Josh Kraushaar: National Journal:
Impeachment Is Now a Real Risk for Trump
That means two of the three political preconditions for impeachment have already been met or largely met (Democrats retaking the House and a bombshell from the Mueller investigation). The third precondition that’s left: Whether enough Republican voters defect from the president as legal pressure mounts…
The most logical explanation for why Trump isn’t budging on the government shutdown despite slowly bleeding support is that he views the Republican base as the last line of defense against the growing possibility of impeachment proceedings. It’s still awfully hard to see 67 senators (including at least 20 Republicans) voting to remove a president of their own party from office. But as the lines of Trump’s political defense start to dissipate, the White House should be very worried about how quickly things can fall apart.
And don’t think that cannot happen. Josh is a conservative pundit and/but he sees the writing on the wall.
Yoni Appelbaum/Atlantic:
Impeach Donald Trump
Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals—and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs.
The electorate passes judgment on its presidents and their shortcomings every four years. But the Framers were concerned that a president could abuse his authority in ways that would undermine the democratic process and that could not wait to be addressed. So they created a mechanism for considering whether a president is subverting the rule of law or pursuing his own self-interest at the expense of the general welfare—in short, whether his continued tenure in office poses a threat to the republic. This mechanism is impeachment.
Here’s the latest news:
Mueller Statement Disputes Report That Trump Directed Cohen to Lie, NYT.
In a rare move, Mueller’s office denies BuzzFeed report that Trump told Cohen to lie about Moscow project WaPo
Best advice is to wait and see. Watergate aficionados will remember the one story they got wrong (which didn’t change a thing).
David Leonhardt/NY Times from Jan 5 is looking better and better:
The People vs. Donald J. Trump
He is demonstrably unfit for office. What are we waiting for?
The unrelenting chaos that Trump creates can sometimes obscure the big picture. But the big picture is simple: The United States has never had a president as demonstrably unfit for the office as Trump. And it’s becoming clear that 2019 is likely to be dominated by a single question: What are we going to do about it?
Speaking of great NY Times pieces from the past, this from Liz Spayd, Jan 2017:
The Times has yet to apologize. of course the email story needed to be covered but the proportionality was all wrong. So was covering Clinton Cash. So was not covering this, and with each passing day the Times looks worse and worse.
I don’t mean to undermine them, but they can’t hide behind that. They owe us a reckoning.
Will Bunch/philly.com:
L.A. teacher strike may be cutting edge of a revolution against what’s rotten in America
For local readers who recall the bitter picket lines that frequently closed public schools in Philadelphia — and in other large U.S. cities — during the 1970s and ’80s, this is not your mother’s teacher’s strike. Yes, wages are on the table, but with labor and management only half a percentage point apart, teacher salaries or benefits aren’t really the heart and soul of this showdown.
It might sound cliched, but L.A.'s teachers truly seem to striking less for themselves and more for the kids — much like the “red wave” of educator walkouts that during 2018 shocked “red states” like West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona where Republican lawmakers had been starving public schools for years. In Southern California, teachers aren’t only armed with specific grievances such as growing class sizes and shrinking school services, but are also more broadly worried about the rising clout and enrollment numbers of charter schools and the privatization of public education — concern that spiked when the Los Angeles school board hired an investment banker with no education background, Austin Beutner, as superintendent last May.
Ella Nilson/Vox:
Mitch McConnell calls House Democrats’ anti-corruption bill a “power grab
“House Democrats won’t come to the table and negotiate to reopen government, but they’ve been hard at work angling for more control over what you can say about them and how they get reelected,” he wrote. “They’re trying to clothe this power grab with cliches about ‘restoring democracy’ ... but their proposal is simply a naked attempt to change the rules of American politics to benefit one party.”
Read another way: McConnell could be nervous. Americans of both parties have been clamoring to get money out of politics for years; Donald Trump ran on a message of “draining the swamp” in 2016, and House Democrats rode to a wave election in 2018 on an anti-corruption message.
Democrats wanted to follow up that win by taking concrete action to reform elections, especially after multiple allegations of voter suppression in states like Florida, Georgia, and North Dakota.
“I’m not surprised that he would be attacking the bill and all of its various pieces because I think it presents a threat to the kind of system he’s built,” said Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD), who is spearheading the legislation. “The fact that McConnell would pen something like that validates that we’re doing the right thing.”
HR 1 has a lot in it, but here are some of the key points (for more, read the bill explainer):
Jennifer Bendery/HuffPost:
The vice president says it's "deeply offensive" that people are offended that his wife took a new job at a school that bans LGBTQ kids and employees:
Anyway remember that time Pence was governor and signed a law to let businesses refuse services to LGBTQ people?
More from that twitter thread above.
where ‘vote vs. Trump’ means ‘vote against Trump’.