Susan B. Glasser/New Yorker:
Did Donald Trump Just Self-Impeach?
You could practically hear the collective gasp in Washington. Republicans had spent days denying what Trump had more or less just admitted to. “As President Trump keeps talking, he makes it more and more difficult for his supporters to mount an actual defense of his underlying behavior,” Philip Klein, the executive editor of the Washington Examiner, a conservative magazine, soon wrote. It was as though Richard Nixon in 1972 had gone out on the White House lawn and said, Yes, I authorized the Watergate break-in, and I’d do it again. It was as though Bill Clinton in 1998 had said, Yes, I lied under oath about my affair with Monica Lewinsky, and I’d do it again.
Twitter wags immediately began wondering if the President had just committed the nation’s first act of self-impeachment. On CNN, a chyron read “trump admits to very offense dems looking to impeach over.” His 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, tweeted, “Someone should inform the president that impeachable offenses committed on national television still count.” But that is not, of course, how Trump sees it. He now faces an energized Democratic majority in the House that’s ready to impeach him for abusing his power. But with little prospect that the Republican Senate will dare to convict him and remove him from office, he isn’t even bothering to deny the facts. He’s saying, Yes, I did it—and so what?
What R Senators (and House Rs, as if their opinion matters) need to deal with is Trump saying "yes I did it, confirmed in writing, run the video, so what?"
If they give you the 'there's nothing there' BS or the "Adam Schiff is not Republican-y enough" BS, they're avoiding the question, and they can’t sustain that. See Jonathan Bernstein, below, on already losing on “Trump didn’t know” and “not enough evidence”.
Separate from approval rating, Harry Enten/CNN:
Trump's impeachment polling is historically unprecedented
Even after two dramatic events, the public was apprehensive about impeaching and removing Nixon.
Now, you could make the argument that the fairer comparison for Trump to Nixon is after the
entire House formally voted to start the impeachment inquiry in February 1974. A
Harris poll taken a few weeks later put support impeaching and removing Nixon at 43% and opposition at 41%. That gap is about equal to the gap we see today and only came months after the inquiry had really already began.
But even if you consider this later date, the 46% in favor of impeaching and removing Trump now is greater than the 43% who favored it during a similar point in the Nixon impeachment process. It wasn't until right before Nixon resigned that close to a majority wanted him out.
Some of the support for impeaching Trump and the impeachment inquiry against him may be because of polarization and dislike for the President. Trump's
strongly disapprove rating has consistently been around 50%, and most of the people who disapprove of Trump are for some sort of impeachment action.
Polarization, however, is probably not the root cause of the polling we're seeing on a possible Trump impeachment. Politics were polarized during Barack Obama's administration, and not many wanted him impeached and removed. Only 33% of Americans wanted Obama impeached and removed in a
July 2014 CNN poll. Most, 65%, didn't feel that way.
That split came even though Obama was about as a popular (42% approval rating) as Trump is today.
Meanwhile Trump’s approval rating has not changed, but it’s early.
Politico:
Trump’s impeachment defiance spooks key voting blocs
Many voters critical to Trump are breaking from the president on impeachment, posing a risk to his congressional firewall.
President Donald Trump was in trouble with women voters long before House Democrats launched a formal impeachment inquiry against him last week. Since then, his standing has grown only worse.
Nearly a half-dozen polls conducted since last Tuesday, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi directed her colleagues to proceed with pursuing Trump for potentially impeachable offenses, have shown women voters rallying behind her decision, exacerbating concerns among White House allies that white women who helped carry Trump to victory in 2016 can no longer be counted on next November.
The development comes as independent voters and college-educated whites — two more demographic groups that could make or break Trump’s reelection bid — have shown signs of softening their resistance to impeachment. Taken together, the latest polls paint an alarming picture for the president, whose base is sticking by him but cannot be counted on by themselves to deliver him a second term.
Tom Nichols and Philippe Reines/USA Today:
How Democrats should impeach Trump: A searing constitutional duty, a plan from 2 realists
We're different but we agree: No president has placed America in more peril for less reason than Trump. Refusing to confront him only emboldens him.
We are realists, adults without illusions, who have worked in Washington and who know the chance of Trump being removed from office is, as of this writing, close to zero. But we both see Trump’s impeachment as a constitutional duty, and we are relieved that the House Democrats finally decided, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in quoting Thomas Paine, that “the times have found us” for impeachment.
But if Trump is likely to survive this process, what is the point?
Impeachment, in our view, serves more purposes than removal and should proceed without the certainty of a slam-dunk conviction in the Senate. Indeed, the process has more, rather than less, legitimacy if the outcome is not entirely predetermined by partisanship.
And circumstances can change quickly. If we have learned anything in the age of Trump, it is never to say “never.” After all, when the Senate opened hearings against President Richard Nixon in 1973, fewer than 1 in 5 Americans favored impeaching a man who had only a year earlier won reelection in a 49-state landslide. Then, as now, the GOP was primed to protect the president — but only until the weight of Watergate became too much and senior Republicans went to Nixon to tell him it was time to go.
Clarity:
Lee Drutman/FiveThirtyEight:
If Republicans Ever Turn On Trump, It’ll Happen All At Once
It’ll feel inevitable, but only in hindsight.
So now begins the reading of the tea leaves and the careful scrutiny of every Republican senator’s statements (or silence). Will Republicans finally break with Trump? We may not know until it happens. But be forewarned — if it does happen, it will likely take us by surprise. After all, political science has shown us that big political changes often come suddenly, after long periods of stasis. Looking back, it seems like of course the Soviet Union was bound to collapse. But up until the moment it did — and remember, it fell all at once — almost nobody predicted it.
Judge Andrew Napolitano/Fox News:
Trump’s call with Ukraine president manifests criminal and impeachable behavior
The president’s allusions to violence are palpably dangerous. They will give cover to crazies who crave violence, as other intemperate words of his have done. His words have already produced offers of "bounties" in return for outing and finding the whistleblower.
Trump also suggested that his impeachment would produce a second American Civil War. This language is a dog whistle to the deranged.
GOP objection to Joe Biden’s work in Ukraine is ahistorical, CNN:
Republican senators echoed Biden in urging Ukrainian president to reform prosecutor general's office
A newly unearthed letter from 2016 shows that Republican senators pushed for reforms to Ukraine's prosecutor general's office and judiciary, echoing calls then-Vice President Joe Biden made at the time.
CNN's KFile found
a February 2016 bipartisan letter signed by several Republican senators that urged then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to "press ahead with urgent reforms to the Prosecutor General's office and judiciary."
The letter shows that addressing corruption in Ukraine's Prosecutor General's office had bipartisan support in the US and further undercuts a baseless attack made by President Donald Trump and his allies that Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire then Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin to stop investigations into a Ukrainian natural gas company that his son, Hunter Biden, sat on the board of. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Joe or Hunter Biden, nor is it clear whether Hunter was under investigation at all.
This is an amazingly detailed thread about the Volker testimony from yesterday:
During the 5 hour gap, the whistleblower complaint was filed.
Charlie Cook/National Journal:
But it is unclear whether this Ukraine story will have any real impact on the Trump base—those folks he has boasted would stick by him even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue. After they have weathered so much already, is this the time when it will suddenly be different for them? And what effect will Ukraine have on the 10-20 percent in the middle—those who neither love nor hate Trump, don’t follow politics very closely, and don’t get engaged in politics until the final weeks of a campaign, if ever?
Twin unknowns are what’s next for the U.S. economy and what effect tariffs will have. Would a slow economy or even a drop have an impact, given the tribal nature of American politics these days, when so many partisans seem to think that leaders of their own party can do no wrong while those in the opposite party can do nothing right? And will tariffs and their impact on farm prices and markets diminish the enthusiasm of small-town and rural Americans who turned out in unprecedented numbers in 2016? That could, in effect, break the political models in many states where Hillary Clinton hit many (but not all) of her urban and suburban targets but got buried among those well away from cities.
It is also unclear whether impeachment is a smart strategy for Democrats or not. The pros and cons have been debated ad nauseam. Everybody has a theory; nobody really knows.
I’m confident that impeachment is not a detriment for Democrats because I’m very confident Trump did what he’s admitted to. I am not now nor have I ever been obsessed with what it means for Trump's base. They are not big enough to win with. It's everyone else that matters more.
Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:
Trump’s Allies Are Running Out of Excuses
It’s dawning on Republicans that the normal defenses of presidential misconduct won’t work this time.
Put it all together, and one thing is clear: The normal defenses that a president’s allies in Congress would mount in such a situation increasingly aren’t available.
One typical excuse made when a president gets into trouble is that there’s insufficient proof. That’s what President Richard Nixon’s defenders often resorted to, and it’s something Republicans tried out over the past week – noting that the whistle-blower in the Ukraine scandal had access only to secondhand evidence. That always seemed like a weak defense, especially once the White House published a summary of a call between Trump and the president of Ukraine that corroborated the whistle-blower’s account. But after Thursday, it’ll be hard to use that one at all, at least in good faith.
Another classic defense is to question whether the president was personally involved. That’s how Republicans defended President Ronald Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandal, with some success. But it was never especially viable this time, and after Trump’s public performance on Thursday, it’s hopeless.
That leaves the defense that Democrats successfully used for Bill Clinton: that the president’s misconduct doesn’t merit impeachment. Unfortunately for Republicans, that one isn’t credible either. Not only does asking (or pressuring) foreign nations to interfere in U.S. elections obviously fit within traditional conceptions of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” but there’s plenty of other evidence of Trump abusing his power, obstructing justice and more. If this doesn’t merit impeachment, nothing will.
That’s why process arguments lose. Republicans cannot win on process objections.
The above is also part of the scandal; valid crime reports were blocked by DOJ. Stay tuned and, Mr. Barr, lawyer up.