Last Call For A Taxing Explanation

Donald Trump -- and all presidential candidates -- will have to disclose tax returns to be on the ballot in the nation's most populous state soon.

California will send legislation to Gov. Gavin Newsom's desk requiring presidential candidates to submit five years' worth of tax returns in order to appear on the ballot, joining 18 other states in a jab at President Donald Trump's refusal to release his tax returns. 

California joins New York, Illinois and Washington, among other states, that have introduced bills requiring all candidates to release their individual tax returns to qualify for the presidential primary ballot. Tax returns have become a key 2020 issue, with Trump refusing to surrender them and Democratic presidential candidates sharing their tax information with varying degrees of timeliness.

But it may not be a sure thing.  It's failed once before.

The state's Senate passed the measure by a 27-10 party line vote Thursday, but whether Newsom, a Democrat, will sign the bill remains unclear. 

Newsom spokesman Jesse Melgar told CNN, "with regard to this and all proposed legislation, should the bill reach the Governor's Desk it would be evaluated on its own merits." 

While former California Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed similar legislation in 2017, Newsom has shown support for tax returns in his own political career, releasing his tax returns as a candidate and promising to continue releasing them every year as governor.

Unless Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, Colorado and/or Arizona pass legislation to do this, it's meaningless, and odds are extremely low any of those seven states would pass such legislation.

Besides, red states will almost certainly counter with things like, you know, requiring birth certificates and whatnot.  There's a serious chance this becomes a Jim Crow issue, even if the Supreme Court wasn't guaranteed to step in and overturn such legislation.

No, this is a waste of time in the end.  Do you think Trump cares if he's on the ballot in states he'll never win?  Ahh, but red states being able to block the Democratic candidate from getting on the ballot, especially Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, all with overwhelming GOP majorities in state?

It's just because they haven't figured out how to do it yet.  California making this law will make that a top priority.

Let's not go down this road.

Going After The Orange Bloc

Former VP Joe Biden is now comfortably ahead in early Democratic 2020 presidential polling, and he's beating Trump handily in head-to-head matchups.  The reason he's doing this is because he's playing to the middle, and that there's gettable white Trump voters who would vote for Biden over Trump...but tellingly, not for several other non-white, non-male Dems.

As Joseph R. Biden Jr. made his way across Iowa on his first trip as a 2020 presidential candidate, the former vice president repeatedly returned to one term — aberration — when he referred to the Trump presidency.

“Limit it to four years,” Mr. Biden pleaded with a ballroom crowd of 600 in the eastern Iowa city of Dubuque. “History will treat this administration’s time as an aberration.”

“This is not the Republican Party,” he added, citing his relationships with “my Republican friends in the House and Senate.”

There is no disagreement among Democrats about the urgency of defeating Mr. Trump. But Mr. Biden’s singular focus on the president as the source of the nation’s ills, while extending an olive branch to Republicans, has exposed a significant fault line in the Democratic primary.

Democrats, like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, see the president as a symptom of something deeper, both in a Republican Party overtaken by Trumpism and a nation cleaved by partisanship. Simply ousting Mr. Trump, they tell voters, is not enough.

It’s a debate that goes beyond the policy differences separating a moderate like Mr. Biden from an insurgent like Mr. Sanders, elevating questions about whether the old rules of inside-the-Beltway governance still apply. And it has thrown into stark relief one of the fundamental questions facing the Democratic electorate: Do Democrats want a bipartisan deal-maker promising a return to normalcy, or a partisan warrior offering more transformative change?

It's a legitimate question.  The cynical calculus is that Biden can win and do what Obama or Hillary couldn't, because only swingable Obama-Trump voters matter, and they guide all of America.

I don't personally agree with that, but you know what?  I'm not arrogant enough to think my views on the Democratic primary are typical of America, either.  Biden is popular.  He's not my first choice for the Dems, but he's not my last choice either.

We'll see where he goes.  It enrages me that people OK with Trump are now cool with Biden, but I'm but one voter.

Most of all I want the GOP nightmare to end, but getting rid of Trump alone won't fix the problem.  I know that.  You know that.

Does Joe Biden?

Deportation Nation, Con't

Quite a bit on the immigration front this week, as former Trump White House "Adult in the Room ™" John Kelly has landed on his feet on the board of America's biggest supplier of private kiddie concentration camps.

In April, protesters outside the nation's largest facility for unaccompanied migrant children noticed a familiar face enter the massive, fenced site in Homestead, Florida: former White House chief of staff John Kelly. Soon after, a local television station recorded footage of him riding on the back of a golf cart as he toured the grounds.

It wasn't clear why he was there, but Friday, Caliburn International confirmed to CBS News that Kelly had joined its board of directors. Caliburn is the parent company of Comprehensive Health Services, which operates Homestead and three other shelters for unaccompanied migrant children in Texas.

Prior to joining the Trump administration in January 2017, Kelly had been on the board of advisors of DC Capital Partners, an investment firm that now owns Caliburn.

The Caliburn board includes other former high-ranking military personnel, including retired General Anthony C. Zinni, Admiral James G. Stavridis and Rear Admiral Kathleen Martin. The company's portfolio includes work in a variety of defense sectors.

"With four decades of military and humanitarian leadership, in-depth understanding of international affairs and knowledge of current economic drivers around the world, General Kelly is a strong strategic addition to our team," said James Van Dusen, Caliburn's CEO. "Our board remains acutely focused on advising on the safety and welfare of unaccompanied minors who have been entrusted to our care and custody by the Department of Health and Human Services to address a very urgent need in caring for and helping to find appropriate sponsors for these unaccompanied minors."

Kelly joined DC Capital's board in February 2016 and stepped down in January 2017 when he was confirmed as Secretary of Homeland Security. Kelly switched jobs in July 2017 to become President Trump's chief of staff, a position he left at the end of 2018.

During Kelly's tenure, the administration pursued ambitious changes to immigration enforcement, and the average length of stay for an unaccompanied migrant child in U.S. custody skyrocketed.

In the past year, Comprehensive Health Services, the only private company operating shelters, became one of the most dominant players in the industry. Last August, it secured three licenses for facilities in Texas, totaling 500 beds, and in December, the Homestead facility began expanding from a capacity of 1,250 beds to 3,200.

Located on several acres of federal land adjacent to an Air Reserve Base, the facility is the nation's only site not subject to routine inspections by state child welfare experts.

Kelly is giving the game away as to what's coming: a massive detention regime as ICE will be rounding up millions, and soon.  Concentration camps for kids is a growth industry, because the Trump regime knows full well these kids will never be reunited and taking kids to deport them is designed as punishment too cruel to imagine.

On the same day the Trump administration said it would reunite thousands of migrant families it had separated at the border with the help of a "central database," an official was admitting privately the government only had enough information to reconnect 60 parents with their kids, according to emails obtained by NBC News.

"[I]n short, no, we do not have any linkages from parents to [children], save for a handful," a Health and Human Services official told a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement on June 23, 2018. "We have a list of parent alien numbers but no way to link them to children."

In the absence of an effective database, the emails show, officials then began scrambling to fill out a simple spreadsheet with data in hopes of reuniting as many as families as they could.

The gaps in the system for tracking separations would result in a months-long effort to reunite nearly 3,000 families separated under the administration's "zero tolerance" policy. Officials had to review all the relevant records manually, a process that continues.

Meanwhile, Trump's constant refrain of "getting rid of immigration judges" is coming closer to reality.

The Department of Homeland Security is racing to implement a plan that would give federal law enforcement on the border the authority to conduct interviews with asylum seekers who fear returning to their home countries, according to two sources with firsthand knowledge of the plan.

Under the pending procedural change, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers would train Border Patrol agents on the southern border how to conduct "credible fear interviews," which immigrants must pass to go on to claim asylum. Agents would conduct the interviews shortly after apprehending people who have illegally crossed from Mexico to the U.S.

The Trump administration is pushing to start agent training “ASAP,” according to one official.

The proposal has some downsides. For instance, there likely would be fewer Border Patrol agents performing law enforcement duties while undergoing training. But that would be offset by an overall decline of undocumented immigrants seeking refuge in the U.S.

“If that gets rolled out and we actually start deporting people within a timely manner, you’re going to see the numbers drop exponentially,” the official said.

This is flat out illegal, but again, we no longer live in a country where rule of law matters.  Trump does what he wants, and many of us go along.  With Border Patrol taking the place of immigration judges and making spot decisions to deny asylum and proceeding to immediate deportation, it's only a matter of time before the same power is used against undocumented already in the US.

And maybe some US citizens too.  Oops.

Serwer's Maxim applies: The cruelty is the point.

 

Last Call For It's About Suppression, Con't

In one of the biggest 2020 election judicial decisions so far, a three-judge panel has struck down Ohio's congressional map as unconstitutional.

A federal court ruled Friday that Ohio’s congressional map is unconstitutional and ordered a new one be drawn for the 2020 elections.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court in Cincinnati ruled unanimously that district boundaries were manipulated for partisan gain by Republican mapmakers and violates voters’ rights to democratically select their representatives. The ruling blocks Ohio from holding another election under the current map.

The ruling is likely to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the judges ordered that the state propose a new map by June 20.

Voters’ rights and Democratic groups who sued Ohio Republican officials said redistricting completed after the 2010 Census yielded a statewide map that has produced an unbending 12-4 Republican advantage in Ohio’s delegation. Republicans said the map was drawn with bipartisan support. They also pointed out that a new map will be drawn anyway after the 2020 Census.

Plaintiffs said Ohioans shouldn’t have to wait for a fair map.

The U.S. Supreme Court is already considering challenges to congressional maps in North Carolina, drawn by Republicans, and Maryland, drawn by Democrats.

In a case similar to Ohio’s, a three-judge panel ruled this month that Michigan’s congressional and legislative maps are unconstitutionally gerrymandered, and ordered the state Legislature to redraw some districts for 2020. The judges wrote that GOP mapmakers in 2011 drew maps with the goal of ensuring “durable majorities” for Republicans. An appeal is likely. 

American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio Legal Director Freda Levenson had said the 10-year map was being challenged because the legal landscape has changed and because the map’s results in terms of partisan representation are easily shown.

The suit called Ohio’s current map “one of the most egregious gerrymanders in recent history,” and that it reliably has done its job of creating a 12-to-4 advantage for Republicans in the state’s congressional delegation despite the GOP having only about half the state’s votes.

It's those NC and Maryland cases before SOCTUS that actually matter.  All indications are that SCOTUS will rule in June that partisan gerrymandering is 100% fine, even given complete admission by North Carolina republicans that race was a massive factor in redrawing districts, because the racism was purely political in nature.

Again, nothing will happen here.  I guarantee you Ohio's map in 2020 will be the same as it is now.

It's Mueller (Report) Time

Jerry Nadler and the House Democrats on the Judiciary Committee are finally playing hardball, giving Attorney General Bill Barr a Monday 9 AM deadline to turn over the unredacted Mueller report and evidence or face a contempt charge.

House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler on Friday sent his latest offerAttorney General William Barr to try to reach an agreement in his effort to obtain the unredacted special counsel report and the underlying evidence before Nadler moves forward with holding the attorney general in contempt of Congress.

Nadler sent Barr a new letter proposing that the committee could work with the Justice Department to prioritize which investigative materials it turns over to Congress, specifically citing witness interviews and the contemporaneous notes provided by witnesses that were cited in the special counsel Robert Mueller's report. Nadler wrote that he was "willing to prioritize a specific, defined set of underlying investigative and evidentiary materials for immediate production." 

But Nadler's letter does not budge on Democrats' insistence that the Justice Department allow Congress to view grand jury material that's redacted in the report, which Barr has argued he's not allowed by law to provide. 

Nadler set a deadline of 9 a.m. ET Monday for Barr to respond and said he would move to contempt proceedings if the attorney general does not comply. 

"The Committee is prepared to make every realistic effort to reach an accommodation with the Department," Nadler wrote in the letter, which was obtained by CNN. "But if the Department persists in its baseless refusal to comply with a validly issued subpoena, the Committee will move to contempt proceedings and seek further legal recourse." 

So the stage is set for Monday morning, and the result will most likely be an immediate court challenge to the contempt charge that will tie up the proceeding for months, if not years.

This will go nowhere, unfortunately.  And it will be forgotten by the end of next week, most likely.  Trump's minders will find a federal judge to issue an injunction on whatever executive privilege nonsense they can get some Federalist Society clerk to write, and this will get hung up in the courts until after the 2020 election when the Roberts court sides with Trump that cabinet secretaries are immune to contempt of Congress.

People forget that AG Eric Holder was cited for contempt of Congress by House Republicans in 2014 and the judge that tossed that contempt citation was none other than Amy Berman Jackson herself, the judge in the Stone and Manafort trials.

Meanwhile, Barr will continue to do whatever he wants, and the Mueller report will remain buried.

Democrats will need to come up with something better than a contempt citation, or the republic is lost.

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

Benjamin Wittes at Lawfare has finally admitted that giving Attorney General Bill Barr the benefit of the doubt was a "catastrophic" idea.

I was willing to give Bill Barr a chance. Consider me burned.

When Barr was nominated, I wrote a cautious piece for this magazine declining to give him “a character reference” and acknowledging “legitimate reasons to be concerned about [his] nomination,” but nonetheless concluding that “I suspect that he is likely as good as we’re going to get. And he might well be good enough. Because most of all, what the department needs right now is honest leadership that will insulate it from the predations of the president.”

When he wrote his first letter to Congress announcing the principal conclusions of the Mueller report, I wrote another piece saying, “For the next two weeks, let’s give Attorney General William Barr the benefit of the doubt” on the question of releasing the report in a timely and not-too-redacted fashion.

I took a lot of criticism for these pieces—particularly the second one, in which I specifically said we should evaluate Barr’s actual performance in regard to releasing the Mueller report, and thus wait for him to act, rather than denouncing him preemptively.

Barr has now acted, and we can now evaluate his actual, rather than his hypothesized, performance.

It has been catastrophic. Not in my memory has a sitting attorney general more diminished the credibility of his department on any subject. It is a kind of trope of political opposition in every administration that the attorney general—whoever he or she is—is politicizing the Justice Department and acting as a defense lawyer for the president. In this case it is true.

And yet, there is very little that Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats can actually do.

Attorney General William Barr’s snub of a House hearing on Robert Mueller’s Russia report exposed that Democrats are in an awkward position: They don’t have any good options for forcing the Trump administration to cooperate with their multiple investigations.

Democrats seeking to compel -- or punish -- Barr and others who ignore Democratic invitations and subpoenas could pursue contempt proceedings, which carry no tangible penalty when branches of government face off, or take action in court, which would be protracted.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic leaders are resisting the other obvious option -- moving to impeach the president -- even as Republicans goad them on.

Barr didn’t show up as scheduled Thursday to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, complaining about the format for questioning. That came as Barr and the Justice Department defied a committee subpoena to turn over the full, unredacted version of Special Counsel Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and the evidence behind it.

“This is a great danger to American democracy,” Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler said. "We are going to use what process we have in the courts and elsewhere to get the answers and the information we need."

Meanwhile for his next trick, Bill Barr is arguing that all of Obamacare is unconstitutional because Congress eliminated the individual mandate penalty in 2017.

We're maybe one, two SCOTUS summers max away from an autocracy, guys.

StupidiNews!

• Actor Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca in several Star Wars films, died at age 74, the seven-foot-three Mayhew was a fan and convention favorite who entertained for over four decades.
• Alabama Republicans have passed a state House bill criminalizing abortion that would send doctors to jail for performing the procedure, the bill is expected to pass the state Senate.
• One of the injured victims of last month's Christchurch mosque shooting has died at his home in Turkey, bringing the death total to 51, according to Turkish officials.
• NASA says a metals manufacturer faked test results for faulty materials, resulting in the failure of two satellite missions that cost the space agency nearly $700 million.
• The Justice Department is investigating a Mississippi carbon-capture power plant project that scrapped millions in high-tech grant money to build a regular natural gas plant instead.

Last Call For Climate Of Destruction, Con't

Record Midwest flooding continues, this time in Iowa, while the Trump regime keeps insisting that climate change isn't real and that Trump is the best president on disasters or some crap.  The levees broke yesterday and downtown Davenport is basically gone.

For weeks, residents of Davenport, Iowa, looked warily toward the flooded Mississippi River as it encroached on their downtown, the water kept at bay only by temporary barriers lining the street.

On Tuesday, those barriers broke, sending murky river water rushing into businesses and forcing residents to scramble to safety. About 30 people who did not make it out in time were rescued by firefighters.

“The whole city had a very frantic feel about it,” said Rebecca Nicke, a co-owner of Abernathy’s, a vintage store located about half a block from the barrier, who said she ran for her vehicle and drove toward a hill when she heard the water coming.

“You start shaking,” said Ms. Nicke, who salvaged much of her inventory but does not expect to be able to return to her building for weeks. “And everything around me was like a blur.”

The flooding in Davenport, the third-largest city in Iowa, came amid a record-setting year of floods that have devastated cropland, small towns, infrastructure and Native American reservations across a large area of the Midwest. The damage in Davenport was more limited in scope than recent months have brought to parts of Nebraska, Missouri and western Iowa, but it was a reminder of the ongoing risks to the region as rivers rise and rainfall compounds the problems.

In the region around Davenport, the Mississippi has been above major flood stage for 39 days, a record. More rain is in the forecast with few signs of relief ahead.

“We’re not expecting the river to really go down anytime soon,” said Jessica Brooks, a hydrologist at the National Weather Service office in Davenport. “With the levels as high as they are and the flood conditions as they are, any additional rain we get will probably cause additional rises.”

Davenport was not the only place dealing with flooding on Wednesday as storms moved through the region.

In Douglas County, Mo., a 59-year-old man, who was apparently homeless and camping near a creek, was found drowned on Wednesday after a flash flood swept through the area.

Heavy rains also caused flooding in parts of Michigan and Illinois, where officials closed roads and warned residents not to drive through high waters. In Dearborn Heights, Mich., the mayor requested an emergency declaration from the state and opened a shelter for flood victims. In Detroit, officials said they would ask residents to help fill sandbags after water breached a sea wall in a residential area.

More rain, more flooding, more years of 100-year and 1000-year floods happening every 10.  And Republicans will do everything in their power to make America choose between social programs and climate change preparations.  That $2 trillion infrastructure deal won't even get a vote in the Senate, let alone pass.

Republicans will continue to make sure nothing happens, and that they are the ones most able to loot the treasury while the rest of us suffer.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

House Democrats like Nancy Pelosi at least understand what's at stake here with Attorney General Bill Barr's obvious cover-up attempts.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday accused Attorney General William Barr of committing a crime by lying to Congress, blasting him in a closed-door meeting and later at a news conference.

“We saw [Barr] commit a crime when he answered your question,” Pelosi told Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.) during a private caucus meeting Thursday morning, according to two sources present for the gathering.

“He lied to Congress. He lied to Congress,” Pelosi said soon after at a news conference. “And if anybody else did that, it would be considered a crime. Nobody is above the law. Not the president of the United States, and not the attorney general.“

The allegation comes as Democrats have intensified their criticisms of the attorney general over his handling of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, his refusal to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday, and the Justice Department’s unwillingness to comply with a subpoena for the full unredacted report.

Pelosi’s comments were an apparent reference to Barr’s response to Crist last month during a House Appropriations Committee hearing, when the attorney general said he was not aware of any concerns that Mueller’s investigators might have expressed about his four-page summary of Mueller’s findings.

Barr’s response appeared to contradict the revelation earlier this week that Mueller himself wrote to the attorney general saying he was worried that Barr’s summary “threatens to undermine ... public confidence” in the Russia probe. Mueller also said Barr’s memo “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the investigation.

So let's get going with those impeachment hearings against Barr at the very minimum, guys. 

It's time to play hardball.  Mocking Barr is one thing.  Arresting him is another.

Giving It Up To Mitch

High-profile Democratic challengers for Senate Republicans are in fact passing on Senate runs, leaving Mitch McConnell free and clear to block any and every cabinet, agency, and federal judge nominee in 2021 of a Democratic president, and I'm disappointed across the board.  Stacey Abrams doesn't want anything to do with David Perdue's seat in Georgia,and now both Beto O'Rourke and Julian Castro are bailing on John Cornyn's seat in Texas, with O'Rourke running for President instead.

All this means Democrats are in serious trouble in the Senate in 2020.

Senate Democrats' bid to take back the majority is running into a big roadblock: Some of their most coveted recruiting targets are refusing to run.

After straining to defend seats in bright-red states in 2018, Democrats are focused on picking off Republicans to claim the Senate majority in 2020. But, so far, a number of the party’s high-profile recruits have said no to Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the party’s campaign arm.

Stacey Abrams, a rising star in the party after nearly winning the Georgia governor’s race last year, passed on a Senate run Tuesday despite a sustained and public recruitment that included multiple meetings with Schumer. Hours later, Rep. Cindy Axne, who flipped a swing district last year, confirmed she was running for the House again — and not challenging Iowa's first-term Republican senator, Joni Ernst.

Democrats haven’t struck out everywhere: Former astronaut Mark Kelly in Arizona was a huge get in a critical battleground state. But three Democrats in other key states have passed on Senate bids to run for president despite the crowded field, and the party has missed out on its top recruits in Georgia and North Carolina.

“The Senate is not an appealing place for smart, talented candidates because it’s a broken institution. And Democrats have not yet offered a vision for how to fix it, aside from wringing their hands and wishing things were different,” said Adam Jentleson, a longtime aide to former Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). “What’s the pitch? 'Come here, do nothing and let Mitch McConnell eat your lunch every day?'”

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, chairwoman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, denied she and Schumer had blown it. Democrats need to flip only a handful of seats, and they'll be in a position to get them, she said.

“We don’t need all of these states to take back the majority. We just need three or four. And we’re going to do really well,” Cortez Masto said. “Just because we don’t get somebody that you’re aware of doesn’t mean we’re not going to have somebody that can beat those Republican incumbents.”

Schumer declined to say whether Abrams’ decision was a personal rejection of him but said the party will find a strong candidate to take on freshman Sen. David Perdue.

“We’re going to win in Georgia. And we have lots of good candidates in many different states, including Georgia,” Schumer said.

At this point Chuck Schumer and Catherine Cortez Masto are one for six with Commander Kelly running in Arizona against Martha McSally.  If Dems don't win back the Senate, I guarantee you McConnell will block everything.  Nothing the new Democratic president wants to do will get done.  It won't get passed.  It won't get a vote.  Mitch will block it, period.

And Democrats don't seem to give a damn.

StupidiNews!

Charlotte police are calling UNCC shooting victim Riley Howell a "hero", the 21-year-old student tackled a gunman Tuesday and stopped his rampage but was shot and killed at point blank range.
Asylum officials in Texas say a 16-year-old from Guatemala died in DHS custody over the weekend, the teenager was being held in Brownsville and died after an unknown illness.
A political stalemate in Venezuela continues as opposition leader Juan Guaido's call for an uprising has not yet resulted in the toppling of President Nicolas Maduro.
UK Prime Minister Theresa May and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn are hinting at a compromise Brexit plan in the works that could be revealed as early as next week.
A new research study on drought and climate change finds man-made factors contributing to lack of water as far back as 1950.

Last Call For The Map To Victory

Long-time Political Wire prognosticator Taegan Goddard is out with his preliminary 2020 electoral map site, based on early numbers, and it makes a lot of sense to me.

If the Dems keep this map and win the rust belt states from 2016 (PA, MI, and WI) then they win the White House.  Even with NC and Florida, Trump can't win in that scenario.

I'll update this as it goes.

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

Brian Beutler sums up the Democrats' failures in the post-Mueller report era pretty succinctly in his latest Crooked Media article.  I know "failures" here is a strong word, but given two plus years of lies and perfidy, Democrats are still acting like this all can be fixed with a goddamn handshake over bourbon.

Democrats have allowed their fear of taking a lonely stand to metastasize into the complete collapse of the last-remaining mechanism of presidential accountability. They are also apparently willing to sidestep a debate over this decision by executing a Trump-like pivot to infrastructure, but in a manner that seems destined to provide Trump a political boost. What president wouldn’t salivate over the prospect of having $2 trillion at his disposal to rebuild the country’s failing infrastructure during an election year?

It didn’t have to be this way. Instead of preemptively abdicating the impeachment power, Democrats could have announced that they would not allow Republicans to quietly nullify it to protect Trump from accountability. Instead of conceding that, absent bipartisanship, “there will be no impeachment, no matter how high the crime or serious the misdemeanor,” they could have lamented that in a polarized time, when the right wing is drowning in propaganda, impeachment might have to be deployed as a partisan tool—a means of collective accountability for the high crimes and misdemeanors of a derelict president whose party has enabled him. Republicans might keep Trump in power, but they would have to vote on the proposition that his obstruction of justice, his felonious conduct, his betrayal and looting of the country is acceptable behavior in a president.

It bears repeating that there’s no consequence-free way for Democrats to take impeachment off the table. This is what the post-election panic about “normalization” was all about. Responding to his historic depredations with the ordinary tools of congressional oversight doesn’t just look weak, betray the anti-Trump resistance, and invite Democrats to make fatal diversionary missteps. It also invites a terrifying moral hazard into our political system. Trump’s opportunities to obstruct justice weren’t and aren’t limited to the Russia investigation—there are many more Trump-related investigations, including several under the supervision of an attorney general who has already asserted that Trump’s obstructive acts aren’t criminal. The Democratic bias toward inaction invites Trump to sabotage all of them.

It also invites Trump and his surrogates to solicit foreign autocrats and oligarchs to commit more computer crimes against his Democratic opponent. It invites Republicans in Congress to help Trump complete his coverup and enable his corruption, while they treat him as a righteous victim and (laughable as it sounds) lay claim to the mantle of ethical governance.

The combined effect of all this will be a cacophony of Benghazi-like propaganda hearings about SPYGATE and the Deep State, staged with the complete cooperation of William Barr, that drowns out Democrats as they waste months in court trying to enforce the subpoenas he and Trump proudly flout.

The last best hope for avoiding this nightmare scenario is for Democrats to find an onramp to impeachment in spite of their misgivings. Between their anti- and pro-impeachment poles, some Democrats, including former Vice President Joe Biden, have allowed that Trump’s stonewalling tactics might leave Democrats no choice but to begin an impeachment process reluctantly.

To be clear, the reluctance is unwarranted and the delay is harmful. The Democrats’ palpable impeachment panic, set against the GOP’s unwavering claims of vindication and lust for revenge, has moved public opinion away from impeachment, and that view will harden in the very districts Democrats think they’re protecting. Likewise, if Democrats move to impeach Trump on the basis of his stonewalling alone, it will convey a petty lack of principle and a sense that his documented misconduct is not itself the problem. But it would at least bring us into the realm of appropriate recourse—into an arena where we can learn that Robert Mueller has accused William Barr of sabotage, and the question of what to do about it has an obvious answer. 

Mueller's response in his letters today made this all very clear.  Barr's response in Senate hearings today was 100% predictable: No crimes were committed by Donald Trump,  and he set the stage once again for the coming months of hearings and investigations into the FBI itself, into the Steele Dossier, and of course into Hillary Clinton.

I guarantee you Beutler is right about this.  Dems are almost out of time.  If they don't announce impeachment proceedings before Barr starts announcing new investigations, impeachment is effectively off the table, and the rest of 2019 will be defined by LOCK HER UP.

I know that rushing into this incorrectly will be devastating, but waiting too long will also be a catastrophe.

Senate Democrats are putting the brakes on impeachment chatter in the House, cautioning that lawmakers need to do more work before even thinking about moving forward on the issue.

A number of steps should be taken before there can be a serious discussion about impeaching President Trump, including hearing testimony from special counsel Robert Mueller, say several Senate Democrats.

They also want the House to review the unredacted version of his report and its underlying documentation.

“We ought to get the full report unredacted, get the underlying documentation, have Mueller come testify, and then we can make decisions on where to go,” Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday.

“We need to see the whole truth. Then we’ll make decisions on impeachment,” he added.

Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), who are both running for president, have come out in favor of starting impeachment proceedings, but they’re alone among Senate Democrats so far.

And soon we'll be buried in HER EMAIL hearings.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Attorney General Bill Barr is expected to testify today before House Democrats on his redactions and characterization that there was no funny business, and that Robert Mueller supported the conclusions in his letter last month.  But last night somebody in the DoJ hung him out to dry as it turns out Robert Mueller sent Bill Barr a letter very plainly saying that Barr's "summary" was bullshit, ans somebody leaked that letter to the Washington Post.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III wrote a letter in late March complaining to Attorney General William P. Barr that a four-page memo to Congress describing the principal conclusions of the investigation into President Trump “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of Mueller’s work, according to a copy of the letter reviewed Tuesday by The Washington Post.

The letter and a subsequent phone call between the two men reveal the degree to which the longtime colleagues and friends disagreed as they handled the legally and politically fraught task of investigating the president. Democrats in Congress are likely to scrutinize Mueller’s complaints to Barr as they contemplate the prospect of opening impeachment proceedings and mull how hard to press for Mueller himself to testify publicly.

At the time Mueller’s letter was sent to Barr on March 27, Barr had days prior announced that Mueller did not find a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian officials seeking to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. In his memo to Congress, Barr also said that Mueller had not reached a conclusion about whether Trump had tried to obstruct justice, but that Barr reviewed the evidence and found it insufficient to support such a charge.

Days after Barr’s announcement, Mueller wrote the previously undisclosed private letter to the Justice Department, laying out his concerns in stark terms that shocked senior Justice Department officials, according to people familiar with the discussions.

“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

Remember, Barr testified earlier this month to the Senate that he had no indication that Mueller disagreed with his summary.  Indeed, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi and others made it a central tenet of their Trump exoneration argument that if Mueller had disagreed with Barr's summary, he would have said something about it.

Mueller did say something about it over a month ago.

The Justice Department covered that fact up.

And Bill Barr lied about it to Congress.

So why doesn't Mueller testify to this fact?  He can't.  He's still a Justice Department employee at this juncture, and the Trump regime is refusing to let him testify because of that.

House Democrats tell The Daily Beast they’ve been told Special Counsel Robert Mueller is willing to testify before them about his report on Russian interference in the 2016 election but that the Department of Justice has been unwilling to set a date for it to happen.

The impasse comes as lawmakers have grown increasingly frustrated over Attorney General Bill Barr’s handling of the release of the Mueller probe and as other Trump World figures have declined to appear before congressional committees.

Shortly after it was reported on Tuesday night that Mueller had written and called Barr to complain that he not fully represented his findings, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) sent out a statement demanding both appear before his committee and revealing that he had been stonewalled so far.

“The Attorney General has expressed some reluctance to appear before the House Judiciary Committee this Thursday,” Nadler said. “These reports make it that much more important for him to appear and answer our questions. The Department of Justice has also been reluctant to confirm a date for Special Counsel Mueller to testify.”

Nadler had sent a letter to DOJ following the department’s release of the Mueller report asking that Mueller appear for questioning no later than May 23. Two sources familiar with the conversations said the Judiciary Committee has been in regular contact with DOJ about setting a date for that Mueller’s testimony and that those conversations were ongoing as of this week. Committee sources said that it was their impression that Mueller was willing to testify to discuss his findings though it was unclear whether that would take place in public or behind closed doors.

But the DOJ has, according to multiple sources, not agreed to a date, citing Mueller’s continued status as a department employee—since the Special Counsel serves under the attorney general.
A Department of Justice spokesperson did not return request for comment.

To recap, Bill Barr lied to Congress under oath.  That's a felony.  Mueller is being blocked from testifying on his own report.  That's obstruction of justice.  Barr should be facing impeachment.  This whole mess just got untenable for Trump.

Democrats have to act, and now.

StupidiNews!

• Two people are dead and four injured as a gunman opened fire at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte campus Tuesday evening, the suspect was disarmed and is in custody.
• New York Attorney General Latisha James has confirmed that investigations have been opened into Donald Trump's family finances, the Trumps are suing to keep the information secret.
• A former Minneapolis police officer was found guilty of murder for the fatal shooting of an Australian woman in 2017, the officer faces more than 16 years in prison if convicted.
• The Trump regime is preparing to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group at the request of Egyptian President Sisi, the designation could affect millions around the globe.
• NASA's planned 2024 moon landing may never happen as the agency hasn't been given the money, and is not expected to be able to get funding past conservative Republicans in the Senate.