Impeachment Today: “No Witnesses Allowed” Says Moscow Mitch
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has declared there will be no witnesses at Senate hearings on impeachment. He says getting facts together was the duty of the House of Representatives and the Senate will not be part of a "fishing expedition."
The Kentucky Republican isn’t apparently bothered by the refusal of the White House to honor subpoenas, and doesn’t agree with Democrats’ assertion that litigating for court ordered appearance and documents poses a danger to the integrity of the 2020 elections.
"Each witness we named was directly involved in the events that led to the charges made by the House,” says Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, “Senators who oppose this plan will have to explain why less evidence is better than more evidence."
While polling shows a narrow majority of the American people favor impeaching the president, significant majorities across party lines say the President should allow his aides to testify, according to a just released ABC/Washington Post poll.
Sentiment about impeachment could shift in the wake of McConnell’s announcement, since it sends a message that there’s something to hide. Let’s face the facts; witnesses who might offer testimony in defense of Trump haven’t been allowed to testify.
While the President and his enablers like to pretend all is well, a look at the history of recent impeachment polling shows something else:
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The House is expected to vote on passage of the articles of impeachment on Wednesday. Look for Republicans to try, once again, to stall late into the night, hoping to minimize media coverage.
According to the Washington Post, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is in no hurry to name members who would function as managers in presenting the case for impeachment to the Senate.
Two Democratic aides said Tuesday that a procedural measure setting up debate on the articles will empower House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to name managers “at any point” after the House votes to impeach Trump.
The aides spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
The question of which members Pelosi will name to present the House’s case has been a subject of fevered speculation on Capitol Hill, but leaders are keen to save the announcement for another day. In the past, the House has voted on a resolution naming the managers.
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The President’s “free lawyer” is at it again, making the rounds of news outlets, promising big things to come and then adding fodder to the impeachment fire with statements that are --at best-- ill-considered… ...Okay, how about just plain stupid.
Here’s an NBC story with all the statements, ending with:
Giuliani saying he wanted Ukraine to investigate the Bidens? Check.
Giuliani saying he wanted Ukraine to investigate the country’s role in 2016? Check.
Giuliani putting pressure on Ukraine’s president? Check.
Giuliani wanting the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine “out of the way” to pursue the investigations? Check.
And Giuliani saying it was all about helping Trump? Check again.
It’s all there.
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Politifact has announced its Lie of the Year for 2019…
And the winner is:
President Donald Trump’s claim that the whistleblower got his phone call with the president of Ukraine “almost completely wrong.”
The announcement came via the morning Poynter Report. Tom Jones spoke with PolitiFact Managing Editor Katie Sanders:
Relevance and repetition of the claim are really important for this hard choice,” said Sanders, who said that it’s the only time all year that PolitiFact uses the word “lie.”
“Here,” Sanders continued, “the underlying topic carried significant, historic consequence. The whistleblower got it ‘almost completely’ right. What the whistleblower wrote about clearly isn't ‘total fiction’ or ‘sooo wrong,’ as Trump said.”
Sanders also noted that, “Trump repeated this claim in some way more than 80 times over the past three months, in speeches, rallies, interviews, tweets and events with foreign leaders. It was a core part of the messaging, and it was obviously wrong — he is disproven by his own White House reconstruction of the Zelensky phone call.”
The award is even more impressive when you consider that President Trump has made so many untruths sound as though they were true simply because he said them.
Here’s the latest from the folks who make it their job to fact check his statements:
As of Dec. 10, his 1,055th day in office, Trump had made 15,413 false or misleading claims, according to the Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement he has uttered. That’s an average of more than 32 claims a day since our last update 62 days ago.
In fact, October and November of this year rank as the second- and third-biggest months for Trumpian claims. They are exceeded only by October 2018, when Trump barnstormed the country in a desperate — and unsuccessful — effort to thwart a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives. Both Octobers had more than 1,100 claims, with an average of nearly 40 claims a day.
A key reason for this year’s jump: The uproar over Trump’s phone call with Ukraine’s president on July 25 — in which he urged an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden, a potential 2020 election rival — and the ensuing House impeachment inquiry. Nearly 600 of the false or misleading claims made by the president in the past two months relate just to the Ukraine investigation.
The president apparently believes he can weather an impeachment trial through sheer repetition of easily disproven falsehoods.
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That was then. This is Trump.
https://twitter.com/SafetyPinDaily/status/1206986187816222721?s=20
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