Impeachment Today: Trump Has a Temper Tantrum as Vote Looms
I have to give the Democratic leadership in Congress credit: they’re playing this straight and leaving the rancor aside. It is an important day. When history looks back, people will see who held the 45th president accountable and who didn't.
That’s assuming history doesn’t get rewritten. The concept of truth is on shaky grounds these days, and we’ve got to hope good people triumph.
By the end of the Wednesday the House of Representatives will have voted to impeach Donald J. Trump. His presidency should be forever marked with an asterisk.
The facts of the matter, namely that President Trump abused his power for personal gain and then tried to cover it up, are documented in a report based on more than 130 hours of public and private testimony by 17 witnesses before three committees over the past two months.
The dozen witnesses and 71 document requests withheld by the White House could theoretically make the case for his innocence. But at this point, we have no way of knowing.
The President’s defenders say either “nothing bad” happened, or, if it did, “so what?”
The law-breaking incorporated in the actions that have got us to this point (and others covered in the Mueller Report) is documented in House Judiciary Report, which makes the case for criminal bribery and wire fraud.
It should be noted that most constitutional scholars agree that violations of criminal statutes are not necessary for impeachment to proceed.
“It is our considered judgment,” an open letter signed by over 700 historians says, “that if President Trump’s misconduct does not rise to the level of impeachment, then virtually nothing does.”
For the first time in his life, Donald Trump is being held accountable for something that he can’t bury or ignore. So, of course, he’s having a meltdown.
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It’s really hard not to join in the chorus of cynicism based on the President’s behavior. Take, for instance...
With the assistance of resident racist Stephen Miller, Trump flung together six pages of word salad dressed with exclamation marks aimed at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Here’s (not liberal) columnist Jennifer Rubin’s take:
On the eve of his impeachment, a stain that obviously torments him more than his enablers have let on, President Trump issued a rambling, unhinged and lie-filled letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
It is difficult to capture how bizarre and frightening the letter is simply by counting the utter falsehoods (e.g., repeating the debunked accusation that Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin was fired for investigating Burisma; claiming Congress is obstructing justice; arguing he was afforded no rights in the process), or by quoting from the invective dripping from his pen.
What is most striking is the spectacle of the letter itself — a president so unhinged as to issue such an harangue; a White House entirely unable to stop him; a party so subservient to him that it would not trigger a search for a new nominee; a right-wing media bubble that will herald Trump for being Trump and excoriate Democrats for driving the president to this point; and a mainstream media not quite able to address a public temper-tantrum (resorting instead to euphemisms such as “scorching,” “searing,” etc.).
The letter and the response (or lack thereof) is the perfect encapsulation of the state of American politics — in which one major party has bound itself to the mast of a raging, dangerous narcissist while the other cannot uphold the norms and institutions on which our democracy depends.
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