Harry Reid wants impeachment inquiry :
Former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who as recently as last month cautioned Democrats about the perils of pursuing President Trump’s impeachment, now says the House should open an impeachment inquiry that might or might not lead to a formal effort to remove him from office.
“It’s not the right thing to do nothing,” Reid said in an interview Monday with USA TODAY. “It’s not the right thing to jump into impeachment without doing an inquiry.”
The most important goal, he said, would be to “give the American people a view of what’s going on.”
jsc1953:
I stand corrected! Senate Republicans have let it be known that they would vote to disapprove Mexican tariffs, with a veto-proof majority. Apparently they found their balls, on an issue in which Trump is entirely on his own without a single ally.
Watching Trump try to walk back from the shit-show he started could be awesome.
WHAT??
This has to be fake news! “Balls Found on Capitol Hill” ? I don’t think so. Cite, please. :dubious:
The murder of Khashoggi does not appear to have impacted on the bin Salman-Trump/Kushner relationship:
I’m really digging the avatar/ post combo. Bravo, sir.
Here’s some news, analysis and opinion about Jared Kushner :
In a remarkable interview with Axios on HBO, Jared Kushner, a senior advisor in the White House (and, coincidentally, the president’s son-in-law), made a number of notable statements. Among them is his ambivalence regarding how he might handle a Russian approach (akin to the infamous Trump Tower meeting) if it were to happen again. Asked if he would call the FBI in similar circumstance, Kushner responded: “I don’t know. It’s hard to do hypotheticals, but the reality is is that we were not given anything that was salacious.”
Let’s be clear—that’s the wrong answer. I will limit this discussion to legal obligations; the moral failings are self-evident. Even if Kushner had no legal obligation to report the Russian contacts in 2016 when he was a private citizen, he no longer is. At the direction of the president, he now holds a top-secret (TS) clearance. And with that clearance comes a legal obligation to notify relevant authorities in the FBI and White House regarding suspicious foreign contacts.
Incompetent or traitorous? They report; you decide.
Kimstu
June 4, 2019, 11:21pm
33312
Was he simply using the word (incorrectly) as a synonym for “illicit” or “compromising” in a more general sense? Or is this an echo of the old Russian-hooker rumors?
I’m picturing “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic.”
I found an excellent article on Lawfare about why Alan Dershowitz’s views about impeachment are wrong and the author twice touches on how this is dangerous:
Separate from the question of what counts as an impeachable offense is who gets to decide what counts as an impeachable offense. The traditional answer to that question has been that Congress gets to decide. The House gets to choose who it wants to impeach, and in an impeachment trial the Senate gets to make the final judgment on whether the House’s action was justified. When the Supreme Court was asked to weigh in on the question of whether the Senate had properly conducted an impeachment trial in the case of Judge Walter Nixon, it firmly rebuffed that effort.
Dershowitz thinks the Court got it wrong in the Nixon case and that Trump is just the president to get the justices to change their minds. If the president thought that the House had overstepped constitutional bounds by attempting to impeach him for something that is not an impeachable offense, he might file an immediate motion in the courts to try to enjoin a Senate trial. If that fails, the president might make a motion to the chief justice, who presides over the Senate trial, seeking to have the case dismissed on the grounds that the charges do not meet the legal definition of an impeachable offense. The chief justice as presiding officer in a presidential impeachment trial would be asked to declare that, given the House’s articles of impeachment, the senators could not properly vote to convict given their oath “to do impartial justice according to the Constitution and the law.” (However the presiding officer rules on such a motion, a majority of the senators could overturn that ruling. If a majority of the senators thought at that stage of the proceedings that no impeachable offenses were being charged on the face of the House’s articles, then acquittal is a foregone conclusion.)
In his latest foray, Dershowitz proposes the worst possible option. If the Senate holds a trial and convicts, Dershowitz suggests, the president should simply refuse to leave office and insist that the Supreme Court adjudicate his claim that his conviction violated the Constitution. Dershowitz stakes out the strongest possible claim for judicial supremacy. The Supreme Court and the Supreme Court alone should resolve all disagreements about constitutional meaning, and the president should simply defy Congress until the court intercedes.
To be clear, Dershowitz is encouraging the president to instigate a constitutional crisis in the hopes that it will force the Supreme Court’s hand in a way that might benefit the president. Why he thinks as either a legal or political matter the justices would want to back a president who defied a conviction by two-thirds of the sitting senators and was refusing to voluntarily leave the White House is not at all clear. Why he thinks that a president who had been encouraged to refuse to accept his conviction and removal by the Senate would suddenly acquiesce to the judgment of a court that affirmed his conviction and removal is perhaps even less clear. Why he thinks that advising a president who likes to reflect on having the support of “the tough people” who could make things “very bad, very bad” if pushed beyond “a certain point” that he could reasonably refuse to leave office after his conviction in a Senate trial is bewildering.
We should not want to be in that world, but Dershowitz is pushing the president to imagine that this is exactly the situation the country is already in. He posits for the sake of argument the possibility of a “crisis caused by a Congress that impeached a president without evidence of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’” and proposes that in such circumstances the president could and should “refuse to leave office.” From there, Dershowitz suggests, the president could expound that the House cannot “possibly [be] allowed” to impeach him “because there was no crime.”
One of the problems with the rhetoric of constitutional crisis is that it encourages political actors to imagine that the gloves have come off, that the rules no longer apply. And so they likewise imagine that any action they might take in response would be justified in the exceptional circumstances of the crisis, even if it would be unconscionable in the ordinary circumstances of normal politics taking place within the constitutional rules. It is wise to be extraordinarily cautious before suggesting to a sitting president that he alone is acting within his rights and that everyone else is behaving illegitimately and illegally.
scr4
June 4, 2019, 11:52pm
33315
jsc1953:
I stand corrected! Senate Republicans have let it be known that they would vote to disapprove Mexican tariffs, with a veto-proof majority. Apparently they found their balls, on an issue in which Trump is entirely on his own without a single ally.
Or they know they can have it both ways - make some news criticizing trump, but not actually having to vote on it because they know McConnell won’t let that happen.
JohnT
June 5, 2019, 12:31am
33316
The tariff is getting horrible press coverage here in Texas, which, I’m sure, plays no small part in the GOP action.
JohnT:
The tariff is getting horrible press coverage here in Texas, which, I’m sure, plays no small part in the GOP action.
Switch to Fox, maybe it will be better news?
Will Trump mess with Texas? Will Texas go loco in response? Stay tuned!
JohnT
June 5, 2019, 12:38am
33319
It’s a $5-10 billion hit to the state, depending upon who you ask.
Will he remember the Alamo? Will he decree that “Tex-Mex” food will from now on only be called “Tex” food? Will he state there is only ONE flag over Texas, and it the United States Flag?
asahi
June 5, 2019, 12:51am
33321
He threatened to close the border and it turned out to be a bluff, and I’m guessing this will also turn out to be a bluff. He doesn’t want to risk the embarrassment of facing a public rebuke from his own party at a time when impeachment chatter is getting louder.
What I suspect Republicans will realize in time is that they’re trapped. When they abandoned their decades-old free trade principles and went down the road of selling out to appease white christian nationalists, they made a decision to let him go unchained. Farmers who overwhelmingly voted for this bastard are beginning to wake up to a cold, hard reality: if he makes America great again, it won’t involve making American agriculture great again. Right now, it’s turning into an unmitigated disaster, and it’s just starting.
Maybe, just maybe Trump will start to feel heat from farmers, sign a truce with China, and then claim victory, and maybe he’ll do that in time for the election, but if his trade wars drag on through summer and into fall when the harvests will be mostly complete, Trump will be in very serious trouble.
Shouldn’t that be, “she doesn’t want them to outlive her”?
I would strongly suspect that Dershowitz would go even further, and opine that in the event that the Supreme court ruled in favour of conviction by 2/3 of the Senate, that Trump should then see if he can get a majority of Generals to back him, and threaten to nuke American coastal cities unless he gets his way.
Dershowitz is an asshole. A dangerous asshole.
asahi
June 5, 2019, 1:13am
33324
Mexico wouldn’t just hit Texas; they would hit other states, including Michigan. Currently, Mexico is our largest trading partner, moving ahead of China (thanks to tariffs).
“Salacious”? “Salacious” means sexually explicit or obscene, titillating, dirty. Why on earth is Kushner assuring us that a Russian suggestion to assist with influencing US politics in his father-in-law’s favor contained nothing “salacious”?