This week, with just a few days til 2020 and 311 days till the 2020 presidential election, Trump, though on holiday at Mar-a-Lago, nevertheless kept his impeachment and his ire at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi close by his side.
On Christmas night, Trump focused a significant amount of energy not on his family, but on his phone, sending out copious tweets attacking Pelosi, who led the impeachment charge against him, and who is currently withholding the articles of impeachment from the Senate until the GOP-dominated Senate lays out a clear plan as to what Trump’s trial in the Senate will look like.
“Why should Crazy Nancy Pelosi…be allowed to Impeach the President of the United States?” Was the general flavor of Trump’s Christmas night tweet frenzy.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already proclaimed that he won’t be an impartial juror in Trump’s trial.
“Everything I do during this, I’m coordinating with the White House counsel,” McConnell told Fox New’ Sean Hannity. “There will be no difference between the president’s position and our position as to how to handle this.”
In the House, Republicans walked in lock step in their opposition to impeachment, presenting a defense of Trump that consisted largely of deflection. In the Senate, however, some Republicans are not comfortable with McConnell’s planned impartiality.
Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska has voiced her concern this week. “In fairness, when I heard that, I was disturbed,” she said.
Referring to not only McConnell, but also to many GOP lawmakers who have already indicated they will not be impartial, Murkowski said, “For me to prejudge and say there’s nothing there or, on the other hand, he should be impeached yesterday, that’s wrong, in my view, that’s wrong.”
Elsewhere in the world this week, a Saudi court sentenced five people to death for the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi royal family. Khashoggi’s gruesome murder at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul brought global condemnation and cast suspicion on Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Lawyers concluded that Khashoggi’s killing was not premeditated, though evidence had been found that a hit team was sent to the Consulate to dispatch Khashoggi. Outside Saudi Arabia, questions remain as to what Crown Prince bin Salman may have had to do with the killing.
In North Korea, a promised “Christmas gift” to the U.S., widely interpreted by the White House to mean a provocative North Korean weapons test, never came. U.S. intelligence remains watchful.
“Maybe it’s a nice present,” joked President Trump when asked how he would respond if North Korea fired a missile over the holidays. “Maybe it’s present where he sends me a beautiful vase as opposed to a missile test. … You don’t know. You never know.”
Back in the U.S., where health care has been ranked among the worst among the industrialized countries, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) continues to fight for its life. This week, a court ruling that further jeopardizes the ACA by declaring it unconstitutional may actually empower Democrats. As the GOP continues its attempts to dismantle the ACA while offering no palatable replacement, more Americans are beginning to feel the crisis our health care is in.
Additionally, more Americans are discovering how the ACA benefits all Americans with protections such as for pre-existing conditions and full coverage for physical exams. This has given Democrats the opportunity to demonstrate their support for protecting the ACA, as well as their desire to create a health care system that works for more Americans, as Republicans appear to be working to restrict access even more. Democrats won the House majority in 2018 in large part on their message of protecting the ACA and its protection for preexisting conditions.
Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said “I think it’s an opportunity to reset with the new year to remind people that there’s a very real threat to tens of millions of Americans. We Democrats are always striving to improve the system, but, at a minimum, the American people expect us to protect what they already have.”
President Trump resumes lashing out against impeachment on Twitter | CBS Evening News [2019-12-26]
Lou Dobbs Tonight 12/26/19 SHOW| Breaking Fox News December 26, 2019 [2019-12-26]
In just 325 days, American voters will decide who will be the next President. While many Democrats say they’ll vote for any of the Democratic candidates if it means defeating Trump, Trump’s base holds steadfast in their support of him. Even through his latest controversy, involving Ukraine, 80 to 90 percent of Republicans approve of the job Trump is doing, and 87 percent oppose impeaching Trump, or removing him from office, according to a Washington Post average of national polls.
This week, on Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House would proceed with two articles of Impeachment against Donald J. Trump: abuse of power, and obstruction of Congress. The former article has to do with his withholding $391 million in military aid on the condition that Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelenskiy publicly announce an investigation of Trump’s political opponent, Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter. The latter article is based on the the fact that Trump and the White House refused to cooperate with Congress’ requests for documents, and blocked White House staff and others from testifying.
On Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee debated the two articles of impeachment in preparation to vote on them. Though evidence to support both articles is plentiful (and it’s indisputable that the Trump administration did not cooperate with the investigation), the GOP’s unwavering and united stance that the president did nothing wrong was almost surreal, and their defense of Trump consisted mainly of distraction tactics.
After approximately 14 hours of hamster-wheel-like deliberation on Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee voted 23-17 along party lines in favor of both articles of impeachment, sending the articles to the full House for a vote.
Congressman Hank Johnson (D-GA), had exhorted his GOP colleagues to “do the right thing,” despite their apparent fear of retribution from Trump.
One GOP lawmaker suggested that Democrats should spend their time on passing laws instead of on impeachment.
House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, however, has argued that not going forward with impeachment would be letting Trump “cheat just one more time.”
Despite the GOP’s claim that impeachment has prevented Congress from working on other issues, and despite Trump’s pronouncement that they are the “Do-nothing Congress,” the House of Representatives has passed nearly 400 bills, according to Vox and other sources. Most of them have been stalled by Mitch McConnell’s Senate.
One bill that was finalized this week with bipartisan support, including that of Trump, was the USMCA (United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement). The agreement modernizes 25-year-old NAFTA, supporting freer markets and fairer trade, and promoting more robust economic growth in North America. In this deal with Trump, Democrats are handing him a win with one hand while supporting his impeachment with the other.
Congressman Eric Swalwell (D-CA) has called it the “Farm Workers’ Bill of Rights, essentially.”
Other bills finalized by Congress this week include a spending bill, a prescription drug pricing bill, a paid family leave bill and a defense bill.
Also this week, the U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General released a report examining the FBI’s handling of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The report found a number of failures on the part of the FBI in its investigation of the Trump campaign, but held that the investigation was justified, and found no politically motivated conspiracy against Donald Trump. FBI Director Christopher Wray backed up the report’s findings, and emphasized that the investigation was justified, and that it had found no conspiracy against Donald Trump.
In response to Wray, Trump tweeted, “I don’t know what report current Director of the FBI Christopher Wray was reading, but it sure wasn’t the one given to me. With that kind of attitude, he will never be able to fix the FBI, which is badly broken despite having some of the greatest men & women working there!”
Some are speculating as to what Trump meant by “current Director of the FBI.”
As we’ve seen so far during the Trump presidency, everything is up for grabs, and everything could change on a dime. (Or on $391 million.) Only 325 more days till the election.
Democrats and Republicans go head-to-head debating articles of impeachment | Washington Post [2019-12-11]
Trump calls USMCA ‘the silver-lining to impeachment’ | Fox Business [2019-12-10]
