Politico:
Here’s why Democrats may rethink impeaching Trump
Judges have repeatedly ruled that Congress has a greater claim to sensitive documents when it can point to an ongoing legal matter, like impeachment.
Absent opening up impeachment proceedings, Syracuse University law professor David Driesen said he thinks the Trump administration has the upper hand in its court fights over the ignored subpoenas and requests. The current argument that the information is needed to help Congress craft legislation just won’t cut it, he said.
“I think the courts — especially conservative judges — are more likely to give weight to an impeachment inquiry than the claim that this is somehow relevant to legislation,” he said.
Democrats have started to flick at impeachment in their legal arguments.
House Judiciary Committee Democrats on Wednesday voted to hold Attorney General Bill Barr in contempt for refusing to hand over the unredacted Mueller report and the special counsel’s underlying evidence. The contempt citation says the full Mueller report is needed to determine whether the committee should be “taking any further steps” to check the executive branch.
“That includes whether to approve articles of impeachment with respect to the President or any other Administration official,” the resolution says.
But some lawyers with Hill experience are cautioning Democrats against embracing impeachment proceedings solely for the benefit of new arguments to make in their legal briefs.
Medium:
Abortion Bans Don’t Work
The best way to prevent abortions is contraception
Abortion is always a hot topic. Partly, that’s because of irreconcilable differences between religious belief in the soul and the practical realities of women’s health. But it’s also because there are dozens of myths about the impact of abortions, with many people basing their arguments almost entirely on basic misconceptions.
Now, I’m not going to go into the morality or ethics of abortion. I’ve done that before, and I think I’ve been pretty clear. And fortunately, as certain right-wing commentators love to say, facts don’t care about your feelings.
So let’s talk facts.
Neutral observation from a political scientist (Asymmetric Politics author):
Bernie best be prepared for it. Also from same author:
Will Bunch/Philly.com:
At Philly campaign kickoff, Joe Biden and fans - young and old - party like it’s 2015
For one thing, the decent-but-not-overwhelming crowd (probably not quite the 6,000 estimated by the Biden campaign) for the rally was sprinkled with blacks and Latinos but overwhelmingly white, even though supposedly it’s his edge with non-whites that has Biden so far ahead of rivals like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. But the attendees were also younger than I’d expected, with a decent number of recent college grads and students.
Yasmine Hamou said she’s undecided in the Democratic primary but she sees Biden’s selling point as that he probably appeals to voters NOT like her — a 22-year-old newly minted Temple University grad and a black woman. Hamou — who canvassed a lot of Republican voters when she volunteered for Obama’s campaigns as a high schooler in her native York, Pa. -- told me Biden “really can relate to a lot of middle-class white Americans and I think that’s what’s really going to be key in this election.”
But doesn’t she want to be excited by a candidate who’s making more of a pitch to voters like her, especially with so many women in the Democratic race?
Hamou took a deep breath. “Yeah, you give up representation and you give up someone who’s going to more fiercely fight for rights, especially as a women .... [But] we can’t take huge steps like this, especially when we’re reeling from something like the 2016 election. Going as extreme as possible is not the right way to go.”
Josh Kraushaar/National Journal (free):
Why the Crowded Primary Field Boosts Biden
If fewer Democrats were running, the former vice president would be a precarious front-runner. But with 23 candidates running, it will be hard for any opponent to unseat him.
The biggest losers from our lengthy two-year presidential campaigns are the voters. In theory, we boast a highly democratic presidential-nominating process. Voters in Iowa and New Hampshire can spend nearly every day for the rest of the year sampling all the presidential campaigns in town. Politics has become a national sport, with more people than ever engaged in the process.
But the reality is that, as Schwartz discovered in his research, all these choices are simply a mirage. Voters will end up so overwhelmed with the lengthy lineup of candidates, they’ll throw up their hands in frustration. All this benefits the default choice, the brand-name candidate voters know and trust. It’s why Joe Biden, despite his advanced age and propensity for gaffes, is the clear front-runner for his party’s nomination.
Russian interference isn’t just for America. Reuters:
Austrian chancellor, president to discuss election after far-right video scandal
Austria’s chancellor and president will discuss a date on Sunday for an early parliamentary election and the makeup of a caretaker government, after a video sting brought down the leader of the far-right junior partners in the ruling coalition.
Chancellor Sebastian Kurz pulled the plug on his coalition and called for a snap election after his deputy, the leader of the far-right Freedom Party, quit over a video showing him discussing fixing state contracts in return for favors.
Heinz-Christian Strache, who was filmed speaking to a woman who posed as the niece of a Russian oligarch, accepted that the video was “catastrophic” but denied having broken the law and said no money changed hands.
The scandal is a blow for one of Europe’s most successful nationalist parties just a week before an election to the European parliament in which far-right groups anticipate record success across the continent.
Daniel Okrent/WaPo:
Kushner’s immigration plan is a version of a discriminatory effort from more than a century ago
It’s a stretch to place the names of Jared Kushner and Henry Cabot Lodge in the same sentence; it’s difficult even to imagine that Lodge, the aristocratic Massachusetts senator who dominated the nation’s immigration debate from the 1890s into the 1920s, would give Kushner the time of day. But Kushner’s new immigration plan, aimed at reducing immigration from specific nations through the virtual elimination of what he and others have disparaged as “chain migration,” and the simultaneous valorization of the highly educated, is simply a version of a blatantly discriminatory effort Lodge initiated more than a century ago.
A man of uncommon refinement and even greater arrogance, Lodge was a Harvard PhD., the erudite author of more than a dozen books and, in many ways, the archetype of the Boston Brahmin of a century ago. His friend Thomas B. Reed, speaker of the House in the closing years of the 19th century, said Lodge arose from “thin soil, highly cultivated.” Lodge himself celebrated his fellow Brahmins for “their intense belief in themselves, their race, and their traditions.” His idea of the west, said another colleague, was Pittsfield, Mass. Look at John Singer Sargent’s remarkable likeness of the young Lodge that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. You almost feel you are despoiling him by your very presence.
Plenty of diners and chain restaurants are still in business though, while the fancy artisanal places…