Steven Strauss/USA Today:
2020 Democrats should embrace populism, run on how Trump made 'rigged' system worse
Donald Trump is a hypocritical demagogue who’s done nothing to drain the swamp, but given half a chance, he’ll again run as a populist. Don't let him.
WaPo:
Trump would have been charged with obstruction were he not president, hundreds of former federal prosecutors assert
More than 450 former federal prosecutors who worked in Republican and Democratic administrations have signed on to a statement asserting special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s findings would have produced obstruction charges against President Trump — if not for the office he holds.
David Byler/WaPo:
Black voters helped make Joe Biden the Democratic front-runner. Will they keep him there?
This is mostly good news for Biden. The prevailing perception on Twitter and other bastions of hyperpolarized political analysis is that Biden is out of step with contemporary Democratic politics and that his performance in the Clarence Thomas hearings and his role in the 1990s crime bill would make him radioactive to black voters. But black voters and Biden may be more aligned than TweetDeck analysts want to believe.
And Biden has an advantage with black voters that no 2020 candidate can match: He was Barack Obama’s vice president for eight years. According to Gallup, Obama maintained an 80 percent to 90 percent approval rating among black voters for almost the entirety of his presidency. Clinton’s close association with Obama — she served as his secretary of state — likely helped her with black voters in 2016. Her popularity with black votersdropped as she fought him for the 2008 nomination but soared when she was in his Cabinet. Biden could leverage his association with Obama in a similar way in 2020, while other candidates, among them South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, have to start building a relationship with the national black electorate from the ground up.
Well, we have certainly heard every side of the impeachment question. From Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:
Impeaching Trump Would Constrain Democrats Too Much
Proceedings would ultimately let the president put the scandals behind him.
Democrats are again being tempted to move toward impeaching Donald Trump. It’s still the wrong call to make, at least so far. Yes, there’s a good case — a very good case — an extremely good case — that Trump has acted contrary to his oath of office and deserves impeachment and removal. With his attorney general pitching the preposterous idea that the president can just pull the plug on any investigation of his own actions, and with the president actively resisting normal congressional oversight, it's clear that the House should be fighting back as strongly as it can. But for now at least, Republicans are not going to vote for impeachment, and so we’re talking about a partisan impeachment and a partisan acquittal.
That’s a path that has no advantages for Democrats before, during or after impeachment.
The “before” question is whether to continue investigations and hearings as part of regular House oversight, or as part of an explicit impeachment inquiry.
Are there advantages with the latter? Not really, I don’t think. Whether it’s called impeachment or not, what matters at this stage is whether Democrats can find ways to publicize Trump’s malfeasance, in hopes of both hurting Trump’s popularity and of finding new allies among any weak Trump supporters among congressional Republicans.
And from Greg Sargent/WaPo:
The nightmare scenario for Democrats on Trump’s corruption
The administration’s categorical refusal to release President Trump’s tax returns heightens the difficult question Democrats face, and raises the prospect of a nightmare scenario — both in political and substantive terms.
Democrats must now choose between continuing to pursue the returns through conventional channels, which carries some risk of failure, and getting serious about impeachment hearings, which would likely minimize that risk to the greatest extent possible.
If Democrats go with the first, it raises at least the possibility that they could squander months in court, only to fail to secure Trump’s returns at the end — at which point they’d decide it’s too late to pursue impeachment, because 2020 would be looming.
To be sure, there are many other reasons to initiate an impeachment inquiry, beyond overcoming resistance to releasing the returns. But this dispute throws the broader choice Democrats face into sharper relief.
Todd Gitlin/CJR:
As the republic teeters, will the news media get serious?
During one presidential campaign, I met an NBC News producer and started itemizing—OK, ranting about—everything wrong with campaign news coverage: the horse-race obsession, the sound-bite fetishes, the gotchas that pass for tough reporting, the ephemera, the shallow excuses for news conferences, the shortage of background reporting on the candidates. My theme was a collective obsession with what is trivial and evanescent in the treatment of what is, after all, the most important act the republic regularly undertakes.
The producer nodded. He freely granted that NBC had overplayed the state of the horse race. “We talk about it all the time,” he said. “But we can’t figure out how to do anything better.”
That conversation took place in June of 1980—ten presidential campaigns ago.
NY Times:
Russian Efforts to Exploit Racial Divisions in 2016 Found Firm Ground in U.S., Report Says
Russian disinformation operations to exploit racial tensions during the 2016 presidential election in the United States found firm ground in a country where legislators have long sought to suppress the black vote, according to a report released Monday.
The report, “State of Black America,” was released by the National Urban League, a civil rights organization based in New York. It underlined the Russian interference in particular but said that black voting rights were under attack from a wide range of actors, including domestic politicians.
In about two dozen states, voting restrictions have gotten worse since 2010 because of changes including new voter identification laws and decisions to limit locations where voters can cast ballots, the report said.
Shahrukh Khan/WaPo:
Why states can’t stop vigilantes terrorizing immigrants at the border
The United Constitutional Patriots, an armed militia at the southern border in New Mexico, has drawn intense scrutiny after live-streaming its activities on social media. Groups like the UCP routinely litter parts of the border with traps of all brands to discourage — and now detain at gunpoint — migrants from coming to U.S. territory. They patrol the Mojave in the dead of night and coordinate with Customs and Border Patrol agents to transfer the people they have kidnapped into government hands.
Yet while these actions have been met with significant outrage (and ultimately the arrest of UCP leader Larry Mitchell Hopkins on federal firearms charges), the group argues that it is acting lawfully, in the tradition of other vigilante groups operating along the U.S.-Mexico border. For all the noise they make, these groups have come to use one practice that, at first blush, is quite meek, and almost arcane in today’s world: the citizen’s arrest. But thanks to critical aspects of U.S. law, this practice is rife for abuse and gives these groups far more leeway to act than one might think.
Originally standing in place of official police departments in Europe, the citizen’s arrest was a practice deployed by royalty to use ordinary people to sniff out criminals. The principle was first created under common, or judge-made, law in the Statute of Winchester in 1285, enacted by King Edward I to replace the existing watch and ward system. It outlined the role that private citizens played in criminal justice and provided that anyone who witnessed a crime would “make hue and cry” until the criminal was caught.
I wonder why Jerry Falwell Jr is a Trump supporter?