Laurence Tribe/USA Today:
Why care about the Trump impeachment? Your right to vote in free elections is at stake.
The Trump impeachment is about protecting our freedom and right to vote from lawless foreign election manipulation invited by a dangerous president
After weeks of House impeachment hearings that resume Monday, Republican defenders of President Donald Trump have contented themselves with pointless, time-wasting calls for roll call votes; baseless complaints about the process, which was the most protective of a sitting president in the nation’s history; and deliberate distortions of what others had written or said. It all amounted to nonsense in the face of a deadly serious matter.
A president who uses the powers unique to his office to solicit what by any plausible definition is a bribe, commits one of the cardinal sins the Constitution identifies as requiring that president’s removal from office upon conviction by the Senate. No ifs, ands or buts about it. So the constitutional case is clear: Trump has done what the Constitution says any president must be removed for doing.
Morning Consult:
Fox News’ Upper Hand Next Year: The Country’s Eyeballs, Down to Districts
Cable giant is most-watched news outlet in nearly 70% of U.S. congressional districts
Fox News is the most-watched cable news outlet in 299 of the country’s 436 districts by a margin of at least 2 percentage points. (The analysis was based on the share of adults who said they watched each outlet at least once a week and was performed using Pennsylvania’s pre-2018 districting.) The conservative-leaning cable giant, which launched in 1996, has led basic cable in total day viewers for the past 40 months, per Nielsen ratings.
Residents in 63 districts watch nonpartisan CNN the most by the same margin, and left-leaning MSNBC is the most-watched cable news network in just one district: California’s 2nd, a historically Democratic district that encompasses the state’s coast north of San Francisco.
Expanding that margin underscores the power of Fox News, which boasts a consumption advantage of at least 10 points over the other outlets in 104 districts, including 10 in Florida and 15 in Texas, while CNN reigns in 16 districts, seven of which are in California. MSNBC disappears as a top outlet at this margin.
Which didn’t stop Democrats from winning in 2018.
Sean Illing/Vox:
A former Republican Congress member explains what happened to his party
And why it belongs to Trump now.
There really is no doubt that Trump did what Democrats accused him of doing. But so far, Republicans have been unwilling to admit it. They may be dishonest, and they’re almost certainly acting in bad faith, but are they being irrational? Not necessarily.
I reached out to David Jolly, a former GOP Congress member from Florida. Jolly left Congress in 2017 and has since renounced his membership in the Republican Party. He explained his reasoning in an article last year, rejecting not only Donald Trump, but what the Republican Party had become.
“Republicans in Congress,” he told me, are now “tearing at the fabric of the Constitution every bit as much as Donald Trump” and “undermining the institution of Congress every bit as much as Trump.”
We talked about what that means, why Republicans have been forced into an impossible position by Trump, and why Trump’s impact on the party will continue long after he leaves office.
Market watch:
President Trump blasted by Jewish group for his ‘vile and bigoted remarks’
A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You’re brutal killers. Not nice people at all, but you have to vote for me you have no choice.’
Those are just some of the words President Donald Trump used on Saturday night that drew fire from left-leaning Jewish groups.
“You’re not going to vote for the wealth tax. Yeah, let’s take 100% of your wealth away,” Trump said, slamming Democratic presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren during his speech at the Israeli American Council
He also told the crowd that Americans need to learn to love Israel more, “because you have people that are Jewish people, that are great people — they don’t love Israel enough,” Trump said.
The Jewish Democratic Council of America, which previously called Trump “the biggest threat to American Jews,” rebuked the comments.
G Elliott Morris/Crosstabs ($$ only):
Independents are the key to Trump's impeachment fallout
It sounds simple, sure, but the marginal groups are the ones who decide electoral fates
Donald Trump won independent voters by four percentage points in the 2016 election, according to the exit poll. But the group has had a negative view of his job approval ever since he took office. With impeachment likely, but conviction not (at least for now), this fact ought to be shaking the president’s re-election committee to its core...
I am prompted to write these very horse race-y thoughts by John Cassidy’s most recent column in the New Yorker. Cassidy writes that impeachment has energized Democrats in ways that will help propel them to electoral victory next year. In Washington, they are protesting outside the White House, occupying Capitol Hill and making themselves known in the halls of Congress. Elsewhere—as his interview with Ezra Levin, the co-founder the anti-Trump “Indivisible” movement, shows—Democrats are laying the groundwork for an active nationwide push in 2020 to elect Democrats, both to the White House and Congress
WaPo:
More than 500 law professors say Trump committed ‘impeachable conduct’
Those who signed on to the letter said they “take no position on whether the President committed a crime.” Earlier this year, Protect Democracy gathered signatures for a similar letter, in which hundreds of former federal prosecutors signed on to a statement asserting that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s findings would have produced obstruction charges against Trump — if he were not a sitting president.
“But conduct need not be criminal to be impeachable,” the group of professors wrote. “Impeachment is a remedy for grave abuses of the public trust.”
Colin McEnroe/Register Citizen:
Shortly after the 2016 election, a pro-Trump commentator and person of blondeness named Scottie Nell Hughes appeared on Diane Rehm’s public radio show. Rehm asked her about complaints that Donald Trump lied all the time. Her answer: “People that say facts are facts. They’re not really facts. It’s like looking at ratings or a glass of half full water ... There is no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts.”
That last sentence has become semi-famous. Obviously, there are such things as facts. It is a fact, for example, that “as” and “of” are not interchangeable words.
I feel that people who omit the first part of the quote are doing readers a disservice. “A glass of half-full water” has a zen-like resistance to rational thought.
Dana Milbank/WaPo:
Trump just assured his own impeachment
“I find it unconscionable that they have not allowed the president to defend himself on the House side,” said Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.).
“Will he be able to defend himself?” demanded Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).
“He has no way to defend himself,” said Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio).
But White House counsel Pat Cipollone, in his letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler ((D-N.Y.) on Friday, undermined both complaints: The letter served as a formal answer from Trump refusing the Democrats’ invitation for him to defend himself in the House proceedings, and it instructed Democrats to hurry up.
“House Democrats have wasted enough of America’s time with this charade. You should end this inquiry now and not waste even more time with additional hearings,” it said, adding: "As the president has recently stated: ‘If you are going to impeach me, do it now, fast, so we can have a fair trial in the Senate, and so that our Country can get back to business.’"
Thus did Trump invite the House to move forward expeditiously with impeachment, assured that he would continue to obstruct the investigation, regardless of its length. The House has no option but to accept.