Senate Republicans push to let Trump off the hook for inciting Capitol attack

Posted on January 21, 2021 by Laura Clawson

Republicans want to move along and forget that whole thing where a mob of Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol, threatening the lives of lawmakers and killing one police officer and wounding others. Donald Trump isn’t in office anymore, the senators who would have to vote in his impeachment trial say, so there’s nothing to talk about anymore.

We should move on from the 15 police officers hospitalized and more than 100 injured as Trump-supporting domestic terrorists beat them with fire extinguishers and American flags and fists and whatever else was available, shot bear spray at them, massed in the hundreds if not thousands to force their way through doors and beat down windows, and in one case Tasered an officer in the neck until he had a heart attack.

Rep. John Katko, the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee and one of the 10 House Republicans who voted for impeachment, said after classified briefings on the attack, “I was left with a profound sense that it was much worse than people realized.”

But Senate Republicans are strenuously looking for excuses not to hold Trump accountable. Sen. John Cornyn spent Thursday morning quoting former Trump impeachment lawyer Alan Dershowitz to suggest that holding Trump to account for his significant role in whipping up the mob that attacked the Capitol would be merely “seek[ing] revenge” and would “distract from President Biden’s agenda, and make it hard to heal the country.”

”What good comes from impeaching a guy in Florida?” Sen. Lindsey Graham asked. But he made clear to CNN that his concern was not about “what good” but about what’s good for the Republican Party, saying: “There's no way to be a successful Republican Party without having President Trump working with all of us and all of us working with him. That's just a fact. And I think we got a decent chance of coming back in 2022. But we can't do it without the President.”

Trump told these people to come to Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, the day Congress met to count the electoral votes that made Joe Biden the president. “Will be wild,” he tweeted. That day, he told the crowd “we’re going to have to fight much harder,” and, “You will have an illegitimate president. That is what you will have, and we can’t let that happen.” Then, “We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” And he told them he would be with them as they marched on the Capitol.

What good would come from impeaching him now that he’s a private citizen in Florida? You put a marker down that inciting violence against Congress specifically as it attempts to carry out the process of democracy is not acceptable. Do Cornyn or Graham treat a dirt-filled wound by slapping a bandage on it and pretending it’s not there? Because that’s a recipe for festering infection, just as refusing to address what happened at the Capitol, and Trump’s role in it, would worsen the already festering infection in U.S. politics.

Republicans like Cornyn and Graham, though, don’t care about what’s good for the nation. They care about what’s good for the Republican Party.

McConnell finally blames Trump for insurrection, but that’s not enough. The Senate must convict

Posted on January 20, 2021 (Updated January 21, 2021) by Joan McCarter

The second impeachment trial of Donald Trump in the U.S. Senate is likely to be a real trial, unlike the first time around when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republicans conducted a sham process, refusing to hear witnesses and refusing to consider the gravity of Trump's crimes. That's changed, now that their place of work—their essential home—has been defiled by an insurrectionist mob incited by Trump. That the impeachment hearings will go forward this time was made clear Tuesday by none other than McConnell, when he stated on the floor "The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people."

Despite McConnell's essential granting of the validity of the charges against Trump and recognition that the process will proceed, there will still be Republicans and Trump apologists who will argue that the Senate shouldn't continue because Trump is already gone—variations on the supposed "unity" theme we have been hearing since January 6 and the violent, armed, deadly insurrection Trump instigated. Some will argue that the Senate cannot try a former president for acts during his or her presidency. Most nonpartisan experts have called that idea bunk, but now we have the pretty darned definitive conclusion of the Congressional Research Service, which looks at all the scholarship and all the precedent, and concludes that it is well within the power of Congress to convict a departed official and that "even if an official is no longer in office, an impeachment conviction may still be viewed as necessary by Congress to clearly delineate the outer bounds of acceptable conduct in office for the future."

The attorneys writing at Congressional Research Service start at the beginning. "As an initial matter, a number of scholars have argued that the delegates at the Constitutional Convention appeared to accept that former officials may be impeached for conduct that occurred while in office," they write. "This understanding also tracks with certain state constitutions predating the Constitution, which allowed for impeachments of officials after they left office." That's following the precedent of British law and practice, which included the impeachment of the former governor-general of Bengal Warren Hastings, impeached two years after his resignation and while the Constitutional Convention was actually happening. The Framers were aware of this while it was happening, and in crafting the impeachment articles did depart from some British precedent—for example requiring a two-thirds rather than simple majority vote for conviction—but they didn't explicitly restrict Congress's power to convict a departed official.

There's the plain text of the Constitution, however, which doesn't really definitively say one way or the other. "The President, Vice President and all Civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment … and Conviction." Then there's the other part: "judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States [emphasis added]," which follows from removal from office. How could you disqualify an already-departed and deserving official from holding future office if you couldn't impeach them first? As one scholar argued all the way back in the 1920s, "an official's resignation following an initial impeachment by the House but before conviction in the Senate may not 'deprive the people of the full measure of the protection afforded them' through the additional remedy of disqualification."

What was in the Framer's heads isn't too hard to divine, either. They told us. CRS relates this: "President John Quincy Adams, who, during debate on the House's authority to impeach Daniel Webster for conduct that occurred while he had been Secretary of State, said in relation to his own acts as President: 'I hold myself, so long as I have the breath of life in my body, amenable to impeachment by this House for everything I did during the time I held any public office.'" There's also the precedence of the 1876 impeachment of Secretary of War William Belknap for, essentially, bribery—accepting payments in return for making an appointment. Belknap resigned hours before a House committee determined there was "unquestioned evidence of malfeasance," but the committee recommended impeachment anyway, despite his resignation. The House debated moving forward, and ultimately approved the resolution, without objection. The Senate debated and deliberated on the issue of whether he could be tried in the Senate as a former official for more than two weeks, and ultimately "determined by a vote of 37 to 29 that Secretary Belknap was 'amenable to trial by impeachment for acts done as Secretary of War, notwithstanding his resignation of said office before he was impeached.'" That vote established the representation of an impeached former official being subject to a Senate trial. A majority voted to convict, but not a two-thirds majority.

What the CRS report does not go into deeply, and what would be the larger point of a Trump conviction, is the disqualification part. That would come in a simple majority vote following a successful conviction, and would prevent Trump from ever holding "any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States." They can't get to that part—the part that matters to McConnell and plenty of other Republicans—if they don't do the first part, convict.

McConnell's condemnation of Trump on Tuesday means little more than McConnell trying to create distance between himself and the man he—almost single-handedly—allowed to remain in a position in which he could raise an insurrection against McConnell's own branch. This could have been prevented if, one year ago, McConnell and Senate Republicans had offered even one word of rebuke to contain Trump. If at any point in the last four years McConnell had done anything to curtail Trump's worst instincts. Hell, if we wound the clock back to late summer 2016 when the entire intelligence community was warning congressional leadership that Russia was intervening in the election on Trump's behalf, when McConnell refused to let that information be made public. But I digress.

Yes, Trump can still be impeached, convicted, and barred from ever holding office again. That's if Senate Republicans care more about the country, about their own institution, about the future of their own party than about their next election and whether the MAGA crowd will primary them.

Freshman GOP Rep Admits Voting To Impeach Trump May Have Destroyed His Career

Posted on January 18, 2021 by LifeZette

Freshman Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI) spoke out on Sunday to admit that voting in favor of impeaching President Donald Trump last week may have destroyed his political career.

Meijer Votes To Impeach Trump

The House voted to impeach Trump for a second time last week over the Capitol riots earlier this month, with the article of impeachment charging Trump with “incitement of insurrection.” The impeachment was approved by a vote of 232-197, with every Democrat and ten Republicans in the House voting in favor of it.

Meijer was one of the ten Republicans to vote in favor of impeaching Trump in a move that he himself admitted one day later that “may have been an act of political suicide.”

While appearing on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, Meijer was asked by host George Stephanopolous, “Are you concerned you ended your career with that vote?”

“Oh, I may very well have,” Meijer responded. “But I think it’s also important that we have elected leaders who are not thinking solely about what’s in their individual self-interest, not what is going to be politically expedient, but what we actually need for country.”

Meijer Explains His Reason For Voting To Impeach Trump

Earlier in the interview, the freshman Republican congressman explained his reasoning behind voting to impeach Trump.

“Impeaching a president, especially a president of my own party, was nothing that we ever hoped to do. Many of us deliberated deeply,” Meijer said.

“This was not as easy as just saying what is in our best political interest, but, frankly, looking at the evidence, looking at the facts of the case, reading the article and asking, ‘Is this true by our own experience, by our lived experience?’ And it was,” he continued.

“You know, I think this is a time for reflection, but it’s also a time for accountability. And that’s something that I am deeply committed to,” he added.

“You know, I’m calling on my party to restore trust, to restore the trust of the voting public and to ensure that we never allow the actions that led up to Jan. 6 and what happened on Jan. 6, we never allow that outburst of political violence to occur in our name again,” Meijer said.

A Senate impeachment trial against Trump is expected to take place after Joe Biden is inaugurated later this week.

This piece was written by James Samson on January 18, 2021. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

The post Freshman GOP Rep Admits Voting To Impeach Trump May Have Destroyed His Career appeared first on The Political Insider.

Rand Paul Issues Major Warning About Future Of GOP If Republicans Support Trump Impeachment

Posted on January 17, 2021 by LifeZette

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) spoke out on Friday to issue a major warning to the GOP, advising what will happen if Republicans continue to support the impeachment of President Donald Trump.

Paul Issues Warning To Republicans

Paul told Fox News host Laura Ingraham that there will be a mass exodus from the Republican Party if enough Republican senators support impeachment to remove Trump from office.

“I don’t often get ask my advice from leadership how they should react. My unsolicited suggestion would be this: they will destroy the Republican Party if leadership is complicit with an impeachment or leadership votes for an impeachment, they will destroy the party,” Paul said, adding that the GOP could lose one-third of its party.

“Impeachment is purely a partisan thing. It’s for these moral, ‘Oh I’m so much better than you and you’re a bad person because I’m so moral’ — It’s for these kind of people to do this,” Paul explained.

“I didn’t agree with the fight that happened last week, and I voted against overturning the election,” he continued. “But at the same time, the impeachment is a wrongheaded, partisan notion. But if Republicans go along with it, it will destroy the party — a third of the Republicans will leave the party.”

“This isn’t anymore about the Electoral College. It’s about the future of the party and whether you’re going to ostracize and ex-communicate President Trump from the party,” the Republican said. “Well, guess what? Millions of his fans will leave as well.”

Liz Cheney Supports Effort To Impeach Trump

This comes after Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the third-highest ranking Republican in the House, supported the left’s effort to impeach Trump.

“Much more will become clear in coming days and weeks, but what we know now is enough. The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” Cheney said.

“Everything that followed was his doing,” she added. “None of this would have happened without the President. The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not.”

This piece was written by James Samson on January 17, 2021. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

The post Rand Paul Issues Major Warning About Future Of GOP If Republicans Support Trump Impeachment appeared first on The Political Insider.

Schumer, Pelosi grapple with uncertainty and ongoing threats in proceeding to Trump’s Senate trial

Posted on January 15, 2021 by Joan McCarter

The timing of the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump in the Senate remains uncertain as the week closes out. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked in her Friday press conference about when the impeachment article charging Trump with "incitement of insurrection," which was passed in the House on Wednesday, will go to the Senate. She didn't answer.

"Right now, our managers are solemnly and prayerfully preparing for the trial which they will take to the Senate," Pelosi said. "At the same time, we are in transition. With the COVID relief package President-elect Biden announced last night, he is delivering on what he said when he was elected, 'help is on the way.'" What that likely means is soon-to-be Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is still working out how it will proceed in consultation with the transition team for President-elect Joe Biden. Outgoing Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused this week to work with Schumer to speed up the process and reconvene the Senate ahead of Tuesday's scheduled official session. Everything about this process from this point is novel for the Senate.

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There's the high level of physical danger surrounding the whole of the Capitol complex after the attack and for Biden's inauguration. There're the two Democratic senators from Georgia, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, whose election still hasn't been certified; the deadline for that is Jan. 22, though it could happen on Jan. 19, the same day the Senate comes back. This process in these circumstances is entirely new: "Everything we are talking about is being invented out of whole cloth," Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy told The New York Times. "We have never tried a president after they left office. We've never had an insurrection against the Capitol. We've never held a trial while we are confirming a cabinet. All of this is first impression."

But Democrats remain committed to figuring it out. "I can see no reason we cannot find a way with our archaic rules," said Sen. Amy Klobuchar. Working that out, at this moment, seems to look like splitting the Senate sessions, the Times reports. Schumer and McConnell met Thursday, with a "goal … to divide the Senate’s days so the chamber could work on confirming members of Mr. Biden’s cabinet and considering his stimulus package in the morning and then take up the impeachment trial in the afternoon." Until that is nailed down, it's not clear that Pelosi would initiate the process by formally sending the article over to the Senate.

The outcome there is also unclear, and again it depends a lot on McConnell. He's reportedly told associates that he's sick of Trump, supports the impeachment, wants him expunged from the Republican Party, and sees his impeachment as a way to do that. But that's hearsay right now; McConnell hasn't made those statements public. Maybe he's waiting to see if Trump does anything else between now and Wednesday, his last day in Washington. Maybe he's genuinely undecided. But if McConnell votes for conviction, there will very likely be 16 other Republicans joining him.

As of now, Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski is the closest to declaring her intent. On Thursday, she said that Trump's words on Jan. 6 "incited violence," which "briefly interfered with the government's ability to ensure a peaceful transfer of power." She continued: "Such unlawful actions cannot go without consequence and the House has responded swiftly, and I believe, appropriately, with impeachment." Others who have suggested they would vote to convince include Sens. Richard Shelby of Alabama, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and Mitt Romney of Utah. If you had that many, surely Maine's Susan Collins would jump on, unless she's too bitter that Democrats had the effrontery to mount a challenge to her reelection. Again, whether enough decide that Trump has to be cut out of the body politic like a cancer depends much on McConnell.

All those Republicans need to heed Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer, one of the 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach, even at potential physical harm to himself and his family. "I have colleagues who are now traveling with armed escorts, out of the fear for their safety. Many of us are altering our routines, working to get body armor, which is a reimbursable purchase that we can make. … It's sad that we have to get to that point," he said. "But, you know, our expectation is that someone may try to kill us."

However, "I think you have to set that aside," he said. "I don't believe in giving an assassin's veto, an insurrectionist's veto, a heckler's veto. If we let that guide decisions, then you're cowering to the mob. I mean, that's the definition of terrorism—is trying to achieve a political end using violence." How many senators will have that courage?

Cartoon: ‘EZ-Leave!’ To Show You Care

Posted on January 15, 2021 by Mark Fiore

Vimeo Video

Now that President Trump has become the first president in the history of the United States to be impeached twice, more of his Republican allies will no doubt slink away. Resignations have already been piling up from the cabinet level on down since Trump incited a violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol building.

Betsy DeVos, Elaine Chao and Mick Mulvaney, among others, have just had it up to here with this president. Why, some switch must have flipped and made Trump a madman, right? (Mulvaney even said that today’s Trump is not the one he knew eight months ago.)

I’m happy complicit Republicans are finally trying to un-complicit themselves, I just wish they had found their spines when Trump tried to get Ukraine’s president to dig up dirt on Joe Biden or when the administration separated thousands of children from their families or right after the “both sides” comment about Charlottesville or . . .

Enjoy the cartoon, cross your fingers for an impeachment conviction and visit me over on my Patreon pages if you can help support my work — and get behind-the-scenes goodies for yourself!

House Republicans overwhelmingly stood behind Trump after he incited white supremacist insurrection

Posted on January 14, 2021 by Ashton Lattimore

The House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald Trump for a historic second time on Jan. 13, and in the process confirmed that even after he incited a white supremacist insurrection at the Capitol building, an overwhelming majority of Republicans see still no problem with Trump’s conduct. While it is technically correct that the 10 Republican votes in favor of impeachment made it “the most bipartisan one in history,” as described by the The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, and others, that’s an extremely low bar to clear. In fact, the vote numbers don’t suggest bipartisanship in any meaningful sense, but rather paint a stark portrait of a political party that has almost unanimously aligned itself with white supremacy and the white backlash to BIPOC political ascendancy. As if to drive home the point, GOP representatives even booed Rep. Cori Bush for denouncing white supremacy during the hearings. Rather than rushing to lionize the handful of Republicans who momentarily broke with the party—and did so only after their own sense of safety was threatened—news coverage needs to reflect these realities.

There are 211 Republicans in the House of Representatives, only 10 of them voted in favor of impeachment. That means over 95% watched as insurrectionists broke into the Capitol with Confederate battle flags held high and white supremacist symbols adorning their bodies as they apparently searched the building for government officials to execute, and decided, “This is fine.” Of course, the overwhelmingly white Republican caucus may have correctly surmised that they weren’t the ones in mortal danger on Jan. 6. Rather, Democratic members of Congress—especially women and Black and brown members—represented the primary targets of the mob’s ire, as newly emerging details have revealed.

The same day the impeachment vote was taken, the Boston Globe reported that as Rep. Ayanna Pressley and her staff barricaded themselves in her office to keep safe from the intruders, they discovered all of the panic buttons in the office had been torn out. On Instagram Live the evening before the vote, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that during the attack she “had a very close encounter where I thought I was going to die.” Both Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez are part of The Squad, an outspoken group of progressive Black and Latina Democratic representatives elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 and 2020, which also includes Bush and Reps. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Jamaal Bowman. As highly visible avatars of women and BIPOC’s growing political and demographic power, members of The Squad have long been on the receiving end of racist rhetoric and right-wing death threats. The events of Jan. 6 suggest at least some people had designs on carrying those threats out, possibly even with help from members of Congress who graciously offered “reconnaissance tours” to the insurrectionists.

The attempted coup also posed a significant risk to a great many Black and brown people who aren’t lawmakers. The residents of Washington, D.C. itself—a largely Black city—along with Congressional support staff and Capitol building custodians had to contend with the trauma of being descended upon by a white supremacist mob, and afterward, were left to clean up the mess that same mob left behind. Overly credulous news coverage praising “principled” Republicans not only threatens to miss the racial realities of where most of the party stands, but also the narrowly circumscribed and race-specific extent of its support for the working class.

With the looming threat of more insurrectionist violence in the coming days, it is of the highest moral and political significance that so many House Republicans condoned and aided the racist incitement that put the republic, fellow Americans, and the lives of their own Congressional colleagues in serious peril. And because the animating impulses behind the Capitol insurrection won’t wane with the dawn of the post-Trump political era, it’s imperative that we in the media don’t close our eyes to what the impeachment vote actually has to tell us about race, politics, and power in the United States.

Ashton Lattimore is the editor-in-chief of Prism. Follow her on Twitter @ashtonlattimore.

Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places and issues currently underreported by our national media. Through our original reporting, analysis, and commentary, we challenge dominant, toxic narratives perpetuated by the mainstream press and work to build a full and accurate record of what’s happening in our democracy. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Rep. Brian Mast is a craven, repulsive liar, but we can still answer his question

Posted on January 14, 2021 by Hunter

Trump loyalist Florida Rep. Brian Mast is now a traitor to his country, but more to the point he is also dishonest, politically craven, and a garbage human being. So let's dispense with this quickly.

During the impeachment vote, Mast was one of many House Republicans attempting to straddle the thin line of claiming to be outraged by last week's armed insurrection against Congress while still insisting that Donald Trump's role in inciting attempted murders was not impeachable because reasons. The argument was insincere, lie-based, and about what you would expect from one of the traitors who himself egged on violence with hoax claims of election flaws that did not exist.

Indeed, Mast was one of those lawmakers to rise in challenge to the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6 immediately before a mob entered the building with the intent of capturing or murdering those who would not sign on to the same Trump-promoted false claims. There is a direct line between Mast's lies and multiple deaths, and between Mast's lies and the now-broken chain of "peaceful transition of power" that lasted from the Civil War until the time Brian Mast was elected to Congress. He is a seditionist, and was before the violence began.

One of Mast's pillars of argument was that you could not pin the armed insurrection on Trump because there was no evidence Trump did the thing everyone in the nation saw him doing: "Has any one of those individuals who brought violence to this Capitol been brought here to answer if they did that because of our president?" He said this very smugly, like a stupid person believing themselves to be the first in history to notice that the sun and moon looked to be approximately the same size, and waited for a response that he knew would not come because speeches on the floor of Congress do not generally follow a call-and-response format.

Here ya go, sport. Video of the insurrectionists asserting that they were "invited" into the building by Donald Trump.

Florida Rep. Brian Mast making what seems, to him, to be a dramatic point: Standing silently after asking if any rioters have said that they acted bc of the president. Well. https://t.co/WfPqWB8BUM
— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) January 13, 2021

We done here? Yeah, probably.

There's not going to be the wholesale expulsion of seditionists and traitors responsible for these deaths because the House Republican caucus is a collection of criminals who fully intend to immunize each other even for insurrection—they will purge the non-seditionists like (shudder) Liz Cheney and elevate the most vocal promotors of the party's democracy-attacking lies to ever-higher positions. That’s too bad, but it does not absolve them of the provably false claims that led to murders and now to law enforcement warnings of a new possible era of conservative-stoked terrorism. They are still the insurrection's ringleaders, and it falls on all the rest of us to treat them with the appropriate amount of contempt and disgust for the rest of their lives.

Rep. Brian Mast, your hoaxes and lies led to an attempt on your colleagues' lives. You are a traitor to your nation. And you are in crowded company.

McConnell might vote to convict Trump, but only if it includes a giant GOP payday

Posted on January 14, 2021 by Kerry Eleveld

Soon-to-be Minority Leader Mitch McConnell got the headline he wanted on Tuesday when he unleashed anonymous sources to tell reporters he believed Donald Trump may have committed impeachable offenses. In other words, he just might vote to convict.

The next day, McConnell got the other headline he wanted when he declined the invitation of soon-to-be Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to reconvene the Senate for an emergency session to take up an impeachment trial. That means any Senate movement on impeachment won't happen until Jan. 19—which importantly buys McConnell at least another week or more to see which way the political winds are blowing before making a final decision on his vote.

McConnell, the perennial craven opportunist, has chosen to leave the nuclear codes at the finger tips of a mad man for another seven days for no other reason than to find the least painful political path to placing Trump in the GOP's rear view mirror. And he has conveniently planted himself right in between the two House Republican leaders who have taken polar opposite positions on impeachment: Reps. Kevin McCarthy of California and Liz Cheney of Wyoming.

Cheney voted to impeach Trump on Wednesday, stating he had "summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack." McCarthy, who eagerly backed Trump's sedition efforts and voted against certifying the election, offered among the most disingenuous and repulsive of justifications for his traitorous vote against impeachment. "We solve our disputes at the ballot box," he said, despite the fact that he worked diligently to overturn what happened at the ballot box in November.

But in these two House GOP leaders, McConnell gets to spend a week surveying the upsides and potential wreckage of their approaches. Key to all of it will be money—because McConnell has built his entire career on wielding the power he gains from selling his soul to Corporate America and, more recently, dark money interests. He will almost surely be burning up the phone lines trying to figure out what he has to do to keep from becoming a political pariah to the corporate donor class. If there's a way for McConnell to thread that needle without fully convicting Trump, he will surely take it. But if he concludes that the only way to escape McCarthy's fate is to take a stronger stand, then that's where he will come down.

To date, 10 major companies have paused donations to Republicans who voted to object to certification of the election results. More have suspended their contributions to the Republican Attorneys General Association after it was implicated in organizing the rally-turned-riot. And still more corporations have paused all donations while they reevaluate their donations going forward.

All of that puts McCarthy in a great deal of jeopardy since his No. 1 charge as GOP Minority Leader is raising money to dole out in order to win back the majority. On MSNBC Wednesday, former GOP strategist and Lincoln Project Co-Founder Steve Schmidt predicted, "Corporate America is never coming back to Kevin McCarthy." Cheney, on the other hand, now has to fight off members of the House sedition caucus, which is already calling for her removal from leadership.

Where that leaves the prospects for conviction of Trump in a Senate trial is somewhere between possible and unlikely. McConnell could go either way and will likely sit back and watch the trial play out at the direction of Schumer and Senate Democrats while he collects data points on the fallout.

On the bright side, the more we learn about the planning and execution of the violent Capitol siege and the role some Republican lawmakers played, the more horrific the entire picture will get for the party. In the end, the GOP might be such a toxic waste dump that McConnell's hand is forced.

Following the impeachment vote, historian Michael Beschloss was moderately optimistic about Senate conviction, which will require 17 GOP votes in the Senate by the time Democrats take control of the chamber. "I think there's a real chance that this guy could get convicted," Beschloss told MSNBC.

But it will really all come down to the calculation of McConnell. If he votes to convict, enough members of the GOP caucus will likely follow his lead to prevent Trump from ever abusing the power of the American government again.

Dem Rep. Swalwell Compares President Trump To Osama bin Laden

Posted on January 14, 2021 by LifeZette

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), who has had his own fair share of problems lately in the wake of the scandal involving him allegedly associating with a suspected Chinese spy, spoke out on Tuesday night to compare President Donald Trump to the late 9/11 terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Swalwell Compares Trump To Osama bin Laden

“Well, Osama bin Laden did not enter US soil on September 11, but it was widely acknowledged that he was responsible for inspiring the attack on our country,” Swalwell said on “PBS NewsHour.”

“And the president, with his words — using the word ‘fight,’ with the speakers that he assembled that day, who called for trial by combat and said we have to take names and kick ass — that is hate speech that inspired and radicalized people to storm the Capitol,” he continued.

A visibly surprised host Judy Woodruff asked of Swalwell was really comparing Trump to bin Laden, at which time the Democrat doubled down.

“I’m comparing the words of a [sic] individual who would incite and radicalize somebody, as Osama bin Laden did, to what President Trump did,” Swalwell said. “You don’t actually have to commit the violence yourself, but if you call others to violence, that itself is a crime.”

Rep. Eric Swalwell compares President Trump to Osama bin Laden saying that he "inspired and radicalized people to storm the Capitol" in the same way that bin Laden inspired 9-11 pic.twitter.com/pYr3l4qhMw

— The First (@TheFirstonTV) January 13, 2021

Republicans Demand Swalwell Be Removed From House Intelligence Committee

This comes one month after seventeen Republicans sent a letter to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) demanding that Swalwell be immediately removed from the House Intelligence Committee after his relationship with a suspected Chinese spy was revealed.

“We write to you today out of concern with Congressman Eric Swalwell’s reported, close contacts with a Chinese Communist Party spy recently reported by Axios. Because of Rep. Swalwell’s position on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, his close interactions with Chinese intelligence services, however unintentional they may be, are an unacceptable national security risk,” they said in the letter.

“HPSCI handles some of the most sensitive information our government possesses — information critical to our national defense,” they added. “As such, we urge you to immediately remove Rep. Swalwell from his position on the House Intelligence Committee.”

Not only did Pelosi not remove Swalwell from the intelligence committee, she has also just made him one of her impeachment managers in her effort to remove President Donald Trump from office.

Full Story: Eric Swalwell Named As One Of Pelosi’s Impeachment Managers

This piece was written by James Samson on January 13, 2021. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

The post Dem Rep. Swalwell Compares President Trump To Osama bin Laden appeared first on The Political Insider.