December 6, 2019
No big news dump tonight, so if you’re waiting for that, you’re off the hook and can stop reading. What did happen today, though, was that the contours of where we are grew clearer, clear enough that they are becoming stark. Trump and Giuliani and Pence are digging in—tripling down, as House Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) put it— on their insistence that there is nothing wrong with their attempt to rig the 2020 election. Both a new Senate investigation and the new publicity campaign by former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley indicates that their pressure on Republicans to bow to their takeover of the Republican Party is working.
Today, in a scathing two-paragraph letter, Trump’s lawyer Pat A. Cipollone informed Jerrold Nadler, the chair of the Committee on the Judiciary, that, after complaining bitterly that he was not included in the initial impeachment proceedings, Trump will now not participate in the ongoing impeachment proceedings. The letter is worth quoting in its entirety, both because of its attempt to deflect attention from the damning reality of the evidence against the president by accusing Democrats of misdeeds, and because of its utter contempt for Democrats and Congress.
“Dear Chairman Nadler,” it reads. “As you know, your impeachment inquiry is completely baseless and has violated basic principles of due process and fundamental fairness. Nevertheless, the Speaker of the House yesterday ordered House democrats to procced with articles of impeachment before your Committee has heard a single shred of evidence.
“House Democrats have wasted enough of America’s time with this charade. You should end this inquiry now and not waste even more time with additional hearings. Adopting articles of impeachment would be a reckless abuse of power by House Democrats, and would constitute the most unjust, highly partisan, and unconstitutional attempt at impeachment in our Nation’s history. Whatever course you choose, as the President has recently stated: ‘if you are going to impeach me, do it now, fast, so we can have a fair trial in the Senate, and so that our Country can get back to business.’”
Remember that, as Colorado Representative Joe Neguse established on Wednesday when questioning George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, Nixon allowed his White House counsels to testify and that Clinton provided written responses to 81 questions from the impeachment committee.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani continues to try to film a “documentary” spreading the very allegations Trump tried to get Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to make. While there, Giuliani continued to attack the impeachment process at home. Democrats took this as a sign of contempt for Congress.
Jeffrey Edmonds, former Russia director at the National Security Council under both President Barack Obama and Trump said: “It’s unbelievable to me the open way in which the administration and Giuliani are still pursuing this. It is a way of… asserting that everything that we’re doing is perfectly normal, perfectly fine and we’re going to keep doing it.” Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor and Trump supporter, agreed. “The fact that Giuliani is back in Ukraine is like a murder suspect returning to the crime scene to live-stream themselves moon dancing…. Its brazen on a galactic level.”
Today, Chair of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff wrote to Vice President Michael Pence to ask him to declassify testimony by his Special Advisor for Europe and Russia, Jennifer Williams, who had added more information to her public testimony about Pence’s own phone calls with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky on September 18. Schiff told Pence that, after reading Williams’s new testimony, the committee “strongly believes that there is no legitimate basis… to assert that the information… is classified.” He reminded Pence that “in no case shall information be classified… for the purpose of concealing any violations of the law or preventing embarrassment of any person of entity.”
Trump is consolidating power, and Republican leaders are acquiescing.
In the Senate, Trump’s key supporters are now trying to pursue the idea that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in our 2016 election (once again, this is Russian propaganda that has been thoroughly debunked by our own intelligence agencies). They are also setting out to investigate Hunter Biden, just as Trump tried to strong-arm Zelensky into doing. Today, Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA), and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Ron Johnson (R-WI) announced that they intended to interview two people they think can prove that Ukraine plotted in favor of Hillary Clinton in 2016. They are also seeking documents about Hunter Biden and Burisma, the company on whose board he sat.
Nikki Haley, who previously was willing to speak out against Trump, is now doing a circuit of talk shows seemingly designed to enable her to step into a high position either under him or in place of him. Recently she has praised Trump, and today she made it a point to defend the Confederate flag as one that symbolized “service, and sacrifice, and heritage” until Dylann Roof corrupted it with his mass murder at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. This is just weird, not only because we well know that the Confederate flag had fallen into disuse and was resurrected after the 1954 Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision to protest desegregating American schools, but also because Haley knows that too. She did an interview on it in 2015.
Today, the House passed a bill to restore the Voting Rights Act, gutted in 2013 by the Supreme Court in Shelby v. Holder. The VRA was always a bipartisan bill because Americans shared a belief that our democracy functioned best when everyone had a say in it, so they made it a priority of the government to try to make sure every voter was equal before the law. First passed in 1965, the VRA won support from 80% of House Republicans and 75% of House Democrats (the vote was 333-85). When it was reauthorized in 2006 the vote was 396-33.
Today the vote was by party lines: only one Republican voted in favor. Even Republican Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) who in March co-authored a bill to update the VRA, voted against it. Republicans recognize that they cannot win in a free and fair vote, so they are openly backing voter suppression and lining up behind Trump's effort to welcome foreign help in our elections.
How terribly ironic it is that today is the anniversary of the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, an amendment pressed by Republican President Abraham Lincoln and passed by a Republican Congress. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in America except as a punishment for crime. It set into law the principle that all men are created equal.