Category: TedCruz

Who is Donald Trump’s most gutless toady?

Posted on by Aldous J Pennyfarthing

The result of the latest Trump impeachment trial was a fait accompli when Mike Pence was pulled from his mother’s womb, saw his shadow, and scurried back home like a frightened baby wallaby for six more weeks of gestation.

The evidence now makes it abundantly clear that Donald Trump incited a riot, delighted in the mayhem, knew Mike Pence was in mortal danger, and not only did nothing to protect his unflinchingly loyal VP after hearing about his potential, you know, murder but actually sought to further incite the rioters by tweeting hateful lies directly at him. 

And what was Pence’s response to all this?

Crickets.

And not cool, genetically engineered murder crickets or anything—just plain old regular crickets.

Senate Republicans acquitted Donald Trump of high crimes and misdemeanors twice. So make them pay: Donate $1 right now to each of the Democratic nominee funds targeting vulnerable Senate Republicans in 2022.

The Washington Post:

[A]fter four years of obedience as vice president, Pence has no plans to condemn Trump or to speak out during the Senate impeachment trial, people close to the former vice president said. He is still operating from a playbook of obsequiousness that became second nature — he never aired his grievances publicly and delivered his often rose-colored counsel to Trump only in private, one-on-one settings.

I wonder if there’s a literal “playbook of obsequiousness,” and if so, does Mother let him read it after bedtime?

Oh, but Pence’s continued public deference to Trump doesn’t mean his feelings weren’t hurt by Trump’s decision to let him be hanged in public so Trump wouldn’t have to give up his extra White House ice cream scoop and unlimited free airplane rides. They were. You’d just never know it from talking to him.

But the rift that emerged between Trump and Pence — after Trump encouraged a frenzied mob that later chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” as it stormed through the Capitol, in search of the then vice president — is unlikely ever to fully heal, people close to Pence said.

One ally described the former vice president as frustrated with what Trump did and said it would forever change his relationship with Trump. This person added, however, that Pence does not share the animus or fury that some of his former aides have for the president.

Do Republicans feel some weird frisson of excitement when Trump brutally attacks or betrays them? Is this something we mere mortals simply can’t understand? Because if any of my bosses had ever treated me this disrespectfully, I’d have immediately FedEx’d them my company-issued gimp costume (without dry-cleaning it first!) and never spoken to them again.

But Republicans keep coming back for more.

Why?

And it’s not just Milquetoast Mike Pence. 

Trump gave out Lindsey Graham’s private cell phone number at a rally, and Graham eventually became his champion.

Trump implied Ted Cruz’s wife was ugly and that his dad had a hand in JFK’s assassination, and Ted became his gracious and loyal servant.

Kevin McCarthy was harassed and nearly killed by Trump’s mob, and Trump refused to lift a finger to protect him. Nevertheless, McCarthy still flew down to Florida three weeks later to kiss his ring.

And despite knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that Trump is the human equivalent of dumpster sushi, Mitch McConnell gladly wolfed down every rancid, mealy bite for years.

It’s inconceivable, but it is what it is. If these guys got into a gruesome clown car accident and you had to Frankenstein them together to confect one historically awful legislator, you’d be hard-pressed to locate a spine or recover a single languorous ball.

So who do you think is the worst? Answer the poll question and find out!

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Three ‘very friendly’ Republican senators met with Trump’s defense lawyers

Posted on (Updated by Laura Clawson

At the beginning of an impeachment trial, senators swear an oath to “do impartial justice.” Most Republican senators have made clear throughout both of Donald Trump’s impeachment trials that this was a lie—at best, a fig leaf they used to get out of answering questions about how they saw the evidence. Then there’s Lindsey Graham, Mike Lee, and Ted Cruz. Those three met with Trump’s defense lawyers Thursday evening to offer advice.

The “very friendly guys,” according to Trump lawyer David Schoen, were making sure Trump’s lawyers were “familiar with procedure.” Probable translation: Wanted to be sure these clowns didn’t screw this thing up too badly for even Republicans to ignore. Was that ethical, though? “Oh yeah, I think that's the practice of impeachment,” Schoen claimed. 

How badly do Graham, Lee, and Cruz think Trump’s lawyers are going to screw up their defense arguments? Alternatively, how worried are they that some Republicans were persuaded by the House impeachment managers’ case? All but six Republicans already voted against holding an impeachment trial at all on the obviously false grounds that it was unconstitutional, giving them an excuse to vote to acquit without engaging the substance of what Trump did at all. 

Sens. Roy Blunt and Marco Rubio are sticking with that claim, for instance. “My view is unchanged as to whether or not we have the authority to do this, and I’m certainly not bound by the fact that 56 people think we do,” Blunt said. “I get to cast my vote, and my view is that you can’t impeach a former president. And if the former president did things that were illegal, there is a process to go through for that.”

And Rubio: “The fundamental question for me, and I don’t know about for everybody else, is whether an impeachment trial is appropriate for someone who is no longer in office. I don’t believe that it is.”

Do Cruz, Lee, and Graham think Schoen and immediately notorious idiot Bruce Castor need their advice to get through what’s forecast to be a very abbreviated day of arguments? Or are they still trying that pathetically hard to suck up to Trump? They do seem to have gotten the attention of his inner circle, with sleazeball adviser Jason Miller repeatedly mentioning their involvement on Newsmax, making absolutely clear the senators were there to build the case for Trump. “It was a real honor to have those senators come in and give us some additional ideas,” he said.

Republican senators have that “not constitutional” sham to hide behind, and they are energetically doing so. They have state parties ready to attack them the minute they step out of line. Donald Trump has his own defense lawyers, albeit not exactly the prime talent of conservative law. And as of Thursday, he officially has three of the people sworn to do impartial justice actively strategizing to help him get off.

The House impeachment managers, on the other hand, had the truth of what happened, and it was too powerful for Republicans to fully ignore. But that is unlikely to be enough.

Senate Republicans are working hard on excuses to acquit Trump despite the powerful case against him

Posted on (Updated by Laura Clawson

Despite the House impeachment managers’ devastating case that Donald Trump incited the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Senate Republicans remain determined to let him off the hook. The arguments Wednesday showed Trump’s repeated attacks on Mike Pence for refusing to try to overturn the election results. They showed the mob chanting “Hang Mike Pence.” They showed Trump’s tweet yet again directing the ire of his supporters at Pence, and they showed an insurrectionist reading that tweet through a bullhorn in the middle of the attack on the Capitol. But according to Sen. Ted Cruz, “They spent a great deal of time focusing on the horrific acts of violence that were played out by the criminals, but the language from the President doesn't come close to meeting the legal standard for incitement.”

“Donald Trump over many months cultivated violence, praised it,” Del. Stacey Plaskett, one of the House managers, said. “And then when he saw the violence his supporters were capable of, he channeled it to his big, wild historic event.” And they showed, in meticulous detail, how Trump set the stage for the January 6 events, down to the fact that he was the one who called for a protest on that date, the date Congress was meeting to certify the election results. Far-right groups were planning Washington, D.C., events for other dates—until Trump started calling for January 6. “Be there, will be wild,” he tweeted on December 19 in just one of several times he promoted the event. And lo, it was wild.

But despite all the time spent on Wednesday showing all the ways that Trump convinced his supporters to believe that the election had been stolen, and how he repeatedly urged them to show up on that date—a date chosen because Congress would be cementing his loss one more time, an event he was frantically trying to block—and how he specifically focused their ire on Pence, and how he called on them to march to the Capitol—despite all that, Senate Republicans are pretending that the case against Trump is simply a matter of people who happened to support Trump doing a bad thing without any connection to him. That sure, there are some very scary videos showing that they themselves were in jeopardy, and that’s a terrible thing, but those are unrelated to Trump himself.

“The images are—first of all, they’re real, it’s not manufactured, but they are put together in a way that adds, on purpose, to the drama of it,” Sen. Kevin Cramer said. “I don’t begrudge them that.” But he clearly wanted focus on those images of the attack, because they enabled him to try to send all those carefully drawn ties to Trump down the memory hole.

“Senators are, you know, pretty analytical, as a matter of just a profession,” he said. “So it doesn’t affect me in terms of how I feel about the president’s culpability. That’s what’s on trial.” Yes, and there was evidence of that … but Cramer and most other Republicans don’t want to talk about it, though Sen. John Thune did acknowledge that the House managers were “connecting the dots.”

Other Republicans plan to rely on their obviously partisan claim that they aren’t allowed to even hold an impeachment trial for someone who is no longer in office. That way they don’t even have to consider the evidence—as Sen. Mike Braun said, “When you think the process is flawed in the first place, I think it's going to be different to arrive at a conclusion on the facts and the merits itself.”

Whether Republicans are afraid that Trump will again send his violent supporters after them physically, afraid that they will be primaried with Trump’s support, or simply are too partisan to take action against any member of their party ever, they are telling us—again—that the evidence doesn’t matter. Their party comes first. Donald Trump comes first.

Since Republicans won’t convict, turn the second impeachment into a trial of the Republican Party

Posted on by Dartagnan

Quavering under explicit threats from Donald Trump that he will start a neo-fascist third party (grossly named “The Patriot Party”), Senate Republicans, led by Kentucky blowhard Rand Paul, have signaled that there is no way they would ever vote to convict Trump for inciting the deadly insurrection that killed five people on Jan. 6, and sent hordes of stinking Trump supporters to smear feces all over the House and Senate chambers while trying to hunt down members of those legislative bodies.

Now that we know this, now that it’s clear, let’s just remember who controls the trial and the admissible evidence in that trial: the Democratic Senate. Just like then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell constrained the first trial by admitting no witnesses or evidence, Democrats are free to admit whatever it takes to paint a clear picture of the environment Trump created, which motivated and aided his incitement of the mob.

Max Boot, writing this week for The Washington Post, makes an excellent point.

When the impeachment proceedings begin in the Senate, it will not be just Donald Trump in the dock. The entire Republican Party will be on trial. And there is every reason to believe that the GOP will fail this test — as it failed every other during the past four years.

As Boot emphasizes, Trump’s guilt here is crystal clear and becoming even clearer than that with each passing day. Boot notes the Center for Responsive Politics report revealing that Trump’s corrupt campaign funneled $2.7 million to groups that organized and participated in the violent insurrection. Many of the participants in the event itself have directly characterized their actions as a response to Trump’s siren call.

There’s no doubt that Trump is guilty of inciting the insurrection. As an added bonus, it’s also clear that he had exhausted all other means to overturn the election, even trying to force the attorney general’s office to involve the Justice Department in the coup attempt. Many witnesses may now be called to attest to Trump’s desperation, further providing evidence for his motives in inciting the Jan. 6 attack.

As Boot observes, we caught a fleeting glimpse, out of the corner of our eyes, of Republicans possibly, maybe, kind of considering doing the right thing and convicting this criminal president of the worst offense any president could possibly commit against this nation: willful insurrection.

But no, it was not to be. Because … they’ve all suddenly become Constitutional scholars!

To avoid having to defend Trump’s indefensible conduct, many Republicans are taking refuge in the argument that it’s unconstitutional to impeach a president who has already left office. This is simply untrue, as more than 150 legal scholars — including a co-founder of the Federalist Society! — point out. “In 1876,” they note, “Secretary of War William Belknap tried to avoid impeachment and its consequences by resigning minutes before the House voted on his impeachment. The House impeached him anyway, and the Senate concluded that it had the power to try, convict, and disqualify former officers.”

Never mind that this vast concern for the Constitution wasn’t on display during Trump’s first impeachment trial, or throughout his entire months-long effort to delegitimize a national election and disenfranchise 80 million Americans. Nothing unconstitutional to see there, I guess.

But there actually was something to see, after all. It was the sight of House and Senate Republicans doing absolutely nothing to stop that effort, and in fact aiding and abetting it through their votes to negate the verdict of the American people—though not in their own elections, mind you. In fact, there was a whole lot to see. And there’s a whole lot of complicity to explore.

We saw Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley raise his fist in support of the insurrectionists, practically egging them on, as long as he could ride the coattails. We saw Texas Sen. Ted Cruz lending his own voice to the treachery, along with 140 members of the House of Representatives.

These people not only supported this lie, they campaigned on it in their own elections. The rot runs right down into the state legislators who wanted to get in on the action. Local party organizations are supporting Trump’s insurrection efforts in state after state, from Wyoming to Arizona.

The GOP appears more eager for retribution against Republicans who upheld their oaths of office than against a president who violated it. All 10 of the House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump are now facing a backlash at home, with local party organizations scolding them for disloyalty and primary challengers lining up against them. Pro-Trump House members are  also demanding Cheney’s ouster as chair of the House Republican conference.

The cancer cuts down to the bone. It isn’t just Trump, but a culture of Republican-abetted sedition that needs to be presented to the American people on Feb. 8. Call some witnesses from those state legislatures who met with Trump as he hemmed, hawed and threatened them. Call Hawley as a witness and obtain all his contacts and communications with the administration before the insurrection. Same with Cruz. There’s no privilege attached, not when you’re trying to commit a crime, boys.

Americans really need to see the big picture.  Let’s give it to them. And let Hawley and Cruz—and Trump—squeal their seditious little asses off.

Abraham Lincoln explained exactly how we should respond to the insurrection of Jan. 6

Posted on by Dartagnan

Since the Jan. 6 attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol we’ve been treated to the spectacle of people like Rep.Kevin McCarthy, Sen. Ted Cruz, and others within the Republican party invoking a spirit of “unity” as they urge Democrats to temper their response to a crisis that Republicans themselves were responsible for causing.

As Sarah Churchwell, writing for the New York Review of Books, observes, these newfound calls for “unity” are from the exact same people who have constantly cast themselves as the “Party of Lincoln” at various times over the past four years.

Republican leaders enjoy flashing their badges as the “Party of Lincoln,” preening themselves on Lincoln’s moral victories and declaring themselves his rightful political heirs. “Our party, the Republican Party, was founded to defeat slavery. Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, signed the Emancipation Proclamation,” Senator Ted Cruz declaimed at the Republican National Convention in 2016, as a prelude to endorsing for president a man whom he had once called a “sniveling coward” and “pathological liar,” a man who had insulted Cruz’s wife and accused his father of conspiring to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. Senator Marco Rubio is another who presumes to speak for “the party of Lincoln,” including the time he tweeted, in February 2016, that Donald Trump would “never be the nominee of the party of Lincoln,” as does House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who managed to recall a few familiar words from the Gettysburg Address in honor of Lincoln’s birthday last year.

But, as Churchwell illustrates, the real Abraham Lincoln had some strong opinions about the kind of treachery we witnessed on Jan. 6, one in which white supremacist seditionists perpetrated a mob-style attack on the seat of American government. And his opinions were not couched in any wishful concept of “unity.” His views, in fact, were unsparing and to the point:

Lincoln consistently likened the minoritarian efforts of the South to a mob, as it employed threats, intimidation, blackmail, political chicanery, voter fraud, and violence to coerce the majority into giving way to ever more unreasonable demands. “We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose,” he told John Hay, his private secretary. For Lincoln, as he said repeatedly, the Civil War was more than a question of the moral wrongs of slavery, as fundamental to the conflict as those were; the principles of democratic self-government and the political character of the nation were also at stake.

As applied to the events of Jan. 6, the Republicans’ vision of “unity” is one in which their party escapes blame for the horrifying spectacle of a treasonous, would-be despot inciting his rabid and deluded minions to violently desecrate our national heritage, all egged on and applauded by complicit state and federal officials within the Republican ranks.

As Churchwell suggests, not only would Lincoln have rejected any invocation of “unity” under such circumstances, he would have been appalled:

The actual party of Lincoln made the opposite decision, believing that the deep principles of preserving the Union far outweighed the superficial comity of false unity. Lincoln had been pressured on all sides to capitulate to Southern demands, including permitting the South to secede, to “let the erring sisters depart in peace!” But part of his reason for refusing to do so was, as the historian James M. McPherson put it in This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War (2007), the fear of setting a “fatal precedent,” one that could be “invoked by disaffected minorities in the future, perhaps by the losing side in another presidential election.” And so they made the apparently paradoxical decision to fight a civil war in an effort to achieve, not unity, but a more perfect union.

In fact what occurred on Jan. 6 was exactly what Lincoln foresaw as the ultimate test for our nation’s survival. As Churchwell points out, contrary to espousing any attempt at “unity” with such insurrectionists, Lincoln’s counsel was to bring the hammer down, hard, on attempts at insurrection by way of the mob.

In particular, Lincoln cautioned against turning a blind eye to mob violence in the futile effort to maintain a tenuous and self-devouring peace. Leaving the perpetrators of such violence “unpunished,” he held, would only embolden the mob and inevitably destroy democratic self-government, as “the lawless in spirit, are encouraged to become lawless in practice” and “absolutely unrestrained.” Without accountability, such a mob would “make a jubilee of the suspension of [the Government’s] operations; and pray for nothing so much, as its total annihilation.”

In reality, it’s not “unity” that Republicans want, but absolution. They want Americans to forget what we just witnessed and what we are now likely to witness over and over again as the delusional, poisonous racism fanned by the GOP over the last thirty years intrudes, unsolicited and unwanted, into Americans’ daily existence.

As Lincoln well understood, there can be no “unity” where our democratic traditions are under attack by an insensate, racist right-wing mob.

CIVIQS poll shows most Republicans are now Trump supporters first, party supporters … not at all

Posted on (Updated by Mark Sumner

In 2016, Donald Trump infamously said that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue without losing the support of his fanatical followers. That still appears to be pretty much true as, after refusing to acknowledge the results of a free election, splitting his own party, presiding over the loss of the Senate, and instigating a deadly, violent assault on the Capitol in a bid to interfere with counting electoral votes, the latest CIVIQS results still show Trump holding onto 43% support. 

In fact, if anyone has suffered from Trump’s actions it’s every other Republican official. It doesn’t even seem to matter to what degree they supported Trump in his efforts to topple the elected government. Kevin McCarthy? Way down. Mitch McConnell? Down to a hilarious 11% favorable rating. But the biggest loser may be Mike Pence, who has seen his support among Republicans plummet, putting him at a 33% favorable rating.

All of this can be explained simply enough: Republicans no longer think of themselves as Republicans. By a two to one margin, those who voted for Trump say they consider themselves “a Trump supporter,” not “a Republican.”

The way that these voters attach to Trump rather than anyone else can be seen in another value in the poll. When asked if they believed the election was “stolen,” a jaw-dropping 40% of Americans still said yes, over a week after the assault on the Capitol. But when asked if Republicans who voted against certifying the vote were “protecting democracy,” only 37% agreed. Even when Republicans were doing exactly what Trump asked them to do, they still got lower marks than Trump himself.

There was an interesting split on views of the actual insurgency. Asked if the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol represented “a coup attempt,” 53% of Americans agreed—within a point of those in the poll who said they did not vote for Trump. However, when asked if the attack was “an act of terrorism,” the number rose to 60%. That number indicates that even some of those who voted for Trump were upset over the the sight of a mob prowling the halls of Congress. That number was apparently confirmed by the 62% who agreed that everyone who broke into the Capitol building should be arrested. And still, the guy who instigated the attack is polling far higher than other Republicans.

Finally, a plurality of voters want to see both Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley kicked out of the Senate. In Hawley’s case, that includes at least some voters who went for Trump.

Everything in the poll seems to indicate that Trump voters remain Trump voters, not Republican voters. If there remains a core of non-Trump Republicans, they are vanishingly small. As the GOP tries to separate itself from the angry guy leaving the room, it’s completely unclear how many of those Trump voters are ready to come back into their ranks without Big Orange at the lead. With a 11% favorable rating for McConnell, and a 20% rating for McCarthy … just who is the leader of the Republican Party going into 2021? 

One possible side effect of this deep schism in the Republican Party is that it may make it easier for McConnell and other Republicans to support Trump’s impeachment. To coin a phrase: What do you have to lose?

Every minute of AOC’s hour-long Instagram video about the pro-Trump insurgency is worth watching

Posted on by Marissa Higgins

On Tuesday night, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hopped onto an Instagram live video and shared her experience during the pro-Trump insurgency at the U.S. Capitol last Wednesday. In a moving address straight to followers (of which more than 100,000 people joined in to listen and watch), the progressive lawmaker said she had a “very close encounter” with the rioters and  “I thought I was going to die.” She repeated the chilling sentiment later in the hour-long video, saying, “I did not know if I was going to make it to the end of that day alive.” She did not give more details on the encounter, citing security reasons.

What did she give more details on? Her concerns about sheltering with some Republican lawmakers. Why? Because she was afraid some of them might give up her location or enable chances for her to be hurt or kidnapped by insurgents. Let’s dive more into that horrifying possibility, as well as the lawmaker’s discussion of trauma and political nihilism, below.

“I didn’t even feel safe going to that extraction point because there were QAnon and white supremacist members of Congress who I felt would disclose my location and create opportunities to allow me to be hurt,” Ocasio-Cortez stated. She did not explicitly name the colleagues she thought might expose her to danger. 

"Let me give you a sneak peek,” she stated in an address to Republican Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. “You will never be president. You will never command the respect of this country, never. Never. And you should resign.”

Ocasio-Cortez also stressed that the two conservatives essentially cast their votes in an effort to overturn election votes “not out of genuine belief” but instead out of “political ambition.” She also described Donald Trump as a “traitor to our country,” which, of course, he is.

“I don't want to see the Republican Party talk about blue lives ever again,” Ocasio-Cortez said in reference to a Capitol police officer losing their life during the riot. “This was never about safety for them. It was always a slogan. … Because if they actually care about the rule of law, they would speak up when people break the law."

Ocasio-Cortez also spoke intimately about trauma, saying, “You have all of those thoughts where, at the end of your life, these thoughts come rushing to you. That’s what happened to a lot of us on Wednesday. I did not know if I was going to make it to the end of that day alive. And not just in a general sense, but in a very specific sense." She also brought up that in addition to members of Congress, staffers, and even the children of lawmakers, were at the Capitol that day. 

On a personal level, Ocasio-Cortez said she found herself sleeping more in the days after the riot, and that, “to me is telling me that my body is going through something and my brain is trying to heal."

People, as usual, were impressed by the progressive’s ability to connect with people—even at 11 PM on a weeknight.

.@AOC just gave an impassioned speech about impeachment to more than 100,000 people on Instagram at 11 o’clock on a Tuesday night. Her natural political skills, spontaneous eloquence and fluency with social media are so striking, especially at a national moment like this.

— Liam Stack (@liamstack) January 13, 2021

AOC is giving a Gettysburg Address level oration over Instagram live right now "White supremacy is doomed to fail... supremacy is a myth, so they resort to violence"

— Prerna Jagadeesh (@PrernaJagadeesh) January 13, 2021

Watching @AOC’s Instagram live and knowing as it happens that it’ll be featured in history books one day as a piece of important oratory of the moment is really something.

— Amanda Litman (@amandalitman) January 13, 2021

And her transparency was, as ever, moving and important.

Turns out the first moment of real human solidarity I've felt in the past 6 traumatizing days is watching @AOC's unbelievably moving instagram live with a bunch of friends and strangers who feel the same way on twitter at 11PM

— Helen Brosnan (@HelenBrosnan) January 13, 2021

Watching @AOC's instagram live helped me finally recognize all of the anger and grief and fear that's become so commonplace that I don't even notice I'm feeling it anymore. I'm really grateful for that.

— Taylor (@taylorjeanjn) January 13, 2021

AOC almost died the other day and got on Instagram Live to talk to us about trauma and what’s actually happening behind closed doors. Her transparency is a gift and will hopefully save lives pic.twitter.com/prLImsgDFT

— ilana kaplan (@lanikaps) January 13, 2021

In speaking about nihilism in politics, Ocasio-Cortez really hit home with an emotional address, saying, “What claim will you have? That you rule over a destroyed society? That the ashes belong to you?" Those are questions every member of the Trump administration should answer. 

You can also watch snippets of the live stream on YouTube below.

YouTube Video

Update: This statement from fellow progressive Squad member Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s chief of staff Sarah Groh about realizing panic buttons had reportedly been “torn out” of the Congresswoman's office adds another unsettling and chilling element.

According to Ayanna Pressley’s chief of staff Sarah Groh, the panic buttons in the Congresswoman’s office were all “torn out—the whole unit.” They don’t know why or who did it. https://t.co/MLhxhi7nUp pic.twitter.com/l7wgoHOJKN

— Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) January 13, 2021

GOP seditionists are suddenly worried about divisiveness

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

Republican lawmakers who have spent four solid years embracing Donald Trump's hate speech and targeting of Democrats, liberals, people of color, and women are suddenly very concerned about divisiveness.

It's a convenient time for Republicans’ craven conversion as they prepare to be relegated to minority status in Washington and spend the next few years pointing fingers and whining. And naturally they have zero shame about their hypocrisy, mainly using their unity calls as a club to chastise Democrats over their efforts to impeach Trump.

But the most glaring aspect of the calls for unity is who they are coming from. Naturally, it's the worst of the worst offenders—the GOP lawmakers who backed Trump at every turn, echoed his dangerous and deceptive fraud claims, and voted for his objections to certification in what amounted to a fascist effort to disenfranchise the will of the people.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy last week lamented that impeachment would "only divide our country more."

"I've reached out to President-elect Biden today & plan to speak to him about how we must work together to lower the temperature & unite the country to solve America’s challenges," McCarthy tweeted. 

Save it, Kev. The only worthy thing McCarthy has left to offer the country is to resign his position and leave Congress after he poured gasoline on the fire that exploded at the Capitol last week.

Same goes for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who was among the first Senate Republicans to say he would join GOP House members in opposing certification of the Electoral College votes. The very day of the violent assault, Cruz, who was uniquely responsible for stoking the unhinged fervor that ultimately cost lives, was blaming people who had no role in the incitement.

"Stop stoking division. Stop spreading hatred," Cruz tweeted last Wednesday at Beto O'Rourke after O’Rourke noted that Cruz's "self serving attempt at sedition" had helped inspire the attack and attempted coup.

Hearing these seditionists now make calls for unity after they nearly destroyed the country in a matter of four years is truly special. If there's one saving grace here, it's that calls for the resignations of McCarthy, Cruz, and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri continue to flow. 

Dem. Sen. Whitehouse (Judiciary): “The Senate Ethics Committee must consider the expulsion, or censure and punishment, of Senators Cruz, Hawley... Because of massive potential conflict of interest, Senators Cruz, Hawley, and Johnson need to be off all relevant committees."

— j.d. durkin (@jiveDurkey) January 11, 2021

Tomorrow, I’m introducing my resolution to expel the members of Congress who tried to overturn the election and incited a white supremacist coup attempt that has left people dead. They have violated the 14th Amendment. We can’t have unity without accountability.

— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) January 10, 2021

“We can't have unity without accountability” is exactly right. If people like McCarthy, Cruz, Hawley, and others who helped push Trump supporters into this frenzy escape without consequence, they will simply continue poisoning the well in perpetuity to their own benefit. 

Republicans can’t quit Trump and it’s tearing their party apart

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell's Faustian bargain with Donald Trump is backfiring in spectacular fashion as his Senate caucus descends into bitter internecine warfare over whether to back Trump's seditious effort to overturn the presidential election results.

That intra-party battle spilling into public view is how Republicans kicked off the 117th Congress. As House Democrats narrowly reelected Nancy Pelosi as Speaker Sunday, McConnell lost grip on the caucus he had marshaled nearly a year earlier to clear Trump of impeachment charges against the backdrop of a mountain of evidence Senate Republicans ultimately dismissed without hearing from a single witness. That blind fealty helped assure Trump that no matter what action he took—however reckless, illegal, or traitorous—he would never pay a price for it. And so when Trump lost the presidential election, he decided yet again that making a bid to steal it would be both perfectly in order and without consequence.

So McConnell and congressional Republicans once again stood by Trump for over a month, declaring repeatedly that he had every right to try to overturn the results of an election that was secure, fair, and devoid of fraud. The longer Trump's baseless effort continued, the more bogus it was shown to be through a series of endless losses in both state and federal courtrooms. But when states across the nation finally certified their results rendering Trump the loser, McConnell figured he could just flip the switch, reluctantly embrace the results, and leave Trump in the rearview mirror. 

Not so fast. The monster McConnell nurtured over the last four years with the help of his fellow Republicans has turned on him. Despite his repeated pleas for Senate Republicans to leave Trump for dead when Congress certifies the election results in a joint session Wednesday, the lure of personal ambition proved too powerful for the greater good of the GOP caucus. After Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri announced with the gleam of 2024 in his eyes that he would challenge the results during certification, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas suddenly wanted a piece of the action too. Now about a dozen Senate Republicans—all hoping to ingratiate themselves with Trump's cultists to boost their own political star—have jumped on board the Trump's sedition train. As Joan McCarter notes, that pro-fascist coup faction represents a quarter of the Senate Republican caucus. 

At the other end of the spectrum, several of their GOP colleagues have spoken out forcefully against the largely symbolic, politically expedient, and certainly futile effort—which will ultimately be shot down in the Democrat-controlled House. Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who notably isn't running for reelection in 2022, blasted Hawley and Cruz by name in a statement for trying to undermine "the right of the people to elect their own leaders."

On Wednesday, Toomey said, "I intend to vigorously defend our form of government by opposing this effort to disenfranchise millions of voters in my state and others.”

Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, who has regularly marched to the beat of his own drummer in the caucus, also skewered the effort as an "egregious ploy." And Sen. Ben Sasse, who is no doubt working to burnish his own brand of Republicanism, called the challenge “a very, very, bad idea,” saying he was both "concerned about the division in America" and the health of the Republican Party. "This is bad for the country and bad for the party,” said Sasse, who just secured another six-year Senate term.

Sen. Tom of Cotton of Arkansas, a GOP firebrand also eyeing 2024, turned in a somewhat unusual condemnation of the pro-Trump challenge on constitutional grounds, saying it would "only embolden those Democrats who want to erode further our system of constitutional government.” 

Even some Republicans in the House have objected to the Trumpian coup. Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, also a GOP firebrand and one-time aide to Sen. Cruz, forced his GOP colleagues Sunday to vote on whether the House delegations from the states Trump is challenging should be seated since Republicans are claiming widespread systemic fraud took place in those states.

"After all, those representatives were elected through the very same systems—with the same ballot procedures, with the same signature validations, with the same broadly applied decisions of executive and judicial branch officials—as were the electors chosen for the President of the United States under the laws of those states," Roy said of the House delegations from Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada. Naturally, nearly every one of his GOP voted in favor of seating the delegations, with a vote of 371-2 permitting Pelosi to swear in all the House members from the states Trump is challenging. The two GOP members who voted against it said they simply wanted to debate the matter. 

While the whole episode on Wednesday will serve as yet another stain on the entire Republican party, it will at least have the benefit of forcing Senate Republicans to go on the record either backing a bald-faced betrayal of American democracy or risking the wrath of Trump. Neither one of those positions is particularly enviable for the cohort of vulnerable Senate Republicans in 2022. It forces those Senate Republicans to place very early bets on risking the alienation of more moderate suburban voters in order to woo Trump voters who may or may not actually continue to turn out for the Republican party once Trump isn't on the ticket. Sitting GOP senators such as John Thune of South Dakota are already facing the prospect of attracting primaries from Trump acolytes, which in turn could imperil the GOP’s path to prevailing in subsequent general election contests. 

If Senate Republicans had hung together and refused to challenge the election results during this week’s joint session, they all could have started to build a certain amount of insulation from Trumpian politics moving forward. But as it turns out, a craven party that eagerly betrayed the country to achieve its own political ends has only served to embolden its own cohort of craven politicians who are eagerly throwing their colleagues under the bus to serve their own political ends. What comes around, goes around. 

Senate Republicans make clear: It’s not about Ukraine. It’s about ending American democracy for good

Posted on by Mark Sumner

On Wednesday, the Senate conducted the first of two days of question-and-answer in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, with the House managers and Trump’s legal team. Throughout the sessions, Trump’s team made it clear that any attempt to get at the truth of what happened would result in retaliation in the form of asking for an endless stream of witnesses, fighting every request in court, and holding up activity in the Senate “for a very long time.” Meanwhile, the House managers continued to swing for the fences with a number of stirring moments, sharp responses, and ringing calls for the Senate to do its job for the country.

From the start of this session, it was clear that Republicans were not taking the day seriously. Confident that enough of their members had fallen in line to suppress any possibility of subpoenaing a witness, the Republican side indulged in question after question written for no other reason than to promote conspiracy theories and smears by having Chief Justice John Roberts read them aloud. But even that wasn’t the worst damage done during the course of the evening.

As the night wore on, Trump legal team member Alan Dershowitz rose repeatedly to make it very clear what Republicans were authorizing: They were not just embracing foreign interference, but literally allowing Donald Trump to do anything in pursuit of reelection.

Much of the evening seemed to be the Ted Cruz Show. Having abandoned any pretense that they were seeking information, Republicans allowed the Texas assassin to have a hand in at least eight questions, all of them designed to spread ridiculous, corrosive smears against the whistleblower, Rep. Adam Schiff, and former Vice President Joe Biden. Trump’s defense team joined in eagerly, citing information from the worst of right-wing sites as “public information” to justify repeating claims. By the end of the night, Senate Republicans had endorsed every aspect of the conspiracy theory that Trump had tried to extort from Ukraine, and they had gone on to indict the whistleblower as having a hand in the “double bribery.”

Again and again, Republicans such as Cruz and Josh Hawley demonstrated that they were laughing up their sleeves, playing the “Roberts will repeat anything” game. That included using questions to make statements that Adam Schiff had collaborated with the whistleblower, long after Schiff had explained—again—that he had not met the whistleblower, that he did not know the whistleblower, and that no member of his staff was involved in preparing the whistleblower’s complaint. It didn’t matter, because for Cruz, getting out the facts was never the point of the exercise.

A special award goes to Kentucky Republican Rand Paul. At one point in the late afternoon, he managed to concoct a question so vile that Roberts refused to read it—the only time that happened, even though some of the questions from Cruz included recitations of multiple false charges.

Trump’s team leaned into the chance to spread unfounded information. Despite hours and days of chest-beating over “hearsay” or “second-hand information,” Trump’s attorneys relished every word of the beyond-Q conspiracies that came their way (including a rare appearance from benchwarmer Pam Bondi so bad that it’s already gathered more than two million views). And when not rolling in vile claims with absolutely no foundation, they used much of their time to directly threaten the Senate, stating again and again that any attempt to call a witness would be met with an unending string of requests, privilege claims, and court fights. 

In the middle of the evening, Schiff made a major play and said that, to expedite the process, the House managers would agree to be bound by decisions from Roberts when it came to validating subpoenas, authorizing witnesses, and requesting documents. Citing the way that the House had taken as many as five depositions in a week, Schiff made it clear that there was no reason that a process involving witnesses had to be lengthy. But Trump’s legal team said that it would not agree. Instead, it continued its threat to respond to any call for witnesses by wrecking the Senate, drowning the trial in frivolous requests, and demanding a string of witnesses (including every member of the Biden family, every House manager, the whistleblower, people cited in right-wing media … an unending parade). And Republicans on both sides of the table pretended that this threat wasn’t simply an argument that any legal process can be crushed by the power of the White House.

But it wasn’t the cudgel of delay, or the giggling efforts of Cruz, Hawley, Paul, and others to place their hands under Robert’s robe and make him talk that did the most damage. The worst damage to the evening, the trial, and America’s future came from doddering Alan Dershowitz, who used the evening to expand his previous defense to a degree that didn’t just exonerate Trump in this case, but also exonerated him in any possible case. 

In a pair of appearances, Dershowitz expanded on his theory that abuse of power isn’t a permissible cause for impeachment. Deliberately and directly contradicting the historical sources he cited, Dershowitz called every constitutional expert in America a “never Trumper” for daring to disagree with him. And while claiming to be the only reasonable man in the country, he said he didn’t stand alone … because he had found a single attorney in 1867 whose views were similar. And 1867 is closer to when the Constitution was written, so that view wins. If you ignore all the people involved in the writing of it.

Then, having literally made up dictionary entries to support his redefinition of legal terms, Dershowitz went not just all-in, but completely overboard. According to Trump’s finest legal mind, there is nothing that Trump can’t do in pursuit of reelection. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. So long as Trump believes that his reelection would be good for the nation, he can extort foreign governments for made-up dirt. He can directly threaten an ally. There is no limit.

Along the way, Dershowitz also argued that there is absolutely nothing wrong with launching an investigation into a political opponent. In fact, he asserted that a run for office itself can be justification for investigating an opponent. He directly embraced the idea that a president launching investigations of his political opponents using domestic or foreign sources wasn’t just fine; it was desirable. He argued that daring to run against Trump painted a target on anyone’s back, and that Trump had all the power he needed to shoot at it.

If there was any doubt going into the evening, Dershowitz removed it: voting to acquit Trump means voting not just to dismiss this charge, but to embrace the idea that Trump trumps the law. He didn’t hint that Trump could do anything he wanted in pursuit of reelection; that was the core theme of his whole presentation. That was the point. That was what he said.

The Senate listened to a presentation from Trump’s legal team according to which there is nothing Trump can do in pursuit of reelection that isn’t justified. There is no limit to how Trump can use his power to persecute political opponents. According to the theory that was put forward on the floor of the Senate, Trump could simply lock up every Democratic opponent, or suspend elections indefinitely, and that would be just fine—not only an impeachable offense, but a good thing.

Republicans are going to vote for that. Republicans are going to press the button on not just a step toward autocracy, but a full-on embrace of it. They’re going to do it with a smile.