The GOP ‘once saw their roles as legislators first and Republicans second.’ Trump has destroyed that

One of the many characteristics of The First Former President to be Indicted (Twice Thrice, Four Freaking Times, for now) is that he sucks all the oxygen out of the room of our national public discourse (not to mention that he just sucks in general). Another is that he’s a fascist who’d destroy our democracy without a second thought in order to save his own skin, but we’ll leave that aside for a moment. This chaos agent’s actions reverberate throughout our politics in a way no American figure has before—not even Richard Nixon, who resigned from the presidency in disgrace in the aftermath of Watergate.

That scandal brings to mind another comparison between then and now, namely how differently leading Republicans, in particular those in Congress, have reacted to the leader of their party facing investigation and accountability for his behavior. Let me start with a little hint: The Trumpist Republicans of today don’t come out of this comparison looking very good.

RELATED STORY: House Republicans swiftly act to obstruct on Trump’s behalf

After The Man Who Lost an Election and Tried to Steal it made his first court appearance and entered a plea in response to the deadly serious national security-related charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith in the classified documents case, we saw responses from a broad array of Republican officials. Overall, it ain’t pretty. The same goes for the responses to the Jan. 6-related Trump indictments as well as to the indictments in Georgia offered by most of the Republicans running, in theory at least, against Trump for the GQP presidential nomination, along with other top members of the Trumpist party.

who is speaking out?

There are some exceptions, no doubt, including Sens. Lisa Murkowski, Bill Cassidy, and Mitt Romney, Rep. Don Bacon, and Gov. Chris Sununu. Within the Republican presidential field only several have spoken out strongly, but none of them exactly qualify as a frontrunner. Chris Christie said Trump “has been a one-man crime wave. Look, he’s earned every one of [the indictments]. If you look at it, every one of these is self-inflicted.” Will Hurd shared, “Donald Trump is running to stay out of prison.” Asa Hutchinson said, “I have said from the beginning that Donald Trump’s actions on January 6 should disqualify him from ever being president again.” The other candidates have been fairly mealy-mouthed at best (even after the fourth indictment, which caused little change in how they talked about the erstwhile frontrunner), with the Nikki Haley versus Nikki Haley debate being particularly pathetic. Meanwhile, a number of them have stated they’d even pardon the insurrectionist-in-chief.

Given his slavish loyalty along with the completely false presentations in support of his boss he made prior to the 2020 election, the assessments former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr offered on the documents case as well as on the Jan. 6 indictments carry perhaps the most weight. However, as Daily Kos’ Laura Clawson so helpfully reminds us, he remains a “sleazeball.”

But for the most part, the sycophantic (not to mention dangerous to our democracy) behavior of congressional Republicans is both awful and yet exactly what you’d expect, in particular from the MAGA caucus over in the House. It doesn’t get much more moronic than Barely Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who was asked whether it was perhaps problematic that the disgraced former president was knowingly storing national security secrets next to the toilet. He replied that “a bathroom door locks.” (Hey, Kev, you know it only locks from the inside, right?) Looks like he’s locked the remnants of his integrity behind such a door and has thrown away the key. Additionally, his comments regarding the Jan. 6 indictments were less laughable, but if anything more cynical.

Regarding the attempt by McCarthy and the other Trump stooges to attack the indictment by drawing false parallels to investigations of President Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton, Jesse Wegman of The New York Times thoroughly dismantled that malarkey one bald-faced lie at a time. What’s so harmful is that Trump—the most prodigious liar in American history—has set a precedent that Republicans who lie will never be punished by their own party. Would there have been a George Santos or a shady grifter like Vivek Ramaswamy in our politics if there hadn’t already been a Donald Trump, who has led with lies and deceit right from the start of his public career?

Moving forward, will we see more members of what remains of the Party of Trump actually reject their pro-crime, anti-law enforcement stance and turn on their leader as more evidence comes into public view? That’s a key question for the present.

looking to the past

But how about the past? Specifically, how did Republicans measure up on that very question a half-century ago, the last time a president from their party behaved criminally and put our constitutional democracy at risk? To start with, it's not as simple as saying that Republicans back then immediately turned on Nixon once reporting made clear by spring 1973 that the White House was engaged in a cover-up. However, during the following year, two profoundly important developments took place.

First, Republicans in the House backed the impeachment inquiry's subpoena efforts. Nixon had claimed that executive privilege gave him the right to withhold recordings of Oval Office conversations along with other relevant evidence. Michigan Republican Rep. Edward Hutchinson, the ranking member of his party on the House Judiciary Committee that ultimately voted to impeach Nixon, utterly rejected such a claim, stating that “executive privilege, in the face of an impeachment inquiry, must fail.”

Rep. Edward Hutchinson said “executive privilege, in the face of an impeachment inquiry, must fail.”

The House agreed overwhelmingly, and in a vote of 410-4 (!) gave the committee the authority to subpoena whatever it felt necessary. The four no votes were all Republican. Those subpoenas resulted in the production of the tapes that ultimately brought down a president. Second, when that overwhelming evidence came out, House and Senate Republicans assessed it fairly and told Nixon he had to go.

Garrett Graff, who wrote the recent book “Watergate: A New History,” offered the following summary to The New York Times: “In 1972 to 1974, the Republicans participated as good-faith members of the process. They saw their roles as legislators first and Republicans second.” Regarding the charges leveled against a president from their own party, “they definitely were skeptical” at first; however, ultimately “they followed the facts where they led.”

One separate but related point of comparison concerns the media. During Watergate, most Americans got their information from outlets that reported, well, the news. Now a good chunk of Republican voters soak up propaganda from sources like Fox, which just this June shamelessly and without any factual basis for doing so characterized the elected president of the United States as a “wannabe dictator.” (At least the producer who was responsible resigned three days later, but the damage was done.) That’s not good for our democracy.

Getting back to the politicians, Garrett further explained that when Nixon’s own second-in-command, then-Vice President Spiro Agnew, went after his boss’ enemies, he focused his ire “mainly against the press, not the F.B.I. or the special prosecutor.” Trump, on the other hand, has assailed our entire system of justice. He called Jack Smith a “deranged lunatic” and a “psycho;” referred to “the ‘Thugs’ from the Department of Injustice;” slandered Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who filed the charges against him in Georgia, by calling her a racist; and attacked Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the Jan. 6 case, as “highly partisan” and “VERY BIASED AND UNFAIR.” Ohio State law professor Joshua Dressler stated, “This could be interpreted as an attempt to intimidate Judge Chutkan.” Not even the Nixon White House went that far. Trump’s allies have shown themselves to be equally erratic—he sets the example and others follow it blindly—with Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona going all the way to no sense left at all.

Defund and dismantle the FBI.

— Rep Andy Biggs (@RepAndyBiggsAZ) May 15, 2023

Beyond Biggs, we’ve already seen violent rhetoric spewing forth from Trump supporters, along with threats of violence credible enough to lead to criminal charges. Unfortunately we can expect more of this as his trials move forward. Fuck a L’Orange himself has already incited one violent insurrection, and that was just to keep his day job. Do we really think he’ll hold back when the stakes are a prison sentence? That’s one punishment he won’t be able to buy his way out of.

but what about the democrats?

Because we’ve discussed Republicans acting in a bipartisan fashion during Watergate and contrasted that against the overwhelming majority of Republicans in the Trump era, it’s important to also address how Democrats acted during the investigation and impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. First, yes, Democrats were unified in opposing Clinton’s impeachment and removal from office, but there are fundamental differences between what happened then and what Trump has done over the past few years.

Most importantly, Clinton was investigated for private behavior. Trump (and Nixon), on the other hand, were investigated and, in the Tangerine Palpatine’s case, impeached for abuses of office that rendered them unfit to serve (though Trump obviously has some private behavior he’s on the hook for as well). Both demonstrated themselves to be threats to the rule of law.

Second, Robert Fiske, the initial, nonpartisan special counsel assigned to investigate Clinton, was unjustly removed by a panel of Republican judges and replaced by hyper-partisan Ken Starr. Fiske had at that point already concluded that there was no criminality in the Whitewater or Vince Foster cases, which happened to be the matters he was charged with investigating. Republicans in the House ultimately impeached Clinton over wrongdoing that would never have occurred without Starr coming in and forcing him to testify under oath.

Democrats were right to vote against impeachment and conviction there because not only did Clinton’s behavior, wrong though it was, not rise to the level of necessitating the overturning of the will of the people, the Starr process was partisan from the start. And the American public consistently agreed with the Democrats’ stance. In other words, just as Republicans acted on the side of our Constitution by working with Democrats during Watergate, Democrats did likewise by opposing Republicans during the Starr/Clinton business.

Getting back to the current cast of characters, Jackie Calmes wrote a year ago that Trump-era Republicans—as well as the Republican voters who keep rewarding them in primary elections—had already failed the American people by letting Trump off the hook for the unconscionable crimes he committed while in office. Will they, as a party, take this final opportunity provided by Smith and Willis to redeem themselves? Don’t hold your breath.

Here’s one thing we can say about how leading Republicans acted in Nixon’s time—a time when, as Calmes pointed out, “the truth had a common meaning to both parties.” Back then they knew when the game was up, and they made sure Nixon wouldn’t end up being able to raise $7 million for another White House run off a mugshot.

RELATED STORY: Here's what you need to know ahead of a historic mugshot

putting democracy over partisanship

Were Watergate-era Republicans in Congress reading the political tea leaves? They couldn’t ignore them, that’s for sure (and neither will the Republicans of 2023, many of whom will only turn on Trump if and when it suits them politically). But beyond the polls, enough Nixon-era Republicans at least recognized the gravity of what their leader, the president of the United States, had done. They were prepared to join with Democrats in Congress to remove him from office. They sealed his political fate. They put democracy over partisanship. Country over party.

On the other hand, when Putin’s puppet got impeached the first time, Mitt Romney was the only Republican senator to vote for conviction. The second time around, he was joined by six others. I guess that represents progress? On the other hand, of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump over Jan. 6, only a paltry two made it back into the next Congress. (Four retired, including Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, while four were defeated in GQP primaries.) Either way, I have not a single doubt that in the unimaginable hypothetical circumstance where a Democratic president had behaved exactly as Trump did, every single Republican member of the House would have voted to impeach, and every single Senate Republican would have voted to convict. Oh, and so would have every Democrat in their respective chambers. That’s another pretty damn important point of comparison to make here.

As it stands right now, congressional Republicans have no official responsibility for what becomes of Donald Trump, either criminally or politically. His criminal fate rests in the hands of the folks serving on various juries in Florida, New York, Georgia, D.C., and who knows where else, while his political fate, at least at first, is in the hands of Republican primary voters.

When it comes to moral responsibility, congressional Republicans as a whole showed absolutely none of it when they were charged with assessing whether Fuck a L’Orange should have been impeached and removed from the presidency. If they had acted responsibly, maybe our country wouldn’t be stuck where we are now: in a room without any oxygen.

RELATED STORIES:

 'A dark moment' for the Republican Party

Trump's enablers are turning on each other. Will they turn on him next?

Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)

Dick Morris: Liz Cheney ‘Has A Snowball’s Chance In Hell’ At Getting Re-Elected

Former Clinton campaign adviser and popular political prognosticator Dick Morris recently said that Congresswoman Liz Cheney will lose her re-election campaign in 2022 in the GOP primary due to her decision to impeach former President Donald Trump.

Morris also said allowing Cheney to remain in Republican leadership shows how out of touch party’s leaders are with their base.

RELATED: Newt Gingrich Predicts Democrats Will Throw Away Congress ‘Once Again’ With ‘Radical’ Budget Agenda

Morris: ‘Liz Cheney Is A Gone Goose’

“She has snowball’s chance in hell of getting reelected,” Morris recently told Newsmax

“Her favorability is down to 13% and she loses the projected primary by 3-1 or 4-1,” Morris said. “Wyoming went 70% for Trump.”

“And Liz Cheney is a gone goose,” he added.

Morris explained how Republicans leaders don’t understand where the rank and file base is right now.

Morris said, “And it’s ridiculous, and shows how out of touch Kevin McCarthy and the Republican leadership is with the voters of the Republican Party, that he and Scalise worked overtime to round up votes for this…traitor, who voted to impeach Donald Trump.”

“The voters of her state, Wyoming, her state,” Morris insisted “will not be so forgiving.”

Cheney was censured last week by the Wyoming Republican Party for being among the ten Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump.

Previous to that state-wide Party vote, many of Wyoming’s County Republican parties also voted to censure her.

Morris: ‘She’s Part Of Republican Royalty Because Of Her Father’

“While she did win the vote in the House because it was basically set up by the leadership and she’s kind of inherited royalty among Republicans,” Morris noted.

Morris did stated a glaring fact about Cheney’s current popularity back home.

“But, in fact, there’s some polling in Wyoming [that suggests that] she has a 13% job approval among Republicans,” Morris said.

Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, is currently the third highest-ranking position in the House GOP.

“She shouldn’t be [Wyoming’s] congressman in any case,” Morris said. “But she’s part of Republican royalty because of her father and they don’t want to move against her.”

“But the voters have their own minds,” Morris reminded.

RELATED: Trump Voices Support For Lou Dobbs After Fox Cancels His Show – ‘Nobody Loves America More’

Morris then explained how Republican leaders are probably mis-analyzing their own voters.

“The word ‘base’ is something the Left likes to use to describe Trump supporters,” Morris said.

“It’s not his base, it’s 80% or 90% of the Republican Party. The word is the Republican Party. And they try to pretend it’s fragmented, but it’s not.”

“And if it [is] fragmented, it’s not the Left against the Right, it’s the top against the rest of it,” Morris explained.

“That’s what you’re seeing here” Morris finished.

The post Dick Morris: Liz Cheney ‘Has A Snowball’s Chance In Hell’ At Getting Re-Elected appeared first on The Political Insider.

Hillary Clinton gets brutally honest about what our nation needs to do if we want to heal post-Trump

Less than one week after a group of pro-Trump insurgents rioted and stormed the U.S. Capitol, former U.S. secretary of state and 2016 presidential nominee Hillary Clinton published a smart, somber analysis in The Washington Post. Surprising few, Clinton calls for Donald Trump to be impeached. She discusses the grief, horror, and trauma that comes with an insurgency at the Capitol. But she also discusses the white supremacy that enabled Trump—who wasn’t surprised by the violent riot in Washington, D.C. last week—and, perhaps most importantly, what President-elect Joe Biden must prioritize as president. 

Let’s discuss her op-ed below.

Clinton (accurately) points out that Trump ran for office “on a vision of America where whiteness is valued at the expense of everything else.” During his time in the White House, he emboldened white supremacists and conspiracy theorists and sowed a deep mistrust in some of the nation’s fundamental values, like a free and fair election, for example. Most recently, Clinton argues, when it came to the riotous attack on the Capitol, “Trump left no doubt about his wishes, in the lead-up to Jan. 6 and with his incendiary words before his mob descended.”

The obvious answer most Democrats, progressives, moderates, and even some Republicans agree on? We need to prosecute the domestic terrorists who attacked the Capitol. But as Clinton points out, it’s not actually enough to merely “scrutinize — and prosecute“ them. According to Clinton, “We all need to do some soul-searching of our own.”

Clinton points out that many, many people in this nation were not in the least bit surprised by what happened last Wednesday. Who? Many people of color. Why? Because, as Clinton puts it, “a violent mob waving Confederate flags and hanging nooses is a familiar sight in American history.” In bringing us through recent horrors, Clinton references police violence during Black Lives Matter protests and stresses the fact that if we want unity and some degree of healing, that process “starts with recognizing that this is indeed part of who we are.”

In practical terms, Clinton outlines a few key starting points. She wants to see social media platforms held accountable in efforts to stop the spread of violent speech, new state and federal laws to hold white supremacists accountable, and tracking the insurgents who stormed the Capitol. 

In the biggest, most immediate picture, Clinton wants to see Trump impeached and believes the Congress members who enabled him should resign immediately. Unsurprisingly, she also argues that “those who conspired with the domestic terrorists should be expelled immediately.”

There are currently 159 House members and 24 senators who are on record supporting impeachment and removal. Regardless of where your members of Congress stand, please send them a letter.

Brad Pitt’s Anti-Trump Oscar Speech: 45 Seconds is ‘More Than the Senate Gave John Bolton’

Right on cue, Hollywood liberal Brad Pitt made his Oscar acceptance speech political last night when he bashed the U.S. Senate for not having John Bolton as a witness during the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.

Pitt was accepting the award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” when the 56-year-old actor decided to make his speech overtly political.

RELATED: Bolton Goes After Trump on North Korea Amid New Tensions

Pitt Couldn’t Resist Letting His Left Flag Fly

“They told me I only have 45 seconds up here, which is 45 seconds more than the Senate gave John Bolton this week,” Pitt said.

“I’m thinking maybe Quentin does a movie about it. In the end, the adults do the right thing,” he added.

Pitt thanked Tarantino and also his co-star Leonardo DiCaprio, as well as the actors and directors who helped him throughout his successful career, including Geena Davis who co-starred with him in the 1991 film “Thelma & Louise.”

Pitt Had Been Working with Obama and Clinton Speechwriters on His Oscars Acceptance Speech

Vulture reported last week that Pitt had collaborated with former Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton speech writers to help write his acceptance speeches this year.

This was recognized on Twitter again Sunday night.

Some on social media also had fun with Pitt’s remarks.

“Imagine telling someone in 2005 that Brad Pitt would shout out John Bolton during his Oscar speech,” tweeted Republican activist Matt Gorman.

Conservative talk host Larry Elder tweeted, “Brad Pitt, winner of Best Supporting Actor, and made a crack about John Bolton not testifying before the Senate during the Trump impeachment trial. Apparently, Pitt is unaware that Bolton has REFUSED to testify without a subpoena.”

RELATED: Tucker Carlson Rips Into Bolton, Compares Him to Snake from Trump’s Parable

Typical Hollywood Liberal Garbage

Believe it or not, this was Pitt’s first Oscar win for acting and yet he couldn’t resist going straight to politics with his John Bolton line. Many in Hollywood can’t understand why so many Americans tune out the pomposity and arrogance of activist celebrities, and yet Pitt lived up to that stereotype perfectly on Sunday night.

Brad Pitt wonders who John Bolton didn’t testify during the impeachment trial. We wonder how many Americans changed the channel when he started his childish rant?

The post Brad Pitt’s Anti-Trump Oscar Speech: 45 Seconds is ‘More Than the Senate Gave John Bolton’ appeared first on The Political Insider.

New clip of young Lindsey Graham talking about impeachment confirms his hypocrisy knows no bounds

Republican hypocrisy knows no bounds. It is hard to write this in new ways every few minutes, but it is the job of any honest person to acknowledge it. With Donald Trump’s impeachment trial playing out in the Senate and a Republican Party now actively colluding to cover up his crimes, old videos of very visible Republicans and Trump allies contradicting their current positions have started springing up.

Sen. Lindsey Graham is one of the more obvious examples because his 180-degree turnabout on executive powers, the abuse of those powers, and the subject of impeachment is arguably the most transparent example of how craven the Republican Party has become in its amoral quest for power. 

Dating back to Jan. 23, 1999, the clip below shows a younger Sen. Graham speaking at a press conference and basking in that camera limelight he so clearly desired and now requires.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: The law allows a different disposition if the offender comes before the court: “yes I’m guilty and I’m sorry and I throw myself on the mercy of the court.”  The sentence is usually different in a case like that versus someone who takes the legal system to the bitter end, and uses every twist and turn, and every gimmick, to try and beat the charges, for lack of a better word. So I’m going to argue that proportionality is something we need to consider, but is something that the defendant usually has to earn. And when you have someone who has flouted the law at every turn, then usually the sanctions are much more severe.

This was Sen. Graham’s attempt to dismiss the fact that the Republican Party’s “high crime” against then president Bill Clinton was that he obstructed justice in order to hide and lie about an extramarital affair he was having. The “proportionality” being brought to his mouth was the fact that none of it seemed very high crime-like, and Graham wanted to angle for the idea that Clinton’s lack of remorse showed an elitism and a belief he was above the law.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has arguably committed high crimes not only every day that he has been president, but every day since he began running for president.

x