitler, Josef Stalin, the Holocaust and tyranny.

"There are lies that, if you believe in them, rearrange everything," he says.

"Hannah Arendt, the political thinker, talked about the fabric of reality," Snyder says. "And a big lie is a lie which is big enough that it tears the fabric of reality."

In his cover story for The New York Times Magazine this week, Snyder calls Trump "the high priest of the big lie."

As for where big lies lead, Snyder writes: "Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president."

"When I say pre-fascism, I mean when you take away facts, you're opening the way for something else," Snyder tells NPR. "You're opening the way for someone who says 'I am the truth. I am your voice,' to quote Mr. Trump — which is something that fascists said, as a matter of fact. The three-word chants, the idea that the press are the enemy of the people: These are all fascist concepts."

"It doesn't mean that Trump is quite a fascist himself," Snyder adds. "Imagine what comes after that, right? Imagine if the big lie continues. Imagine if there's someone who's more skillful in using it than he is. Then we're starting to move into clearly fascist territory."

All of this is much too big to address in one piece, but we need more real facts to reach people who are instead turning to sources like YouTube and Facebook to selectively reinforce their worldview. Part of that is because local newsrooms across the country have been decimated. Part of it also due to lack of education and critical thinking skills. We must make education affordable and find ways to build fact-based news back into American life, so that it isn't only accessible to the elite. 

And finally, as much as I'm not a fan almost any Republican, we desperately need the ones who have at least been willing to tell the truth about Trump's lie. The 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach and the five Senate Republicans who at least voted to proceed with the trial can be at base be part of the solution even if some of them have also done considerable damage as part of the problem. We should absolutely be trying to defeat every Republican at the ballot box, but I'm at least willing to give these 15 Republicans a small piece of credit. To greater and lesser extents, some of them actually put their lives on the line because that's how rabid the fringes of the GOP base have become.

Anyway, much of the short- and long-term solutions involve developing a more robust welfare state. Republicans will spend the next four years crowing that we simply cannot afford it, because deficit (which they didn't give a damn about for the last four years). What's clear given where we are now is that we can't afford not make these investments because cost of not doing so could be democracy itself.

QAnon extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene moves up as Trump’s House allies fixate on ousting Liz Cheney

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

The news isn't good for Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who dared admit the truth that Donald Trump's insurrection at the Capitol was the greatest "betrayal" by any commander in chief in American history.

On Thursday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy traveled to Mar-a-Lago to suck up to the guy who tried to have him and his fellow lawmakers killed. “United and ready to win in ’22,” McCarthy tweeted following his meeting with Trump, referring to the GOP effort to reclaim the House majority.

As McCarthy chummed it up with Trump in Florida, pet Trump seditionist and Sunshine State representative Matt Gaetz jetted off to Cheney's home state to rail against her reelection. "Defeat Liz Cheney in this upcoming election, and Wyoming will bring Washington to its knees," Gaetz told hundreds of mostly maskless attendees. 

Gaetz topped off his Cheney hate tour Thursday night with a hit on Fox News in which he urged McCarthy to put Cheney's leadership post within the GOP caucus up for a vote.

“Kevin McCarthy needs to hold a vote on Liz Cheney,” Gaetz told Fox host Tucker Carlson. “And if he doesn’t, the Republican Conference is a total joke. More than half of the Republican conference has said that this person does not speak for us.”

But while McCarthy and Gaetz line up to do Trump's revenge bidding, House Republicans have been burying their heads in the sand about their very own pro-assassination QAnoner and 'space laser' enthusiast Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

Greene has been trying to systematically erase her dark trail of social media posts in which, for instance, she promoted executing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and called Parkland school shooting survivor and gun control activist David Hogg a "coward," suggesting he was being "paid to do this." Greene is also a Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting denier, claiming the horrific mass shooting that took the lives of 27 victims—including 20 children—was staged.

Hogg had urged McCarthy over Twitter to deny Greene any committee placements given her reprehensible behavior, not to mention her unfitness for office. In a separate post, he also explained the horror of a group of teenaged shooting survivors being harassed by a 44-year-old woman. 

”In that video you see a group of people most of whom are 18 or 19 acting calm cool and collected,” he wrote, “what you don't see are the sleepless nights, the flashbacks, the hyper vigilance and deep pitch black numbness so many of us feel living in a society [where] we are told our friends dying doesn’t matter.”

House Republicans' abhorrent response was to assign Greene to the House Education and Labor Committee—a move Pelosi called "appalling."

"What could they be thinking?" Pelosi asked on Wednesday. "Or is thinking too generous a word for what they might be doing? It's absolutely appalling, and I think the focus has to be on the Republican leadership of this House of Representatives for the disregard they have for the death of those children."

Mark Barden and Nicole Hockley, who lost their children Daniel Barden and Dylan Hockley respectively in the Sandy Hook shooting, called Greene's placement on the committee "an attack on any and every family whose loved ones were murdered in mass shootings that have now become fodder for hoaxers."

Any party that hadn't been infiltrated by homegrown domestic terrorists might be turning its attention to expelling Greene from their midst rather than giving her a bigger platform. Instead, House Republicans are fixated on a debate around demoting Cheney for telling the truth and ousting her from Congress altogether.

It’s not good news for Cheney—but it’s even worse news for America. 

A third of Trump voters are ready to jump GOP ship for the ‘Patriot Party’

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

Fully 81% of Republican voters still get warm fuzzies when they think of Donald Trump, with 54% feeling "strongly" about their adoration, according to a newly released Politico/Morning Consult survey taken Jan. 23-25. That whole attack Trump orchestrated on the homeland—whatevs. In fact, positive views of Trump have bounced back a handful of points since the outlet's Jan. 10-12 survey taken shortly after the riot. The survey also found that 75% of GOP voters disapprove of the Senate following through with an impeachment trial for Trump, with just 18% backing it.

So if you're wondering why 45 Senate Republicans just voiced their opposition to putting Trump on trial for his role in inciting the Capitol siege, it's because none of them have the faintest idea how to win elections without Trump—the guy who helped the GOP forfeit the White House, the House, and the Senate in just four years' time. Impressive. 

On top of that, Trump's musings about forming a so-called "Patriot Party" have piqued the interest of more than a third of 2020 Trump voters (35%) and 30% of Republican voters overall. In fact, Trump's Patriot Party splits both groups of voters—Republicans and Trump voters—roughly into thirds, with a third sticking with the GOP, a third interested in joining the new party, and a third who say they aren't interested in affiliating with either party or else hold no opinion on the matter.

Trump, the great divider, is working his magic on the Republican Party and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. And no one in the Republican Party is inspired enough to chart a new course to winning more voters over to their side. 

Loser Trump is all they've got. 

Trump plots death-by-a-thousand-cuts for Republican Party

Posted on (Updated by Kerry Eleveld

Aides to Donald Trump have apparently jingled some keys in front of him just long enough to divert him away from forming his own party, but that has only renewed his focus on torturing what remains of the Republican Party. First and foremost, that means figuring out how to exact revenge on Republicans who crossed him on impeachment, such as Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. 

But Trump's dark cloud extends far beyond some dozen or so GOP congressional lawmakers all the way into the states, where parties are veering far right. Arizona is perhaps the best example, where the Republican Party voted to censure former GOP Sen. Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain for opposing Trump, and Republican Gov. Doug Ducey for failing to steal the election for Trump (i.e., certifying the election results).

At the same time, Trump also plans to meddle in the GOP's effort to retake the U.S. Senate. In fact, he's already arguably hobbled the party's efforts—after being censured, Ducey decided not to run for the state’s Senate seat in 2022, where newly elected Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly will be trying to win a full term following his special election victory last November. 

But Arizona's Senate race is just the beginning. Republicans are now facing 2022 battles for open seats they currently control following Republican Senate retirements in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina—a list that could easily expand. And this is where Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Trump will almost surely be at loggerheads over who the party should nominate to run for those seats. In Ohio, for instance, Trumper and seditionist Rep. Jim Jordan seems like a shoo-in for backing by Trump. But while Jordan's radical stances and questionable personal history are a perfect fit for his district, he's likely not the strongest statewide candidate. 

More broadly, McConnell surely wants to claim ownership over the center of gravity of the national party, but that will be impossible as long as Trump is squatting on his turf. That is particularly true because Trump remains a fundraising juggernaut at the moment, with tens of millions in PAC money at his disposal and almost no limitations on what he can do with it. And as we all know, Trump has zero allegiances to achieving real goals for the party, such as winning back the Senate or retaking the House. Trump's only real goal is getting revenge and maintaining his stranglehold on the GOP. If Trump blows a few elections in the process, meh—that's of little concern to him as long he can throw his weight around. 

Speaking of which, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is still trying to claw his way back into Trump's good graces after admitting on the House floor that Trump played a role in helping to incite the Capitol riot. Of course, McCarthy also went full seditionist, opposing certification of the election results and voting against Trump's impeachment. But Trump only ever fixates on the negative—it's part of his charm. 

So state Republican parties are severing their ties to the moderating forces that once made the GOP safe for suburban voters, Trump and McConnell are about to go to war on Senate candidates, and McCarthy is chasing his own tail in the House and coming up short every time. On top of that, an ominous fundraising cloud continues to hang over the seditionist caucus.

Other than that, everything's perfectly copacetic. Oh, and if you want some insight into how those warring factions have been working out electorally for Republicans, look no further than Georgia, where twin GOP losses just handed control of the Senate to Democrats.

An unapologetic Biden is finally saying goodbye to the centrism that hobbled Democrats for decades

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

As Barack Obama's inauguration kicked off on Jan. 20, 2009, LGBTQ Americans across the country watched with mixed emotions while evangelical pastor Rick Warren delivered the invocation. Though the vast majority of them had voted for Obama, Warren had urged members of his California-based megachurch to vote in favor of a ballot measure stripping marriage rights from same-sex couples; indeed, Proposition 8 narrowly passed on the same night Obama was elevated to the highest office in the land. Election Night had been a double-edged sword for gay and transgender individuals, and Warren's presence made the inauguration bittersweet as well.

But Obama's pick of Warren symbolized what ultimately emerged as a stumbling block to his ability to accomplish many of the priorities liberals had voted for in 2008 and which were also broadly popular—action on immigration, climate change, and, at least initially, queer rights. Obama was an incrementalist at heart, and he was still approaching Republicans as rational players in America's democratic experiment. Including an anti-gay evangelical pastor in his inauguration was one of several olive branches Obama extended to conservatives in the early days of his administration in what would prove to be a fruitless effort to win their cooperation. A dozen years later, however, Obama's former No. 2—a man who was viewed in the 2020 Democratic primary as far less progressive than Obama had been in the 2008 contest—is quickly advancing a far more unapologetically progressive agenda from Day One of his administration.

In fact, President Joe Biden has quickly dispensed of many of the old Obama-era battles that flummoxed liberals and eventually drew them to the streets to protest the administration's inaction. Biden has already sent Congress a bold immigration bill that unequivocally includes a pathway to citizenship, expanded green card access, and fortifies the DACA program for Dreamers established by Obama in 2012. Biden also immediately yanked the Keystone XL pipeline permit—an action Obama didn't take until 2015, after years of pushing by climate activists. And building on the many hard-fought Obama-era wins on LGBTQ equality, Biden quickly signed an order pushing the most aggressive interpretation of Title VII protections for transgender and gay Americans in employment, housing, and education.  

Sure, these are old battles. And to some extent, Biden has benefited from a natural evolution of the issues over a decade. That is particularly true on policies concerning the LGBTQ movement, which emerged from Obama's presidency lightyears ahead of where it began. But it is also a measure of how far the progressive movement has come over the past decade that we aren't immediately having to go to battle with a Democratic administration that seems less intent on advancing liberal causes than using them as bargaining chips on the way to accomplishing other goals. So far, that vestige of 90s-era Clintonian politics seems to have finally been laid to rest in the Biden White House. 

The departure is clearly throwing some Washington journalists for a loop after decades of watching Democrats kowtow to Republicans.

During Thursday's White House press briefing, The New York Times' Michael Shear fixated on why President Biden wasn't extending more olive branches to Republicans, like Obama had in early 2009. Biden, for instance, doesn't have any GOP Cabinet members such as Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates—a holdover from the Bush administration. Shear also marveled that Biden's first directives were "largely designed at erasing as much of the Trump legacy as you can with executive orders"—the inference being that such an aggressive rejection of Trump policies would turn off Republicans, thereby crushing all comity. Gee, what ever happened to "elections have consequences"? 

Part of what has gotten lost in translation for journalists is the word "unity," which Biden peppered throughout his inaugural address in some form or another no less than 11 times. Washington journalists view the word almost exclusively as a measure of bipartisan compromise. And to be fair, Biden's emphasis during the Democratic primaries on working with Republicans worried many liberals too. But whatever Biden meant by his compromise talk during the campaign, his definition of unity now appears to be centered around coming together to save America's democratic experiment. This political moment is simply that “dire,” as White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki put it, that fraught. In Biden’s view, no true American patriot needs to sacrifice their values or core beliefs in order to mobilize against white supremacy and the corrosive scourge of disinformation.

In his inaugural address, Biden decried "lies told for power and for profit" and named the truth as one of the "common objects we love" as Americans. Lawmakers, he said, "who have pledged to honor our Constitution and protect our nation," bear a special responsibility to "defend the truth and to defeat the lies."

Biden also declared war on white supremacy, imploring Americans to unite in battling the nation's "common foes" of "extremism, lawlessness, violence."

In response, many Republicans are already reverting to their old tricks. They are calling Trump's impeachment divisive—as if siccing a murderous mob on the Capitol to overturn an election was a great unifier. They say they are uncomfortable with holding a trial for a president who is no longer in office—as if watching the nation's chief executive unleash an attack on the homeland wasn't uncomfortable for the vast majority of Americans.

As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters this week: "The fact is, the president of the United States committed an act of incitement of insurrection. I don’t think it’s very unifying to say, ‘oh, let’s just forget it and move on.’ That’s not how you unify."

And the very same Republicans who saddled taxpayers with some $2 trillion in debt to pass a giant tax giveaway to the rich and corporate-y, are now lining up against Biden's $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package to help struggling Americans and shore up the economy.

“The one thing that concerns me that nobody seems to be talking about anymore is the massive amount of debt that we continue to rack up as a nation,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, who voiced no such concerns before casting his 2017 vote for the GOP's tax bonanza for nation's wealthiest.

The White House has consistently said Biden believes there is bipartisan appeal for the relief package priorities, such as funding for unemployment insurance, vaccinations, and opening schools. “What are you going to cut?" Psaki posited at her first press briefing on Wednesday.  

Psaki said Biden plans to be personally involved in rallying support for the package. But she also didn't rule out using the budget reconciliation process as a way to pass relief with a simple majority vote in the Senate, rather than the 60 needed to bypass a GOP filibuster. Biden has been here before, in 2009, as the country was staring down the Great Recession and negotiations with Republicans yielded a modest stimulus of $787 billion that ultimately hamstrung a quick recovery as many economists had warned. How much patience Biden has for haggling with Republicans in this moment of need remains to be seen.

But what jumps out from his first days in office is both Biden's resolve and his unapologetic use of the tools at his disposal to take decisive action. He seems uniquely clear about the perils of this political era and what is required to meet them—a distinct break from the centrist dogma that has hung over Democrats for the better part of 30 years. And congressional Democrats across the liberal-to-moderate spectrum seem entirely bought into Biden's vision.  

Republicans, for their part, are playing very small ball. The best any of the saner ones can manage is clinging to the same tired Reagan-era talking points that left the party open to hijack by a vulgar populist demagogue. It seems safe to say that it's going to require a lot more inspiration and creativity than what we are currently witnessing for the Republican Party to build an electorally viable coalition of voters over the next several years.

If President Biden continues to rise to the moment, the unity he engenders may ultimately be less about winning GOP votes for his policies than it is about unifying some 65% of Americans against a factionalized but dangerous party of seditionists.