We begin today’s roundup with Robert Baird’s piece at The New Yorker previewing the House articles of impeachment against Donald Trump, featuring insight from Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld, who was tasked with researching impeachment during the Nixon era:
[Beyond Ukraine] A second article, Weld suggested, might comprise the “ten examples of clear and convincing evidence of obstruction of justice, which are contained in Volume II of Bob Mueller’s report.” There, too, he said, “I can tell you, having conducted and supervised many obstruction-of-justice investigations, I’ve never seen evidence like that. I’ve never seen evidence so clear.” Weld said “a third possible article would be—similar to the third article against President Nixon—contempt of Congress.” On that front, “President Trump and his defenders have gone beyond any historical claim ever made,” he added, by asserting that “Congress has no authority to investigate him at all.” He alluded to a recent speech by William Barr, in which the Attorney General, as Weld put it, “said that the President’s power under Article II is so absolute that he can’t be questioned as to why he exercised the power.” That, Weld said, is “nothing other than the divine right of kings.”
Former Republican Senator Slade Gorton:
To my fellow Republicans, I give this grave and genuine warning: It’s not enough merely to dismiss the Ukraine investigation as a partisan witch hunt or to hide behind attacks against the “deep state,” or to try to find some reason to denounce every witness who steps forward, from decorated veterans to Trump megadonors.
History demands that we all wrestle with the facts at hand. They are unavoidable. Fifty years from now, history will not accept the position that impeachment was a referendum on the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. It must be a verdict reached on the facts.
At The New York Times, Michelle Goldberg deconstructs the latest GOP defense about a “Russian hoax”:
“Crime in Progress” is the best procedural yet written about the discovery of Trump’s Russia ties. It demolishes a number of right-wing talking points, including the claim that the Steele dossier formed the basis of the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence inquiry into Trump. (The Justice Department inspector general’s report on the origins of the Russia investigation will reportedly disprove this canard once and for all.) But it also makes plain what many Republicans knew before the 2016 election, even if they’ve now pretended to forget it. For years, Trump was financially entangled with organized crime as well as with Kremlin-friendly oligarchs, and by keeping those entanglements secret, he gave Putin leverage over him from the moment he took office.
Dana Milbank explains that support for the president is so entrenched that no one really expected impeachment hearings to move the numbers in a big way:
But if politics is a spiritual battle between God and demons from hell, who cares what statistics from the Commerce Department say — or what any of the impeachment witnesses say?
On Fox News on Sunday, Energy Secretary Rick Perry reported that he told Trump he was God’s choice: “I said, 'Mr. President, I know there are people that say you said you were the chosen one and I said, 'You were.’”
Who but a demon could vote to impeach God’s chosen one?
The surest way to make a climate-change denier even more aggressive in his denial is to present him with more science. Likewise, presenting Trump supporters with evidence of Trump’s wrongdoing only makes them more defiant of the demons doing the presenting. Scream about the facts and the damage done by ignoring them until you’re blue in the face (I do), but it makes no difference.
More from Pete Wehner at The Atlantic on the demonization of Trump’s opponents:
Just ask yourself where this game ends. Do demonic powers explain opposition to all politicians supported by Graham and Metaxas, or to Trump alone? Would they argue that all Christians (and non-Christians) who oppose Trump are under the influence of Satan? What about when it comes to specific issues? Should we ascribe to Beelzebub the fact that many Americans differ with Graham and Metaxas on issues such as gun control, tax cuts, charter schools, federal judges, climate change, the budget for the National Institutes of Health, foreign aid, criminal justice and incarceration, a wall on the southern border, and Medicaid reform? Are we supposed to believe that Adam Schiff’s words during the impeachment inquiry are not his own but those of demons in disguise? Were the testimonies of Ambassador Bill Taylor, Fiona Hill, and Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman truthful accounts offered by admirable public servants that badly hurt the president’s credibility—or the result of demonic powers?
And on a final note, here’s USA Today on Trump’s behavior as commander in chief:
Trump, who seems to equate war crimes with battlefield toughness, certainly has the authority to order such a thing as commander in chief of the military. But is it worthy of being obeyed? Military ethicists have debated this for years. [...]
The circumstances were murky, but it’s clear that Trump’s unwelcome intervention precipitated another mess. Military leaders shouldn’t have to choose between their conscience and an order from the commander in chief.