We begin today’s roundup with David Graham at The Atlantic on why Republicans are complaining about the impeachment process:
There’s a reason Republicans have been making a great fuss about the process of the impeachment inquiry over the past few days. Unwilling, or more likely unable, to mount any substantive defenses of President Donald Trump’s behavior with regard to Ukraine, members have instead assailed the way Democrats are conducting the inquiry. [...]
The protesters claimed that as Republicans they were being squeezed out of the process, but as BuzzFeed noted, 12 of them were already authorized to participate in the process, because they’re members of committees involved in the depositions. Republicans have not been allowed to call witnesses, and it’s easy to understand why they’d feel slighted by that, but they are allowed to participate in questioning of witnesses—and have been doing so, according to The Washington Post.
And here’s The Washington Post on the matter:
Republican legislators are present at all of these closed-door sessions and are free to pose questions. In fact, the rules allowed many of those who stormed Wednesday’s testimony to enter the room in a civilized fashion if they so chose. The impression Republicans tried to convey, of Democrats cooking up an illegitimate indictment of the president while locking all others out of the room, is a partisan fantasy.
Damon Linker at The Week says the stunt was “ clearest example yet of the GOP's embrace of gonzo politics”:
Gonzo politics is different in kind. Its hypocrisy is so absolute that the concept itself becomes meaningless. That's what happens when truth and any sense of commonality, the good, or a shared public world collapses in on itself like a black hole, with the only thing remaining the pursuit of power solely for the sake of its own selfish rewards. Under such conditions, politics becomes all show, all performance, with no objective criteria of truth or goodness available to evaluate it.
Susan Glasser writes about Trump’s use of the phrase “human scum” for his critics:
Still, the President’s “human scum” tweet bears noting. First of all, it is quite simply the language of tyrants and those who aspire to be tyrants. Hitler called his enemies human scum, and so did Stalin. In recent years, the Brazilian President, Jair Bolsonaro, often referred to as “the Trump of South America,” denounced refugees as “the scum of humanity,” and the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, denounced Sergei Skripal, the former spy recently poisoned by Russian agents, in Britain, as a disloyal “scumbag.” The North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, with whom Trump says he has a “love affair,” executed his uncle after a show trial in which he was called “despicable human scum . . . worse than a dog.” Kim’s regime, it should be noted, also called Trump’s former national-security adviser John Bolton, who differed with the President on the subject of North Korea, a “bloodsucker” and “human scum.”
At USA Today, Senator Tammy Duckworth analyzes Trump’s Syria drawdown:
[W]ho would want to partner with us if they know that one phone call could persuade us to sell them out to their enemies? Who would want to follow in the Kurds’ footsteps, losing thousands of their bravest only to be betrayed — left to die without a second thought? And how could American troops serving today — those about to go on a night raid with our partners in Somalia or Afghanistan — not worry that those allies will abandon them now, just as we did to the Kurds?
If I were a division commander or special operations commander today, I would have spent the past week brushing off my operational plans, because with no ally around to help shoulder our burden, we’ll have no choice but to send more American troops when ISIS regroups and raises their black-and-white flag once again.
On a final note, don’t miss this poignant piece by current and former staffers to the late Rep. Cummings on his legacy:
He was inspiring, both in public and even more so in private. He brought moral clarity to everything he did, and his purpose was pure — to help those among us who needed it most. He taught us that our aim should be to “give a voice to the voiceless,” including families whose drinking water had been poisoned, sick patients who could no longer afford their medicine and, most of all, vulnerable children and “generations yet unborn.”