James.galbraith

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is refusing to defend a state agency that’s being sued by a a bigoted justice of the peace who got pissed that she was disciplined for refusing to follow the law and marry same-sex couples. "We believe judges retain their right to religious liberty when they take the bench," said Paxton’s spokesperson, Marc Rylander.

It’s not just that Paxton is camouflaging his own homophobia and lawlessness in claims of “religious liberty”; it’s that this shameless motherfucker is also doing it while he faces three securities fraud charges.

This upcoming summer will mark five years since Paxton was indicted for allegedly violating state securities laws, and for nearly five years now he and his legal team have apparently pulled every trick in the book to delay his trial. Prosecutors said that those tricks have included an alleged “campaign to taint potential jurors by maligning the prosecution and the case against him,” the Austin American-Statesman reported.

Prosecutors moved to have the trial take place in Houston, but Paxton, who could face as long as 99 years in prison, argued “that his case was improperly transferred to Houston by a judge who no longer had the authority to issue such a ruling,” the Statesman continued. Someone facing as serious charges and prison time as Paxton probably shouldn’t even be in office while doing so, yet Paxton not only refuses to budge—he’s gonna stay to buck his own state’s commission to continue his anti-LGBTQ agenda.

The office he’s refusing to defend, the Commission on Judicial Misconduct, had warned justice of the peace Dianne Hensley for “her yearslong refusal to marry gay couples while continuing to marry heterosexual couples,” NBC News said, with PinkNews reporting that Hensley had allegedly called gay marriage “offensive.” She then sued the commission for $100,000, PinkNews continued, “claiming that her rights have been infringed upon.” 

In what’s surely just a coincidence, CBS Austin reports that the firm defending Hensley, First Liberty Institute, is led by Kelly Shackelford, who has “endorsed Paxton and contributed to a legal defense fund Paxton has used to fight off a four-year-old criminal indictment for securities fraud.” Nothing to see here, folks. Nothing at all.

All eyes are on impeachment this week. But President Donald Trump’s border wall is churning up a second constitutional crisis all by itself on the sidelines.

The wall is not the issue. Instead, it is the extreme steps taken to undercut Congress’ constitutional power over spending and the response thus far by the judicial branch, which has run for cover in a manner that strains credibility.

Indeed, since the wall fight moved to the federal courts last year, it often has seemed as political as it was in Congress. From California to Texas to blocks from the Capitol, thousands of pages of legal briefs and opinions have been filed in the past 12 months. But with a troubling consistency, the outcomes match whatever political party chose the judge making the decision.

To be sure, it’s early enough that the sample of judges is limited. But the sole exception — Richard Clifton, a senior judge on the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals — seems a reminder of a lost time: a jurist nominated by a Republican president, George W. Bush, approved by the Senate 98-0 and willing now to break party lines and stand up to Trump.

More often, the record shows a fresh crop of judges nominated by Trump has stepped in for the president, either to stay injunctions or deny standing to those challenging his unprecedented use of emergency powers to get around Congress.

The wall’s opponents have gained traction only when they appear before at least one Democratic-appointed judge. That explains the focus now on the 9th Circuit, where a panel of three judges — including two Democratic appointees — has agreed to expedite hearings on a suit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the Sierra Club.

But those oral arguments won’t be heard until early March and the president seems emboldened to move billions more to the wall while the window is open.

Only weeks after Congress approved fresh 2020 appropriations in December, the Pentagon was asked on Jan. 15 to come up with enough money to build an estimated 270 miles of wall under the heading of “counter-drug” activities. That’s double the miles contracted under the same title in 2019, yet Defense Secretary Mark Esper has laid out a schedule for a prompt decision by his department in the coming days.

The request from the Department of Homeland Security was framed not in dollars but in miles of construction over six sections of the border. So the estimated cost of meeting this goal is not yet public. But the White House is relying on diverting more Pentagon funds to wall construction than it did in 2019.

On the ground, only about 30 miles of wall have been built thus far from all the military funds moved last year. But the pace will surely quicken in 2020.

For example, all of the $2.5 billion in 2019 counterdrug funds is now committed to contracts for 129 miles of wall construction. The $3.6 billion taken from military construction funds is expected to add another 175 miles, but the money arrived later and progress is slower. Just four of 11 projects are still without contracts and construction is just getting started for many of the others.

Looking ahead to 2020, about $7.2 billion in new defense funds will be in play: $3.5 billion under the rubric of antidrug activities and $3.7 million from military construction accounts. That’s about $1 billion above last year’s total and a fivefold increase above the $1.375 billion which Congress actually appropriated for new wall construction in 2020.

Watching with astonishment is Louis Fisher, a constitutional scholar and veteran senior specialist on separation of power issues for the Congressional Research Service. "I can't imagine anything more dangerous than a president who says he can take funds appropriated for other purposes and shift them to build the wall along the southern border, claiming it is necessary to satisfy a campaign pledge,” Fisher said. “I'm surprised that hasn't been brought into the impeachment process. I’m just stunned.”

A recent 2-1 decision by a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals illustrates the partisan dynamics.

At issue was an injunction issued by U.S. District Court Judge David Briones in El Paso, Texas, blocking the $3.6 billion in military construction funds that had been diverted to the wall in September 2019 by the Pentagon.

Briones, nominated by President Bill Clinton, grounded his ruling on a specific limitation written into the fiscal 2019 Consolidated Appropriations Act. El Paso County, which claimed injury because of the loss of a Fort Bliss roads project, was the plaintiff. And after reaching his decision in October, the judge followed up in December with an injunction tailored to block just the military construction funds being used for the wall.

The administration appealed to the 5th Circuit for a stay on Briones’ injunction. What it got was even more.

The two Republican-nominated judges granted the stay, but then went further. They rejected El Paso’s request for an expedited hearing on the merits of the case and also cast doubt on the county’s standing to bring suit in the first place.

One of the two judges was Andrew Oldham, a controversial Trump nominee added to the 5th Circuit in 2018. Ironically, the 42-year-old attorney and former counsel to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had played a prominent role only years before in challenging President Barack Obama’s authority to carry out his own immigration policies.

The sole Democratic-appointed judge on the 5th panel protested, saying his colleagues were ignoring “a constellation of sensitive and complex legal questions all in the context of a nationwide injunction.” But it was the standing issue that stood out for Richard Bernstein, a retired Washington attorney and former clerk to the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who has been active in filing amicus briefs in the wall fight.

“The most pernicious aspect of the Fifth Circuit's ruling is stating that the Constitution denies these plaintiffs standing to enforce statutory limits on executive branch spending without any hint that the Constitution permits anyone else to enforce such limits,” Bernstein said. “The Fifth Circuit's license to Presidents to violate statutory limits on spending puts separation of powers in grave danger."

In fairness, federal courts of all stripes have shied away from stepping into turf wars between the executive and legislative branches. But the wall fight is exceptional in two regards.

First is the raw nature and size of Trump’s actions: forcing a shutdown of the government last year and then transferring billions of dollars without the approval of Congress or its Appropriations Committees.

Second, the judicial branch bears some responsibility for tipping the scales in Trump’s favor when the Supreme Court in 1983 struck down the past practice of Congress using legislative vetoes as a check on executive agencies.

Such vetoes had been a convenient tool for Congress to strike a balance between two goals: giving executive agencies more discretion to administer laws while also retaining some authority for lawmakers to step back in when they felt it was needed. But in INS v. Chadha, the justices ruled that the practice violated the Constitution since the legislation was never presented to the executive branch for the president’s signature as required by the separation of powers.

The National Emergency Act — which Trump invoked last year to justify his going around Congress to build the wall — was among the laws most affected by Chadha. As enacted in 1976, the act allowed lawmakers to terminate any emergency proclamation by a president if majorities in the House and Senate adopted such a concurrent resolution. That safety valve disappeared after Chadha and it’s now Trump who has the veto to frustrate attempts by Congress to curb his emergency authority in the wall case.

To solve one separation of powers question, the courts created another. But rather than rule on the merits and risk going against the president, the easier route for Republican-appointed judges is to deny standing to those challenging the wall funding.

Richard Pildes, a law professor at New York University, said whatever the merits of Chadha, the impact on all branches — including the courts — is real.

“Had Chadha come out the other way, these issues would have been fought over between Congress and the president,” Pildes said. “And if the Congress were opposed to these particular uses of emergency powers and voted them, then the courts wouldn’t be in the picture at all potentially.”

The fact the White House continues to shift more money adds to the stakes. “I was sorry to hear that Trump plans again this year to take money away from military needs to spend on his wall,” said Charles Tiefer, a law professor at the University of Baltimore. “That bodes badly for the rest of his time as president.”

Tiefer, who served in the office of the General Legal Counsel for the House, in the ’80s and early ’90s, joined last May in an amicus brief urging that the House be given standing in federal court to bring a lawsuit challenging Trump’s funding of the wall. The 18-page document, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, stands out for its bipartisan character: those signing included House counsels who had served Republican and Democratic speakers going back 40 years.

Like the impeachment proceedings in the Senate, the brief is laced with the Federalist writings of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. “The House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose, the supplies requisite for the support of government,” Madison wrote. And he and Hamilton both saw Congress’ singular “power of the purse” as the best way to counter “the sword” of the presidency.

In 2015, in fact, a Republican-appointed judge in the same D.C. federal court, had granted standing to the House — under GOP control — when it sued the Obama administration. Then, too, it was an appropriations-related issue, but this time with Democrats in control of the House, U.S. District Court Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, denied standing last June.

“There are two or three different appropriations provisions but the most important is that no money can be spent except by appropriation,” Tiefer said. “Congress has a strong position that not only did Trump violate the ordinary general constitutional distribution of power in taking money that had been provided for the military needs in and spending it instead on the border wall. But this also violated the powerful constitutional provision that focuses on not spending any appropriations except under specific provisions.”

At the Guantánamo Bay detention camp Thursday, James E. Mitchell—one of the two men whose company was paid $81 million to design and conduct a torture program for the CIA to use on captives suspected in the 9/11 attacks—downplayed the impacts of what has been creepily euphemized as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” For years, the presiding officer of a military commission preparing for the trial of five of the captives, slated for next January, has pondered whether Mitchell should testify. The key reason for his testimony? Evidence derived from torture is unreliable and inadmissible in a war crimes trial, so knowing the impacts of torture could determine what might be excluded by the military tribunal. Since his name and that of his partner, Bruce Jessen, came to light in 2007, Mitchell has regularly claimed that what was done wasn’t so bad and had no long-lasting effects on the men to whom it was done. 

In his latest effort, reports New York Times reporter Carol Rosenberg, Mitchell fell barely short of saying that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused of masterminding the 9/11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, had become a friend whom he helped gain special privileges at the detention center. Being sleep-deprived, waterboarded 183 times, and having his head repeatedly slammed against walls didn’t cause Mohammed permanent psychological damage, Mitchell asserted. Mohammed’s attorney rejected those claims.

You might think those oodles of cash that Mitchell and Jessen took in for their work—your tax dollars and mine—tainted their views just a tad. Four years ago, Mitchell made clear his stance: “The word ‘torture’ has become like the word ‘racist.’ It’s been used so many times it loses its meaning,” he told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute. He isn’t advocating torture, he said. He just thinks we should have a “civil debate” about it. Coercion of suspects should be part of the U.S. arsenal, or we’ll wake up one day and Los Angeles will be a smoking hole in the ground. In other words, foes of torture are practicing “political correctness” and putting national security at risk.

A big reason “torture” has lost its meaning is because Mitchell and men like him all the way to the top of our government sought to redefine it. A reminder: The Mitchell/Jessen program included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, chained-to-the-wall stress positions, wall-slamming, confinement in a fetal position in tiny cages, prolonged nakedness, sexual humiliation, and “rectal feeding.” The U.N. does not euphemize these techniques as something less than torture. A 2014 Senate probe found these inhumane tactics to be ineffective at doing what was claimed for them—eliciting actionable intelligence. 

Torture like that used on Mohammed and others can cause physical deterioration, panic, rage, loss of appetite, lethargy, paranoia, hallucinations, self-mutilation, cognitive dysfunction, disorientation, and mental breakdowns, any of which, alone or in combination, can spur detainees to give interrogators more information than they might otherwise surrender. But the quality of that information is at question when captives are wondering what to say—or invent—next that will keep interrogators from hauling out the towels and water buckets again. This reaction is the opposite of the rapport between the captor and interrogator that a broad range of experts—including those at the FBI—have found is most valuable in getting a suspect to talk. 

In his testimony Thursday, Mitchell gave the impression that he had developed that rapport with Mohammed, even sitting and holding hands when talking to him, common among men in the Middle East and Central Asia. No way fear of waterboarding No. 184 could have been Mohammed’s motive in becoming friendly with his torturers, right?

When his role was discovered, the American Psychological Association blasted Mitchell for designing the torture program. But the accusations made no nevermind to him. 

Because the government chose not to release the full 6,000-page torture report generated in a lengthy investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee, we’ll probably not learn the full extent of what was done until 50 or so years in the future, when authorities decide most of the principals are dead and no reputations of living people will be sullied. For now, only the summary is in the public domain.

What we do know is horrible enough. Most horrible of all is knowing that medical personnel and psychologists like Mitchell violated the most basic tenet of their professions—do no harm—by crafting torture-enhanced interrogations designed to break prisoners. Some did break. Some were killed. This systematic torture focused on sensory deprivation, overstimulation, and dependency creation. Massive amounts of pain and fear were also included. For their part, psychologists "reverse-engineered" the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program—designed to help American soldiers and marines resist torture—as a means to teach interrogators how to employ torture against captives.  

Let me repeat that: Training established to help American prisoners of war cope with, or at least anticipate, their captors' efforts to break them down was "reverse-engineered" as a means to break down prisoners at Guantánamo and "black sites" run by the CIA or military intelligence operations in Europe, Asia, North Africa, and on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

Talk about becoming the enemy.

Indiana Republican lawmakers have killed a bill aimed at curtailing child-trafficking in response to a Democrat’s amendment that would have repealed the state’s unconstitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

The child-trafficking measure would have raised the general minimum age for marriage to 18. Currently, people as young as 15 can marry in Indiana with parental consent.

A House committee approved the bill 9-1 “after hearing from women who testified they were 15 or 16 when their parents forced them to marry men who had raped or molested them and then faced more abuse before being able to escape the relationship,” according to the Associated Press.

However, GOP House Speaker Brian Bosma declined to take up the measure before Thursday’s deadline after Democratic Rep. Matt Pierce introduced an amendment to strike 1997 language from the marriage code stating: “Only a female may marry a male. Only a male may marry a female.”

Bosma called the amendment “political” and said Pierce’s intention “wasn’t just to eliminate obsolete language.”

“This was to have a big knockdown, drag-out discussion about it on the floor. That just isn’t productive,” Bosma said.

Pierce said he assured Bosma he wouldn’t force a floor vote on the amendment, because he didn’t want to derail the child-trafficking bill.

“I did not think it was unreasonable to remove what is now null-and-void unconstitutional language from the code,” Pierce said. “I didn’t think it would be that controversial because this issue has been settled now. Apparently to the Republican caucus it is controversial.”

The post Indiana Republicans Kill Child-Trafficking Measure to Avoid Same-Sex Marriage Debate appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

There's a new nickname for Maine Sen. Susan Collins floating around the internet: It’s #SidekickSue, in recognition that she's Moscow Mitch McConnell’s most valuable player when he's trying to fix a Senate vote. That the fix was in (and that she had a key role in it) was glaringly apparently Thursday night in the choreographed release of statements from Collins and Sen. Lamar Alexander regarding whether they wanted to compel additional witnesses and testimony in Donald Trump’s impeachment trial. (Collins said yea, while Alexander said nay.)

The final cynical fillip came Friday morning from Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the other reliable player in McConnell's game, with her duplicitous embrace of the cover-up with crocodile tears: "It is sad for me to admit that, as an institution, the Congress has failed." But she did her job for McConnell, and she's providing the cover Collins needs. It's not going to work this time.

The jig has been up for Collins since she betrayed every principle she previously touted and voted in favor of Brett Kavanaugh’s conformation to the Supreme Court. "Just as we've known she would, Collins announced her support for witnesses only when the votes were fixed to block witnesses and rig the trial to cover-up the corruption of Donald Trump," Marie Follayttar, co-director of Mainers for Accountable Leadership, told Common Dreams. "We see Collins for who she is—Sidekick Sue to Moscow Mitch and a corrupt and despotic Trump."

Collins has chosen her side, and Maine knows it. Please give $1 to help Democrats in each of these crucial Senate races, but especially the one in Maine!

Moderate GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Rob Portman of Ohio and Marco Rubio of Florida issued statements Friday saying they will vote against allowing witnesses and additional documents in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial.

Murkowski’s announcement, which came first, likely dealt the “fatal blow” to Democrats’ effort to compel new evidence, according to the New York Times.

Reactions from Twitter below.

You can tell they all know Trump is guilty as hell and they’re a bunch of craven cowards, because their attempted rationalizations are just absolutely ludicrous. https://t.co/p0ncajcapg

— Charles Johnson (@Green_Footballs) January 31, 2020

This is so goddamn weaselly I want to put it in the ferret cage in a pet store.https://t.co/qENadUuKjA

— Gary Legum (@GaryLegum) January 31, 2020

Is this a riddle? https://t.co/w1o9CFsKdC

— Stephanie Ruhle (@SRuhle) January 31, 2020

Portman is also a No.

Portman also believes the president did it, tried to cheat in the election and corruptly squeeze a foreign country, but he won't remove him for it.

He doesn't think the Senate can be bothered to take "weeks if not months" to call witnesses. https://t.co/Y8kCcDnaLK

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) January 31, 2020

Portman wants to get back to work for the American people. Can't wait to see all the great stuff @GOP will do once Senate Rs dispose of this trial. More tax cuts for the 1%? Killing pre-existing condition coverage?? Options are endless. https://t.co/NrlBcLBsVY

— Kerry Eleveld (@kerryeleveld) January 31, 2020

Murkowski issues pathetic nonsense statement and will be the decisive vote for the cover-up, because Republicans don't know if they can count on Roberts to complete the cover-up for them. https://t.co/hhsf98u4tu

— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) January 31, 2020

Susan Collins gets to tell Maine she didn't assist in the rigging of a sham trial. Lisa Murkowski gets to tell Alaska voters she stood up for Trump's kingly right to commit crimes & get away with it without a real trial.

Sad day for democracy, great one for McConnell.

— Ashton Pittman (@ashtonpittman) January 31, 2020

Another stunningly illogical rationale. Murkowski says there is not going to be a fair trial in the Senate and therefore will vote against witnesses. Generally, witnesses are a key element of a fair trial. https://t.co/6xIZSKtwkH

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) January 31, 2020

A senator from Alaska — a state with something like 750,000 souls in it — gets to decide one of the most monumental things in Senate history. That is insanity, and @lisamurkowski is not only a terrible senator, she's also a terrible person with no principles. Folded to McConnell.

— Boy Culture Blog (@mattrett) January 31, 2020

A co-conspirator speaks out. https://t.co/OkGaetc347

— Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor) January 31, 2020

Isn't this sort of like saying "Why would I bother to learn how to swim when people drown in water?"? https://t.co/Oisv0yzu1d

— Nahal Toosi (@nahaltoosi) January 31, 2020

An absurdly hypocritical statement from @lisamurkowski in which she laments the "partisan nature of this impeachment" and that "there will be no fair trial in the Senate" while declaring that she'll vote against witnesses. Senator, you're now a party to this cover-up. It's yours. https://t.co/HJhFX0avLQ

— Evan McMullin (@EvanMcMullin) January 31, 2020

It's disheartening to hear "LOL Nothing Matters" from anyone these days, but especially from a US senator whose decisions clearly could matter if she only tried. https://t.co/2GFSJNAiqg

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) January 31, 2020

“Just because actions meet a standard of impeachment does not mean it is in the best interest of the country to remove a President from office." OMG you’re such a coward.

— Dave Zirin (@EdgeofSports) January 31, 2020

The GOP has abandoned the entire history of the party to keep this momentary hold on power. There is no “back to normal” after this. You have chosen Trump as the hill that you want the words Republican & GOP will die on. The Trump Party is what you are now. Shameful.

— HoweverKT (@HoweverKT) January 31, 2020

If it were the House, I'd impeach him on Monday for bribery.
When the Senate kicked that, I'd impeach him the next day for treason.
When the Senate kicked that, I'd impeach him the next day for emoluments.
Impeachment now, impeachment tomorrow, impeachment forever.

— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) January 31, 2020

The post Twitter Blasts Murkowski, Portman, Rubio for Opposing Witnesses: ‘A Bunch of Craven Cowards’ appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Instead of getting timid, they should go after Trump and his corruption even harder.

As the Senate sits down to go through four hours of debate over hearing witnesses in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, The New York Times has released more information on what’s contained in former national security adviser John Bolton’s upcoming book. That information includes how Donald Trump ordered Bolton to squeeze Ukrainian officials for damaging slander of political opponents two months earlier than was known. Trump ordered Bolton to call Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shortly after his election and tell the incoming leader to meet with Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, specifically to orchestrate an announcement of investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden.

And just to cap off a week in which Republican senators admitted that they believe that Trump is guilty but aren’t going to do anything about it, it turns out that one of the conspirators in Trump’s Ukraine scheme has been sitting right on the Senate floor through the entire not-a-trial. Bolton’s book says that White House counsel Pat Cipollone was in the room when Trump gave Bolton his marching orders to extort lies from Zelensky.

Friday, Jan 31, 2020 · 5:44:21 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

Donald Trump has made a response to the claim, saying that he “never instructed John Bolton to set up a meeting for Rudy Giuliani” while at the same time calling Giuliani “one of the greatest corruption fighters in America.” He also mentions that the meeting never happened.

Which might be because Bolton says he never made the call Trump demanded.

Friday, Jan 31, 2020 · 6:18:39 PM +00:00 · Barbara Morrill

So, Rudy responded:

“I think he’s making some of it up. He’s sure making up — I wouldn’t call it making it up, but he’s acting like a real scumbag by never telling me that he objected once, & then saying I was a time bomb, or a firecracker or something."

The Times says that the order from Trump came at a meeting attended by Bolton, Cipollone, and acting chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney. Mulvaney’s involvement in the Ukraine plot has been evident from the beginning, as he directed the withholding of funds from Ukraine through the Office of Management and Budget. Bolton had previously referred to the whole affair as a “drug deal” dreamed up by Mulvaney.

But the claim that Cipollone—officially the lead counsel in Trump’s impeachment defense—was directly involved in the events at the core of the case should be explosive. Cipollone has been standing in front of the Senate denying that there are firsthand witnesses available, when he himself is a firsthand witness. He’s been denying facts of which he is a fact witness.

His direct involvement in the Ukraine plot should be an enormous siren sounding through the Senate proceedings. In legal terms alone, it’s indefensible.

However, since Republicans have already determined that the House team has proved its case, and they’re sticking with the Dershowitz Defense that Trump can do as he pleases … it’s not at all clear that learning that Trump’s lead counsel has been directly, repeatedly lying and covering up information right to the Senate’s face will have even a tiny effect.

A scene from Trump’s December rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, on December 10, 2019. | Mark Makela/Getty Images

What a top reporter’s explanation of Lamar Alexander’s vote reveals.

Sen. Lamar Alexander’s decision to oppose witnesses in President Trump’s Senate impeachment trial seems like the nail in the coffin. Without Alexander’s vote, Democrats have virtually no shot at winning enough support to call vitally important figures like former White House national security adviser John Bolton to the Senate floor to testify about Trump’s threats to withhold military aid from Ukraine.

Alexander’s justification for his vote is remarkable. He argues that there is “no need for more evidence to conclude that the president withheld United States aid, at least in part, to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens” because ‘the House managers have proved this with what they call a “mountain of overwhelming evidence.’”

Not only did Alexander admit that Trump was guilty, but he admitted that what Trump did was wrong — he just didn’t think it warranted Trump’s removal from office.

“It was inappropriate for the president to ask a foreign leader to investigate his political opponent and to withhold United States aid to encourage that investigation,” he says. “But the Constitution does not give the Senate the power to remove the president from office and ban him from this year’s ballot simply for actions that are inappropriate.”

He thinks, in effect, that a president who attempted to interfere with the integrity of the 2020 election should be allowed to compete in that election without any real punishment for his behavior.

This is an absurd position. It’s an especially absurd position given that Alexander is retiring from the Senate, and thus has nothing to fear from Trump politically. So what is going on?

The best explanation I’ve seen comes from Tim Alberta, Politico’s chief political correspondent and a deeply sourced reporter among congressional Republicans. He suggests that Alexander was afraid — not of losing his job, but of threats to his future income and social status:

To put it another way, many Republicans exist in a social world where criticizing Donald Trump is an act of cultural treason. Bucking Trump doesn’t merely risk their congressional seat, but also their ability to find future employment and live comfortably in their communities even after retiring. Alberta describes profound fears of Trump’s “cult,” of “harassment of their families, loss of standing in local communities, [and] estranged relationships.”

I agree with Alberta that, when the stakes are as high as impeachment, this is a form of “weak-ass excuse-making.” And not all Republican officials live in social worlds as Trumpy as the ones described in his thread. But those qualms aside, I think it’s also worth making two additional points about the significance of the phenomenon he’s describing.

First, it’s an example of the dangers of what political scientist Lilliana Mason calls “mega-identity” in politics: Partisanship has come to be so closely linked to other parts of people’s identities, like their religion and racial self-identification, that it has become a kind of master stand-in for cultural belonging.

In a country defined by two mega-identities, defeat for your side isn’t merely a political loss, but an existential threat to your entire way of life. When Republicans feel this way about politics, then it makes sense that they’d see a vote against their president as an act of deep betrayal — and treat the person responsible accordingly, even in private life. This kind of extreme identity polarization poisons politics in ways often invisible in day-to-day observation that, nonetheless, contribute to the fundamental dysfunction of our political system.

The second thing is that it shows the ways in which the modern right depends on its own form of “political correctness.” We’re often told that the modern left is in some ways uniquely censorious, particularly on issues relating to race, gender, and sexual orientation. “There’s no right-wing equivalent to this kind of ideological policing toward people sympathetic to right-wing causes,” as the journalist Cathy Young recently put it.

Alberta’s explanation of Alexander’s vote shows us that this is simply not true. In conservative cultural spaces, even a very long right-wing record like Alexander’s doesn’t immunize you from the consequences of violating the community’s political standards. Stalwart conservative legislators are, according to Alberta, terrified of what people in their communities think of them. Imagine the ways in which many ordinary people in red areas, who have far less financial and social capital than the Lamar Alexanders of the world, feel about expressing anti-Trump sentiment!

The fact that this kind of censorship plays out in local communities, rather than the pages of national magazines, makes it no less powerful — and arguably more so. In fact, right-wing political correctness appears to be an important reason why Trump is about to get away with a monumental attack on the integrity of our democracy.

Video screencap

Pence struggled to justify a new policy in an exchange that captured something profound about the health care debate.

Dr. Rob Davidson was grabbing a bite at the Drake Diner in Des Moines, Iowa, on Thursday when Vice President Mike Pence just happened to stroll in. The polite but determined exchange that ensued became a viral video — and captured something profound about the state of the health care policy debate in President Trump’s America.

Davidson works as an emergency room doctor in western Michigan and is the executive director of the Committee to Protect Medicare. He told Vox he was in Iowa for a press conference related to his work for the committee. So as Pence glad-handed around the diner, Davidson took the opportunity to press him on a new plan the Trump administration rolled out earlier that same day that would allow states to use waivers and block grants to cut federal Medicaid funding.

When Pence walked up to his table, Davidson introduced himself and said, “I’m an emergency doctor. I’m worried about the plans [Trump] talked about last week to maybe cut Medicare, and then the rollout today of cutting Medicaid. I work in one of the poorest counties in Michigan and my patients depend on expanded Medicaid, so how is that going to affect my patients?”

Pence, however, didn’t seem to be familiar with the plan his administration had announced.

“Uh ... I hadn’t heard about cuts,” he said, prompting Davidson to explain the block grant proposal to him.

“Cutting Medicaid — yeah,” Davidson said. “The head of CMS [the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] announced the plan to let states file for waivers so they could get block grants, so that would essentially cut the amount of money going to states. So that would cut federal Medicaid funding. Is that a good idea?”

As Vox’s Dylan Scott explained, enacting block grants, a long-held goal of ideological conservatives, “would fundamentally change how the program is financed” and ultimately result in funding cuts and less coverage:

Medicaid would no longer pay whatever is necessary to provide medical care to the people in or near poverty who qualify for its benefits. Instead, spending would be limited in states that got a waiver from the federal government, and they could impose cuts on benefits.

Instead of addressing the question, Pence deflected by bringing up the Medicaid expansion that happened in Indiana while he was governor. But Davidson pressed him to actually address his question.

“Right — but now they’re talking about scaling back the Medicaid expansion that we got with the Affordable Care Act. 680,000 Michiganders, 600,000 in Iowa — a lot of people got health care,” Davidson said. “I’m just talking about the president and your administration right now.”

But Pence still seemed to be confused.

“I think you’re oversimplifying things,” he said.

“Well, I think it comes down to that for the people I take care of all the time,” responded Davidson. “People I see in the emergency department that can’t get primary care doctors, [but] once they got Medicaid they could get primary care doctors. They stay out of the ER, they actually work more, they actually contributed to our community more.”

“Now, if you tell those people, ‘Sorry, you don’t get your health care’ — that’s going to be a real negative in their lives,” Davidson continued.

The conversation extended into a second video. Pence continued to deflect by touting his health care record in Indiana, and Davidson kept pressing him to address what the Trump administration is doing right now.

“I think if the Trump administration wanted to expand Medicaid, that’d be great. But the problem is they’re contracting Medicaid,” Davidson said, alluding to the contradiction involved in Pence bragging about expanding Medicaid while he was governor of Indiana while being part of a presidential administration that’s actively working to cut it.

The interaction ended with Pence telling Davidson, “I respectfully disagree” — even though Davidson’s observations about the Trump administration’s new plan were not a matter of opinion.

Davidson told Vox that block-granting Medicaid has been part of mainstream Republican thinking about health care for decades, so he doesn’t buy that Pence was as ignorant about his administration’s new plan as he seemed to be. (The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“I think he was not expecting to be pressed on that, and didn’t have his talking points prepared, so he retreated back to his safe space,” Davidson said. “I believe he understands exactly what his administration is doing.”

The interaction encapsulated a dynamic at the core of the current debate about health care policy: Republican plans involve unpopular spending and coverage cuts, so they dress them up with nice-sounding jargon like “consumer-directed.”

“‘Innovation,’ ‘flexibility’ — that’s all code for cutting spending and putting more in the laps of people who can’t afford it,” Davidson said. “This would further reduce that funding.”

Asked what he hopes people take away from the video — which has been shared more than 20,000 times on Twitter and has nearly 1.5 million views as this is published — Davidson said he hopes it raises awareness about his work with the Committee to Protect Medicare and encourages doctors to feel comfortable in the policy space.

“We all have the ability to stand up to any level of folks who are coming along and proposing policies that hurt our patients,” Davidson said. “I think it’s time now for doctors to step out of the exam room and get out into the public space and advocate in a bigger way, and I hope that health care providers who see this want to join with us or in some way on their own become advocates for health care.”

“Patients have a hard enough time scrounging to get coverage,” Davidson added. “If we won’t stand up for them, I’m not sure who will.”

---

The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

Senators who claim to be principled owe us a full accounting.

U.S. border officials have claimed there was no directive that led to the recent detention and questioning of a large number of U.S. citizens and permanent legal residents of Iranian descent at the U.S.-Canada border earlier this month. If authenticated, a document leaked to a Washington state immigration attorney and then shared with a local media outlet stands to prove officials were lying. “In a bulletin issued by the tactical analytical unit (TAU) in U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Seattle Field Office, officers were instructed to conduct vetting on all individuals who met certain criteria, including being Iranian nationals or having traveled to Iran,” The Northern Light reports.

The document was given anonymously to immigration attorney Lee Saunders, and was reportedly obtained by NBC News as well. “The CBP memo, confirmed to be authentic by a source familiar with the matter, is headed ‘Updated Procedures’ and tagged ‘Threat Alert High,’ and then notes that Iran's supreme leader vowed ‘forceful revenge’ after the U.S. strike that killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran's Quds Force, on Jan. 3,” NBC News said in its report.

If confirmed, this means U.S. border officials harassed U.S. citizens, including their young children, because of who they are, and possibly lied about it. One of those harassed Iranian Americans, Negah Hekmati wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post that the five-hour long ordeal “terrified my children. That night, as we walked through the chilly parking lot, they were bursting with questions we couldn’t answer. My daughter told me, urgently, not to speak Farsi. If I didn’t speak Farsi, she said, they wouldn’t know that we were from Iran, and we wouldn’t get into trouble.”

“CBP officials had previously denied issuing any such directive,” NBC News said in its report on Thursday, a statement that now stands to be scrutinized even more with this document coming to light. The Washington Post reports that Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s office is working to verify its authenticity. “It is becoming increasingly clear from multiple conversations with travelers and CBP staff that there was, indeed, a directive from the Seattle Field Office to target Iranian Americans for secondary screening based on their country of origin and despite the fact that they were largely American citizens, legal permanent residents and legal visa holders,” she said according to The Post.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi played this perfectly. Delaying the transmission of the articles of impeachment to the Senate generated exactly the desired extra attention to the moment and opened up the time necessary for critical new information to come out. And new information did come out. That information included John Bolton’s yes-he-did manuscript leaks, as well as a whole series of FOIA responses showing the desperate moves going on inside a White House scrambling to cover-up actions it knew were illegal.

Rep. Adam Schiff played this perfectly. Day in and day out, Schiff not only provided the Senate with a master class in presenting a case, but he also ended those days with speeches that called back to the best of American oratory. And while Schiff was delivering a live action remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the rest of the House management team absolutely had his back. Val Demings, Zoe Lofgren, and Hakeem Jeffries were standouts, but the whole crew pulled its weight and then some.

And that only makes what’s happening in the Senate today a thousand times more difficult.

I cannot imagine how hard it was for Adam Schiff and the rest of the House team to get up this morning. They went to the wall. Left it all on the field. Whatever metaphor for “did absolutely everything they could and then some” you prefer, it applies in this case. They worked hard. They did everything they could to save this nation, against impossible odds and in dire circumstances. They charged that hill and did not hold back for a moment.

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Still ahead of them are four hours of arguments about calling witnesses. Four hours made absolutely pointless by the declaration ahead of time of a Republican majority that they have already made their decision based on the fine legal tradition of We Don’t Give A Damn. To even make the House team come in on Friday and argue a case when Republicans have already forged Donald Trump’s crown is both a waste of time and cruel. Ted Cruz is surely looking forward to it.

Trump’s legal team could sleep through the final day. They could let Dershowitz call in from Miami to discuss underwear brands. They might even consider having Pam Bondi present a short course in “How to get away with obvious bribery,” but senators have already had that course. It’s called being a Republican in the Senate.

Papa, if Mitch McConnell sat down with that nice lady from Alaska and promised her hundreds of millions for her vote, is that impeachable?

No, my child. That’s how Republicans in the Senate work every f’ing day.

On Friday the House team will walk into a Senate whose Republican members has already decided to join Trump in his cover-up. Except that’s not even the right term. They’ve already decided that obstruction is valid tool for a White House that wants to end congressional oversight in full. Except … even that’s not enough. Because the Republican senators aren’t unaware of Trump’s actions, or even particularly concerned about who else finds out. They’re simply putting their loyalty to Trump over liberally, literally everything. 

They’ve decided they don’t care about obstruction. They don’t care about the elimination of their oversight authority. Because they’re not denying what Trump did. The final decision from the Republican Senate didn’t simply put a gun to the head of American democracy. It fired it.

Which doesn’t mean that they won’t come out of the Senate, after agreeing that Trump was guilty, and march right in front of Fox cameras to proclaim his total innocence. Of course they will. After all, it was a perfect call.

When the House impeachment managers come back to the other end of Capitol Hill, they should do so with heads held high. More than that, they should be met with trumpets. With flowers. With every plaudit that can be brought to genuine heroes of their nation. They should get a parade.

And then there should be another parade of people in the streets. In every street in the country.

Workers take down the Iowa state flag after a campaign stop by presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg in Cedar Falls, Iowa, on January 15, 2020. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Iowa has voted first since 1972. It’s ridiculous.

Iowa has been the host of the country’s first presidential nominating contest since 1972.

It’s a small state that doesn’t award many delegates, but Iowa plays a huge role in our nomination process. Winning Iowa means instant credibility for a candidate and that means more favorable media coverage and therefore more momentum for a campaign.

But here’s the problem: The Democratic Party is a collection of diverse groups — young people, liberal whites, conservative-leaning African Americans and Latinos, non-religious Americans, city-dwellers, and so on. By contrast, Iowa’s population is roughly 90 percent white, uncommonly old, and heavily rural.

In other words, it doesn’t really look like America and isn’t representative of the Democratic base. And yet a 2007 study found that a voter in Iowa or New Hampshire (where the first primary is held) has about 20 times more influence than someone who votes in a later primary. That doesn’t seem fair by any standard.

So why is a state that’s not terribly representative of the party allowed to set the trajectory for its nomination battle?

Caroline Tolbert, a political scientist at the University of Iowa, examined Iowa’s privileged role in a 2010 book she co-authored with David Redlawsk and Todd Donovan called Why Iowa? How Caucuses and Sequential Elections Improve the Presidential Nominating Process.

Tolbert has a novel idea to reform our primary process. She doesn’t defend the status quo — she doesn’t think there’s any compelling reason why Iowa should be first — but she does think there’s room for retail politics in small states, while instituting a national primary.

It’s arbitrary and unfair to allow the same small states to hold the first primary or caucus every election. Tolbert’s idea is to have a window in which every state that wants it has the chance to hold a caucus or a primary, and then follow that up with a national primary. In this system, the early voting window would function like a national straw poll, signaling which candidates are viable but also allowing input from voters everywhere, not just in Iowa or New Hampshire.

The main goal is to ensure that no one state always goes first. Instead, a window is designated and each state can hold its caucus or primary whenever it decides, or there could be a rotation of states that go first each cycle. But, unlike the current model, no single state could dominate the process by going first every time.

I spoke to Tolbert about the merits of this proposal, why just switching to a national primary doesn’t work, and if there’s any argument at all for preserving Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

The main objection you hear from people about Iowa is that it’s not representative. The Democratic Party is a young and diverse coalition rooted largely in urban centers. Iowa is extremely white, extremely rural, and disproportionately old.

Is that fair?

Caroline Tolbert

It’s fair, but I’d add that Iowa is one of the fastest-growing states for the growth of the Latino population and it’s actually more liberal than some of those demographics might suggest. This is partly why Bernie Sanders has been shooting up the polls in Iowa lately. So Iowa, demographically, isn’t really reflective of the broader Democratic base, but ideologically it’s not all that different.

It will be interesting to see how the state evolves moving forward. Iowa has always been what we’d call a swing state, going back and forth from election to election. It supported Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then Trump in 2016. In that way, it’s a decent snapshot of the country as a whole.

Sean Illing

Is there a defense of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status? Should they keep it?

Caroline Tolbert

I can’t really defend it. But I will say that unless we’re going to have a national primary, some states have to go first. Our book makes a pretty strong argument that any small state could start, however. And in fact we actually think there should be a relatively short window for these nominating events across the country.

We should look at these early voting states like straw polls that are effectively testing the candidates to see how viable they are. Can they speak to voters? Do they connect with people on the ground? Do they seem authentic? The early rounds of voting can answer these questions and then we follow that up with the national primary where everyone can vote all on one day.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Sean Illing

Can you say a little more about your reform proposal and why you think it takes the best of all the different systems we have now?

Caroline Tolbert

The idea is to take what’s most valuable about caucuses focused heavily on retail politics (candidates campaigning face to face with citizens), and merging it with a more fair process for all voters (national primary). Again, our caucus window is intended to be straw polls that would inform voters nationwide about which candidates were viable and could win the nomination.

There’s an advantage to presidential nominations beginning in smaller population states (because one doesn’t have to have billions of dollars to run national TV ads), and our proposal is that any state can hold a caucus in the designated window set up by the party.

Many states moved away from caucuses in 2020 because the Democratic Party changed the rules, making it harder for states to hold caucuses. Given the realities of the new DNC rules, one could imagine modifying this reform proposal so that states could hold non-binding caucuses or primaries during an early voting window. This would be followed by a national primary where voters from all states cast a binding ballot on the same day (the idea of Super Tuesday expanded).

Under the current system, Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada provide information to voters nationwide about which candidates have a chance to win. But it doesn’t have to be just these four states.

Sean Illing

And what’s wrong with just shifting to a national primary?

Caroline Tolbert

The problem with a national primary is that in order to be successful, you need Mike Bloomberg or Tom Steyer-type money, because you’d have to run a massive national campaign, and that requires a huge amount of financial resources. So a system like that would naturally favor the richest candidates and that seems like a bad idea.

Sean Illing

Wouldn’t it be easier and more fair to let larger, more representatives state like California or Texas go first and allow them to set the tone for the primary battle?

Caroline Tolbert

But if you do that, then everything is basically over and the smaller states that follow would be effectively disenfranchised. And again, that’s the same problem with just running a national primary. You’re going to get a certain type of candidate, mostly rich people who can afford to sustain the kind of campaign you’d need to win in a big state.

I really do think a big benefit of starting with small states is that any candidate can afford to campaign there. You can go to Iowa and drive a bus around the state and engage in old-school retail politics — attending town halls and rallies, for instance. And you have a decent chance of interacting with real people. This kind of engagement is important and worth preserving, because the alternative is just blanket national TV campaigns and ad blitzes.

Sean Illing

Iowa and New Hampshire have fought hard to keep their first-in-the-nation status. Do you see any chance that they lose it any time soon?

Caroline Tolbert

The system may already be in transition, and the parties — at the state and national level — may not be able to control it. Right now we have Tom Steyer investing heavily in the four early states and also in a broad national ad campaign. I think he’s spending 10 times more than his competitors on TV ads. And then we’ve got Mike Bloomberg basically doing nothing but running a full national campaign on TV and radio, with no real attempt to campaign in the early voting states. If any of those strategies work, it could change things.

The 2020 cycle is going to be fascinating for all of these reasons. We might see a new pathway to victory forged, which could force the parties to adjust. And even if Iowa remains first, if someone wins without paying much attention to it, its role would be diminished and candidates wouldn’t prioritize it anymore.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speak as Tom Steyer looks on after the Democratic presidential primary debate at Drake University on January 14, 2020 in Des Moines, Iowa.  | Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images

What if we have to destroy the judiciary in order to save democracy?

At a campaign stop in Iowa, Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer embraced a radical proposal to counter Republican domination of the Supreme Court — court-packing.

After Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016, stripping Republicans of their Supreme Court majority in the process, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell promptly announced that he would not allow anyone President Obama nominated to fill this vacancy to be confirmed. After President Trump won the 2016 election, Republicans confirmed Neil Gorsuch to fill the vacancy left open by Scalia’s death. Gorsuch is now one of the most conservative justices on the Court.

Republicans claimed that, in Sen. Chuck Grassley’s words, “it’s been standard practice over the last 80 years to not confirm Supreme Court nominees during a presidential election year,” but this claim appears to be entirely made up. At least 14 past justices were confirmed in a presidential election year — the most recent was Justice Anthony Kennedy in 1988.

In a video posted on Wednesday, Steyer says that he is “for” expanding the Court, arguing that Republicans “have been cheating.”

“When I think about the Supreme Court,” Steyer told a voter who asked about court expansion, “let us remember why we have the Supreme Court we have.” The answer, according to Steyer, is that “Mitch McConnell refused to allow President Obama’s choice to ever be brought up” for a hearing and a confirmation vote.

Though the Constitution provides that a Supreme Court shall sit at the apex on the judiciary, our founding document is silent about how many justices sit on the Supreme Court. A 1789 law established a six-justice Court, and the number of justices ebbed and flowed during the 19th century — swelling to 10 justices under President Abraham Lincoln before settling into a nine-justice configuration under President Ulysses S. Grant.

After a reactionary Supreme Court struck down several New Deal policies, President Franklin Roosevelt proposed expanding the Court to as many as 15 justices — although this proposal did not fare well politically, to say the least.

Steyer, it’s worth noting, is not the only Democratic presidential candidate who has floated court-packing as a counter to the tactics that placed Gorsuch on the Supreme Court. Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg suggested expanding the Court’s membership to 15 but also proposed having five of those justices selected in a process intended to minimize partisanship. Sen. Elizabeth Warren hasn’t fully embraced court-packing, but she told Politico that “it’s a conversation worth having.”

The party’s two frontrunners, former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, both oppose court-packing.

Court-packing is a dangerous tactic — but it could become necessary

Before Scalia’s death, and McConnell’s efforts to keep that seat in Republican hands, court-packing was virtually unthinkable.

Roosevelt offered his court-packing plan shortly after winning reelection in a landslide, and the popular president did so while the Court was actively sabotaging his efforts to end a historic economic crisis. But even Roosevelt was not able to build majority support for the idea. Many historians mark his court-packing plan as the moment that shattered his coalition and ended his ability to push liberal legislation through Congress.

As a practical matter, courts often depend on voluntary compliance to effectuate their orders. The South’s campaign of “massive resistance” to Brown v. Board of Education (1954) largely succeeded for 10 years. Public school segregation remained widespread in the Deep South until Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which gave the federal government additional tools it used to pressure schools into integrating.

A similar story could play out if Democrats resort to court-packing in order to preserve liberal victories. If a packed Supreme Court reinstates Roe v. Wade (1973) after a conservative Court overrules that decision, many red states are likely to launch a new campaign of massive resistance.

That said, I’ve written that there is one entirely possible scenario where court-packing could be justified: if the Supreme Court grows so hostile to voting rights that the only way to preserve competitive elections in the United States is to eliminate the Court’s anti-democratic majority. In this circumstance, Democrats might conclude that court-packing was a less terrible option.

Steyer’s embrace of court-packing is interesting not because he is likely to implement it himself — Steyer’s campaign for the Democratic nomination in eighth place, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. Rather, Steyer’s support for court-packing is interesting because he has a history of spending lavishly to bring ideas on the political fringes into the mainstream.

As of January 2019, Steyer had reportedly spent $50 million on his “Need to Impeach” campaign targeting Trump.

Steyer is both a billionaire and a longtime activist in the fight against climate change. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s Republican majority has signaled loudly that they plan to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of much of its regulatory power. It’s not hard to imagine a future where Steyer grows so frustrated with the Court’s efforts to stop environmental regulation that he starts writing big checks to push a court-packing agenda.

NY Times:

To Senate Republicans, a Vote for Witnesses Is a Vote for Trouble

Lawmakers fear allowing new testimony would tie up the Senate indefinitely and open the door to a cascade of new accusations.

“We don’t need Mr. Bolton to come in and to extend this show longer, along with any other witnesses people might want, and occupy all of our time here in the Senate for the next few weeks, maybe even months,” Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas and a close ally of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said Tuesday evening on Fox.

Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff and a top outside adviser to Mr. McConnell, made it clear that Republicans viewed the idea of calling witnesses as a disaster in the making.

“More witnesses = Hindenburg,” Mr. Holmes wrote Wednesday on Twitter, showing a picture of the flaming airship. “None of it changes ultimate acquittal.”

They are afraid of the facts. Now, Republicans will be patting themselves on the back today about how clever they are but meanwhile …

Yoni Appelbaum/Atlantic:

Trump has led his party to this dead end, and it may well cost him his chance for reelection, presuming he is not removed through impeachment. But the president’s defeat would likely only deepen the despair that fueled his rise, confirming his supporters’ fear that the demographic tide has turned against them. That fear is the single greatest threat facing American democracy, the force that is already battering down precedents, leveling norms, and demolishing guardrails. When a group that has traditionally exercised power comes to believe that its eclipse is inevitable, and that the destruction of all it holds dear will follow, it will fight to preserve what it has—whatever the cost.

Tim Alberta had a very pointed thread on Lamar Alexander (who said the House managers proved their case, so he’s a ‘no’ on witnesses for that reason, and a ‘no’ on impeachment because what Trump did is bad but not impeachable bad):

I’ve spent a LOT of time with retired (and retiring) congressional Rs since 2016. Most feel zero sense of liberation to bash Trump on the way out. If anything, they’re even more cowed & cautious, fearing that being out of favor w: POTUS (and his party) limits their earning power.  And it’s not just about money. I’ve had numerous retiring Rs talk warily — sometimes fearfully — about the “cult” of Trump supporters back home. They worry about harassment of their families, loss of standing in local communities, estranged relationships, etc.  If you think this is a bunch of weak-ass excuse making from people who ought to rise above it and do what they think is right..... well, no argument here. I’m just explaining the reality for these Rs. They feel trapped, most of them—and retirement isn’t the escape we might think. 

But Lamar was right about one thing. The House managers proved their case:

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There is no need for more evidence to conclude that the president withheld United States aid, at least in part, to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens; the House managers have proved this with what they call a “mountain of overwhelming evidence.” 3/15

— Sen. Lamar Alexander (@SenAlexander) January 31, 2020

Lamar’s epitaph:

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Coward senator caves to Trump, earns infamous place in history https://t.co/6XzgTppMyP

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) January 31, 2020

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I am going to reserve comment on this moment of disgrace until I have properly composed my thoughts on it.

— Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) January 31, 2020

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By refusing to have witnesses the GOP (1) assured that Trump’s acquittal is not an exoneration, (2) defies overwhelming public support for hearing witnesses (3) puts senate majority at risk by forcing vulnerables to cast toxic vote for coverup.....

— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) January 31, 2020

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Burn it down. The fix was always in. America knows there is no acquittal in a sham trial. Burn it down.

— John Weaver (@jwgop) January 31, 2020

That message was aimed at ex-Republicans.

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I realize all of you are feelings the SADs right now. Even though an outcome is expected, small hope is always there. And when that hope gets crushed, people get pissed. Which is why I've argued the acquittal, although expected, is still going to PISS people off & add to D adv.

— Rachel "The Doc" Bitecofer 📈🔭 (@RachelBitecofer) January 30, 2020

That’s our message: make them pay in November and yes, we are pissed.

Tom Nichols/USA today:

Trump is being impeached over an extortion scheme, not a 'policy dispute'

Trump was shaking down Zelensky while trying to keep the rest of the government in the dark. That’s not a 'policy,' that’s a conspiracy.

This scheme (it is too misleading even to call it a “policy”) was a rogue operation against Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, conducted by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and a squad of shady characters, none of whom were answerable to anyone but Trump himself. (One wonders how Sen. Lee’s constitutionalism squares with foreign operations being conducted by the likes of Giuliani and Lev Parnas, out of sight of pesky members of Congress and their annoying questions.)

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Bolton played a clever game trying to ramp up the value of his book, but he didn’t factor in that Bill Barr is coming to destroy him at the behest of an exonerated Donald Trump with newly unlimited executive powers.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) January 31, 2020

Quin Hillyer/Washington Examiner:

The longer GOP blocks Bolton, the more he will hurt them

Senate Republicans covering for Trump are letting all their chips ride on the intensity of the voters from Trump's base to carry them through to reelection, but that’s a risky bet. Especially with highly controversial candidates, those supporters can suddenly reach a breaking point where enough is enough. I’ve seen numerous elections where support for high-risk candidates suddenly evaporated, resulting in massive, sudden swings in the polls — one from a dead heat to a 25-point loss in just three weeks.

Republicans who don’t hedge their bets by at least allowing witnesses will have no chance to survive if Trump takes a dive. The remaining Republicans would face increasing odds of finding themselves a powerless minority against an enraged and emboldened Democratic majority absolutely out for blood.

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From me: YouGov’s polling reveals that voters perceive all the major Democratic contenders other than Joe Biden as MORE ideologically extreme than Donald Trump. https://t.co/B0IUkef1OK

— G. Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris) January 30, 2020

G Elliott Morris on what the data for electability (fwiw) says, from the Economist ($$):

Who will be Donald Trump’s most forceful foe?

Data suggest that one Democratic candidate would do better than others against the president in November

Here, Mr Biden looks strong. YouGov’s polling reveals that Americans view him as the most moderate Democrat, on average. They perceive all the other major Democratic contenders as more extreme than Mr Trump (see chart).

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We think that (B) is especially important, so let me just reiterate here. The typical argument for ideologues is that the "fire up" the base. That's true! But they fire up the other side even more. This will be esp. important in 2020 with turnout expected to exceed 60%.

— G. Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris) January 30, 2020

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While 71% of Americans in our new @USATODAY @Ipsos poll say they would be comfortable with a woman president, just 33% say their neighbors would be--perhaps a more candid measure. https://t.co/sUSlPtwSgW

— Susan Page (@SusanPage) January 31, 2020

A majority, but a shaky one. Then again, everything about America is shaky these days.

Dennis Aftergut/USA Today:

Dear Mr. Dershowitz, 'mixed motives' is no impeachment defense when there's corrupt intent

Taken together, Donald Trump's actions — at least seven of them — contradict the defense claim that he had any legitimate national interest in mind.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, opened the question-and-answer portion of the Senate impeachment trial by asking whether President Donald Trump was guilty if he had "mixed motives." In other words, what if he was protecting both American interests by seeking an investigation of alleged foreign corruption and protecting his own interests because the investigation — and its announcement — would smear rival Joe Biden?

The president's lawyers responded that the Senate cannot properly convict a president for a "mixed motive" quid pro quo. After all, professor Alan Dershowitz argued, all elected officials take action to help their electoral prospects, and all believe that the nation is best served by their reelection. Presidents may not be removed from office for self-serving actions that also advance the public interest.

This absurdist argument is raised as a smokescreen to avoid what makes a trial a trial: hearing testimony from firsthand witnesses such as former national security adviser John Bolton, who says the president told him he would only allow military aid if Ukraine investigated former Vice President Biden and his son Hunter.

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GOP argument:* We've already heard enough witnesses, so we don't need to hear from the one with the most direct knowledge of Trump's central act* We'll acquit, b/c Ds failed to produce testimony from anyone with direct knowledge of Trump's central acthttps://t.co/SU4LaLouUD pic.twitter.com/dk4xthZcgy

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) January 30, 2020

WaPo:

World Health Organization declares coronavirus outbreak a ‘public health emergency’

The World Health Organization announced Thursday that it was declaring the coronavirus outbreak a “public health emergency,” setting in motion a plan for global coordination to stem the spread of the virus, which originated last month in Wuhan, China.

Chinese officials announced more than 1,900 new cases of the coronavirus on the same day, as the total number of people infected in mainland China reached over 8,000 and surpassed those infected with SARS during the 2002-2003 epidemic.

The United States confirmed a sixth U.S. case of the Wuhan coronavirus on Thursday, marking the first time the virus has spread from person to person in the United States.

With experts saying a vaccine is still a long way off, more international cases of the illness have appeared. Australia, Vietnam and South Korea all announced new coronavirus infections, while India and the Philippines had their first ones. Here’s what we know so far:

One thing we know is it’s an evolving situation so what I write today might not be true in a month, but at the moment, flu seems worse, at least in the US. In China, well, that is another story. 

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I'm watching this slowly tick up from my office in Hong Kong. Wherever you're reading this, you're not as far away as you likely think. National borders mean very little to pathogens.#CoronaOutbreak pic.twitter.com/vuk91KXrwE

— Bryan Druzin (@BryanDruzin) January 31, 2020

One thing of concern is that personal protective supplies are running short there, and eventually here (that’s where some of it is made).

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Russia has now shut its entire land border with China - one of the longest borders in the world - in an effort to prevent the spread of the #coronavirusMaybe they need some sort of great wall on that border. pic.twitter.com/Emt8igZGsH

— Bryan Druzin (@BryanDruzin) January 31, 2020

With airline cancellations and border closures, look for economic effects soon. And don’t assume it’s over.

In the meantime, follow CDC, trusted medical sources, and be wary of internet memes and self-styled  ‘experts’. And get your flu shot and wash your hands.

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This paper just published in the New England Journal of Medicine will be of interest for anyone concerned about the potential spread of the Wuhan virus.#coronavirus https://t.co/eaxGWnjX9b

— Bryan Druzin (@BryanDruzin) January 31, 2020

NEJM is making all coronavirus articles free, no paywall. Not a new policy, they do that with big public health issues.The Lancet has, as well. 

Back to politics:

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stop it with the logic https://t.co/iaUKRv22dv

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) January 30, 2020

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Can we all just be honest?The GOP no longer believes in fair elections because fair elections gave us a black president.It’s really NOT more complicated than that. That’s the heart of Dersh’s argument that 45 can cheat if he thinks it’s in the national interest.

— Pam Keith (@PamKeithFL) January 29, 2020

As soon as tomorrow, the 100 members of the U.S. Senate will deliver a historic verdict in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. The news stories—and likely the senators themselves—have been focused on political risks to their seats and their party.

But there’s also a more profound, personal consequence to their votes on the two articles of impeachment: How they will be remembered.

It might seem impossible to know how history will look back on a vote taken on one day in Washington in 2020. But in this case, there’s a useful antecedent, which is how history looked back on the House members who weighed President Richard Nixon’s fate in 1974. I studied the obituaries in major newspapers of every Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee who voted to support or oppose the articles of impeachment for Nixon in the summer of 1974. (The issue never came to a full House vote before Nixon’s resignation later that summer.)

The results were striking. Regardless of whether the congressmen voted for or against the articles, their legacies were largely defined by this one moment. No matter what other choices they made in life or legislation they helped pass, that one decision shaped how they were remembered in their obits.

Whether fair or not, the headlines themselves reveal the mark on their legacies: “Thomas Railsback, Congressman Who Broke with GOP to Back Nixon Impeachment, Dies,” the Associated Press reported. The newspaper reported nothing else about his 16 years in Congress, including his leadership on juvenile justice, election law reforms and legal aid protections. “Ex-Rep. Charles Sandman, Nixon Supporter, Dies,” read the New York Times headline, choosing to elevate that one aspect of Sandman’s life, despite his serving as a New Jersey Superior Court judge at the time of his death, and having been president of the state Senate and a prisoner of war in World War II.

The obituaries show us just how much a little moment in time can shape the public’s memory of lawmakers’ decision on impeachment.

It’s possible to detect a couple of patterns. First, the obituaries show us that the writers love a Republican who breaks ranks. Maryland Representative Larry J. Hogan’s obituary, for instance, says he “projected an image as a scrappy politician and conservative stalwart” who “possessed an independent streak, most visibly when he put his political future at risk by turning against a president from his own party during the Watergate scandal.” The New York Times obituary for Representative M. Caldwell Butler of Virginia recalled the words of the columnist Mary McGrory, who called Butler’s announcement that he would call for impeachment “the single most fiery and liberating sentence spoken” during Watergate.

For those who switched their position at some point in the Nixon proceedings, even after the committee vote, the obituaries give a starring role to these changes of heart. In California Representative Charles Wiggins’ obit, the New York Times noted that the congressman abruptly reversed his support of Nixon when the news broke that the president had helped conceal the Watergate break-in. “Because of that, Mr. Wiggins said, he had reached the ‘painful conclusion’ that it was in the national interest for Nixon to resign,” the obit reads. Representative Wiley Mayne of Iowa, too, is remembered principally for his pivot on the issue.

What else do the obituaries show us? Some of them are remarkably detailed about how one congressman or another responded to the pressures of the time. Butler’s obituary tells the story of his mother’s writing him that his future “will go down the drain if you do not stand with your party at this critical time.” “Dear Mother,” he replied, “You are probably right. However, I feel that my loyalty to the Republican Party does not relieve me of the obligation which I have.” (Butler’s mother was wrong in the end. He won reelection four more times.) We can guess the obituaries of the future will note that in 2020, mostly Republican senators voted in opposition to what the public wanted: For instance, by noting that 75 percent of all Americans in the most recent poll and 69 percent of Republicans in another want the impeachment trial to hear from witnesses.

The obituaries also note how these votes affected their political futures. Support for Nixon, “and President Gerald R. Ford’s subsequent pardon of Mr. Nixon, were widely regarded as responsible for Mr. Maraziti’s defeat by Helen S. Meyner, a Democrat, in the 1974 election,” reads the New York Times obituary for Representative Joseph Maraziti of New Jersey. The Orlando Sentinel obituary for Indiana Representative David Dennis starts off by describing him as “a former U.S. representative whose vote against impeaching President Nixon cost him his seat in Congress.” It’s possible these representatives read their cards wrong when weighing the costs of their vote in the 1970s—something that current senators might want to note.

The Nixon-era congressmen’s obituaries also illustrate that even in death, people will still judge the senators’ and congressmen’s reasons for voting how they did. The Washington Post called Michigan Representative Edward Hutchinson’s reasoning “a somewhat convoluted theory of constitutional law in defense of his president and party leader.” In Sandman’s obituary, the New York Times described the strategy he led: “to construe the evidence as narrowly as possible, require ironclad proof and propose benign explanations of information damaging to the President.”

Another lesson from these obituaries is how the lawmakers’ record on the vote can even reflect on their family members who stay in public service. On July 23, 1974, the first Republican to announce he would vote to impeach Nixon was no moderate. It was the staunch conservative Hogan, who made headlines for his act of courage. Hogan’s obituary highlights the influence of this one act on the lives of his family including most notably one of his sons. “While Larry Hogan Jr. was running for the Maryland governor’s office in 2014, he often cited his father’s stance toward Nixon as an example of political courage,” the Washington Post’s obituary said. Governor Hogan said of his father, “He taught me more about integrity in one day than most men learn in a lifetime.” That one day was the day of the impeachment vote.

Nixon, of course, ultimately resigned over disclosures that revealed much more about the issue at the center of his impeachment inquiry. For Trump, it is not clear if we will ever have such a smoking gun—or, if we’ve already had it, but in a very different era and media environment from the one in which Nixon was driven to resign. But it’s likely that the distance of only a few years will give the public a different perspective on those who will vote for and against the articles of impeachment. These obituaries remind us of the possibilities.

Danielle A. Schulkin contributed research for this article.

The Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump appears to be coming to its inevitable conclusion at a fairly rapid pace. The entire impeachment process has been distressing to observe, but it is time to start thinking about the fallout and how to minimize the damage to the constitutional system.

Given the legal strategy that the president's defense team has adopted, there is a particular risk that an acquittal will be framed as a repudiation of the traditional understanding of the scope of impeachable offenses and an endorsement of some version of the constitutional argument offered by Professor Alan Dershowitz. The Dershowitz argument would gut the congressional impeachment power and embolden future presidents to further abuse the powers of their office.

All high profile impeachments have legacies. To this day, we continue to argue over the lessons of the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and apparently even over the resignation of Richard Nixon. How we understand those events has consequences for how we think the constitutional system should work today. The constitutional implications of an impeachment do not turn solely on whether an officer was acquitted or convicted. They turn also on what we understand the impeachment to mean. I argued similarly after the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

The Republican senators who will be voting to acquit President Trump of the charges that have been leveled against him by the House have a responsibility not to do lasting damage to the system of constitutional checks and balances in the process. The senators will have an opportunity to go on record to explain their votes to convict or acquit, and the senators should use that opportunity to say something about what kind of precedent they are setting.

In particular, Republican senators should resist the temptation to seize on Dershowitz's argument as providing the rationale for rejecting these particular charges against this particular president. Rather than embracing a general rule that presidents cannot be constitutionally impeached for abuse of power, senators should instead try to limit their judgment to the unique circumstances of this particular case.

It is not unreasonable to conclude that the charges leveled against the president are not sufficiently grave to justify his immediate removal and that the president can be safely left in office until the voters have a chance to express their judgment on his performance in November. The type of charges brought by the House might well be within the scope of the impeachment power, but senators must still exercise an independent judgment to determine whether the conduct in question is serious enough and dangerous enough to justify the immediate removal of a president. It is possible for a constitutionally conscientious senator to vote to acquit, but in casting such a vote senators should take care not to undermine the potency of the impeachment power entrusted to Congress by the constitutional framers.

Senators can put this matter in the hands of the voters, but they need not endorse a flawed understanding of the Constitution in order to do so. As they draft their statements explaining their votes, they should explicitly reject the constitutional argument put forward by the president's defense team.

I have elaborated on this argument in an op-ed now available at the Washington Post. It can be found here.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren clearly wanted Chief Justice John Roberts to ponder his place in history Thursday when she sent this doozy to him to read aloud at the Senate impeachment trial: “At a time when large majorities of Americans have lost faith in government, does the fact that the Chief Justice is presiding over an impeachment trial in which Republican senators have thus far refused to allow witnesses or evidence contribute to the loss of legitimacy of the Chief Justice, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution?” 

In other words: Hey, we all know this is a sham trial, the American people know this is a sham trial. Any chance you’ll do the right thing and protect the integrity of the court and your legacy by casting your vote for witnesses in the event of a 50-50 tie? Kapowie!

Do yourself a favor and watch Roberts read it below.

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Warren asks a question about the "loss of legitimacy of the chief justice, the supreme court and the constitution."And Roberts has to read it.#impeachment pic.twitter.com/4PK6cLlO5L

— Zach Wolf (@zbyronwolf) January 30, 2020

The American Farm Bureau just released its study on the state of the U.S. farming industry in 2019. According to the Farm Bureau, things are not going well. This is a not-very-surprising turn of events. However, the rise in Chapter 12 bankruptcies is the highest our country has seen since the year after the Great Recession: According to the study, farm bankruptcies rose 20% from 2018 to 2019.

Breaking that down, the Farm Bureau says 595 family farms filed for bankruptcy in 2019, and this rise in bankruptcies has been growing for “five consecutive quarters.” Wisconsin was hit hardest with 57 of those filings in 2019, followed by Georgia.

While the Trump administration made a big deal of publicizing how much money it was throwing at farms, it turns out that giving most of that money to already-wealthy, big agricultural companies doesn’t help the smaller, family-run farms nearly as much as conservatives promised. Then again, if MAGA supporters ever took the cheap red-hat cotton out of their ears, they might have heard the Trump administration telling audiences that conservatives don’t really care about small business.

Every day there seems to be a new story about how this administration is hurting America’s farmers. Numerous articles have highlighted the deteriorating relationship between the Trump’s farming voters and the Trump administration. Hopefully, whichever candidate faces off against the Republican Party in 2020 will be buoyed by the fact that he or she could sleep for four years and still do a better job than our current Republican leadership.

Trump defense lawyer Pam Bondi speaks during the impeachment trial on Thursday. | Senate Television via Getty Images

The shamelessness is the point.

Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi has become something of a punchline during President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in her role as the defense team’s Hunter Biden specialist.

Over the course of 10 hours of testimony on Wednesday, she only spoke once, but the halting and deliberate manner in which she pushed conspiracy theories aimed at shifting attention from Trump to the Biden family went viral and became the subject of a Daily Show video.

Things went downhill for her again on Thursday when she stumbled through an allegation about how Hunter and his father Joe Biden going on fishing trips together was purportedly evidence of corruption.

The point of Bondi’s remarks seemed to be that Hunter was in close touch with Joe Biden, and therefore that his father must’ve been in the loop about his work for Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company that has been accused of corruption. But there’s no evidence that Hunter’s work influenced the Obama administration’s foreign policy, or that Joe Biden pulled strings to get Hunter his position. Hunter selling his family name, while unseemly, is not in and of itself corrupt.

Bondi’s arguments have nothing to do with the two charges against Trump under the articles of impeachment — abuse of power over withholding taxpayer-funded military aid to Ukraine in exchange for the personal political favor of investigating the Hunter Biden, and contempt of Congress charges for failing to comply with the investigation. Instead, her job is to change the subject; she wants to make it seem like it’s the Bidens who have a corruption problem.

But Bondi herself is a bit of a strange figure to serve the role of the “corruption” expert. Let’s review Bondi’s own very spotty record on the subject.

Bondi decided not to sue Trump University after she got a donation from Trump, among other unseemly things

Bondi’s relationship with Trump dates back to 2013, when as Florida attorney general, she announced she was considering joining a lawsuit that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was filing against Trump University for scamming students.

But four days later, Trump’s foundation cut Bondi’s reelection campaign a check for $25,000. Lo and behold, Bondi never ended up joining the lawsuit.

While still serving as Florida attorney general in August 2018, Bondi raised eyebrows by serving as co-host of Fox News’s The Five for three straight days. She didn’t end up running for reelection.

Bondi has been attacking Hunter Biden for serving in a well-compensated role despite having questionable credentials, but after leaving office in Florida, a firm she worked for was paid $115,000 a month for work she did lobbying for the Qatari government.

She left that role to join Trump’s legal team. In the months leading up to the impeachment trial, she’s served as one of Trump’s TV surrogates — a role in which she’s mangled basic facts surrounding the Ukraine scandal.

If all of this seems to point toward Bondi being a less than ideal choice to make the case for Trump about purported Biden corruption, you’d be right.

The shamelessness is the point

Bondi is just about the inappropriate person possible that Trump could’ve picked for her role. But the fact that she’s in that position anyway speaks to a broader shamelessness.

A key part of Trump’s defense has been to argue that the most personally corrupt president in modern American history is actually a principled opponent of corruption. Trump has claimed to not know fixers who worked with Rudy Giuliani to carry out his Ukraine scheme, despite video of them hanging out together at his Mar-a-Lago resort. He’s repeatedly pushed a number of easily debunkable lies about the timeline of the Ukraine scandal in order to make it seem like Democrats have just had it out for him.

Meanwhile, Trump’s Republican defenders have complained about Democrats not presenting new evidence during the impeachment trial, ignoring that the reason they’ve been unable to because Republicans voted to block them from being able to do so. And as new evidence of Trump’s misconduct has emerged, Trump’s defenders in the Senate and on his legal team have moved the goalposts from “there was no corrupt quid pro quo” to “corrupt quid pro quos aren’t impeachable.”

So shamelessness is a feature of Trumpism, not a bug. And while Pam Bondi’s performance may seem laughable to most, it’s been sufficient for Senate Republicans — and as far as Trump’s fate during the impeachment trial is concerned, that’s good enough.

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The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

In response to a question from Democrat Joe Manchin and Kristin Sinema, and Republicans Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins about whether the White House would assure the Senate that it would not allow private citizens to conduct foreign policy, White House lawyer Patrick Philbin stepped in it, and Rep. Adam Schiff pounced. Philbin answered "I just want to make clear that there was no conduct of foreign policy being carried on here by a private person."

That was all the opening Schiff needed. "We have just heard a breathtaking admission by the President's lawyer," he said. "What the President's counsel said was that no foreign policy was being conducted by a private person here. That is Rudy Giuliani was not conducting U.S. foreign policy. Rudy Giuliani was not conducting policy. That is a remarkable admission," Schiff continued. They have suggested, he said, that "this is a policy issue," about burden-sharing or corruption, but "they have no acknowledged that this was not about policy. […] This was not policy conducted by Mr. Giuliani."

"They have just undermined their entire argument," he added. "If Giuliani wasn't there conducting foreign policy, it must have been a "personal political errand."

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Schiff: “They have now acknowledged that the person in charge of this [Rudy Giuliani] was not conducting policy. That is a startling admission.” https://t.co/kfaqEJJajc pic.twitter.com/078mN8Nojk

— CBS News (@CBSNews) January 30, 2020

Pete Buttigieg gets blowback for saying that we need someone from the Midwest to run Washington.

L'état, c'est moi. I am the state. That is where we are—a declaration of self as sovereign once made famous by France's Louis XIV, whose pre-revolutionary reign as king lasted 72 years until his death in 1715. This appears to be exactly what Senate Republicans are preparing to embrace on Friday when they will likely vote against hearing witness testimony so they can summarily move to acquit Donald Trump without engaging even the most basic due diligence of any fair fact-seeking trial.

At least we won't have to endure any more insulting bothsidesisms from the media like this New York Times classic from December asserting that "the lawmakers from the two parties could not even agree on a basic set of facts in front of them." Actually, House Republicans hadn't even pretended to deal in facts, they were too busy deploying the distraction of emotional hyperbole. 

The failure of House Republicans to lay a factual foundation for Trump’s defense is exactly why, over the course of the past week, the arguments of Trump's legal team have effectively devolved from "he didn't commit a crime" to "it doesn't matter if he did" to "it's perfectly legal and acceptable for a president to break the law in pursuit of his self interests because his interests are the state's interests." 

“If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment,” Alan Dershowitz told U.S. senators Wednesday, only to refute himself on Thursday.

“The idea that any information that happens to come from overseas is necessarily campaign interference is a mistake,” White House deputy counsel Patrick Philbin offered. “Information that is credible that potentially shows wrongdoing by someone who happens to be running for office, if it’s credible information, is relevant information for the voters to know about.”

Trump's so-called "information" seeking about Biden was never credible. But that's clearly immaterial to Philbin. He doesn't even think Trump seeking something of value from a foreign government to win reelection is criminal, when it actually is under 52 U.S.C. 30121. But who cares? C'est la vie. He's president. Get over it. 

That's basically the exact same argument Trump made to ABC journalist George Stephanopoulos last June. "It's not an interference, they have information—I think I'd take it," Trump said of dirt offered to him by a foreign government. Trump also told Stephanopoulos that FBI Director Christopher Wray was "wrong" when he advised Congress that politicians should report any approaches made by foreign entities to the FBI.

The next day, Trump was momentarily shamed into walking back his comments, saying "of course" he would report such an instance to the FBI. That whiplash 180 came after Republican lawmakers like South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham flatly rejected the idea of accepting foreign help in campaigns. “If a foreign government comes to you as a public official, and offers to help your campaign giving you anything of value, whether it be money or information on your opponent, the right answer is no,” Sen. Graham said on June 14, 2019.

Oh, those were the days, when Trump lackeys like Graham still gave at least some deference to the law.

Now the Wall Street Journal editorial board is endorsing the presidential exceptionalism that Trump’s lawyers advanced. "Every President equates his re-election self-interest with the public interest. It isn’t grounds for impeachment," read the subhead of the board's jaw-dropping editorial. The board cited Philbin asserting, “All elected officials, to some extent, have in mind how their conduct, how their decisions, their policy decisions, will affect the next election. ... It can’t be a basis for removing a President from office.”

In a rebuttal, House Intelligence Committee chair and floor manager Adam Schiff pointed out the disingenuousness of that argument. "We're calling that policy now. It's the policy of the president to demand foreign interference and withhold money from an ally at war unless they get it," Schiff said. "That's what they call policy. I'm sorry, that's what I call corruption."

But by Thursday morning, none other than the GOP chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee was echoing Philbin's folly. “I have no problem with what Philbin said,” Burr told reporters. “I think that the idea that any information that happens to come from overseas is necessarily campaign interference is a mistake. ... If it’s credible information, [it's] relevant information for the voters to know about.” 

In other words, Republicans are removing the origin of the information as the standard of criminality and replacing it with a subjective determination about whether the information is "credible." And according to Trump, the president, his corruption concerns were credible enough to bypass the U.S. Department of Justice on the way to demanding an investigation led by a government so corrupt, he wouldn’t release foreign aid to it. 

It doesn't pass the smell test, folks, but Schiff got it right on both counts. That's corruption, plain and simple. And that's also what Republicans call policy now.

Watch Schiff’s rebuttal.

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SCHIFF: "A failed scheme does not make you innocent ... It's a policy of POTUS to demand foreign interference & withhold $ from an ally at war unless they get it. That's what [Trump's lawyers] call policy. I'm sorry, that's what I call corruption." pic.twitter.com/EjgCyD53yj

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 30, 2020

The Trump administration took a big step forward Thursday to let states convert a portion of Medicaid funding into block grants, a long-sought conservative overhaul of the safety net health care program that Democrats will wield as a political weapon during the election.

The plan is the administration’s boldest step yet to curb Medicaid spending and shrink the program covering about 1 in 5 low-income Americans. But the move is inciting fierce opposition from Democrats who say it’s the latest evidence President Donald Trump is trying to sabotage health coverage.

CMS Administrator Seema Verma, who’s crafted the politically sensitive and closely guarded plan for over a year, on Thursday encouraged state Medicaid directors to request budgeted federal payments to cover poor adults who enrolled through Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion in recent years. States who voluntarily cover adult populations outside of the Obamacare expansion could also receive capped funding.

Some conservative states have expressed interest in block grants in recent years, but it's not clear how many will take up the Trump administration's new offer.

Capped Medicaid payments would represent a radical departure in how the 55-year-old program is financed. The federal government has long provided open-ended matching funds to states.

Verma is touting block grants as a way for states to take greater accountability for the health of their residents while better controlling spending on the program, which takes up a chunk of state budgets. Verma also sees the policy as a way to constrain Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid to millions of low-income adults — a program that she argues has siphoned away resources for the most vulnerable populations covered by Medicaid.

"Adult Medicaid beneficiaries can hope for better health and all beneficiaries can expect a stronger, more sustainable program for years to come," Verma said Thursday morning.

The rollout of the policy represents a signature achievement for Verma, who pushed through the plan just weeks after a high-profile feud with HHS Secretary Alex Azar jeopardized both of their jobs. The two have tried to repair their working relationship after an intervention from senior White House officials, and Azar appeared at Thursday’s rollout in a show of support for Verma’s policy.

Still, Medicaid advocates are likely to challenge the policy in court. Democratic lawmakers have long cautioned the Trump administration against advancing the policy, contending the health department doesn’t have the authority to unilaterally cap program spending. In a letter to Verma this week, more than 30 House Democrats warned the move “defies Congress” and threatens care for some of the country’s most vulnerable people.

Democrats are portraying the new block grant policy as a cut to Americans’ health care and tied it to Trump’s efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act. During the failed effort to repeal and replace Obamacare in 2017, Congress rejected a similar block grant proposal after analysts found it would result in millions of people losing coverage.

"Even after people across the country spoke out and pressed Congress to reject President Trump’s plan to gut Medicaid with his Trumpcare bill, he’s still charging forward with harmful policies that will hurt the many families who rely on Medicaid," said Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate health committee.

The health care law — and in particular its Medicaid expansion — remains popular after the failed effort to replace it during Trump's first year in office. Nearly three-quarters of states have expanded Medicaid since 2014, and support for the program has boosted Democratic candidates in conservative strongholds.

On Wednesday, one day before the block grant rollout, Verma sought to rebut claims that the administration is undermining Obamacare — even as Trump supports a lawsuit that could kill the entire health care law.

“The tired canard that the Trump Administration is sabotaging the ACA rings hollow,” Verma said. “Rather, we are keeping what works and fixing what’s broken.”

Block grants have been a regular feature in Republican health plans dating back to the 1980s. Republicans say that states can better manage the programs on a defined budget and fewer rules set by Washington. However, Medicaid advocates say a block grant would limit states’ ability to respond to economic downturns and expensive new drugs, forcing them to trim their programs.

The administration said states can pursue block grants under the health department’s authority to waive Medicaid requirements to test new payment and health care delivery ideas. Critics argue, however, that the administration can’t legally cap Medicaid spending without permission from Congress.

Sensitive to the negative connotations surrounding block grants, the Trump administration is branding the policy “Healthy Adult Opportunity.” Officials are emphasizing that states receiving lump-sum payments will face stricter oversight to ensure patients aren’t getting sicker or losing access to health care providers. Traditional populations covered by the program — like children, elderly adults and people with disabilities — would not be eligible for capped payments.

State Medicaid programs would also have new ability to limit health benefits and drugs. They would also be allowed to set premiums and cost-sharing, but patients can't be required to pay more than 5 percent of their household income on out-of-pocket costs.

Some states have been frustrated that Medicaid programs, which must cover every FDA-approved drug, have had limited tools for constraining drug costs. Under the new guidance, state Medicaid programs could establish a list of covered drugs known as a formulary.

States could choose to receive lump-sum funding or receive funding based on the number of enrollees.

Democratic states that expanded Medicaid are unlikely to take up Trump’s offer, but it may draw some interest from conservative states.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, whose state hasn’t expanded Medicaid, appeared alongside Verma to announce he would apply for a new waiver, calling the new policy a "game changer." Stitt for months has been agitating for a block grant as an alternative to a Medicaid expansion referendum expected on the Oklahoma ballot this fall.

Mike Dunleavy, Alaska’s Republican governor, has also expressed interest in a block grant. Tennessee, which hasn't expanded Medicaid, last fall became the first state to formally request a block grant for its program. Verma said that the Tennessee request is broader than the scope of the new guidance.

Litigation could still halt the new policy, potentially leaving another one of Verma’s Medicaid initiatives tied up in courts after a federal judge blocked new work rules. A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., is weighing the Trump administration’s request to revive the rules requiring some Medicaid enrollees to work, volunteer or attend school as a condition of coverage.

Groups like the National Health Law Program, which sued over work requirements, said they'll closely review the block grant plan. Its legal team will be “carefully assessing the enforcement and litigation options" said Leonardo Cuello, the group's health policy director.

Rachana Pradhan contributed to this report.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

There were gasps and laughter on the Senate floor when House impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff announced this: Even as Trump's lawyers insisted repeatedly, over and over, that a president cannot be impeached for refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas, his Bill Barr-led Department of Justice is in court, today, insisting that Congress absolutely can respond to a president refusing to abide by congressional subpoenas by ... impeaching that president.

CNN reports, "Justice Department lawyer James Burnham said without hesitation that the House can use its impeachment powers, among other options, like withholding appropriations." The courts have no role in enforcing subpoenas directed at the executive branch—that has been the repeated Trump court argument. In the Senate, in the meantime, Trump's team is simultaneously arguing that impeachment cannot be used in response to a president's team ignoring subpoenas, that it must be argued through the courts.

The Trump defense is inherently corrupt. The Republican defense, in the Senate, is inherently corrupt.

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"You can't make this stuff up... The Justice Department, in resisting House subpoenas, is in court TODAY and was asked: If Congress can't come to the court to enforce subpoenas... what remedy is there?The DOJ lawyers response? Impeachment." - @RepAdamSchiff pic.twitter.com/eUMkaENXHQ

— House Intelligence Committee (@HouseIntel) January 30, 2020

The House of Representatives passed two Democratic amendments Thursday designed to constrain presidential war-making authority. One, introduced by Rep. Barbara Lee, would repeal the 2002 Iraq Authorization for the Use of Military Force that the Trump regime most recently leaned on for its authority to assassinate Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. That amendment passed 236-166. The other, introduced by Lee’s fellow Californian Rep. Ro Khanna, would require a president to obtain congressional approval for any offensive use of force against Iran. It passed 228-175. Both were attached to a noncontroversial World War II medals bill, H.R. 550.

Donald Trump vowed a veto on Monday. But on Wednesday, on Twitter, he mixed his messages by urging House members to vote their conscience. Passage of the legislation in the Republican-controlled Senate seems unlikely, though not impossible. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell could simply ignore the legislation, tossing it into the pile of nearly 300 bills the House has passed since January 2019 that he has held back from consideration. 

In a statement of policy before the vote, the White House said that repealing the 2002 AUMF would undercut “the president’s ability to defend United States forces and interests in the region against ongoing threats from Iran and Iranian-sponsored proxies.”

In an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Lee said that she doesn’t believe Trump “understands or believes that this is a democracy.” She added, “Congress has the responsibility of making sure that we insist that we uphold our constitutional responsibilities, and make sure that we hold any president, now it’s this president, accountable.” 

In a statement on her webpage, Rep. Lee said,

For far too long, Congress has been missing in action on matters of war and peace – but today, we took a historic step to reassert our Constitutional authority and stop our endless wars by voting to repeal the 2002 Iraq AUMF.  

Let me be clear: the 2002 AUMF no longer serves any operational purpose. U.S. military deployments and operations carried out under the 2002 AUMF – dubbed Operation Iraqi Freedom – officially concluded in 2011.

Make no mistake, the President must seek specific authorization from Congress for any use of force against Iran or any country. Trump’s claim that the 2002 AUMF can authorize his attacks against Iran has no basis in reality, underscoring the need for immediate action.

In the Senate, Sen. Bernie Sanders has introduced a companion resolution to the Khanna amendment. In a statement they said:

After authorizing a disastrous, $738 billion military budget that placed no restrictions on this president from starting an unauthorized war with Iran, Congress now has an opportunity to change course. Our legislation blocks Pentagon funding for any unilateral actions this president takes to wage war against Iran without Congressional authorization.

Steps in the right direction. But it will take a Democratic Senate and a Democratic president to turn these measures into policy. Other measures need to be added to those restrictions as well, including moves to reduce the bloated Pentagon budget. 

The chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence—INTELLIGENCE—says he has no problem with the argument from impeached president Donald Trump's lawyer Patrick Philbin that it's fine for a president to solicit and accept dirt on a political opponent from a foreign government. "I have no problem with what Philbin said," North Carolina Republican Richard Burr told reporters.

"God help us," Sen. Mark Warner told Politico, responding to Republicans who defended that argument from Philbin. Warner is the ranking member on Intelligence. He said that when he heard that argument, "my head exploded." He added, "I think [Philbin's arguments] dramatically weaken America's expectation that we’re going to have a free and fair election. I think it directly contradicts the work of" the intelligence community. So now we have Moscow Mitch and Benedict Burr working against a fair 2020 election.

Apple engineers have put forward a proposal today to standardize the format of the SMS messages containing one-time passcodes (OTP) that users receive during the two-factor authentication (2FA) login process. From a report: The proposal comes from Apple engineers working on WebKit, the core component of the Safari web browser. The proposal has two goals. The first is to introduce a way that OTP SMS messages can be associated with an URL. This is done by adding the login URL inside the SMS itself. The second goal is to standardize the format of 2FA/OTP SMS messages, so browsers and other mobile apps can easily detect the incoming SMS, recognize web domain inside the message, and then automatically extract the OTP code and complete the login operation without further user interaction. By doing this, the process of receiving and entering a one-time passcode could be automated, eliminating the risk of a user falling for a scam and entering an OTP code on a phishing site, with the wrong URL.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.