Leigh Ann Caldwell/NBC:

House Democrats draw the line: No bipartisan cooperation with Republicans who questioned the election

After the Jan. 6 riot, some Democrats say they simply can't work with anyone who voted against certifying the election.

Democratic lawmakers are each drawing their own lines, and some are finding that it means there are colleagues whom they once worked with to craft bipartisan legislation but with whom they now are unable, or unwilling, to collaborate.

Tim Miller/Bulwark:

Leadership Lessons From A Scandal-Ridden Governor

Dems show how the GOP should have treated Trump. Plus: Q-A-Mom?

A popular leader massively botches a crisis and covers up his mistakes. He is credibly accused by multiple women of inappropriate behavior. And yet the voters stick with him.

Sound familiar?

Well here is where the story changes a bit.

The party leaders rebuff their voters. They declare that no matter the level of popular support, someone who has committed such unacceptable acts has lost the ability to govern and should be removed from office.

What a concept!

I can understand if this series of events might be disorienting. After-all this is what a properly functioning democratic republic—one with properly functioning political parties—looks like. The GOP should take note.

Rebecca Traister/New York:

Andrew Cuomo’s governorship has been defined by cruelty that disguised chronic mismanagement. Why was that celebrated for so long?

Four years later, and one year after he began his star turn as “America’s Governor,” steering his state through COVID via daily, reassuringly matter-of-fact press briefings, Andrew Cuomo’s third term as governor of New York is suddenly deeply imperiled. In January, State Attorney General Letitia James released a report showing that his administration had underreported COVID deaths in nursing homes by as much as 50 percent. In February, liberal State Assembly member Ron Kim, who had criticized the governor in the wake of that report, spoke publicly about how Cuomo called him at home and threatened his career. Then the floodgates opened: His adversary Mayor Bill de Blasio called the bullying “classic Andrew Cuomo”; state legislators Alessandra Biaggi and Yuh-Line Niou began openly suggesting that the governor’s hard-knuckled approach to politics is simply abusive. And since last month, when Cuomo’s former aide and candidate for Manhattan borough president, Lindsey Boylan, published an article on Medium accusing him of sexually harassing and kissing her against her will, five more women have come forward with tales of harassment, objectification, and inappropriate touching. As of publication, dozens of Democratic members of the State Assembly and Senate, and 11 Democratic members of Congress, have called for his resignation.

Joyce White Vance/WaPo:

Civil suits may pry out the information we need to hold Trump accountable

The former president faces at least 10 lawsuits, and procedural rules he can’t dodge

Civil cases differ from criminal cases in obvious ways: They seek money damages; no one goes to prison; and plaintiffs establish their claims by a preponderance of the evidence, not “guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” But civil cases differ in another way, too. They have extensive pretrial discovery. Nothing in a criminal case — or impeachment, for that matter — compares to civil discovery, the process of scooping up evidence from depositions of parties and witnesses, requests for documents, and written questions answered under oath. Discovery is more regimented in criminal cases; it primarily involves the prosecution sharing with the defense the evidence it will use at trial, as well as exculpatory evidence. Civil discovery, in short, can lead to the mother lode.

Trump is a defendant in at least 10 civil cases, including his niece’s. A reckoning awaits — one that will require his personal participation in instances where he has no Fifth Amendment privilege to assert, and it is likely to be speedier and more direct than any criminal reckoning.

Margaret Sullivan/WaPo:

Online harassment of female journalists is real, and it’s increasingly hard to endure

Julia Carrie Wong remembers a time, years ago, when she felt that being a part of digital culture was fun.

“I used to really enjoy online spaces, having a personality and a voice,” recalled the 37-year-old technology reporter for the Guardian.

That changed radically several years ago after she wrote on Twitter in support of a journalist who had been targeted by a white-nationalist site.

The trolling began. Wong had once described herself, in a first-person story, as half-Chinese American and half-Jewish, so her online attackers blasted vicious slurs against both parts of her heritage. They circulated photos doctored to show horns on her head. They talked about where she lived.

It has only gotten worse since then. In 2019, Wong wrote a story about the man accused of killing 23 people at an El Paso Walmart after allegedly penning a missive posted to 8chan, an anonymous discussion board. Swarms of toxic online denizens of that site and others came after her, bombarding her with death and rape threats.

Salone Dattani/New Statesman:

Where will the next pandemic come from and how can we prevent it?

From factory farming to climate change, the connections between humanity and nature carry increasing risk.

Over a hundred thousand people have now died of Covid-19 in the UK alone; people around the world have been separated from their family and friends, and entire economies have come to a standstill. All of which raises an important question: how can the world prevent another pandemic?

The obvious place to start is at the beginning – before a pathogen has been seeded around the world and serious damage has been caused. If we can predict where the next pandemic will come from, perhaps we can stop it at its source.

John Harwood/CNN:

Biden's toughest test on economic inequality will be reinvigorating the labor movement

For the Democratic left, President Joe Biden's mammoth victory on Covid relief has inspired new hope of rebalancing America's increasingly unequal economy.

Nothing will test that hope more severely than Biden's goal of reinvigorating the labor movement as a way to do it.

His aspiration to be "the most pro-union president you've ever seen" stems from his upbringing in post-World War II Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he witnessed the early stage of Rust Belt decline. Labor movement experts see early evidence of commitment in a recent video he recorded affirming the right to organize as Amazon workers in Alabama vote on whether to form a union.

"Arguably the most pro-union public statement by a president...in the entirety of American history," tweeted Erik Loomis, a labor historian at the University of Rhode Island.

Tim Miller/Bulwark:

CPAC Was the Real Republican Party All Along

It turns out that the conservative Star Wars bar was actually representative of the Republican base.

CPAC didn’t misrepresent the conservative base because the real Republican voters out there were more normal and serious suit-and-tie types. It misrepresented the Republican voters in the other direction: CPAC attendees were more policy oriented than your median Republican voter. But as a matter of weirdness and tribal antipathy, they were actually a pretty good reflection of the right, broadly speaking.

By nature of being in or around Washington and drawing people who were passionate about policy—sometimes insane policies, but policies nonetheless—CPAC over-indexed away from the GOP’s core demo: the middle- and working-class exurban Boomer dittoheads who were the beating heart of the party all along.

And it turns out that those voters didn’t give a hoot about John Barasso’s Obamacare Replacement Plan or Ludwig Von Mises or the Fourth Great Awakening.

They just wanted their anti-elite grievances validated in the most entertaining (and/or bullying) way possible.

Elizabeth Dye/Above the Law:

After SCOTUS Green Light, Mazars Finally Hands Over Trump’s Bigly Amazing Tax Returns He probably fought so hard to keep them hidden out of, ummm, modesty.

And now … we wait. Maybe there will be evidence of rampant criminality in those returns. Or maybe everything is by the book and Trump just tried to hide them because he’s given away so much money to charity that he didn’t want to embarrass Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg for their paltry donations. (Yeah, probably not.)

But in the meantime, as (Cyrus) Vance pointed out in his response to Trump’s certiorari motion, the New York Times has already seen the returns and published a whole series of articles about them. So whatever happens with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, we already know that Trump is about to face a day of reckoning with the Joint Committee on Taxation, the bipartisan congressional panel tasked with reviewing all IRS refunds to individuals which exceed $2 million.

Zeynep Tufekci/Atlantic:

5 Pandemic Mistakes We Keep Repeating

We can learn from our failures.

This pessimism is sapping people of energy to get through the winter, and the rest of this pandemic. Anti-vaccination groups and those opposing the current public-health measures have been vigorously amplifying the pessimistic messages—especially the idea that getting vaccinated doesn’t mean being able to do more—telling their audiences that there is no point in compliance, or in eventual vaccination, because it will not lead to any positive changes. They are using the moment and the messaging to deepen mistrust of public-health authorities, accusing them of moving the goalposts and implying that we’re being conned. Either the vaccines aren’t as good as claimed, they suggest, or the real goal of pandemic-safety measures is to control the public, not the virus.

Five key fallacies and pitfalls have affected public-health messaging, as well as media coverage, and have played an outsize role in derailing an effective pandemic response. These problems were deepened by the ways that we—the public—developed to cope with a dreadful situation under great uncertainty. And now, even as vaccines offer brilliant hope, and even though, at least in the United States, we no longer have to deal with the problem of a misinformer in chief, some officials and media outlets are repeating many of the same mistakes in handling the vaccine rollout.

WaPo:

Most House Republicans voted not to certify some election results. Democrats are still seething.

Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), who won a GOP-held seat in 2018, said he still counts some Republicans from that class as friends and “potential partners” in legislation. But he drew a sharp contrast with the new Republicans.

“I’ll say this about the 2018 Republican freshman class: None of them tried to kill me or overthrow the United States government. So the only thing I could possibly have against them is an occasional disagreement,” Malinowski said.

WaPo:

What’s in the House’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus plan

The House on Saturday passed the American Rescue Plan, marking a crucial step towards the White House’s first major piece of legislation.

Here’s what is in the House version. These breakdowns and estimates were compiled from Congressional summaries and reports, as well as the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

LA Times:

Why your place in the COVID-19 vaccine line depends on where you live

When the first doses of COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out in the United States, the choice of who should receive them was fairly obvious — and widely accepted.

They would go to healthcare workers, who are highly exposed to the coronavirus and keep the medical system functioning, and people living in nursing homes, who have made up a third of all COVID-19 deaths nationwide.

Since then, the choices have gotten tougher: Teachers, farmworkers, senior citizens and dozens of other groups have made compelling arguments for why they should go next. For leaders making those decisions, it is effectively a zero-sum game: giving priority to some means fewer doses for others.

Though the nation’s vaccine availability will probably improve substantially in the coming months, officials at this moment are wading through what could be the most contentious phase of the rollout — a collision of relentless demand and constrained supply.

David Mastio and Jill Lawrence/USA Today:

Is Donald Trump a declining parody or a terrifying threat?

David: Trump’s CPAC comeback speech revealed a sad little man, angry at local courts and politicians and disappointed in the federal judges he seated, but who “didn’t have the guts or the courage” to bow to him. Trump tried to carry on as if he hadn’t been impeached after the Capitol was ransacked by a mob, but even the lies seemed faintly ridiculous. “We will win. We’ve been doing a lot of winning,” was the wacko fib he launched his speech with, as if he hadn’t cost Republicans control of the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House. Trump Republicans know that truth.

If you feel constrained about saying nasty things about the late Rush Limbaugh, feel free to unload on Ted Cruz.

No one will mind.

NY Times:

Ted Cruz’s Cancún Trip: Family Texts Detail His Political Blunder

The Texas senator faced fierce blowback for fleeing his state as a disaster unfolded. Text messages sent by his wife revealed a hastily planned trip away from their “FREEZING” family home.

Photos of Mr. Cruz and his wife, Heidi, boarding the flight ricocheted quickly across social media and left both his political allies and rivals aghast at a tropical trip as a disaster unfolded at home. The blowback only intensified after Mr. Cruz, a Republican, released a statement saying he had flown to Mexico “to be a good dad” and accompany his daughters and their friends; he noted he was flying back Thursday afternoon, though he did not disclose how long he had originally intended to stay.

WaPo:

Texas, the go-it-alone state, is rattled by the failure to keep the lights on

As cities and towns shiver, anger grows and the determined isolation is getting a lot of the blame

Rich in both fossil fuels and self-confidence, Texas has long been devoted to its singular power grid, rejecting federal electricity regulation and the kinds of shared high-voltage connections with neighboring states that can be found across most of the country.

Warnings over decades that confidence in the grid was misplaced were ignored by top officials, and largely as a result Texas is entering its fourth day with widespread power failures after a severe cold snap and snowstorm.

In 1989, punishing cold weather that caused power failures across the state led to a federal study that spelled out how to avoid such a disaster in the future by winterizing equipment the way more northern power companies do.

In 2011, after Arctic weather caused a series of rolling blackouts, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) produced another report that warned Texas power companies and regulators again that they had to winterize their equipment. “The single largest problem during the cold weather event was the freezing of instrumentation and equipment,” it said.

Greg Sargent/WaPo:

The latest GOP nonsense on Texas shows us the future Republicans want

No doubt many Republicans expressing outrage at the failures producing this disaster — and calling for accountability and reform — are sincere in their intentions, though we’ll see how long those demands persist.

But it’s painfully obvious that in an important larger sense, many aspects of their reaction to the Texas calamity do indeed demonstrate the future they want.

It’s a future in which the default response to large public problems will be to increasingly retreat from real policy debates into an alternate information universe, while doubling down on scorched-earth distraction politics and counter-majoritarian tactics to insulate themselves from accountability.

Olivier Knox/WaPo:

Liz Cheney wants an ideas-driven GOP. Limbaugh predicted her defeat

The handful of Republicans who broke with former president Donald Trump during his second impeachment trial now say their party stands at a crossroads and that it’s time to reject the most extreme voices and return to what they describe as the GOP’s ideological roots. But Rush Limbaugh, who died yesterday at 70 from lung cancer, essentially predicted their defeat five years ago.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the third-ranking House Republican, told her home state’s Casper Star-Tribune yesterday the GOP must “be the party that stands for principle and stands for ideas” in order to survive. And she urged Republicans to reject “antisemitism, white supremacy, [and] Holocaust denial.”

...

But Limbaugh, who rode right-wing rhetoric to the pinnacle of talk radio, diagnosed in January 2016 that it’s not traditionally conservative governing philosophy that unites and propels Republicans.

In Limbaugh’s telling, the party’s establishment exaggerated the appeal of policy and undervalued what, in 2021, might be called the desirability of “owning the libs.”

Two threads on COVID related issues, first from Apoorva Mandavilli, NYT health reporter:

Yesterday, the CDC released new guidelines for schools. Clear, science-based guidance was long overdue, so everyone was agog all week. Did they get what they wanted? This is a long 🧵, buckle in. 

Before I dive in: I have no agenda here. I am not anti-kids, anti-schools or anti-teachers. The only thing I am is anti-virus. I follow the science, but despite what both sides insist, the science is not straightforward, or we wouldn't have this much division and dissent. 

So, back to the CDC guidelines: Pro-opening advocates hoped for a sensible read of the evidence and teachers unions for strict precautions and vaccinations. Did they get what they want? Short answer: No. 

There is no issue that is more divisive right now (ok, masks and vaccines). But kids of all colors are suffering, and the long-term loss of education and emotional toll might be devastating. OTOH: the rates in the US might be dropping but objectively they are still very high. 

Tom Nichols/USA Today:

Republicans who acquitted Trump put their careers over duty, honor and the Constitution

Trump's acquittal proved with final certainty that Republicans are driven only by ambition, comfort and self-interest — and the Constitution be damned.

The Republicans who voted to acquit Trump acted with selfishness, cynicism and even malice. They have smeared their betrayal of the Constitution all over their careers the same way the January insurrectionists smeared excrement on the walls of the Congress itself.

At least human waste can be washed away. What the Republicans did on Feb. 13, 2021, will never be expunged from the history of the United States.

Elizabeth Neumann/USA Today:

Far-right extremists went mainstream under Trump. The Capitol attack cements his legacy.

Six years of Trump tweets, rallies and coddling brought extremist groups together. He used his final stand Jan. 6 to strengthen their unity and purpose.

With former President Donald Trump's second impeachment trial now over, much of the world is ready to move on from the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol to COVID-19 vaccine distribution, another economic relief package and the doings of the new Biden administration. But those responsible for tracking, understanding and defeating far-right violent extremists will be thinking about the Jan. 6 attack for decades to come.

To understand why, it’s important to recognize the scope of the threat posed by the various far-right radical groups in the United States. For a variety of reasons, the government doesn’t have good data on the numbers of violent extremists. Cynthia Miller Idriss, an academic expert on radicalization and extremism in the United States, offers a range in her book, "Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right."

Greg Sargent/WaPo:

Ugly new attacks on Republicans who defied Trump hint at a dark GOP future

If you believe that the health of our civic life depends in part on having a pro-democracy, pro-empiricism center right in this country, you will be deeply dispirited by some new comments from a Pennsylvania Republican that have now gone viral.

David Ball, the chair of the Washington County GOP, vented his anger at Sen. Pat Toomey, fellow Republican of Pennsylvania, who committed the apostasy of joining six other GOP senators in voting to convict former president Donald Trump of inciting insurrection.

“We did not send him there to vote his conscience,” Ball said on Monday. “We did not send him there to do the right thing or whatever he said he was doing. We sent him there to represent us.”

The first half of this comment is generating headlines. After all, the unvarnished expression of the idea that Toomey’s proper role was to side with Trump, rather than do what his conscience dictates, is unintentionally revealing.

But the second half — the notion that representing Republican voters required this of Toomey — is also telling, and suggests the ongoing GOP war over Trump’s legacy may well lead to a very dark place.

Daniel Goldman/WaPo:

Lack of witnesses at Trump’s trial is not the problem. Witness intimidation is.

The former president has a record of threatening rhetoric toward anyone who crosses him. Now there’s a record of supporters willing to back him with violence.

Based on what we now know, the House managers made the right call. The problem was not that they decided against witnesses. The Herrera Beutler statement bolstered what was already a strong case. Additional witnesses almost certainly would not have changed the outcome. Too many Republican senators had already made up their minds not to cross Trump — or his supporters — based largely on technical arguments unrelated to the overwhelming evidence of Trump’s guilt.

Instead, the problem is what the decision highlighted: that witness intimidation was yet again a factor in a proceeding intended to hold Trump accountable for his misconduct. Trump had tried to influence potential witnesses during the special counsel’s investigation; he had intimidated witnesses in his first impeachment; and at least one surrogate appeared to be engaged in witness intimidation this time around. Given this track record, it’s reasonable to worry that such intimidation will come into play in the various investigations now circling Trump.

NY Times:

On Trump, Michigan Republicans Lean One Way: ‘Fealty at All Costs’

Even after his defeat, Donald Trump is causing fierce infighting among Republicans in a crucial battleground state. Loyalists are rewarded. Dissenters face punishment.

Mr. Trump’s acquittal on Saturday in his impeachment trial served as the first test of his continuing influence over Republicans, with all but seven senators in the party voting against conviction. But in Michigan, one of the key battleground states Mr. Trump lost in the November election — and home to two of the 10 House Republicans who supported impeaching him — there are growing signs of a party not in flux, but united in doubling down on the same themes that defined Mr. Trump’s political style: conspiracy theories, fealty to the leader, a web of misinformation and intolerance.

David Frum/Atlantic:

The Founders Were Wrong About Democracy

The authors of the Constitution feared mass participation would unsettle government, but it’s the privileged minority that has proved destabilizing.

The system of government in the United States has evolved in many important ways since 1787. But the mistrust of unpropertied majorities—especially urban unpropertied majorities—persists. In no other comparably developed society is voting as difficult; in no peer society are votes weighted as unequally; in no peer society is there a legislative chamber where 41 percent of the lawmakers can routinely outvote 59 percent, as happens in the U.S. Senate.

David M Drucker/Washington Examiner:

Local GOP officials closing the tent to Trump apostates

The wave of party-sponsored censures greeting Republicans who cross former President Donald Trump reveals a GOP interested in pushing out heretics whose lone political sin is disloyalty to the vanquished party leader.

More than a dozen prominent Republicans have been slapped with censure resolutions by state or county parties this year. Most were rebuked for voting to impeach Trump or to convict the former president at trial in the Senate because they hold him responsible for the Jan. 6 siege of the Capitol by his grassroots supporters. Some Republicans were censured because party activists decided they ignored Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Shrink the party!

EJ Dionne/WaPo:

The beginning of the end of Trumpism

Don’t waste time mourning the Senate’s failure to convict Donald Trump for crimes so dramatically and painstakingly proven by the House impeachment managers. The cowardice of the vast majority of Republican senators was both predicted and predictable.

Instead, ponder how to build on the genuine achievements.

Margaret Sullivan/WaPo:

‘A moment of truth’? After years of Trump’s lies, amplified by MAGA media, that proved impossible for most Republicans

“Democracy needs a ground to stand upon — and that ground is the truth,” lead House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin said in his opening statement, quoting his father, the political activist Marcus Raskin.

This Senate trial would not be a contest among lawyers, or between political parties, said the Maryland Democrat, who led the prosecuting team trying to make the case that the 45th president had incited the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

No, the trial would be, and should be, “a moment of truth for America.”

Philip Bump/WaPo:

An incomparable historic rebuke of a president by his own party

The final chapter of Donald Trump’s presidency was written Saturday, leaving no question about how it will be perceived by history. Seven senators from his own party voted to convict him on an article of impeachment alleging that he incited an insurrection against the government, a condemnation unlike any other in American history. Trump’s second impeachment came much closer to conviction than either his first or that of Bill Clinton in 1999, precisely because so many Republicans supported the move.

The ultimate acquittal was expected. As we reported this week, only three members of the Republican caucus represent states that didn’t vote for Trump in last year’s election. Only about a third of the caucus faces reelection in 2022, which might have been expected to motivate them to appeal to a Republican base that is still strongly loyal to the former president.

Yet five Republicans from states that backed Trump supported conviction. The seven Republicans joining all 48 Democrats and the Senate’s two independents were Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.), Richard Burr (R-N.C.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah). Of those seven, only two — Burr and Toomey — have announced plans to retire, and only Murkowski faces reelection in 2022.

Dana Milbank /WaPo:

Trump left them to die. 43 Senate Republicans still licked his boots.

Her account wasn’t seriously or substantively refuted. On Saturday afternoon, senators agreed that Herrera Beutler’s statement would be entered into the trial record as evidence.

Even knowing this, most Republican senators, as long expected, voted to acquit Trump, a craven surrender to the political imperative not to cross the demagogue. But the impeachment trial was not in vain, for it revealed the ugly truth: Trump knew lawmakers’ lives were in danger from his violent supporters, and instead of helping the people’s representatives escape harm, Trump scoffed.

Politico:

Trump escapes conviction but even his allies say he’s damaged

The former president may be out for revenge after his acquittal. But beyond that, his future is uncertain.

Without the legal protection against federal criminal prosecution afforded sitting presidents, Trump faces a web of investigations into his conduct in office and business practices beforehand. Just this week, Georgia prosecutors announced a new probe into Trump’s myriad attempts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, including during a threatening phone call on Jan. 2 with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The investigation could open the door for criminal charges against the former president by state and local authorities.

Trump could also face criminal charges in Washington, D.C., if the city’s attorney general, Karl Racine, decides to pursue a case against Trump for his alleged role in the Capitol riots. Racine was reportedly weighing the move even before the Senate voted to acquit Trump on Saturday.

Michael W. McConnell/NY Times:

How Democrats Could Have Made Republicans Squirm

G.O.P. lawmakers were unlikely to convict Trump. But a different approach to impeachment would have been more difficult for them to ignore.

The House should have crafted its impeachment resolution to avoid a legalistic focus on the former president’s intent. This could have been done by broadening the impeachment article. The charges should have encompassed Mr. Trump’s use of the mob and other tactics to intimidate government officials to void the election results, and his dereliction of duty by failing to try to end the violence in the hours after he returned to the White House from the demonstration at the Ellipse.

Whether or not Mr. Trump wanted his followers to commit acts of violence, he certainly wanted them to intimidate Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress. That was the whole point of their “walk,” as Mr. Trump put it, to the Capitol. The mob was not sent to persuade with reasoning or evidence.

Garrett Epps/Washington Monthly:

The Jamie Raskin Moment

At the bizarre trial of Donald Trump, the Maryland Congressman, law professor, and grieving father was the man of the hour.

Then Raskin closed, explaining the impact of the attack on the Capitol on him and his family. He had invited his daughter and son-in-law to be present to witness the certification of the election—as much, it seems, to distract him and them from the funeral the day before of Raskin’s beloved son Tommy who had committed suicide. While Raskin was hustled to a different location, they were locked in the majority leader’s office—and, like most others, trapped by the mob, anticipating imminent violent death.

When they were reunited, Raskin said to his daughter that the next time she came to the Capitol would not be so bad. “I don’t want to come back to the Capitol,” she said.

At this point, Raskin’s voice broke.

That moment is what anyone who watched will remember, not just during the trial but for years to come. Aristotle wrote in Rhetoric that forensic rhetoric had three aspects—the logos, or the validity of what was said; the ethos, or the implication by the speaker that he or she is the kind of person whom the listener should listen to; and the pathos, or the emotional content of the speech and of the issue it concerns.

Raskin crushed all three.

Jason Sattler/USA Today:

Trump's two impeachments hold same lesson: Republicans can't be trusted with our democracy

Democrats have less than 2 years to make sure America never has another president who would incite a mob against his own government. End the filibuster.

And there was the pandemic that left more than 400,000 Americans dead on Trump’s watch, with 40% of those deaths being avoidable, according to the recent findings of a Lancet Commission.  

So it’s hard to tell exactly what made this country reject Trump’s GOP so quickly. What is clear is Democrats now have less than two years to do everything they can to make sure America never faces another president who would turn a deadly mob on his own running mate and our government.

We have now seen the limits of the Republicans who believe they have any responsibility to govern, especially when a Democrat is president: exactly seven Republicans. But to make almost anything happen in Congress, you need 10 Republican senators because of the Senate filibuster. Actually, let’s be precise. Because of Mitch’s Filibuster™.

USA Today Editorial Board:

Convict Donald Trump and banish the 45th president from American democracy

Our View: The second impeachment trial is not about punishing Donald Trump. It's about protecting the Founding Fathers' United States of America.

The evidence is overwhelmingly clear that the Senate should vote to banish Donald Trump from American democracy.

That is, after all, what is at stake.

NY Times editorial board:

Trump Is Guilty

There’s no doubt who must be held responsible for attacking the Capitol and trying to overturn the results of the election.

If you fail to hold him accountable, it can happen again.

This is the heart of the prosecution’s argument in the ongoing impeachment trial of Donald Trump. It is a plea for the senators charged with rendering a verdict not to limit their concerns solely to the events of Jan. 6, when a mob of Trump supporters sacked the U.S. Capitol, but also to act with an eye toward safeguarding the nation’s future.

To excuse Mr. Trump’s attack on American democracy would invite more such attempts, by him and by other aspiring autocrats. The stakes could not be higher. A vote for impunity is an act of complicity.

Norman Eisen/USA Today:

Impeachment: The Senate is on trial along with Trump. Will 33 senators do the wrong thing?

In Trump's 2019 impeachment trial, Romney was the only Republican who voted to convict. Already, six times that many have broken with the ex-president.

As a trial lawyer who served as co-counsel for the first impeachment of then-President Trump, I had been expecting surprises and there were many. The House managers enlivened what was supposed to be a constitutional debate Tuesday by previewing their main argument: that Trump knowingly incited the insurrectionists. It's amazing that Trump's lawyers were caught off guard by this. We did the same thing in the 2019 impeachment trial, using the opening debate over whether to call witnesses to preview the entire case. Nevertheless, Trump's counsel were thrown into confusion — they both showed it and one admitted that they'll "have to do better."  

Max Burns/NBC Think:

Trump impeachment trial video means GOP can't pretend the former president is innocent

Republicans are criticizing Democrats for playing politics with a trial they know will end in acquittal. But the proceedings' importance goes beyond the outcome.

nd, of course, even if the outcome is the acquittal of Trump, it’s important to show Americans — particularly Republican voters — what their GOP leaders are willing to turn a blind eye to. The evidence presented by the Democratic House impeachment managers damns congressional Republicans for making terms with the existential threat of right-wing extremism instead of leaving the party in protest. And regardless of how lawmakers vote, Wednesday’s honest accounting will play a critical role in helping our nation assess the sweeping damage Trumpism has inflicted on our institutions.

Sarah Longwell/Bulwark:

Hold Them All Accountable

The people who stormed the Capitol are facing the music. It’s up to us to make sure that the people who incited them do, too.

Finding 17 Republican senators to convict Trump is a Herculean task, not least because many of them joined him in feeding the lie that brought these people to the Capitol in the first place. In that regard, this trial is unique for having members of the jury who are not just not impartial, but are both witnesses and accomplices to the crime.

Remember: Prior to the attack, more than a quarter of Senate Republicans had publicly announced plans to object to certifying the election results. Many of them are now trying to retcon these objections as “just asking questions” and not an attempt to overturn the election itself. But their calls for investigations into voter fraud and irregularities—despite dozens of court losses and then-Attorney General Bill Barr’s assurances that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud—were nothing less than hype-man interjections meant to bolster Trump’s claims that he “won in a landslide” and that the election was being stolen.

Tim Miller/Bulwark:

Not My Party: Guilty, Guilty

But this was different: Never before in this country has a sitting president tried to steal an election to stay in power. Yes, it didn’t work. Yes, the way he went about it was clownish and ridiculous. But Officer Brian Sicknick is dead because of Trump’s actions. Others are gravely injured. The vice president and Democratic members of Congress nearly suffered the same fate.

This all happened because Trump supporters took him seriously and literally.

At 6:01 PM, hours after the carnage, Trump tweeted this: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace.”

No! You made this happen, Donald. You did this! And it could have been worse.

Josh Marshall/TPM:

The Unbearable Weakness of Kevin McCarthy

To make sense of all this we need to go back a decade to 2011 when John Boehner became House Speaker. Boehner found the job notoriously difficult and eventually resigned in a mix of disgust and relief. But the reality of the situation is important to understand. The 2011-17 House majority was run not by its nominal leaders but by the Freedom Caucus, a sort of proto-Trumpite group, and to a lesser degree by the Republican Study Committee, a sort of earlier version of the Freedom Caucus which is now basically just the mainstream congressional GOP. It served that proto-Trumpite core of representatives purposes to have the nominal leadership in the hands of a ‘mainstream’ Republican like John Boehner – both for the sake of appearances and to be free of accountability.

Boehner had all the responsibility and none of the power and the Freedom Caucus folks had all the power and none of the responsibility – a very nice deal for the guys in the Freedom Caucus! This was made possible by the fact that the proto-Trump core of the House caucus had little in the way of a positive legislative agenda. They mostly wanted to stop things from happening – a revealing parallel with President Trump himself when he came to the White House. The relationship between three or four dozen proto-Trump representatives and Boehner parallels the larger reality we’ve discussed in other contexts: that the GOP is basically a rightist, revanchist party like France’s National Front or Germany’s Alternative for Germany masquerading as a center-right party of government like the Tories in the UK or the Christian Democrats in Germany. For that reason having a Boehner type with nominal authority was a good deal. And the Freedom Caucus had a veto over everything anyway. So no downside.

Eli Stokols/LA Times:

‘Not a pundit,’ Biden ignores impeachment trial to focus on his priorities

“Joe Biden is the president. He’s not a pundit,” Jen Psaki told the 14 reporters seated before her. “He’s not going to opine on the back-and-forth arguments in the Senate, nor is he watching them.”

Biden echoed that assertion moments later as he sat in the Oval Office to discuss his top priority, a $1.9-trillion coronavirus relief package, with a group of business leaders. A day later when Psaki appeared in the briefing room, reporters pressed her about Biden’s refusal to comment on the “historic” events occurring in the Senate. One, seemingly incredulous, asked just how the public “should interpret his silence?”

“The American public,” Psaki said, “should read it as his commitment on delivering on exactly what they elected him to do, which is not to be a commentator on the daily developments of an impeachment trial.”

Will Bunch/Philly.com:

ICE ‘Deep State’ is blocking Biden’s quest for justice for refugees 

So far, Biden is finding that abruptly reversing U.S. immigration policy is like turning around a battleship using the tiny, loose steering wheel of the USS Minnow. His highest-profile immigration move — an executive order pausing deportations for 100 days — has been blocked by a federal judge in Texas whom Trump had appointed just last year. In this vacuum of uncertainty, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE — still under an interim boss hastily installed in the last week of the Trump administration — and the Border Patrol, whose rank-and-file officers zealously supported POTUS 45, have seemingly sped up deportations and other enforcement actions.

Axios:

Republicans face party punishment back home for questioning Trump's role in Capitol attack

The big picture: State and county Republican apparatuses throughout the country are punishing those in their own party who want to hold the former president accountable, signaling that Trump's grasp on the GOP remains unfaded.

Sen. Bill Cassidy is the latest member to receive condemnation after the Louisiana senator sided with Democrats on a vote over the constitutionality to impeach a former president.

Chris Hayes/Atlantic:

The Republican Party Is Radicalizing Against Democracy

The GOP is moderating on policy questions, even as it grows more dangerous on core questions of democracy and the rule of law.

The republican party is radicalizing against democracy. This is the central political fact of our moment. Instead of organizing its coalition around shared policy goals, the GOP has chosen to emphasize hatred and fear of its political opponents, who—they warn—will destroy their supporters and the country. Those Manichaean stakes are used to justify every effort to retain power, and make keeping power the GOP’s highest purpose. We are living with a deadly example of just how far those efforts can go, and things are likely to get worse.

At the same time, the Republican Party is moderating on policy. On a host of issues, the left is winning. It’s not a rout—and ideological battles continue—but public opinion is trending left. Yesterday’s progressive heresy has become today’s unremarkable consensus. On top of that, Democrats have established a narrow but surprisingly durable electoral majority, holding control of the House, winning back the Senate, and taking the presidency by 7 million votes.

NY Times:

‘Its Own Domestic Army’: How the G.O.P. Allied Itself With Militants

As the Senate on Tuesday begins the impeachment trial of Mr. Trump on charges of inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol rioting, what happened in Michigan helps explain how, under his influence, party leaders aligned themselves with a culture of militancy to pursue political goals.

Michigan has a long tradition of tolerating self-described private militias, which are unusually common in the state. But it is also a critical electoral battleground that draws close attention from top party leaders, and the Republican alliance with paramilitary groups shows how difficult it may be for the national party to extricate itself from the shadow of the former president and his appeal to this aggressive segment of its base.

“We knew there would be violence,” said Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, about the Jan. 6 assault. Endorsing tactics like militiamen with assault rifles frightening state lawmakers “normalizes violence,” she told journalists last week, “and Michigan, unfortunately, has seen quite a bit of that.”

AP:

Analysis: A race war evident long before the Capitol siege

For a very long time, civil rights leaders, historians and experts on extremism say, many white Americans and elected leaders have failed to acknowledge that this war of white aggression was real, even as the bodies of innocent people piled up.

Racist notions about people of color, immigrants and politicians have been given mainstream media platforms, are represented in statues and symbols to slaveholders and segregationists, and helped demagogues win elections to high office.

The result? A critical mass of white people fears that multiculturalism, progressive politics and the equitable distribution of power spell their obsolescence, erasure and subjugation. And that fear, often exploited by those in power, has proven again and again to be among the most lethal threats to nonwhite Americans, according to racial justice advocates.

So how does the nation begin addressing the war of white aggression after countless missed opportunities?

Perry Bacon Jr/FiveThirtyEight:

In America’s ‘Uncivil War,’ Republicans Are The Aggressors

Biden didn’t explicitly say that the extremism, domestic terrorism and white supremacy is largely coming from one side of the uncivil war. But that’s the reality. In America’s uncivil war, both sides may hate the other, but one side — conservatives and Republicans — is more hostile and aggressive, increasingly willing to engage in anti-democratic and even violent attacks on their perceived enemies.

The Jan. 6 insurrection and the run-up to it is perhaps the clearest illustration that Republicans are being more hostile and anti-democratic than Democrats in this uncivil war. Biden pledged to concede defeat if he lost the presidential election fair and square, while Trump never made such a pledge; many elected officials in the GOP joined Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results; and finally, Trump supporters arrived at the Capitol to claim victory by force. But there are numerous other examples of conservatives and Republicans going overboard in their attempts to dominate liberals and Democrats:

Jill Lawrence/USA Today:

Trump legacy: Personal responsibility is for suckers and GOP means 'Grievances On Parade'

Trump's Senate impeachment trial and fake victims Josh Hawley and Marjorie Taylor Greene symbolize the Republican descent into whiny entitlement.

Not that there’s much suspense, given the GOP path since it embraced Trump and, in the memorable phrase from the late New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, defined deviancy down. Moynihan was talking about mental health, family structure and crime. Trump has spearheaded the downward redefinition of personal responsibility. The expectation is that bad behavior will carry no consequences, and if there are some, that’s liberals trying to cancel conservatives.

Daily News:

Trump’s trial matters more than you think

Thomas Paine, hero of the American Revolution, wrote that those “holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.” Trust in government depends on accountability, and so do liberty and democracy. Otherwise, elected officials, especially presidents, could upend our government and rights with impunity.

That is why the Senate trial of Donald Trump matters, both to determine his guilt for trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power and to maintain freedom.

Peter D Keisler and Richard D Bernstein/Atlantic:

Freedom of Speech Doesn’t Mean What Trump’s Lawyers Want It to Mean

The First Amendment does not limit the removal and disqualification powers conferred on Congress by the Constitution.

Front and center in former President Donald Trump’s defense this week will be the argument that convicting him and disqualifying him from holding future office would violate his First Amendment rights—that it would essentially amount to punishing him for speaking his mind. His new lawyer, David Schoen, has warned that convicting Trump “is putting at risk any passionate political speaker, which is against everything we believe in in this country.”

That is wrong. Even if the First Amendment protected Trump from criminal and tort liability for his January 6 exhortation to the crowd that later stormed the Capitol, it has no bearing on whether Congress can convict and disqualify a president for misconduct that consisted, in part, of odious speech that rapidly and foreseeably resulted in deadly violence.

Above are staunch conservatives.

Pippa Norris/WaPo:

Why Republicans haven’t abandoned Trumpism

Parties can and do change. But these four barriers stand between the Republican Party and moderation.

Most congressional Republicans continue to embrace Trumpism, despite some wavering after the deadly Capitol riot. The GOP has backtracked on impeachment, with most Senate Republicans voting against holding an impeachment trial. State parties have punished Republicans such as Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), who spoke and voted in favor of impeachment, rather than members such as Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Josh Hawley (Mo.), who supported the falsehood that the presidential election had been stolen. House Republicans did not sanction Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), despite her past endorsements of wild conspiracy theories.

But the notion that the GOP would suddenly abandon Trumpism once Donald Trump left the White House has the basic story upside down. Trump wasn’t the cause of authoritarian populism; his success was the consequence of deeper underlying forces.

Here is today’s musical interlude:

NY Times:

Lawsuits Take the Lead in Fight Against Disinformation

In just a few weeks, lawsuits and legal threats from a pair of obscure election technology companies have achieved what years of advertising boycotts, public pressure campaigns and liberal outrage could not: curbing the flow of misinformation in right-wing media.

Fox Business canceled its highest rated show, “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” on Friday after its host was sued as part of a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit. On Tuesday, the pro-Trump cable channel Newsmax cut off a guest’s rant about rigged voting machines. Fox News, which seldom bows to critics, has run fact-checking segments to debunk its own anchors’ false claims about electoral fraud.

This is not the typical playbook for right-wing media, which prides itself on pugilism and delights in ignoring the liberals who have long complained about its content. But conservative outlets have rarely faced this level of direct assault on their economic lifeblood

This is especially sweet during impeachment week. But we are not done with accountability.

Here’s the reference in the picture caption.

Daily Mail:

Parler 'offered Donald Trump a 40 per cent stake in the company while he was president if he agreed to post content on the app four hours before uploading the same messages to Twitter and Facebook'

WaPo:

Biden says Trump should not receive intelligence briefings

Biden stopped short of announcing that he had officially decided to prevent his predecessor from receiving the briefings, which are traditionally given before former presidents travel abroad, particularly in an official capacity. But Biden has the unilateral authority to deny intelligence access to anyone he chooses, and his remarks amounted to a statement that Trump — who for four years controlled the entire U.S. security apparatus — was himself a security risk.

Denying the briefings to a former president would be an unprecedented action, and Biden’s remarks, made during an appearance on “CBS Evening News” with Norah O’Donnell, emphasized the president’s concern, and that of other officials, that Trump poses a risk to national security because of what he might disclose.

Zach Carter/HuffPost:

Biden Beats Back The Austerians At The Gates

The Age of Larry Summers is over.

Back in 2009, many if not most mainstream economists believed that excessive government budget deficits were a bigger threat to society than weak growth or prolonged unemployment. Going too big wouldn’t just risk “overheating” ― it raised the prospect of a second financial crisis that could bring down the dollar and even American political hegemony.

Today, by contrast, economists increasingly accept the idea that deficits are not inherently destabilizing, but a normal part of economic management. The price of going too big isn’t a crash, but a little unwanted inflation ― something that can be reined in through Federal Reserve policymaking or some tax increases from Congress. These may be unpleasant when they come, but it will be much worse for people to lose jobs, incomes and homes in the meantime. When the costs of going too small are shattered families and broken faith in a shared national project, the choice is not difficult.

As conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks put it on Friday, “When your great nation is facing decline because of rising inequality, insecurity, distrust and alienation, you don’t just sit there. You try something big.”

Poynter:

A reporter shares her minute-by-minute recollection of being trapped in the Senate on Jan. 6

CBS News’ Grace Segers was in the Senate press gallery when rioters overran the building and was shuffled around with senators as the chaos unfolded.

After about half an hour, the senators were suddenly evacuated. They streamed to the open doors on one side of the room like fish caught in a current. Sen. Cory Booker, who was on the tail end of this exodus, looked up at the reporters in the Senate gallery and asked how we were doing. He said it casually, with a smile on his face.

“We’re doing OK,” I said, my voice likely tinged with hysteria.

It seemed at first like the senators would be evacuated but the reporters would remain trapped in the chamber.

“What about us?” a Senate gallery staffer shouted down to the police officers, notifying them that the reporters and staffers needed to evacuate, too. Without that staffer’s quick thinking, we probably would have been trapped in the chamber when the rioters entered it just moments later.

Trigger warning on this one...

Hartford Courant:

Teen survivor of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, speaking publicly for the first time, directs her outrage at deniers

The fact that eight years have passed without meaningful gun violence legislation, Ashley added, “is so unacceptable.”

“[President Biden] understands what losing a child is like, and he understands the amount of trauma and pain that comes behind losing a child,” Ashley said. “I think for him to be able to connect to that is so powerful because he can make a difference. And I think a big thing I would tell him is not give up on us, you know, not give up on the idea of, like, you can’t change because like, if he pushes hard enough and if we continue to fight long enough and hard enough, things will change.”

Daily Beast:

The QAnon Rep Isn’t Owning the Libs. She’s Leading the GOP’s Space-Laser Suicide March.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is Sarah Palin, but not occasionally charismatic. Steve Bannon, but not occasionally smart. Donald Trump, but not occasionally funny.

The vote was mostly along party lines, with just 11 of 208 Republicans joining every Democrat to relieve freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments. One hundred and ninety seven Republicans went on the record supporting one of the most repulsive people to serve in congress in my lifetime (and that includes prolific child molester Dennis Hastert and prolific sexual abuse ignorer Jim Jordan).

It’s a shame, too, because while Greene’s theatrics may be raising her own profile by putting her sassy masks on the news a lot, they’re doing so at the expense of her own constituents. What do they get when their representative has no power? Nothing. Not even liberal tears. The libs have not been owned. The libs are in charge. Greene isn’t living rent-free in Democrats’ heads. Greene’s theatrics are paying their rent. And yet, Republicans stood behind Greene. This is the hill they’re going to be space-lasered to death on. This is their platform: We stand with the crazy assholes.

The Hill:

AOC is an asset for Democrats, Greene is an albatross for the GOP

On the other side of the aisle, Ocasio-Cortez’s positive contributions stand in stark contrast to Greene’s negative comments. The progressive Democrat has been working within the system to make major policy changes.

Ocasio-Cortez’s advocacy for stronger environmental protection and comprehensive health care has made enemies among Democratic congressional leaders, but AOC has made the Congress better and the Democratic Party stronger.

Every caucus needs a conscience and AOC along with other progressive Democrats fill that role admirably for the House Democratic majority.

President Biden has acted quickly and decisively with executive orders to protect the environment. It is hard to imagine that the candidate who ran as a moderate would have been so aggressive as president without the fervid and unrelenting advocacy of AOC and other progressives.  

Was it impeachment? Jonathan Chait/New York:

Would Trump Have Won if Not for Impeachment? A Pro-Trump Journalist Thinks So.

Was it the pandemic? The Trump campaign knows so. WaPo:

Poor handling of virus cost Trump his reelection, campaign autopsy finds