Very solemn vote after the histrionics as House Judiciary votes to impeach Trump, reports favorable recommendation on two impeachment articles to full House for Wednesday vote. Remember, Trump is up for reelection, making an impeachment vote even more powerful. And remember, the principle involved is “no one is above the law”.
Now let’s see what the polling shows, only now does it really matter – for 2020. But don’t expect it to change Republican behavior in the short term. They are committed to power, which is why they defend Trump’s proposed and past election cheating.
Politico:
The move marks the first vote at any level of the House on articles of impeachment since 1998. And it sets up just the third presidential impeachment in U.S. history — expected Wednesday, according to Democratic aides.
The articles allege that Trump put his personal interests above U.S. national security by pressuring Ukraine to open investigations into his Democratic adversaries. Then, the articles state, Trump waged an unprecedented campaign to block impeachment investigators from obtaining witness testimony and documents as they sought to probe the allegations.
Next week’s impeachment vote will then lead to a Senate trial, presided over by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, in January. Trump’s allies expect the GOP-controlled chamber will acquit him swiftly — it takes a two-thirds vote of the 100-member body to remove a sitting president — but Republican senators are still deciding whether to ultimately allow Trump to call witnesses.
G. Elliott Morris/economist:
A plurality of Americans—but not of states—want Donald Trump impeached
The president continues to benefit from the constitution’s pro-rural bias
Whereas the electoral college is only mildly anti-majoritarian, the Senate often deviates wildly from the popular will. Because each state is weighted equally, voters in less-populous states are over-represented relative to those in large ones. Now that Republicans derive an outsize portion of their support from rural voters, their share of senators exceeds their share of total votes cast in Senate elections.
This imbalance weighs on the politics of impeachment. Even if the Senate were apportioned by population, as the House of Representatives is, it would not reach the two-thirds majority needed to convict the president. However, if the chamber reflected public opinion more closely, some Republican members seeking re-election might feel obliged to support his removal.
In reality, Republicans are likely to benefit from closing ranks around Mr Trump. To determine senators’ incentives, we estimated opinions on impeachment using a method called multi-level regression and post-stratification (mrp). Its first step uses a national survey—YouGov, a pollster, gave us data from 18,000 people—to measure how demographic traits affect views (eg, Hispanic voters over age 64 tend to oppose impeachment). Next, mrp applies these relationships to the demography of each state, mimicking 50 separate state polls.
Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman/WaPo:
On impeachment, Democrats can put Republicans on defense. Here’s how.
By telling Sean Hannity that the process of Trump’s trial will be set up “in coordination with Trump’s legal team,” McConnell told the world he wants to rig the process to produce maximal benefit for Trump.
But McConnell might not actually be able to do this, if he doesn’t have 51 GOP votes for it — which could be the case, if vulnerable GOP senators don’t want to go along with it.
And that allows Democrats to make a public case for a much fairer and more open process — and to try to force those vulnerable GOP senators to take a stand on whether they, too, want a fair and open process.
Democrats could demand that the mountains of documents the administration refused to turn over to the House impeachment inquiry be admitted as evidence at the Senate trial. The administration stonewalled those documents on the absurd grounds that the inquiry was illegitimate.
But McConnell presumably can’t argue that his own impeachment trial is illegitimate, rendering that excuse a dead letter.
So Democrats could insist that the administration produce some of these documents during the trial.
As for the UK and the Conservative landslide, fingers are pointing at Jeremy Corbyn, who will be stepping down as a failed party leader:
This is a must read re Jeremy Corbyn, Labour, and anti-Semitism by Sara Gibbs/Medium:
Everything I never wanted to have to know about Labour and antisemitism
I have done my best to approach this as dispassionately as possible, but it has been very difficult. I am passionate. I am angry. I am hurt. I am frightened. Most of all, I am utterly exhausted. This article has taken over a week, a team of dedicated volunteer researchers and fact checkers (who I cannot thank enough for their time and energy) and the very last of my reserves.
I am glad it has done so, because while I was writing this piece, Jewish Labour Movement’s redacted submission to the EHRC (The Equality and Human Rights Commission, currently investigating the Labour Party for institutional antisemitism) was leaked. I will address the damning report, which can be read in full here, later in the article.
This piece is long. If you look up TL;DR in the dictionary, it’s just a link to this piece. But I’ve done my best to keep it as simple and easy to understand as possible. And if you are truly a committed anti-racist who wants to understand what’s going on, it’s worth taking the time to read and digest it. Other, smarter, people have written extensively on this topic and I’ll hyperlink to those along the way.
David Schraub/Atlantic:
Why Trump’s Executive Order on Anti-Semitism Touched Off a Firestorm
The fight against discrimination requires judgment—but many Jews don’t trust this administration to exercise it appropriately.
What are Jews? Members of a religious group? A race or an ethnicity? A nation? Some mixture of them all, or something else entirely?
As a debate among the Jews, this question may be academically interesting or, depending on your point of view, incredibly tedious. But as a legal question, it matters a great deal. American antidiscrimination law covers certain protected categories. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in programs receiving federal support on the basis of “race, color, or national origin,” but—unlike many other antidiscrimination provisions—not religion.
So if Jews are deemed “just” a religious group, then they are not covered by Title VI. Publicly funded programs, under this view, could discriminate against Jews with impunity.
But the federal government—starting in the George W. Bush administration, and more formally during the Obama administration—began to settle on a more tailored answer. Title VI does not cover religion-based discrimination. But when discrimination against Jews—or Muslims or Sikhs, for that matter—is based on “the group’s actual or perceived ancestry or ethnic characteristics,” or “actual or perceived citizenship or residency in a country whose residents share a dominant religion or a distinct religious identity,” the government found, then that discrimination falls under Title VI’s purview. Anti-Semitic discrimination is unlawful under Title VI to the extent that it targets Jews as a racial or national group.
[makes the case for administrations past and present actions]
The furious responses from many Jews reflected, in part, simmering anger at a particular form of anti-Semitism characteristic of the Trump administration and elements of the broader conservative movement. President Trump has regularly and repeatedly suggested that America is not the country of American Jews. Israel is “your country,” he says, and Netanyahu is “your prime minister.” The impeachment investigation has likewise seen several prominent Jewish figures have not just their patriotism but their very loyalty to America questioned—most notably Alexander Vindman. Just a few days ago, Trump proffered a cavalcade of anti-Semitic stereotypes in a speech before the Israeli American Council, lambasting American Jews for their insufficient love of both him and Israel, calling Jews “not nice people” who would nonetheless be compelled to vote Republican in order to protect their wealth.
Bill Scher/Politico:
Dean Couldn’t. Hart Wouldn’t. Should Warren and Buttigieg Change Tactics?
College-educated, affluent white voters often rally behind the Democratic presidential candidate who finishes second. We asked previous runners-up and their top aides if they had advice for how to do what their campaigns couldn’t: win.
By “make the turn,” Dean meant pivoting from being, as he put it, a firebrand “who wasn’t going to put up with any crap from any establishment” to being a more polished and unifying candidate, one who knew that the job of president is “to make things work, and that means you can’t exclude people whether you like them or not.”
Dean tried to do that in his campaign speeches, but flinched. “It was really a tug of war. I could actually feel the tugging as I would try to do it,” he said to HuffPost of his internal monologue. “I would try to give a measured speech, and the audience would be completely flat. And I wouldn't let myself leave them flat.” Dean never was able to evolve his persona beyond what his audience had grown to expect.
The 2020 campaigns of Warren and Buttigieg now face similar questions. For a few days in early October, after a run of positive press and big crowds, it seemed as if Warren was poised to break out of her base of college-educated white voters. Yet since Warren peaked in early October and caught Biden in the national RealClearPolitics polling average, she has fallen 12 points and returned to third place. She hasn’t led the past five Iowa polls nor the past four New Hampshire polls.
The future is now: