Last Call For The Reach To Impeach, Con't

We got significantly closer to full impeachment hearings today as the dam broke, flooding DC and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.  Today, she called for a formal impeachment inquiry and says six House committees will move forward with investigations in order to arrive at possible articles of impeachment.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday announced a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump, a dramatic turnaround by the Democratic leader that sets up a constitutional and political clash pitting the Congress against the nation’s chief executive. 

“The actions of the Trump presidency have revealed the dishonorable fact of the president’s betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections,” Pelosi said in brief remarks. “Therefore, today, I am announcing the House of Representatives is moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry.”
Impeachment is a rare and extraordinary first step that could lead to overturning the decision of U.S. voters in 2016 to elect Trump. Pelosi’s decision foreshadows an intensely partisan fall, triggering pushback from Trump allies with repercussions for the 2020 campaign. 

The president immediately lashed out on Twitter. 

“Such an important day at the United Nations, so much work and so much success, and the Democrats purposely had to ruin and demean it with more breaking news Witch Hunt garbage. So bad for our Country!” he wrote.

Pelosi’s change of heart comes after days of consulting allies and follows reports that Trump may have pressured a foreign leader to investigate former vice president and potential 2020 campaign rival Joe Biden and his family. 

Those reports over a seven-day period created a groundswell of support among Democrats for impeachment, with moderates from swing districts joining liberals in calling for an inquiry.

Meanwhile the Senate called unanimously for the White House to turn over the full whistleblower complaint to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees as Republican Sen. Richard Burr says there will be a bipartisan investigation into the report.

Even as the House is ramping up its investigation into the Trump administration’s dealings with Ukraine, the Senate Intelligence Committee is conducting its own inquiry and is seeking an interview with the whistleblower who filed the initial complaint with the intelligence community’s inspector general, according to a letter obtained by Yahoo News. 

A letter seeking to question the still-anonymous whistleblower was sent Tuesday to Andrew Bakaj, the lawyer who represents the official. It was signed by committee chair Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va. — signifying that the panel is pursuing the politically explosive issue on a bipartisan basis. 

“In order to ascertain the appropriate path forward for your client while protecting your client’s privacy, we are writing to request that you make your client available for a closed bipartisan interview with Committee counsel no later than Friday, September 27, 2019, in a mutually agreeable secure location,” the letter reads. 

It was not immediately clear whether the White House will agree to let the official be questioned. A committee spokeswoman declined comment. “Since you showed me the letter, I can confirm its authenticity,” wrote Bakaj’s law partner Mark Zaid in an email to Yahoo News. “But I cannot comment on the substance at this time. The letter speaks for itself.” 

After the letter was sent, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said the whistleblower’s lawyer informed him the official “would like to speak to our committee and has requested guidance” from the acting Director of National Intelligence on his appearance, which could come “as soon as this week.”

So, the game begins in earnest.  Questions I have:

1) Who's the whistleblower?  We didn't find out Deep Throat was FBI associate director Mark Felt for more than 30 years.

2) Does Pelosi have the votes for articles of impeachment?  As of today, the answer is no.  As of today, Pelosi doesn't the votes for a formal impeachment inquiry, either.  The committee votes are there on the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees to investigate, and that was preceding beforehand without Pelosi's announcement today.

3) What's in the whistleblower report?  We may never know.  We could find out tomorrow.  Who knows?

All kinds of things could happen from here.

Boris Bad Enough Versus The Law

As I said two weeks ago, UK PM Boris Johnson is in perilous legal trouble, facing a smackdown from Scotland's Supreme Court.  Now Britain's Supreme Court has laid down a similar unanimous ruling that Johnson's move to suspend Parliament in order to keep his political opponents from taking any action to oust him before next month's Brexit deadline was unlawful.

Britain’s highest court dealt a serious blow Tuesday to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, ruling that his controversial decision to suspend Parliament was unlawful, in a landmark judgment that will have immediate implications for Britain’s departure from the European Union.

In one of the most high-profile cases to come before Britain’s Supreme Court, the 11 judges ruled unanimously that Johnson had attempted to stymie Parliament at a crucial moment in British history.

The court ruled that Johnson’s decision to ask Queen Elizabeth II to suspend Parliament frustrated the ability of lawmakers to do the business of democracy, including debating Johnson’s plans for leaving the E.U. The new prime minister has vowed that the departure, known as Brexit, will occur — “do or die” — by the end of October.

The court’s judgment was a brutal one for the embattled prime minister. The justices asserted that his move to suspend Parliament was a political maneuver and strongly suggested that he might have misled the queen.

Johnson said he will not resign.

Brenda Hale, president of the Supreme Court, eviscerated the government’s case.

Sitting in the high court, avoiding legal language and speaking clearly to the country, Hale said that Johnson’s decision to suspend Parliament “was unlawful because it had the effect of frustrating or preventing the ability of Parliament to carry out its constitutional functions without reasonable justification.”

The court unanimously found that Johnson’s suspension was “void and of no effect,” meaning, essentially, that Parliament has not been suspended.

John Bercow, the flamboyant speaker of the House of Commons, called the high court’s decision “unambiguous” and “unqualified” and said Parliament would resume its duties Wednesday morning.

Lawmakers in the House of Commons will be allowed to ask “urgent questions” of Johnson’s ministers and take part in “emergency debates” Wednesday, Bercow said, foreshadowing a freewheeling session for the chamber to press the government on all fronts.

Some lawmakers were already discussing a no-confidence measure against Johnson in Parliament, where the prime minister already has lost his majority.

“This is an absolutely momentous decision,” said Joanna Cherry, a Scottish politician who helped to launch the case in the Scottish courts.

This could very well be the week where lawmakers in both the UK and the US decide it's time for their respective country's leaders to go.

Stay tuned.

Ukraine In The Membrane

At this point, the Trump/Ukraine extortion story is getting comically stupid, as we're on shoe number five or six to drop.

President Trump told his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to hold back almost $400 million in military aid for Ukraine at least a week before a phone call in which Trump is said to have pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate the son of former vice president Joe Biden, according to three senior administration officials. 

Officials at the Office of Management and Budget relayed Trump’s order to the State Department and the Pentagon during an interagency meeting in mid-July, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. They explained that the president had “concerns” and wanted to analyze whether the money needed to be spent. 

Administration officials were instructed to tell lawmakers that the delays were part of an “interagency process” but to give them no additional information — a pattern that continued for nearly two months, until the White House released the funds on the night of Sept. 11. 

Trump’s order to withhold aid to Ukraine a week before his July 25 call with Volodymyr Zelensky is likely to raise questions about the motivation for his decision and fuel suspicions on Capitol Hill that Trump sought to leverage congressionally approved aid to damage a political rival. The revelation comes as lawmakers clash with the White House over a related whistleblower complaint made by an intelligence official alarmed by Trump’s actions.

So yes, the extortion happened first when the military aid already approved by Congress was blocked on Donald Trump's orders, then the phone call to Zelensky happened where Trump made it clear why he was holding up the money. He expected a foreign leader to come up with something on Hunter Biden in order to help Trump beat Joe Biden in 2020.  Told Mulvaney to lie to Congress about it to boot.

That's it, that's the crime.  Bag em, tag em, fire up the grill.

Dude did it.   And remember Pence was in on it too.

Pelosi now finally moving forward with the big I.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been quietly sounding out top allies and lawmakers about whether the time has come to impeach President Trump, a major development as several moderate House Democrats resistant to impeachment suddenly endorsed the extraordinary step of trying to oust the president. 

Pelosi, according to multiple senior House Democrats and congressional aides, has been gauging the mood of her caucus members about whether they believe that allegations that Trump pressured a Ukrainian leader to investigate a political foe are a tipping point. She was making calls as late as Monday night, and many leadership aides who once thought Trump’s impeachment was unlikely now say they think it’s almost inevitable. 

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly. 

Pelosi’s conversations — and reconsideration of her long-held position that impeachment is too divisive — come amid a growing clamor for impeachment that extends beyond the party’s liberal base and many Democratic presidential candidates to moderate lawmakers in competitive House seats. 

Seven freshman Democrats with previous service in the military, defense and U.S. intelligence said in a Monday night Washington Post op-ed that if the allegations against Trump are true, “we believe these actions represent an impeachable offense.”

Things are starting to move towards a critical mass.  Finally.

StupidiNews!

• Police and protesters in Hong Kong clashed again as demonstrations entered their 16th week, Amnesty International says police may be violating human rights of protesters.
• Donald Trump says as many as 4,500 US troops in Europe could be relocated to new bases being built in Poland as part of the EU's planned NATO military expansion.
• European Union countries are backing the US and Saudi Arabia on Iran being responsible for the recent attack on Saudi Arabia's oilfields but are urging diplomatic measures to resolve issues.
• The Trump Organization has turned over more than 3,300 pages of documents in the ongoing investigation into Trump's charity non-profit finances. 
• Russian researchers investigating arctic wildlife were safely rescued after an angry mother walrus attacked and sank an inflatable craft used by the science team.

Last Call For Spies Like Us, Con't

As TPM's Josh Marshall points out using the White House's own public transcripts from their September 1 meeting in Warsaw, Poland for the 80th anniversary of the start of WW II, Vice President Mike Pence was clearly involved in the efforts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into coming up with something damaging on Joe Biden, and Pence suggested US military aid to Ukraine was at stake if Zelensky didn't deliver.

Here’s the text of the question and answer from the official White House transcript, with my emphasis added.

Q: Thank you very much, Mr. Vice President. I wanted to ask you about your meeting yesterday with the Ukrainian President and for an update on Ukrainian security aid money.  

Specifically, number one, did you discuss Joe Biden at all during that meeting yesterday with the Ukrainian President? And number two, can you assure Ukraine that the hold-up of that money has absolutely nothing to do with efforts, including by Rudy Giuliani, to try to dig up dirt on the Biden family?  

VICE PRESIDENT PENCE: Well, on the first question, the answer is no. But we — with President Zelensky yesterday, we discussed — we discussed America’s support for Ukraine and the upcoming decision the President will make on the latest tranche of financial support in great detail.  

The President asked me to meet with President Zelensky and to talk about the progress that he’s making on a broad range of areas. And we did that.  

We, as I said yesterday, especially since Russian aggression — the illegal occupation of Crimea and Russian aggression in Eastern Ukraine — the United States has stood strong with Ukraine and we will continue to stand strong with Ukraine for its sovereignty and territorial integrity.  

But as President Trump had me make clear, we have great concerns about issues of corruption. And, fortunately, President Zelensky was elected decisively on an anti-corruption message. And he and I discussed yesterday that as he’s assembled his cabinet, and as his parliament has convened, that even in the early days, he informed me that there have been more than 250 bills filed for — that address the issue of public corruption and really restoring integrity to the public process.  

I mean, to invest additional taxpayer in Ukraine, the President wants to be assured that those resources are truly making their way to the kind of investments that will contribute to security and stability in Ukraine. And that’s an expectation the American people have and the President has expressed very clearly.  

We also talked in some detail about what other European nations are doing for Ukraine. The simple fact is that the United States has carried the load on most of the security investments in Ukraine. And we have been proud to do that, but we believe it’s time for our European partners to step forward and make additional investments to stand with the people of Ukraine as they assert their territorial integrity and sovereignty.  

President Zelensky and I talked in great detail about ongoing discussions about resolving the ongoing violence and occupation of Ukraine. And those were the issues that we covered.  

But I assured him that the people of the United States stand with Ukraine for their sovereignty and territorial integrity. But I called on him to work with us to engage our European partners to participate at a greater level in Ukraine, and also told him that I would carry back to President Trump the progress that he and his administration in Ukraine are making on dealing with corruption in their country.

Corruption is a longstanding issue in Ukraine. Rooting out that corruption has been a central focus of US policy in the country for decades. That is why the United States and the European Union were so focused on removing that prosecutor back in 2015. But in the context of what we know was happening and especially the call we know took place a month earlier, these repeated references to progress on corruption and holding up military aid until Zelensky acted could scarcely be more clear.

Yep.  If it's impeachable for Trump, and Pence was in on it, well...

The Rapidly Receding Red Rout

Washington Post reporter Rachael Bade notes that out of the 241 House Republicans who took office along with Donald Trump in January 2017, more than a third of them are gone or will be gone by the end of next year.  Michigan's Paul Mitchell is the most recent departure this month, announcing his retirement a few weeks ago.

Mitchell is among a growing list of House Republicans — 18 to date — who have announced plans to resign, retire or run for another office, part of a snowballing exodus that many Republicans fear is imperiling their chances of regaining control of the House in the 2020 elections.

And the problem for the GOP is bigger than retirements. Since Trump’s inauguration, a Washington Post analysis shows, nearly 40 percent of the 241 Republicans who were in office in January 2017 are gone or leaving because of election losses, retirements including former House speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), and some, such as Mitchell, who are simply quitting in disgust.

The vast turnover is a reminder of just how much Trump has remade the GOP — and of the purge of those who dare to oppose him. Former congressman Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) lost his June 2018 primary after challenging Trump; he’s now a Republican presidential candidate. Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.), the only Republican to accuse Trump of impeachable acts, quit the GOP in July citing the “partisan death spiral.” His political future is uncertain.

Mitchell, who hails from a Republican-leaning district that Trump won easily in 2016, simply decided he had enough. He has a 9-year-old son with a learning disability, and remaining in a highly polarized Washington just wasn’t worth the trade-off, he said.

“Did any member of this conference expect that their job would start out every morning trying to go through the list of what’s happening in tweets of the day?” Mitchell asked, referring to Trump’s Twitter habits. “We’re not moving forward right now. We are simply thrashing around.”

The retirement numbers are particularly staggering. All told, 41 House Republicans have left national politics or announced they won’t seek reelection in the nearly three years since Trump took office. That dwarfs the 25 Democrats who retired in the first four years of former president Barack Obama’s tenure — and Republicans privately predict this is only the beginning.
Most of the departing Republicans publicly cite family as the reason for leaving. But behind the scenes, Republicans say the trend highlights a greater pessimism about the direction of the party under Trump — and their ability to win back the House next year. 

The president has doubled down on an all-base strategy for his reelection campaign, making some Republicans ask whether Trump has put his own political future ahead of the long-term viability of the party of Abraham Lincoln.

“If the party doesn’t start looking like America, there will not be a party in America,” said Rep. Will Hurd (R-Tex.), the only black House Republican, who announced his retirement in August.

That's staggering.  We're talking more than 90 of those same 241 Republicans retired in the last 32 months, lost in 2018, or are retiring before 2021.

More retirements are coming, I guarantee that.  They're not getting the House back anytime soon.  The Senate remains a much different story, but I expect after 2020 redistricting in favor of Democrats at the state level, you're going to see a very solid House Democratic majority for some time.

Well, unless the Dems find a way to blow it.

Doing "Something" About Trump

Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty suggests that while the impeachment debate rages on, the Trump/Ukraine perfidy is worth an unprecedented and historic House censure resolution by Democrats.

This argument will continue, with new fuel being added by the administration’s refusal to turn over a whistleblower’s complaint regarding the Trump-Zelensky conversation. It is hard to see how it could possibly be resolved before we are well into the 2020 campaign season. But there is something the House could do right now, an idea that I have raised before: censure the president. 

The procedure for doing so is pretty straightforward, as spelled out in a recent report by the Congressional Research Service: 

Should a House committee report a non-Member censure resolution, the full House may consider it by unanimous consent, under the Suspension of the Rules procedure, or under the terms of a special rule reported by the Committee on Rules and adopted by the House. 17 If widespread support exists for the censure resolution, unanimous consent or the Suspension of the Rules procedure may be used. Otherwise, the resolution could be brought to the floor under a special rule reported by the Committee on Rules. All three of these parliamentary mechanisms require, at a minimum, the support of the majority party leadership in order to be entertained. 

In other words, a censure resolution could be brought to the House floor with support from Democrats alone, and it would not require any action on the part of the Senate. 

This would not sate the appetite of the pro-impeachment forces, or end the debate over whether that step is warranted. But it could be done quickly, with the evidence at hand, and would have the benefit of forcing Republican members to go on record stating whether they do or do not find this behavior on the part of the president acceptable. While many would argue that censure is a symbolic gesture, it is a disgrace that Trump would share with only one other president in American history — his purported idol, Andrew Jackson. Jackson was censured by the Senate in 1834 as the result of a little-remembered dispute over the Second Bank of the United States; it was expunged a few years later when his pro-Jackson Democrats gained a majority in the chamber, which showed that they regarded a censure as more than a slap on the wrist. 

None of this would end the argument over impeachment, but it would prove to the American people that at least part of their government sets a higher standard of behavior than our current president does. It also, finally, would force Republicans to answer a question that they have been dodging: Is there anything this president does that you will not tolerate?

 Censure of Trump and five bucks will get you a pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks.

Look, at this point Pelosi doesn't have the votes for censure, let alone impeachment. Tumulty admits it won't accomplish anything even if it did happen.  And Trump will simply say -- correctly for once because no Republican would risk getting Amashed over voting for it -- that there's a purely political Democratic "witch hunt" going on against him.

Not even Paul Ryan and John Boehner censured Barack Obama.  Censure resolutions were introduced against Nixon but he resigned, and the censure resolution against Bill Clinton over Monica Lewinsky failed because Newt Gingrich didn't have the votes for it.

House Democrats did vote to condemn Trump over his racist remarks against Reps. Omar, Tlaib, Ocasio-Cortez, and Pressley earlier this year, but it fell short of official censure.

And like the condemnation vote, censure is not going to fix a damn thing, and Tumulty should know better.  If censure was a real option, it would have been used already for precisely the reasons Tumulty laid out.

But that of course leaves us in the same position we've been in since January: Democrats control the House, and Nancy Pelosi controls House Democrats, but so far the votes aren't anywhere close to being there in order to be able to impeach Trump.

The Ukraine situation may change all that in the near future, however.

With Pelosi unwilling to impeach Trump, Democratic rank-and-file members are frantically looking for something to fortify their investigations. On Friday, Judiciary members pressed Nadler to invoke Congress’s long-dormant inherent contempt authority that would allow Congress to jail or fine people for defying subpoenas.
The power hasn’t been used in more than 100 years. Pelosi, leadership and other House lawyers were dismissive of the idea when investigators first floated it last spring. But Judiciary members are once again trying to force the issue.

“Our side says it's ‘legally questionable,’ ‘it hasn't been used in forever,’ and ‘blah, blah, blah,’ ” said Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), a member of the panel, who argues Trump’s legal team frequently has used last-ditch efforts and bogus explanations to block testimony — and the House should do the same. 

“I say do it,” he continued. “Let them argue in court that they take the position that it's legally questionable. We back off of everything! We’ve been very weak.” 

The frustration with the Democratic approach extends to members of Pelosi’s leadership team. 

“We need to develop other tools because our tools are not working,” said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a Judiciary panel member who is co-chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee. “We cannot allow the administration to simply continuously stonewall Congress with no consequences.” 

Lieu is pushing for the use of inherent contempt. 

Even Schiff, who came to Congress in part by defeating a Republican who voted for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, said on Sunday that relying on the courts may not work for Trump, Ukraine and the undisclosed whistleblower complaint.

“We cannot afford to play rope-a-dope in the court for weeks or months on end,” Schiff said. “We need an answer if there’s a fire burning it needs to be put out, and that's why we're going to have to look at every remedy . . . we're going to have to consider impeachment, as well, as a remedy here.”

Ostensibly the next step in this drama is Thursday, when Acting DNI Joseph Maguire goes before the House Intelligence Committee. This whole mess started because Maguire refused to turn over the transcript of Trump's call and the whistleblower complaint as required by law. Committee chair Rep. Adam Schiff then issued a subpoena for Maguire to do so, and that showdown comes later this week.

If Maguire doesn't comply, Pelosi has hinted that the resulting "grave new chapter of lawlessness" would lead to a "whole new stage of investigation" into the Trump regime.  That gives me some small measure of hope at least, but there's not a reason to believe that Trump won't try to call that bluff between now and Thursday.

And if it is a bluff by Pelosi, well, like I've been saying, if Democrats keep walking down the middle of the road on impeachment, they're going to get hit by the bus in the 2020 elections and it won't be a question any longer, because Trump will be re-elected.

StupidiNews!

• Pittsburgh police say a total of seven people overdosed in an apartment, three were pronounced dead and the other four have been hospitalized.
• Israeli President Reuven Rivlin will hold talks among multiple political parties Monday as the country tries to form a government after no party was able to claim a majority in last week's elections.
• France says the EU stands ready to defuse US-Iran tensions at this week's UN General Assembly meeting as Iran is warning that US military forces being sent to Saudi Arabia could lead to war.
• Multiple 2020 Democratic hopefuls joined striking GM auto workers picketing plants over the weekend as both labor and management say they're a long way from settling the ongoing strike.
• Facebook has finally suspended thousands of apps on the platform for violating its privacy rules and improperly sharing user data, but critics say the damage has already been done to tens of millions.

Last Call For (Non)Sense Of The Senate GOP

As Charles Sykes points out, Nebraska GOP Sen. Ben Sasse is now fully a Trump bootlicker, and the last shred of human decency left in the Senate GOP has been set on fire, stomped on, pissed on, dug up, and its ashes shot into the sun.

After Trump proposed his ban on Muslim immigration in 2015, Sasse gave a speech on the Senate floor in which he denounced “demagoguing leaders" and "a megalomaniac strongman ... screaming about travel bans and deportation."

In interviews, he compared Trump to former KKK leader David Duke and described Trump’s rise as a personal breaking point. “This is the party of Abraham Lincoln,” he said. “This is not the party of David Duke, Donald Trump.”

Consistently, he cast the issue as one of fundamental constitutional principles rather than personality. Fundamentally, he said, “this party needs to return to its principles of believing in equality under the law and believing in the greatness of the potential of the American people.” As he said in February of 2016:  

The problem is, at the end of the day, most people really want a choice that is about a constitutional recovery. They want to rebuild what's broken in America, not tear it down. And when you listen to Donald Trump, all you really hear is more Donald Trump, more tear it down, and a lot of praise of foreign dictators. I don't think the American people, and I don't think most Republicans really want a strongman.

Even after Trump had secured the nomination, Sasse refused to fall in line. When asked if he would be attending the GOP convention, his office said that the senator would” instead take his kids to watch some dumpster fires across the state, all of which enjoy more popularity than the current front-runners.”

Sasse’s outspokenness continued through the first years of Trump’s presidency. A Politico profile in July 2018 noted that even as the ranks of never-Trumpers in the Republican Party “dwindles to a lonely few, the Nebraska senator has shown little interest in backing down.” Sasse seemed anxious to polish his conservative intellectual credentials by publishing a book just three weeks before the midterm election titled, “Them: Why We Hate Each Other — and How to Heal,” a decidedly non-Trumpian view of culture, politics and the future.

There was even speculation that Sasse might mount an independent challenge to Trump. In an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” a year ago this month, he told host Jake Tapper that he thought about leaving the GOP “every morning” and said that he thought of himself as “an independent conservative who caucuses with the Republicans.”

When Trump lashed out at the Department of Justice in September of 2018 for indicting two Republican congressmen, Chris Collins of New York and Duncan Hunter of California, Sasse delivered a stinging rebuke: “The United States is not some banana republic with a two-tiered system of justice — one for the majority party and one for the minority party,” Sasse said. “These two men have been charged with crimes because of evidence, not because of who the president was when the investigations began.”

Sasse’s apparent independence continued into 2019. In February, declaring himself a “constitutional conservative,” he urged Trump not to declare a national emergency on the border, warning that it would set a dangerous precedent. “If we get used to presidents just declaring an emergency any time they can’t get what they want from Congress, it will be almost impossible to go back to a Constitutional system of checks and balances,” he said. “Over the past decades, the legislative branch has given away too much power and the executive branch has taken too much power.”

But the next month, he stunned observers when he voted to uphold Trump’s order even though 12 other GOP senators broke with Trump on the issue. It was a breathtaking reversal. In many ways, it was no different than the Faustian bargain made by so many of his colleagues and a reflection of the transformation of Republican politics.

Sasse would have been primaried out and destroyed like Justin Amash was and he knows it, but instead he toed the line and got his Trump tweet endorsement earlier this month.  He figures he's got an easy path in 2020 to re-election, and he'll worry about the country in 2026.  After all, Trump will be long gone by then, one way or another.

Right?

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

I'm as shocked as you are, but the normally roller-skates-on-the-moon useless think tank Third Way actually compiled a list of the 99 House Democratic districts where we need to run up the score the most in order to win the White House and the Senate back in order to start cleaning up the Trump disaster, districts like Rob Kind's in Wisconsin, Rashida Tlaib's in Michigan and G.K. Butterfield's in NC.

Third Way, created in the “New Democrat” mold of Bill Clinton’s presidency, often clashes with more liberal activists over party ideology, but in this report the group has tried to illustrate the range of political geography Democrats need to focus their energy on to ensure a broad victory.

So, in this regard, Third Way places double the value on Tlaib, whose staunchly liberal positions would be out of place with the group’s moderate policy prescriptions. But her seat could prove critical to building turnout for the presidential race and to reelect Sen. Gary Peters (Mich.), one of the few incumbent Democrats that Republicans want to target in a year the GOP will mostly be on defense.

Here’s why: In 2016, Tlaib’s district gave Hillary Clinton a margin of victory of almost 61 percentage points, which might seem staggering. But four years earlier, that district gave Obama a nearly 71-point margin.

Trump won Michigan by fewer than 11,000 votes, making that small drop in Detroit critical to Clinton’s defeat statewide.

Down in North Carolina, Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D) has easily won for 15 years, but the former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus has a district that might be key to tipping the state’s 15 electoral votes to Democrats.

Perhaps more importantly, Butterfield could help the Democratic nominee for the Senate race against Sen. Thom Tillis (R), a contest that could serve as a tipping point for control of the Senate.

Without a comprehensive effort, Democrats fear a new president would be stymied if Republicans still control the Senate, where the GOP could block or water down the Democratic agenda, similar to Obama’s second term.

“It determines whether Democrats can accomplish anything in 2021,” said Lanae Erickson, the group’s senior vice president and a policy expert.

Some obviously important Democratic seats are even more critical when looking up and down the ballot in their respective states. These are what [report author David] de la Fuente calls “five point races”: freshman Democrats who narrowly won a GOP-held seat in 2018, running for reelection in districts that Trump won two years before, whose states will also be battlegrounds in the presidential and Senate contests.

There are eight “five-point” Democrats: Reps. Abby Finkenauer (Iowa), Cindy Axne (Iowa), Angie Craig (Minn.), Jared Golden (Maine), Elaine Luria (Va.), Elissa Slotkin (Mich.), Abigail Spanberger (Va.), and Haley Stevens (Mich.). 

Golden carries even more value because Maine allocates some of its electoral votes based on performance within congressional districts, allowing Trump to claim an extra vote for winning the northern Maine district despite losing narrowly statewide.

If Golden, a Marine veteran from Iraq and Afghanistan, can win next year by a sizable margin, he could secure the state for the Democratic nominee and also help knock off Sen. Susan Collins (R) in another critical race.

The full report is here, ranking the districts by how many of those five points it checks off, but the eight listed above are the holy grail.  The four-pointers are Tom O'Halleran and Ann Kirkpatrick in Arizona, Colin Peterson in Minnesota, and Chris Pappas in NH, and 20 districts are worth 3 of the 5 points, with another 40 worth 2 points.

If Dems win big in those districts, they keep the House, they win the Senate back, and they send Trump home.  Take a look at the list, and if you're in at least a one-point district, keep that in mind.  Turnout in these districts will help the Democrats the most.

If you're like me in a red district, well, you can help too.  This report doesn't take into account the red districts that Dems are gunning for, like Will Hurd's TX-23 border district and winnable Texas suburban districts (TX-10,21,22,24 and 31) and national race districts like MI-6, PA-1 and PA-10, and FL-15.

There's a lot of work to be done. Trump won 31 House districts in 2016 that Democrats currently represent, 23 of those 31 currently have House Democratic freshmen who won in 2018.  Democrats are going to be playing a lot of defense and they're just not going to keep all those districts.

But this report is a good start to know where to go.

 

Sunday Long Read: Just Plane Nonsense

Maureen Tkacik at The New Republic lands our Sunday Long Read this week as we nosedive into Boeing's 737 MAX disaster, a tale of design-by-committee failure and blockheaded corporate culture that killed hundreds of people in airline crashes and may very well finish off America's largest aerospace employer.

Nearly two decades before Boeing’s MCAS system crashed two of the plane-maker’s brand-new 737 MAX jets, Stan Sorscher knew his company’s increasingly toxic mode of operating would create a disaster of some kind. A long and proud “safety culture” was rapidly being replaced, he argued, with “a culture of financial bullshit, a culture of groupthink.”
 

Sorscher, a physicist who’d worked at Boeing more than two decades and had led negotiations there for the engineers’ union, had become obsessed with management culture. He said he didn’t previously imagine Boeing’s brave new managerial caste creating a problem as dumb and glaringly obvious as MCAS (or the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, as a handful of software wizards had dubbed it). Mostly he worried about shriveling market share driving sales and head count into the ground, the things that keep post-industrial American labor leaders up at night. On some level, though, he saw it all coming; he even demonstrated how the costs of a grounded plane would dwarf the short-term savings achieved from the latest outsourcing binge in one of his reports that no one read back in 2002.*

Sorscher had spent the early aughts campaigning to preserve the company’s estimable engineering legacy. He had mountains of evidence to support his position, mostly acquired via Boeing’s 1997 acquisition of McDonnell Douglas, a dysfunctionalfirm with a dilapidated aircraft plant in Long Beach and a CEO who liked to use what he called the “Hollywood model” for dealing with engineers: Hire them for a few months when project deadlines are nigh, fire them when you need to make numbers. In 2000, Boeing’s engineers staged a 40-day strike over the McDonnell deal’s fallout; while they won major material concessions from management, they lost the culture war. They also inherited a notoriously dysfunctional product line from the corner-cutting market gurus at McDonnell.


And while Boeing’s engineers toiled to get McDonnell’s lemon planes into the sky, their own hopes of designing a new plane to compete with Airbus, Boeing’s only global market rival, were shriveling. Under the sway of all the naysayers who had called out the folly of the McDonnell deal, the board had adopted a hard-line “never again” posture toward ambitious new planes. Boeing’s leaders began crying “crocodile tears,” Sorscher claimed, about the development costs of 1995’s 777, even though some industry insiders estimate that it became the most profitable plane of all time. The premise behind this complaining was silly, Sorscher contended in PowerPoint presentations and a Harvard Business School-style case study on the topic. A return to the “problem-solving” culture and managerial structure of yore, he explained over and over again to anyone who would listen, was the only sensible way to generate shareholder value. But when he brought that message on the road, he rarely elicited much more than an eye roll. “I’m not buying it,” was a common response. Occasionally, though, someone in the audience was outright mean, like the Wall Street analyst who cut him off mid-sentence:


“Look, I get it. What you’re telling me is that your business is different. That you’re special. Well, listen: Everybody thinks his business is different, because everybody is the same. Nobody. Is. Different.”
 

And indeed, that would appear to be the real moral of this story: Airplane manufacturing is no different from mortgage lending or insulin distribution or make-believe blood analyzing software—another cash cow for the one percent, bound inexorably for the slaughterhouse. In the now infamous debacle of the Boeing 737 MAX, the company produced a plane outfitted with a half-assed bit of software programmed to override all pilot input and nosedive when a little vane on the side of the fuselage told it the nose was pitching up. The vane was also not terribly reliable, possibly due to assembly line lapses reported by a whistle-blower, and when the plane processed the bad data it received, it promptly dove into the sea.


And so the guys who designed a system that they said literally couldn't crash because the plane would automatically correct the stupid, fallible human pilots who were clearly the most unreliable part of the airline industry discovered they had created a computerized flying deathtrap that on occasion didn't know up from down and would override the pilots like some made-for-TV sci-fi flick and very efficiently murder everyone inside it.

This is not the best part.

The best part is that then they charged people extra to fix the code that was responsible for the unfortunate murdery stuff.

And if that, dear reader, isn't the perfect encapsulation of late-stage American capitalism, I don't know what is.

Spies Like Us, Con't

Never Trump Republican Tom Nichols says if the Ukraine scandal story is true, if Donald Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky eight times in one phone call to investigate Joe Biden, then Trump has to be impeached and removed from office.

Let us try, as we always find ourselves doing in the age of Trump, to think about how Americans might react if this happened in any other administration. Imagine, for example, if Bill Clinton had called his friend, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, in 1996, and asked him to investigate Bob Dole. Or if George W. Bush had called, say, President Vicente Fox of Mexico in 2004 and asked him—indeed, asked him eight times, according to The Wall Street Journal—to open a case against John Kerry. Clinton, of course, was eventually impeached for far less than that. Is there any doubt that either man would have been put on trial in the Senate, and likely chased from office? 

The Republicans, predictably, have decided to choose their party over their country, and the damage control and lying have begun. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, for one, has already floated the reliable “deep-state attack” nonsense that will play well on Fox and other conservative outlets. And while Giuliani did Trump no favors with his incoherent ranting on CNN, he did manage to hammer away at the idea that Biden, and not Trump, tried to shake down the Ukrainians while he was vice president.

The problem for Giuliani, the Republicans, and the president himself, however, is that Biden and his actions are now irrelevant to the offenses committed by Trump. The accusations against Joe Biden are false, as we know from multiple fact checks and from the Ukrainians themselves (which is why I won’t deign to repeat them here). But even to argue over this fable about Biden is to miss the point, because it changes nothing about Trump’s attempts to enmesh Biden in a foreign investigation for Trump’s own purposes.

There is no spin, no deflection, no alternative theory of the case that can get around the central fact that President Trump reportedly attempted to use his office for his own gain, and that he put the foreign policy and the national security of the United States at risk while doing so. He ignored his duty as the commander in chief by intentionally trying to place an American citizen in jeopardy with a foreign government. He abandoned his obligations to the Constitution by elevating his own interests over the national interest. By comparison, Watergate was a complicated judgment call.

In a better time and in a better country, Republicans would now join with Democrats and press for Trump’s impeachment. This won’t happen, of course; even many of Biden’s competitors for the presidency seem to be keeping their distance from this mess, perhaps in the hope that Biden and Trump will engage in a kind of mutually assured political destruction. (Elizabeth Warren, for one, renewed her call for impeachment—but without mentioning Biden.) This is to their shame. The Democratic candidates should now unite around a call for an impeachment investigation, not for Biden’s sake, but to protect the sanctity of our elections from a predatory president who has made it clear he will stop at nothing to stay in the White House. 

I am speaking only for myself as an American citizen. I believe in our Constitution, and therefore I must accept that Donald Trump is the president and the commander in chief until the Congress or the people of the United States say otherwise. But if this kind of dangerous, unhinged hijacking of the powers of the presidency is not enough for either the citizens or their elected leaders to demand Trump’s removal, then we no longer have an accountable executive branch, and we might as well just admit that we have chosen to elect a monarch and be done with the illusion of constitutional order in the United States.

For all of Nichols's lofty rhetoric, it's already too late though.  The goalposts were moved to Mars in just the last 24 hours because the Democrats, with the exclusion of Liz Warren, said nothing.  Democrats are already walking back their attacks because reportedly, Trump didn't actually mention a quid pro quo on the call itself.

As Nichols points out, that's irrelevant.  The pressure itself should be enough for impeachment if it happened, but that ship has already sailed.

It took 24 hours for news outlets to ‘both sides’ a president committing treason. pic.twitter.com/o91dHAyYUG

— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) September 21, 2019

We can't know for sure without the call itself, but Trump will simply claim executive privilege and this will become Hillary's emails all over again, as I predicted Friday.

Can't wait until Monday's news cycle begins, which will herald approximately 13 minutes of "Trump admits to extortion of Ukraine leader in order to help his 2020 campaign" but 14 months of "But Joe Biden's emails!"

— The Full Zandar Report (@ZandarVTS) September 20, 2019

Democrats should be howling at the moon over this.  Republicans should be pissed off over this.  But as always, the GOP has figured out that as long as they cover for Trump, America will refuse to make them pay any sort of price.  But if they rat Trump out, they will be exterminated like Justin Amash, in a matter of days, if not hours.

That's how mobsters work.

We live under a mob crime family and Eliott Ness is nowhere to be found.

Spies Like Us, Con't

The Trump regime Ukraine scandal is only getting worse for the Tangerine Tyrant, but it wouldn't be our media if it wasn't an opportunity to use the completely fabricated nonsense against Joe Biden as "both sides do it!"

Despite the outrage that greeted reports of the president’s actions, Biden’s immediate response was no simple matter. His son Hunter Biden’s lucrative contracts with Ukraine — at the same time the vice president was in charge of U.S. policy toward the country raised — raised the prospect of fueling a narrative with downside political risk for Biden. 

“This puts him on the ropes over having to talk about this,” said Patrick Murray, a pollster with Monmouth University. “He certainly doesn’t want to talk about this, his family.” 

Murray suggested the ethical dimensions of the controversy — and the implications of Trump’s actions for impeachment, which Biden at present does not support — made any extended discussion of the story potentially perilous for Biden. 

“At the primary level, I don’t think Democrats would believe these charges [concerning Biden] because of how polarized the debate is right now, but then they could start worrying that this could hurt him if he is the nominee,” Murray said. “It’s ‘can Biden fight back? Will this hurt his ability to take Trump on fully?’ And will it undermine that electability argument that he’s been making?” 

The only way this becomes an issue for Biden is if the media makes this about Biden by writing stories about how this issue is really about Biden.  If this all seems familiar, I have some Hillary Clinton e-mails that would like a word with you.

The Village would love nothing more than for both Biden's Democratic primary rivals and Trump regime Republicans to attack him over this nonsense that I remind you was debunked back in May, and that was after the previous Ukraine government decided to close an investigation into Paul Manafort in exchange for military aid.  It all stinks.

Again, the Biden story appeared in May and was debunked a few weeks later, and let's not forget that the Ukrainina co-author of that bullshit NY Times story on Biden is now Volodymyr Zelensky's spokesman.The Biden story is disinformation, guys.  Pure and simple.

This is all complete nonsense.  Do not let these assholes do to Joe Biden what they did to Hillary and give us another four years of goddamn Donald Trump.

Hizzoner Hits The Showers

NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio is out of the 2020 presidential race, and with his poll numbers somewhere within the margin of error of zero, it's no wonder.  But it turns out he's probably going to have political problems long after his quixotic quest, as the Trump regime doesn't forgive or forget a foe.

Mayor Bill de Blasio's presidential campaign is over, but concerns over his fundraising practices linger on. 

An official with the Federal Election Commission sent a letter to the mayor's presidential campaign, which ended Friday, highlighting a problem that has been the subject of multiple POLITICO reports and two formal complaints from watchdog groups.

In a July public filing, the de Blasio camp noted a $52,852 debt owed to the NY Fairness PAC, a state political action committee controlled by the mayor. The campaign had argued that this was a permissible loan from one organization to another. But the FEC's senior campaign finance analyst, Robin Kelly, wrote this week that the practice is not allowed by campaign finance rules. 

Such transfers are capped at $5,000 per election cycle, Kelly's letter said, meaning the campaign took more than ten times the permissible amount from the state PAC and spent it on travel and advertising. Kelly mandated that the campaign refile an amended report by late October that corrects the transfer, and noted that an audit of the campaign may follow. 

The campaign repaid the loan Thursday, the day it received the FEC’s letter, spokesperson Jaclyn Rothenberg said. 

Last year, de Blasio created a federal political action committee called Fairness PAC — ostensibly to fund his trips around the country advocating for progressive causes and to offer financial support to other left-leaning Democrats. However, the mayor also quietly created a state committee called NY Fairness PAC and used both to fund exploratory efforts for his own presidential campaign. 

Last month, the Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the FEC illustrating why it found this practice problematic. Essentially, donors who had already given the max to de Blasio's presidential campaign were also donating to both of his PACs. And PAC money was being shifted back into the presidential warchest. 

“[The campaign] appears to have concocted a shell game to arrange for a small number of wealthy donors to support de Blasio’s presidential run above and beyond legal contribution limits,” the group's complaint said. 

Mayor de Blasio's semi-shady shell game aside, did anyone not expect the Trump regime to make ongoing trouble for somebody Trump has had an ongoing feud with for years?  FEC harassment is only the beginning, I suspect.  Trump's enemies' list is as long as his ridiculous ties, after all.

Still, de Blasio's cavalier attitude and pointless presidential run brought this retribution upon himself.  It doesn't look like he's going to pull a Bloomberg and try to get a third term or anything, there's no way City Council would play ball.  As to who will replace him, well he still has another two years to go on that, but the primary fights aren't that far off.

Deportation Nation, Con't

The deal for mass deportations of migrants and asylum seekers (and eventually undocumented and undesirable political enemies already in the country) the Trump regime pressured both Mexico and Guatemala to take may yet go to an eager El Salvador instead.

The United States planned to sign an agreement on Friday to help make one of Central America’s most violent countries, El Salvador, a haven for migrants seeking asylum, according to a senior Trump administration official. 

The official said acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan would sign a “cooperative asylum agreement.” 

Two other officials described the agreement as a first step measure in the governments’ working together on asylum. Details of the broad agreement will be hammered out in the weeks and months ahead, they said. The officials weren’t authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. 

The agreement could lead to migrants from third countries obtaining refuge in El Salvador even though many Salvadorans are fleeing their nation and seeking asylum in the United States. A Salvadoran delegation has been in the U.S. this week discussing the matter. 

It’s the latest effort by President Donald Trump’s administration to force asylum-seekers in Central America to seek refuge outside the United States. Immigration officials also are forcing more than 42,000 people to remain in Mexico as their cases play out and have changed policy to deny asylum to anyone who transited through a third country en route to the southern border of the U.S. 

The senior administration official wasn’t authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity. 

The agreement would be another step by the Trump administration aimed at stopping the flow of migrants coming into the United States. McAleenan also signed a so-called “safe third country” agreement with Guatemala, but officials in that country are still working out how it would be implemented. 

The arrangement with El Salvador was not described as a “safe third country” agreement, under which nations agree that their respective countries are safe enough and have robust enough asylum systems, so that if migrants transit through one of the countries they must remain there instead of moving on to another country. 

The U.S. officially has only one such agreement in place, with Canada, but has been working toward others in Honduras and agreed to the one in Guatemala that has not yet been implemented.

The courts have made it clear that without a safe third country agreement, the Trump regime can't begin mass deportations of millions out of the US.  Canada is big enough to not get pushed around by the US too, and besides, it's pretty easy to check to see if people came in through the southern US border or the northern one.

Honduras is the next country in line if Guatemala and El Salvador don't work out.  But the Trump regime can't begin the deportations without somewhere to actually send them, and the for-profit concentration camps on the US border will start becoming an albatross on Trump's neck for 2020 unless he proves he can empty them out.

Besides, his base will demand the deportations sooner rather than later.