The serial liars in the WH — and there are many — would have you believe that scandal-plagued administrations are the new norm. No thanks, not buying that one.
Eugene Robinson/WaPo:
Democrats must seize and define this moment. Otherwise, Trump will.
I fail to see the benefit for Democrats, heading into the 2020 election, of being seen as such fraidy-cats that they shirk their constitutional duty. Mueller’s portrait of this president and his administration is devastating. According to Graham’s “honor and integrity” standard — which he laid out in January 1999, when he was one of the House prosecutors for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in the Senate — beginning the process of impeaching Trump is not a close call.
It is also important for Democrats to keep their eyes on the prize. The election is the one guaranteed opportunity to throw Trump and his band of grifters out of the White House, and the big anti-Trump majority that was on display in last year’s midterm elections must be maintained and, one hopes, expanded.
But that task will largely fall to the eventual Democratic nominee, whoever that turns out to be. Presidential contenders should be free to position themselves however they see fit on the impeachment question. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has chosen to single herself out by leading the charge. Others may choose to demur and focus instead on the kitchen-table issues, such as health care, that polls show voters care about.
But most Democratic members of Congress (believe it or not) are not running for president. Their focus has to be on their constitutional duty — and nowhere in the Constitution does it say “never mind about presidential obstruction of justice or abuse of power if there’s an election next year.”
Candidates may get a pass, but Congress doesn’t. The tactics of how you get there are up for discussion.
That was his claim that “a few Facebook ads” from the Russians was not a big deal.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Trump plausibly committed impeachable offenses. A leading expert explains how.
Bobbitt, however, is not arguing for a formal impeachment inquiry right at this moment. He told me he’s arguing for “pre-impeachment hearings” that flesh out as much additional information as possible within the framework of what Mueller has now told us:
You can take the Mueller report as an invitation to impeachment. It certainly does not count the other way: It’s not a report that closes the book on impeachment. But I think it would be wise to proceed along several investigative fronts rather than to begin with the bludgeon of an impeachment hearing.
A broad-based series of hearings is the next step. But you can’t appear to have made up your mind that we should go forward with impeachment. You have to give the country a chance to come together.
We can debate endlessly whether anything could get the country to come together on any of this, but that approach — both aggressive and sober, as E.J. Dionne Jr. puts it — appears to be the one Democrats are now taking.
Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:
Congress Has Options for Dealing With Trump
Removing the president from office is purely a political move, and it’s not the only tool at lawmakers’ disposal for dealing with impropriety.
Whatever turns out to be best for Democrats in the House and Republicans in the Senate to do, Trump certainly has brought us to a point where what he deserves is impeachment and removal. That’s not just because of any specific crimes Trump committed (whether it’s obstruction of justice, payoffs of hush money to keep women quiet, conflicts of interest or others). Trump, like Richard Nixon, has acted as if he alone is a legitimate part of the government of the United States. Like Nixon, his defiance of the rule of law is ongoing and promises to continue as long as he’s in office.
To say that he deserves impeachment and removal is not to say that the House and Senate should do it. Again, the politics of the situation matters, and are supposed to matter. But, yes, a president who does the things that Mueller has documented — many of which we’ve seen in plain sight for months — is not fit for the office.
Kurt Bardella/USA Today:
What would Republicans do with a Mueller report? Build an impeachment case.
Imagine for a second that it’s 2014. Barack Obama is president of the United States. The attorney general is Eric Holder, and Republicans control Congress. Republican leaders have called on the attorney general to appoint a special counsel to investigate the IRS’ alleged targeting of conservative groups.
Now imagine what Republicans would have done if a special counsel had been appointed and the president had ordered his removal. Imagine what Republicans would have done if instead of releasing a full and complete copy of the special counsel’s report, the attorney general instead provided Congress and the American people with a four-page summary document. Imagine how Republicans would have reacted if they issued a subpoena for the report, and the attorney general responded by calling it “premature and unnecessary.”
Somehow, I don’t think Republicans would have exercised any form of restraint or encouraged the country to move on. And yet that’s exactly what they are doing right now, when the president happens to be Donald Trump.
Laurence Tribe/USA Today:
I've warned that impeachment talk is dangerous, but the time has come
Congress has a duty to provide a beacon of principle and democratic values to the American people. It must pick up the baton that Mueller has offered and come to a judgment of its own, with the understanding that conduct that falls short of criminal conspiracy may nonetheless be impeachable. Consider, for instance, candidate Trump’s public call for the help of the Russian state in defeating Hillary Clinton — met within hours, the special counsel charged, by Russian attempts to hack domainsused by her campaign and personal office. Read together with Mueller’s report, this incident exposes the welcome that Trump and his circle extended to foreign support in manipulating the U.S. electorate. This behavior, whether called “collusion” or something else, is exactly the kind of conduct the Framers had in mind when they created procedures for impeachment.
The report is unequivocal in concluding that even if Trump is criminally innocent of obstruction, it is not for lack of trying. The main reason the investigation wasn’t completely thwarted was not that the president didn’t “endeavor” to thwart it — the definition of criminal obstruction — but rather that Trump’s subordinates refused to comply.
Will Bunch/The Inquirer:
Saving journalism’s soul in the Age of Trump
And yet too many newsroom leaders are pretending this isn’t happening — that the war on objective reality that was amped up by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, and that all our current president’s men now seem determined to finish off, doesn’t even exist. The epigraph for this attitude was uttered by Marty Baron of the Washington Post, the journalist who, for better or worse, will be remembered as Liev Schreiber in the movie “Spotlight.” Asked how the Post is responding to Trump, Baron said: “We’re not at war… We’re at work.”
I could not disagree more. True, we’re not in a declared war with Donald Trump — that would be both counter-productive and on some level antithetical to the fundamental practice of journalism. But we are in a war for the truth, for objective reality — and if we don’t grab our weapons and start fighting back we’re about to get flattened by a blitzkrieg of tanks.
The problem with mainstream journalism in the Trump era is the broader problem of journalism in the post-Watergate era generally: Too much focus on the process, of checking off the boxes of objectivity and balance and making sure that every one hand has an other hand, even when those five digits in the other hand are clutching a dagger. Meanwhile, there’s much less thought about the end result — about what journalism is actually for. We need to rediscover the soul buried deep inside of the keyboard of that objectivity machine. And that begins, I believe, with the simple acknowledgement that a free press has an agenda: A functional democracy.
Poll says: Biden stable, Bernie sags, Boot-edge-edge surges. BTW, Biden announces tomorrow.