Political Irony

First of all, if you want (or need) a good summary of the current state of the Trump-Ukraine situation, Electoral Vote has a good one today that can bring you up to speed.

Of course, things are moving quickly so that article is already out of date. In particular, Nancy Pelosi is about to announce a formal impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump.

And you know what? I totally agree. I think it is time to impeach. What convinced me was this article by Zack Beauchamp in Vox. It is a good article and you should read it, but the main point is this:

Impeaching Trump over Robert Mueller’s findings in the Russia investigation would have been an attempt to address past offenses; impeaching Trump over these calls would be an attempt to halt what sure looks like an ongoing attempt to hijack American foreign policy in service of the president’s reelection. Democrats have an obligation to try to stop this before it gets any further.

Trump believes he can get away with anything (including shooting someone in downtown NYC). If we don’t stand up to him when we catch him doing something, (as David Frum points out) he will just get worse and worse. He thinks he can sweep this scandal under the table like he has before, but most of those scandals were in the past. He is doing this one now, and we have an obligation to stop him.

Even if the Senate doesn’t convict him. At the very least, it will put all the spineless Republican enablers of Trump into the awkward position of saying that the president of the US is above the law.

Clearly, Trump is now looking for kompromat to discredit his opponent Biden, to take revenge for his friend Paul Manafort, who is serving seven years in prison. We do not investigate Biden in Ukraine, since we have not received a single official request to do so.

— Anton Geraschenko, the Ukrainian government official who would oversee such an investigation.

President Trump in a July phone call repeatedly pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, urging Volodymyr Zelensky about eight times to work with Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer, on a probe.

— The Wall Street Journal

Much as he did three years ago — when he asked Russia to hack the emails of his Democratic rival — President Trump on Friday seemed to make a similar request of Ukraine, all but urging the Eastern European nation to investigate Joe Biden, his potential Democratic opponent.

For Trump, controversial public disclosures have became almost routine, with the president saying the potentially scandalous part aloud. It is a form of shamelessness worn as a badge of protection — on the implicit theory that the president’s alleged offenses can’t be that serious if he commits them in full public view.

— The Washington Post

The president asked a foreign power to help him win an election. Again.

— Hillary Clinton

The disclosure comes amid new details about the White House’s role in preventing Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire from complying with Congressional demands for the material in the complaint.

White House Counsel Pat Cipollone has been engaged in the matter since shortly after the whistleblower action surfaced, officials said, helping to identify legal obstacles to the sharing of information that could be politically damaging to Trump.

— The Washington Post

I do think that we will have to pass some laws that will have clarity for future presidents. A president should be indicted, if he’s committed a wrongdoing — any president. There is nothing anyplace that says the president should not be indicted. That’s something cooked up by the president’s lawyers. That’s what that is. But so that people will feel “OK, well, if he — if he does something wrong, he should be able to be indicted.”

— Nancy Pelosi

A president is sitting in the Oval Office, right now, who continues to commit crimes. He continues because he knows his Justice Department won’t act and believes Congress won’t either. Today’s news confirmed he thinks he’s above the law. If we do nothing, he’ll be right.

— Elizabeth Warren

It is high time for Congress to do its duty, in the manner the framers intended. Given how Trump seems ever bent on putting himself above the law, something like what might have happened between him and Ukraine — abusing presidential authority for personal benefit — was almost inevitable. Yet if that is what occurred, part of the responsibility lies with Congress, which has failed to act on the blatant obstruction that Mueller detailed months ago.

Congressional procrastination has probably emboldened Trump, and it risks emboldening future presidents who might turn out to be of his sorry ilk. To borrow John Dean’s haunting Watergate-era metaphor once again, there is a cancer on the presidency, and cancers, if not removed, only grow. Congress bears the duty to use the tools provided by the Constitution to remove that cancer now, before it’s too late. As Elbridge Gerry put it at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, “A good magistrate will not fear [impeachments]. A bad one ought to be kept in fear of them.” By now, Congress should know which one Trump is.

— George Conway and Neil Katyal

On Tuesday, North Carolina held a special Congressional election. They had to do this because actual election fraud on the part of Republicans caused state officials to nullify the previous regular election. The Republican party pulled out all the stops, spending lots of money and having both Donald Trump and Mike Pence campaign for the Republican candidate, who won by around 2 points.

That may sound good for the Republicans, but this district elected Donald Trump by 12 percentage points, so the Republicans underperformed by 10 points. The Republicans will not be able to spend so much money nor campaign as aggressively during a general election. Also note that the NC Republicans have had their redistricting maps thrown out not once but twice because of blatant partisan gerrymandering.

Consequently, it should be no surprise that the Republicans honored the memory of 9/11 yesterday by pulling more dirty tricks. That morning many NC legislators attended the North Carolina National Guard September 11 Commemoration. The Republican legislators had promised that they would not do any business that morning because of the event, but they lied. Instead, they made sure that enough Republicans did not attend so that they could override a veto by the governor.

The governor had vetoed the budget because he wanted a Medicaid expansion that would insure an additional half a million people in NC. The Republicans wanted to override the veto, but ironically, they didn’t have enough votes because they lost their supermajority in the state assembly after the first time their gerrymandered maps were thrown out. Note that there are roughly the same number of Democratic and Republican voters in the state.

So with only 53% of the legislators (just enough for a quorum) in attendance— and only nine Democrats — the override passed. Hopefully it will not make it through the State Senate.

And incidentally, Donald Trump gave a speech on 9/11, but he spent almost all of it attacking the Democrats and praising himself. As usual.

Donald Trump recently claimed that Jews who vote for Democrats have “a total lack of knowledge” or “great disloyalty” to Jewish people and Israel.

An opinion piece by David Schanzer in The Hill has a good response to this. First he points out that most minorities, including Jews, don’t like being treated as if they all think the same. People are smarter and more diverse than that.

However, it is true that 79% of American Jews voted Democratic in the 2018 midterms. Here is why he believes this is so:

First of all, most American Jews have a close connection to immigrants. Many of us are second, third or fourth generation immigrants. We feel strongly that refugees escaping persecution should be able to seek safety and shelter in America because throughout our history we have been persecuted and forced to flee to save our lives.

We have been on many refugee caravans. Ferdinand and Isabella evicted us from Spain, the tsars used pogroms to chase us out of Russia and we fled on boats and trains and by foot from the Nazis. We support today’s refugees because we know they could have been us. 

We also support civil rights and diversity. We know what it’s like to be an oppressed minority for we “were strangers in the land of Egypt.” 

We may feel very comfortable and secure in America, but we recoil when any American is targeted as “the other” — whether it be the Mexican you accuse of being a rapist or the Muslim you stereotype as being a terrorist — because so often we have been “otherized.”

The Jew with horns, the Jewish moneylender, the Jew with dual “loyalties.” We know that a frenzied mob calling for an American citizen of color to be kicked out of the country might be chanting to kick us out too one day soon. For there is one thing we know for sure: Those folks who don’t like people because they are black, brown or Muslims  don’t like Jews much either. 

I am half Jewish, so his arguments resonate with me, but my other half also understands that these are things that should be important to all Americans. It is always extremely dangerous to support a strongman who divides people for personal gain.