The four pillars of the Trump's administration (incompetence, lying, white nationalism, grifting) are on display this week, more so than usual. And this time, it’s bad. You know it's serious when Rudy is sent out to get ahead of the story while Trump tweets about it.
Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:
How Long Will Republicans Tolerate Trump’s Lawlessness?
There’s only so much Democrats can do about the president’s increasingly bold misconduct.
I was going to write today about how House Democrats are handling the impeachment question. But the truth is, it’s largely irrelevant. As long as Republicans are united in opposition, President Donald Trump will stay in office. That’s not to say that there aren’t bad and worse choices for Democrats, but they’re not the ones who have the real decision to make.
Because the truth at this point is pretty obvious: If they could be assured of even a smattering of Republican votes, Democrats would almost certainly impeach the president. If they had enough votes to ensure his removal in the Senate, you could remove that “almost” – Trump would be gone very rapidly. It’s all up to the Republicans.
We still have only limited information about the emerging whistleblower scandal. But we do know (from what Rudy Giuliani has bragged about) that the president’s lawyer has pressed another country to investigate a Democratic candidate for alleged corruption. That’s on top of the original Trump campaign’s dozens of contacts with a nation attacking U.S. democracy; several documented instances of the president obstructing the investigation of that attack; violations of the emoluments clauses of the Constitution and regular use of government resources to enrich the president’s businesses; and assertions of invented presidential privileges to prevent congressional oversight.
Republicans have been okay with all this, presumably because they’re getting what they want on policy. Or perhaps out of pure partisanship. Or maybe because they’re so deep in the conservative information-feedback loop that they’ve convinced themselves none of it is real. But they should be taking stock now of just how much lawlessness they’re willing to tolerate. At this point, it looks like the whistleblower’s story involves Trump attempting to offer U.S. policy favors to Ukraine in exchange for dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden.
George Conway and Neal Katyal/WaPo:
Trump has done plenty to warrant impeachment. But the Ukraine allegations are over the top.
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.
Aaron Blake/WaPo:
Why Ukraine being the focus of Trump’s whistleblower complaint is particularly ominous
The main reason is because we already knew about demonstrated and very public interest from the Trump team in what Ukraine could provide them when it comes to Trump’s reelection effort. Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani has publicly urged the Ukrainians to pursue investigations that he has admitted would benefit Trump, and one in particular that could damage what appears to be Trump’s most threatening potential 2020 Democratic opponent, Joe Biden….
We know basically nothing about what the whistleblower says Trump might have “promised” or discussed about Ukraine, or even whether it specifically involved that July 25 phone call with Zelensky, which came two and a half weeks before the whistleblower complaint was filed on Aug. 12.
But perhaps tellingly, Giuliani appeared on CNN Thursday night and defended Trump as if there was some kind of a quid pro quo involving investigating the Bidens. (Giuliani will often be dispatched to head off bad stories for Trump, though sometimes he doesn’t have has facts straight.)
It’s not hard to guess that this was re-election tampering. And this is a classic example of how it would be irresponsible not to speculate.
Daily Beast:
The U.S. Attorneys Who Revered Rudy Loathe Him Now
James Comey was among the Reagan-era prosecutors who saw Rudy’s SDNY as ‘a dream job.’ Now, Rudy says his old team was a ‘quintessential Eastern elite.’
The surprise to me was not that so many experienced lawyers thought that the Mueller report set out a crime, contrary to Attorney General William Barr’s spin. Rather, it was the statement’s reference to Giuliani and alleged witness tampering:
“Some of this tampering and intimidation, including the dangling of pardons, was done in plain sight via tweets and public statements; other such behavior was done via private messages through private attorneys, such as Trump counsel Rudy Giuliani’s message to Cohen’s lawyer that Cohen should ‘[s]leep well tonight[], you have friends in high places.’”
Michelle Goldberg/NY Times:
Roy Cohn Is How We Got Trump
From McCarthyism to the mob to Trump, Cohn enabled evil. Why did elites embrace him?
Near the beginning of “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” the new documentary about the lawyer and power broker who mentored Donald Trump, an interviewee says, “Roy Cohn’s contempt for people, his contempt for the law, was so evident on his face that if you were in his presence, you knew you were in the presence of evil.” He wasn’t being hyperbolic.
Will Bunch/Philly Inquirer:
A Democratic president might try to ban fracking in 2021. Is Pa. ready for this?
After a 2016 president race in which the gathering storm of climate change was shockingly ignored, it was hard to say what was more surprising about the recent 7-hour global-warming extravaganza on CNN. That a rating-driven TV network like CNN would devote so much time to [checks notes] saving the planet? That there was a mention of Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale formation in a presidential forum, and that former vice president Joe Biden felt compelled to blurt out, “I know that!”?
Or maybe that the ground underneath the productive but highly controversial oil-and-gas drilling method known as fracking is shifting faster than an Oklahoma earthquake?
Outside of extortion charges, Trump’s two genuine dilemmas, one re foreign policy:
and one domestic:
Astead W. Herndon/NY Times:
Younger Black Voters to Their Parents: Break Up With Joe Biden, I’m Bored
An organic effort by black millennials and Gen Z-ers to influence older family members against Mr. Biden may be important in the Democratic primary.
A groan erupted at a debate watch party at Texas Southern University last week as former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr. got a question about slavery and racism and gave an answer about Venezuela and record players.
But amid that exasperation, some students channeled their inner Beltway operatives and began a targeted rapid-response campaign.
Tyler Smith, 19, texted his grandmother after the debate, hopeful that Mr. Biden's meandering answer may have swayed her from supporting him.
Amaya St. Romain, 19, mounted a three-day lobbying blitz on her mother and her great-grandmother, making sure they had seen the former housing secretary Julián Castro’s criticisms of Mr. Biden onstage.
The point is, of course, that the generational divide is real.
Margot Sanger-Katz/NY Times:
Is America’s Health Care System a Fixer-Upper or a Teardown?
To understand the competing Democratic health care plans, consider an elaborate home construction metaphor.
Imagine the United States health care system as a sort of weird old house. There are various wings, added at different points in history, featuring different architectural styles.
Maybe you pass through a wardrobe and there’s a surprise bedroom on the other side, if not Narnia. Some parts are really run down. In some places, the roof is leaking or there are some other minor structural flaws. It’s also too small for everyone to live in. But even if architecturally incoherent and a bit leaky, it still works. No one would rather be homeless than live in the house.
In Democratic politics, there is agreement that the old house isn’t good enough, but disagreement about just how possible — or affordable — fixing it will be. The biggest fault line in the debate is between candidates who think our current system can be salvaged with repairs and those who think it should be torn down and built anew. Building a dream house eases the way to simplification, but it increases potential disruption and cost.