December 15, 2019

Dec 16, 2019

On this mid-December Sunday, people took a deep breath before jockeying over impeachment began again tonight. There is movement against the Republican leaders’ rigging of the system, but whether or not that is going to matter remains to be seen.

Trump’s surrogates today continued their disinformation. On CNN this morning, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul tried to argue that Trump had not asked Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate a rival. Anchor Jake Tapper noted that Trump asked Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden. Paul said: “He does not call up and say investigate my rival. He says investigate a person.” Tapper had to point out that Biden was Trump’s rival. Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani also began to run his One America News Network “documentary” attacking former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and claiming that the Bidens were laundering money.

If that was what was on display today as the defense of the president, there were Republicans who spoke out against the lockstep. On “Meet the Press,” Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) told host Chuck Todd that ““I think it would be extremely inappropriate to put a bullet in this thing immediately when it comes over…. I think we ought to hear what the House impeachment managers have to say, give the President’s attorneys an opportunity to make their defense, and then make a decision about whether, and to what extent, it would go forward from there.”

Democrats are trying to figure out a way to emphasize that Trump’s impeachment is about country rather than party. Today a group of 30 first-term Democrats in the House asked leaders to add Justin Amash, an Independent libertarian from Michigan, who was a Republican until last July 4, to the list of impeachment managers. Amash is no Democrat; he is a conservative libertarian, and his inclusion, they argue, would help illustrate that impeachment is bipartisan. It’s not clear that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who will name the managers, will include him. He is not on either the House Intelligence or Judiciary Committees, so would be an outside pick, and as a libertarian, would be a bit of a wild card for the Democrats.

The biggest news on the impeachment front today, though, came tonight, when Charles E. (Chuck) Schumer of New York, the Senate Minority Leader (which means he is the highest ranking Democrat in the Republican-controlled Senate) made an opening bid in negotiations over the form of an impeachment trial in the Senate. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has faced a ferocious outcry over his statement to Fox News personality Sean Hannity that the outcome of a Senate impeachment trial was already decided: “There’s no chance the president will be removed from office.” McConnell has made it clear he wants a quick, quiet trial with no witnesses or documents, to avoid both further incriminating Trump and to avoid the kind of circus we saw in the House Judiciary Committee hearings. But there is pushback on such a whitewashing.

Schumer's letter advanced quite reasonable terms for a trial, but those terms are going to chafe McConnell. Noting that he based his provisions on the ones Republicans passed during the Clinton impeachment, Schumer asked for a fairly tight schedule. But he and McConnell will part company over Schumer’s request for witnesses “with direct knowledge of Administration decisions regarding the delay in security assistance funds to the government of Ukraine and the requests for certain investigations to be announced by the government of Ukraine.”

I quoted that line in its entirety because it’s important: Schumer is threading the needle of asking for witnesses without opening up the possibility for Republicans to drag in all the people that have been identified in their circles as being part of a grand Ukrainian conspiracy, including, of course, the Bidens. Schumer has asked for only four people: acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, who withheld the funds; Robert Blair, his senior advisor; Michael Duffey, the Associate Director for National Security in the Office of Management and Budget (which withheld the funds); and John Bolton, the former National Security Advisor. The House asked or subpoenaed all four of these people to testify and all refused. Schumer said the Democrats would be happy to hear from additional witnesses, but only those who had direct knowledge of the issues identified in that line I quoted. So not Hunter Biden or Adam Schiff or Nancy Pelosi, all of whom Trump has insisted should testify.

Schumer also asked for documents, again, limited to the narrow focus on aid to Ukraine in exchange for Zelensky’s announcement of an investigation into the Bidens. That is, essentially material related to the July 25 phone call which started this whole thing.

(By the way… remember Sharpiegate, when someone altered a weather map with a Sharpie to make it look like the path of Hurricane Dorian would follow Trump’s offhand comment that it threatened Alabama and we heard about it for days? That began on September 4, right when Trump would have learned about the whistleblower complaint. Interesting timing, huh?)

Schumer suggested other rules, too, but the witnesses and documents are the big ticket items. He told McConnell that he is not open to monkeying around with these requests, and will not take the chance that the Republicans try to maneuver around them by breaking them into individual rules and then either altering them or voting them down piecemeal. “We believe all of this should be considered in one resolution,” he wrote. “The issue of witnesses and documents, which are the most important issues facing us, should be decided before we move forward with any part of the trial.”

This is going to be hard for McConnell to get around if Senators like Toomey are serious about not simply rubber stamping Trump’s behavior. Harvard Law School’s Laurence Tribe, who is one of our foremost experts in Constitutional law, liked Schumer’s proposal. If McConnell “rejects these reasonable ground rules & insists on a non-trial,” Tribe wrote, “the House should consider treating that as a breach of the Senate’s oath & withholding the Articles until the Senate reconsiders.”

I have been an agnostic about whether or not the House could refuse to send articles of impeachment to the Senate, but if Tribe says it’s constitutional, then as far as I’m concerned, it’s on the table.

Finally, just after midnight tonight, the House Judiciary Committee published its full report on impeachment. The 658-page document explains the committee’s process and argument for the two articles of impeachment it passed. I am not going to read it tonight (!) but reports say it includes this:

“President Trump has realized the Framers’ worst nightmare. He has abused his power in soliciting and pressuring a vulnerable foreign nation to corrupt the next United States Presidential election by sabotaging a political opponent and endorsing a debunked conspiracy theory promoted by our adversary, Russia.”

Indeed.

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Notes:

Paul and Tapper: