WaPo:
Growing number of GOP senators consider acknowledging Trump’s quid pro quo on Ukraine
The discussion underscores the dilemma for congressional Republicans as a cadre of current and former Trump administration officials paint a consistent picture of a president wiling to use foreign policy to undercut a potential domestic political adversary. On Thursday, Trump appointee and longtime Republican aide-turned-National Security Council adviser Tim Morrison became the latest official to testify that nearly $400 million of congressionally appropriated military aid for Ukraine was frozen to increase pressure on President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Biden, a 2020 presidential contender.
And with the House Democrats voting Thursday to open the closed-door impeachment investigation, undermining the GOP’s complaints about a secretive process, Republicans are frantically seeking a new strategy and talking points to defend the president.
David Frum/twitter:
OK look I get: the Senate Rs are in a fix. Unlike their House counterparts, most of them of are intelligent, decent, public-spirited people uncomfortable with corruption and criminality. Trump is super-guilty, and they know it. They are seeking exits from an exit-less room
But just as a matter of tactics ... the new fallback defense is worse not only for Senate Rs, but for the country than the brazen "no Quid Pro Quo" defense. Here's why ...
The "No Quid Pro Quo" defense is admittedly pretty stupid. If you are caught with a bomb, a detonator, and a terrorist manifesto en route to Times Square, you will be be sent to prison despite the fact that the police foiled the plot before you killed anyone.
Aaron Blake/The Fix:
One new poll number that suggests Trump’s base isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
But maybe the most troubling finding for Trump — both when it comes to impeachment and his 2020 reelection bid — is this one: 41 percent of Republicans say that Trump doesn’t make them feel “excited.” A strong majority (58 percent) says Trump does make them feel excited, but this is still 4 in 10 Republicans who aren’t excited about their Republican president.
That’s hardly the kind of base discipline you would want to brag about. And it’s a far cry from the raucous support you see at Trump’s rallies.
Regrettably, we don’t have any similar poll questions to compare it to, so we don’t know if this represents any kind of erosion in GOP excitement about Trump. By contrast, in fact, polls have generally showed both Republicans and Democrats are unusually enthusiastic about voting in the 2020 election. Perhaps they don’t need to be excited to turn out.
WaPo:
White House official who heard Trump’s call with Ukraine leader testified that he was told to keep quiet
The instruction to stay quiet came after White House officials had already discussed moving a rough transcript of the call into a highly classified computer server, and the instruction was delivered by Eisenberg, who would later be involved in the administration’s battle to keep an explosive whistleblower complaint about the call from being shared with Congress.
The interaction between Eisenberg and Vindman suggests there was a sense among some in the White House that Trump’s call with Zelensky was not, as the president has repeatedly claimed, “perfect.” And it threatens to undercut Trump’s argument that the expanding impeachment inquiry is politically driven.
Thomas Edsall/NY Times:
Democrats Can Still Seize the Center
A Republican Trump critic, who asked to remain anonymous in order to offer advice to the other party, cautioned Democrats against appearing to support open borders by decriminalizing border crossing.
Instead, he argued, support for “a generous immigration policy” granting a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants, including Dreamers, is best “made from a position of strength: We have control of the border, so let’s be generous and merciful about how we exercise that control. If we appear to cede control, it’s a lot harder to sell generosity and mercy.”
Along similar lines, Kimberly Wehle, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law and former counsel in Kenneth W. Starr’s Whitewater investigation, argued in an email that the most effective Democratic position on immigration would be:
“One that highlighted the horrors of our current compassionless policies, and started with enough money to strengthen border patrol and care for migrant children. Address head-on the fears of the American people around this topic.”
At the same time, Wehle, who describes herself as “a rule of law person, which means I don’t support this particular presidency,” contended that the policy stand most harmful to Democratic prospects is: “Free medical coverage and public services for undocumented migrants.”
David A Hopkins/Honest Graft:
Pelosi Puts Her Skills on Display
Since the Ukraine story first broke in mid-September, important developments have piled up at such a rate that it's easy to overlook what hasn't happened. But here are a few headlines that have been virtually absent from the last five weeks of cascading news coverage: "Moderate Democrats Resist Impeachment Inquiry and Distance Themselves from Leadership." "Democratic Leaders Struggle to Satisfy Anti-Trump Base." "Democrats Fret that Impeachment Approach will Backfire in Key Districts." "Committee Chairs Battle over Jurisdiction while Senate Democrats Complain About 'Circus' in House."
This is not because the news media has lost its traditional appetite for juicy tales of internal party conflict. Rather, it accurately reflects the unusually high level of Democratic unity on the impeachment issue. Importantly, this unity appears to endure even in private—unlike on the Republican side, where public displays of support for the president have been accompanied by multiple
accounts of anonymous congressional dissatisfaction and sniping at the White House.
Much of the credit for keeping Democrats unified belongs to the Trump administration, combined with the parade of witness testimony that continues to reveal damaging facts about the Ukraine matter at a near-daily frequency. The White House can use the levers of partisanship and conservative media pressure to keep most Republicans from publicly breaking with the president, but it has
no obvious strategy for, or even seemingly much interest in, persuading any Democrats not to go ahead and vote for impeachment and conviction. The red meat contained in the
October 8 letter to Congress from White House counsel Pat Cipollone, for example, was (among other things) a signal that no Democrat who continued to harbor qualms about impeaching Trump was going to be provided with any defense of the president's position that did not primarily rely on appeals to partisan loyalty.
ABC:
54% credit Trump for ISIS leader's death but with broader doubts on Syria policy
Other results in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, point to limited if any positive impact for Trump. Forty-four percent see him as a strong leader, with no bump from its level in January (48%). Most, 54%, don’t see him that way.
Indeed, credit for Trump is countered by criticism on other, related fronts.The public by 44-12% thinks the withdrawal will weaken, not strengthen, U.S. efforts against ISIS. (The rest see no difference.)
Jeffrey Toobin/New Yorker:
In His Dealings with Ukraine, Did Donald Trump Commit a Crime?
In some ways, the legal setting surrounding President Trump’s possible impeachment represents a kind of mirror image of the backdrop to President Clinton’s impeachment, in 1998. There, the core accusation was that Clinton lied under oath about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Perjury is clearly a federal crime, but the question in Clinton’s case was whether his misconduct involved an abuse of Presidential powers. With Trump, his intervention in Ukraine appears to have been an abuse of his powers, but, conceivably, not a crime.
The debate about the criminality of the President’s behavior with regard to Ukraine, on some level, will always remain a theoretical matter. Under Department of Justice policy, sitting Presidents cannot be indicted; impeachment and removal must always come first. But the President and his supporters have already started making the argument that he should not be impeached because there is no proof of any underlying crime. The provisions of the Hobbs Act show that Trump may be wrong about that.
Annie Linsky/WaPo:
Warren wants to be a revolutionary — and electable. Her embrace of new taxes for health care shows the dilemma.
“Health care is a human right, and we need a system that reflects our values. That system is Medicare-for-all,” Warren wrote in a Medium post published Friday. “A key step in winning the public debate over Medicare-for-all will be explaining what this plan costs — and how to pay for it.”
Centrist Democrats moved swiftly Friday to sound the alarm that Warren, who leads the pack in recent early-state polls and has amassed what many see as the most effective Democratic campaign operation, risks handing the Republicans a major advantage.
Not only would Warren have to defend new taxes as part of her health plan — on top of roughly $5 trillion in new taxes she has already advocated to cover a range of other proposals — but she would be attempting to convince Americans to support virtually erasing more than 150 million private health insurance plans.
“The average Democrat in Ohio is going to say: ‘Wait a minute, I mean, how do you do that? How do you do all of that? Free this and free that? How does that happen?’ ” said Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), a moderate who recently dropped out of the presidential race. “We just want to beat Trump. That’s the revolution. Beating Trump.”