Impeachment: Let's Hope for the "Nuclear Option"

Impeachment proceedings begin today in the U.S. Senate. Majority leader Mitch McConnell, assuming he can hold his Republican caucus together, plans for the impeachment trial to take place over a week or two. According to the AP:

After the four days of opening arguments — two days per side — senators will be allowed up to 16 hours for questions to the prosecution and defense, followed by four hours of debate. Only then will there be votes on calling other witnesses. 

At the end of deliberations, the Senate would then vote on each impeachment article.

The only news that seems to have struggled free from the morass of impeachment reporting  is whether there will be enough GOP senators to break with their caucus to approve the Democrats' call for witnesses. Even if that occurs, and I'm skeptical that it will, Republicans are threatening a nuclear option, which includes calling witnesses who Democrats don't want to see testify, like Joe and Hunter Biden.

The two articles of impeachment are abuse of power and obstruction of justice. Trump's novel, if ludicrous, defense is that impeachment can only occur if the president commits an ordinary crime. Since Trump is not accused of committing an ordinary crime (though the Government Accountability Office found the Trump administration guilty of illegal impoundment of funds, there are no criminal penalties for violating that law), he never should have been impeached in the first place.

The Democrats made a calculation at the start of the impeachment process that it was best to limit proceedings to the discussion of Ukraine and the transfer of funds to the Ukrainian military to help with the battle against "Russian aggression"; that way, Democrats could obliquely rehabilitate their discredited Russiagate fixation without reanimating the left populist energy that followed Trump's surprise election in 2016. (Whither the Women's March? Indivisible? #Resist?)

The strategy failed to rehabilitate Russiagate but it was successful in reducing popular enthusiasm for impeachment. The problem with reducing popular engagement in impeachment is that it allows McConnell to run the show as he sees fit, confident that there will be no voter blowback for creating a show trial designed to exonerate Trump.

That's why I'll be very surprised if witnesses are allowed to appear. There is a chance that Schumer and McConnell will get together and decide on a few mutually-agreed-upon witnesses. No incendiary testimony. No bombshells. Much the way Trent Lott and Tom Daschle got together and agreed upon video testimony from a few key witnesses during the Clinton impeachment trial.

My hope, as it has been from the beginning, is for the "nuclear option" --- a runaway-train situation where McConnell loses control and the GOP calls the Bidens and the Dems call Pompeo, Bolton, et al. and both institutional parties burn to the ground.

What would have Happened if Nixon Hadn't Resigned?

Marcy Wheeler has labeled it "Brook Brothers Riot 2.0." (The first iteration of the Brooks Brothers Riot was when Republican staffers interrupted the 2000 presidential vote recount in Miami-Dade County.) According to Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Nicholas Fandos (see "Republicans Grind Impeachment Inquiry to Halt as Evidence Mounts Against Trump"):

Chanting “Let us in! Let us in!” about two dozen Republican members of the House pushed past Capitol Police officers to enter the secure rooms of the House Intelligence Committee, where impeachment investigators have been conducting private interviews that have painted a damaging picture of the president’s behavior. 

The government official being interviewed was deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, Laura Cooper, who was providing the "smoking gun" in the form of testimony regarding Trump's hold on the hundreds of millions of dollars in security assistance for the U.S. banana republic on the Dnieper.

It's going to be hard, following the Taylor testimony, for the GOP to deny that Trump was involved in an illegal shakedown of the government of incoming Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. So they're resorting to circus theater, the next installment of which is going to feature a call to reveal the whistle-blower's identity, as if that matters at this point. Stolberg and Fandos note that

Indeed, some Republicans are growing increasingly uneasy about the inquiry, and fretting that it could get much, much worse for them. Publicly, they are taking their cues from the president, and Wednesday’s performance appeared intended to please Mr. Trump. The president has fumed publicly and privately that Republicans have not been tough enough in defending him, and has recently tried to undercut the inquiry by suggesting that the whistle-blower whose allegations touched it off is not credible or does not exist.

“Where’s the Whistleblower?” the president tweeted on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, the senior Republicans on the three investigative panels involved in the inquiry formally requested that Mr. Schiff arrange for public testimony by the whistle-blower, and all government officials the whistle-blower relied on to compile that account.

The Republicans will continue to spotlight MacGuffins as the impeachment inquiry rolls along. In a way it is a spectacular moment. We are living through counterfactual history. What would have happened if Nixon hadn't resigned in August 1974?

Nixon's resignation is a important moment in time because it kicked off the gestation period for our current zombie neoliberal paradigm.

So we're back to the future. It rarely happens in such a focused way.

Rojava and Impeachment

With the Turkish invasion of northeast Syria about to begin, Kurdish forces are vowing to resist. One can understand why. The Syrian towns of Tel Abyad and Ras al Ain, where Turkish forces are massing and where U.S. forces recently pulled back, lie at the center of Rojava.

The Pentagon has pledged to close theater airspace to Turkish F16 jets. Turkey used air power extensively to defeat the Kurds last year in Afrin. Maybe some of those Javelin anti-tank missiles sold to Ukraine can be diverted to the Kurds, leveling the playing field.

Trump has threatened Turkey with devastating reprisals if its invasion is bloody and destabilizing, at the same time he gave it the green light to go ahead. Congress could punish Turkey if Trump fails to:

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, addressed Turkey on his own Twitter account on Tuesday, warning the country not to go ahead with the operation.

“To the Turkish Government: You do NOT have a green light to enter into northern Syria,” Mr. Graham wrote. “There is massive bipartisan opposition in Congress, which you should see as a red line you should not cross.”

Trump has an equally big mess on his hands at home. White House counsel Pat Cipollone sent a letter yesterday to the U.S. House of Representatives declaring that the White House will not cooperate with the impeachment inquiry. Nancy Pelosi now needs to schedule a full vote of the House on impeachment. She wins that vote, Trump will likely tack back and provide some sort of limited cooperation.

The left case against impeachment, articulated by Taibbi and Urie, is that the whistleblower who got the ball rolling is not a real whistleblower but a spook and impeachment is a CIA-instigated coup. To which I say, okay, yes, you are right. But this doesn't mean that impeachment should be blocked or Trump defended. The underlying facts of Russiagate were never proven. The underlying facts of Ukrainegate are not even in dispute.

Taibbi says

The argument that’s supposed to be galvanizing everyone right now is the idea that we need to “stand up and be counted,” because failing to rally to the cause is effectively advocacy for Trump. This line of thinking is based on the presumption that Trump is clearly worse than the people opposing him.

That might prove to be true, but if we’re talking about the treatment of whistleblowers, Trump has a long way to go before he approaches the brutal record of the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, as well as the cheerleading Washington political establishment. Forgetting this is likely just the first in what will prove to be many deceptions about a hardcore insider political battle whose subtext is a lot more shadowy and ambiguous than news audiences are being led to believe.

My point is that impeachment is a galvanizing and informative exercise. Already the quality reporting that has been done on Ukrainian politics in the last week is much better than what has been delivered in the last three years.

Left Critics of Impeachment Going Silent

The left critique of impeachment has largely gone silent over the last few days. It's pretty much up to Aaron Mate to articulate it. His argument is somewhat sophistical -- but similar to the rhetorical sleight of hand that RT has been performing recently -- in that it reduces impeachment to a trial based on the edited and abridged telephone transcript produced by the White House of the July 25 Trump-Zelensky chat. But impeachment is an investigation launched by the House which produces articles to be judged in a trial conducted in the Senate. Impeachment is a process, and we are at the very beginning of that process.

Chris Hedges made a hash of his case against impeachment when he "debated" John Boniface on Democracy Now! There was really no debate because Hedges, looking uncomfortable in his role of impeachment skeptic, immediately capitulated and acknowledged that he was not opposed to impeachment; he was opposed to a narrow impeachment inquiry based solely on Ukraine. John Bonifaz agreed, reminding Hedges that impeachment is a broad and popular movement that has been focused on the emoluments clause of the Constitution and Trump's treatment of refugees and migrants.

Thomas Edsall has a worthwhile "It Can't Happen Here" article about the chances that Trump won't vacate the White House if he is convicted in impeachment trial or he loses the 2020 election.

The latest breaking news is the growing realization that the State Department will probably ignore some of the subpoenas from the House.

Finally, let's not forget that impeachment is not just a crisis in U.S. politics; it's a crisis in Ukraine's politics as well. This morning WSWS provides this helpful thumbnail sketch of Ukraine:

Imperialist war planners have historically considered the resource-rich Ukraine, which is geographically located at the crossroads between Europe and Asia and the strategically important Black Sea, as key to a domination of the Eurasian landmass. Control over Ukraine was central to the efforts of German imperialism to control Europe in both World War I and World War II, when the Nazis systematically worked with local bourgeois fascist forces to murder the country’s Jewish population and wage war against the Soviet Union.

Since the days of the Cold War, the US has been heavily involved in fostering right-wing political forces in the country to help bring it under its control. Following the dissolution of the USSR and the restoration of capitalism by the Stalinist bureaucracy, the Ukrainian oligarchy, while maintaining extensive ties to Germany and to some extent France, has been heavily dependent on and influenced by US imperialism. As a central component of the efforts of US imperialism to encircle and isolate Russia, both Republican and Democratic administrations have staged two “color revolutions,” in 2004 and in 2014, to bring to power pro-US presidents in Kiev.

Following the 2014 US- and EU-backed toppling of the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych with the heavy involvement of far-right forces, then US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland stated that the US had pumped some $5 billion into Ukrainian “civil society.” Since 2014, the US has stationed military advisers throughout the country, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) alone spent another $2 billion in Ukraine. 

Not Looking Good for Trump

There are good impeachment round-ups in both The New York Times and the Associated Press. Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal attorney who was tasked to ferret out juicy Russiagate tidbits and Biden dross in Kiev, was subpoenaed by the U.S. House of Representatives. Giuliani was given until October 15 to produce records showing that other Trump administration officials were working to get the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden. Giuliani made a statement on CNN in September to this effect.

It was reported that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was listening in on the July 25 call to Ukrainian president Zelensky. Pompeo will likely be subpoenaed soon.

The Times also has a story on the super-secret White House computer network, NICE, where the July 25 Trump-Zelensky chat was archived. There are ellipses in the phone transcript which happen to occur in places where Trump is asking Zelensky for an investigation:

Is the White House account of Trump’s Ukraine call accurate and complete?

Beyond the fact that the memo is not a verbatim transcript, it contains three ellipses where Mr. Trump was speaking — and each in a place where he was asking the Ukrainian president for investigations.

It is not clear if this indicates that Mr. Trump trailed off or that something was cut out of the reconstruction. It is also not clear whether any notes exist by American officials that would indicate whether he said anything more in those spots.

But one official said that any notes or draft documents discussed by two or more National Security Council officials counts as a “record” that may not lawfully be destroyed under the Presidential Records Act. However, the initial file produced by the voice-to-text software would not count as a record and could be lawfully deleted, the official said.

It's not looking good for Trump. I can't understand why guys like Ray McGovern are rushing to his defense.

Trump Tweeting Tough

Last night things did not go well for Trump and the GOP on the season premier of 60 Minutes. Worse, performance wise, than even the repeat whitewashing of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's refusal to answer basic questions about the telephone conversation between Trump and Zelensky, the transcript of which was published last week.

The Republican Party appears to be shakily lining up behind the president with a "see no evil" defense, leaving it to the president himself to throw the haymakers. According to Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker in "Trump Was Repeatedly Warned That Ukraine Conspiracy Theory Was ‘Completely Debunked’":

Mr. Trump continued his bellicose attacks on his accusers. “I want Schiff questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason,” he wrote on Twitter. And he threatened the whistle-blower, who is protected by law from retribution. “Was this person SPYING on the U.S. President? Big Consequences!”

[snip]

The White House put out Stephen Miller, the president’s senior adviser, to offer his defense on the Sunday talk show circuit. Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Miller denounced the whistle-blower as a “deep-state operative” who is part of a cabal of “unelected bureaucrats who think they need to take down this president.”

Patrick Martin noted that

Trump took to Twitter Saturday morning to denounce his Democratic opponents as “savages,” listing by name Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler, chair of the Judiciary Committee, and “AOC Plus 3,” a reference to four liberal Democratic congresswomen, all from minority backgrounds: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley.

It was widely noted in the media that Trump had chosen to target two Jews and four women of color as “savages,” a word with longstanding racist connotations that he has generally reserved for Central American gang leaders. His tweets will undoubtedly be followed by a new volley of threats of violence from Trump’s ultra-right supporters directed against the targeted Democrats.

This week the American public is about to enter the maze of Ukrainian politics. I'll be surprised if Schiff can maintain a coherent focus (see "How a Shadow Foreign Policy in Ukraine Prompted an Impeachment Inquiry" by Kenneth Vogel, Andrw Kramer and David Sanger):

Among the subjects covered in a subpoena sent Friday by House Democrats to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and demands for depositions from American diplomats was Mr. Trump’s decision to freeze a $391 million military aid package to Ukraine this summer not long before his July 25 call with Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who defeated Mr. Poroshenko this spring.

Democrats are also looking into the recall in the spring of the United States ambassador to Kiev, Marie L. Yovanovitch, a career foreign service officer who was seen as insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump by some of his conservative allies. On Friday evening, the State Department’s special envoy for Ukraine, Kurt Volker, abruptly resigned, not long after receiving a summons from House Democrats to sit for a deposition in the coming week.

So far, so good. At the end of this both Trump and the permanent Washington Consensus are going to be weakened.

The American Public will Soon be much More Knowledgeable about Ukrainian Politics

It does appear as if the Democratic leadership in the House is attempting to pour impeachment through the funnel of the U.S. war against Russia via Ukraine. It's a dangerous strategy, particularly if the GOP refuses to go along, in that it will open up to broader public scrutiny the Obama administration's legacy in Ukraine, something that is already happening.

In other words, the desired outcome, Trump and Biden both hoisted on a Ukrainian petard, is still a distinct possibility.

Below are some key quotes:

The Washington Post reported on Friday that Democratic leaders “are eyeing a fast-paced investigation.” A meeting of the Democratic caucus “urged the leadership to keep the messaging around impeachment on national security and the Ukraine probe” led by Schiff, “not on the litany of potential Trump offenses investigated by other panels, including the House Judiciary Committee, which traditionally takes the lead in impeachment proceedings.”

Some senior Democrats, the Post reported, “are even arguing that other committees should forego potentially explosive hearings that could distract from the intelligence panel’s work.” There will be “very few hearings, if any,” according to a senior Democratic Party aide, with most of the investigation taking place in “closed-door interviews.”

[snip]

The Democrats are seeking to frame the Ukraine issue as an extension of their neo-McCarthyite anti-Russia campaign. Pelosi argued along these lines in an interview with MSNBC on Friday morning. After noting that she “prays for the president all the time,” Pelosi declared, without evidence, that “Russia has a hand in this.”

Joseph Kishore, "CIA sets terms for Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into Trump’s crimes"

 ***

Mr. Volker, a widely respected former ambassador to NATO, served in the part-time, unpaid position of special envoy to help Ukraine resolve its armed confrontation with Russia-sponsored separatists.

[snip]

In recent months, the administration has lost John R. Bolton, the national security adviser; Fiona Hill, the top Europe official on the National Security Council staff; and Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, all of whom sympathized with Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.

Peter Baker, "Kurt Volker, Trump’s Envoy for Ukraine, Resigns" 

***

The subpoena for documents is far-reaching and mirrors early voluntary requests sent to the State Department and the White House. It demands a full transcript of the July call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky, a list of any State Department officials who listened to or received a readout of the call, and any records created by the department in relation to it. It also seeks any files related to efforts by the president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to push investigations into Mr. Biden or other matters involving Ukraine; and it calls for records related to the Trump administration’s decision to temporarily withhold $391 million in security aid from Ukraine.

Mr. Pompeo was given one week to produce the material.

Democrats presented their deposition requests as nonnegotiable, listing dates for early October appearances by officials who were either mentioned in a whistle-blower complaint released this week or are connected to American policy work in the region. They include Marie L. Yovanovitch, the former American ambassador to Ukraine; Kurt D. Volker, the United States special envoy to Ukraine; George Kent, a deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs; T. Ulrich Brechbuhl, a State Department counselor; and Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union.

Nicholas Fandos and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, "House Democrats Issue First Subpoena in Impeachment Inquiry" 

Why a Broad Impeachment Inquiry is a Good Idea

One criticism of the impeachment drive underway in the U.S. House of Representatives is that Democratic leadership is narrowing its focus solely to Trump's request that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky open an investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter. As Mehdi Hasan of The Intercept argues:

For House Democrats to wait this long and then impeach a reckless, lawless, racist, tax-dodging president only over his interactions with the president of Ukraine would be to effectively give Trump a clean bill of health on everything else. Going into an election year, Democrats would be unilaterally disarming — unable to offer further substantive criticisms of Trump’s crimes and abuses of power across the board. “Why didn’t you impeach him for it?” Republicans will ask.

[snip]

Do these Democrats take the public for fools? Few would dispute the uniqueness or seriousness of these Ukraine revelations. But are they really saying “everybody understands” Trump’s quid pro quo with the president of a foreign country, and the details of the specific case involving Hunter Biden, but not the illegal payment of hush money to a porn star? Or all of the corrupt behavior on display in front of their eyes? The brazen self-dealing? The daily violation of the emoluments clause?

[snip]

Read a history book. In 1868, Andrew Johnson became the first president to be impeached and, in his case, the House of Representatives adopted 11 articles of impeachment, ranging from his violation of the Tenure of Office Act to his attempt to “disgrace” Congress. A little over a century later, in 1974, the House Judiciary Committee passed three lengthy and detailed articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon, covering obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress. The first of those articles even cited Nixon’s “false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States” and his efforts “to cause prospective defendants, and individuals duly tried and convicted, to expect favored treatment and consideration in return for their silence or false testimony, or rewarding individuals for their silence or false testimony.” (Sound familiar?)

Andre Damon of World Socialist Web Site agrees about the folly of a narrow impeachment focus:

House Democratic leaders have made clear that they are keeping their impeachment investigation narrowly focused on the “national security” issues raised by Trump’s effort to recruit Zelensky into his factional battle with the Democrats.

They are seeking to exclude from the investigation Trump’s vicious persecution of refugees on the southern border, his misappropriation of Pentagon funds to build his border wall in defiance of Congress, and his broader moves to turn the United States into a personalist dictatorship.

“I think we need to focus on what this very clear threat to national security and to our Constitution is,” Democratic Representative Debbie Dingell told the Washington Post. “We are going to focus on this particular matter,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said.

Neither Hasan nor Damon mention Yemen, which should be included as an impeachment article. U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led war on Yemen was never approved; in fact, Congress opposed U.S. involvement by invoking the War Powers Act. How can U.S. fight in a war based solely on presidential fiat? It can't.

Another fruitful line of inquiry that could be pursued in a broad impeachment investigation is the entire trip down the DNC hack rabbit hole. Both the whistle-blower complaint and the transcript of the Trump-Zelensky telephone conversation show Trump's interest in locating the holy grail DNC server in Ukraine. The conspiracy theory, as Craig Murray helpfully explains this morning in "Heroes, Villains and Establishment Hypocrisy," is that Crowdstrike, the shadowy cyber-security firm burrowed in the roots of Russiagate, spirited the hacked DNC server off to Ukraine:

As far as I am aware, the BBC have not reported at all the other thing Trump was asking Zelensky about – Crowdstrike. Regular readers will recall that Crowdstrike are the Clinton linked “cyber-security” company which provided the “forensic data” to the FBI on the alleged Russian hack of the DNC servers – data which has been analysed by my friend Bill Binney, former Technical Director of the NSA, who characterises it as showing speeds of transfer impossible by internet and indicating a download to an attached drive. The FBI were never allowed access to the actual DNC server – and never tried, taking the DNC’s consultants word for the contents, which itself is sufficient proof of the bias of the “investigation”.

Crowdstrike also made the claim that the same Russia hackers – “Fancy Bear” – who hacked the DNC, hacked Ukrainian artillery software causing devastating losses of Ukrainian artillery. This made large headlines at the time. What did not make any MSM headlines was the subsequent discovery that all of this never happened and the artillery losses were entirely fictitious. As Crowdstrike had claimed that it was the use of the same coding in the DNC hack as in the preceding (non-existent) Ukraine artillery hack, that proved Russia hacked the DNC, this is pretty significant. Trump was questioning Zelensky about rumours the “hacked” DNC server was hidden in the Ukraine by Crowdstrike. The media has no interest in reporting any of that at all.

I know it's unlikely. Pelosi and Hoyer would sooner pull the plug on the whole impeachment process than risk a runaway train. But there's still a small chance at this point that a committee chair can make a stink and demand other issues be included.

Best-Case Scenario: Impeachment Hearings Doom both Trump and Biden

What's clear is that Trump doesn't want the full whistle-blower complaint revealed. Trump is willing to provide a transcript of his telephone conversation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who Trump will meet today at the United Nations, and he's willing to negotiate on the whistle blower providing testimony to congress, but as of now he is only considering the release of the complaint in redacted form. My guess is that there is a name or a description of an particular event that needs to be blacked out in order to prevent further inquiry.

When U.S. involvement in Ukraine is opened up to public scrutiny it is not going to play well for either party. Compared to Nixon scuttling peace talks with Vietnam in 1968, Trump's efforts to drum up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden seem insignificant. Trump sees impeachment as a "positive" for him. Newt Gingrich has declared “It is a win-win for Trump.” World Socialist Web Site encapsulates impeachment as

[A] significant escalation in the conflict within the US ruling elite between two right-wing factions: the Democrats, aligned with sections of the military-intelligence apparatus, and the Trump White House, which is turning to ever-more personalist and dictatorial forms of rule, based on fascistic appeals to the military, the border patrol and the police.

That being said, I think some good can come out impeachment hearings, depending on how much information is revealed about what the Obama administration was up to in Kiev. A best-case scenario is that hearings doom both Biden and Trump. It might be a bit of an outlier, but it could happen.

Trump Relishes Impeachment over Ukraine

The latest chapter in the Trump (non) impeachment saga is that

"President Trump personally ordered his staff to freeze more than $391 million in aid to Ukraine in the days before he pressed the new Ukrainian president to investigate the Democrats’ leading presidential candidate, two senior administration officials said Monday."

The story, in a nutshell, is that Trump wants the new Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to reopen an investigation into Burisma Holdings owner Mykola Zlochevsky. Zlochevsky paid Joe Biden's son Hunter -- what for is not clear -- but Trump implies that it was to get the vice president to sack the Ukrainian public prosecutor who was pursuing money laundering and other charges against Zlochevksy.

Last week's reporting on this was actually better than what has been reported this week (see "Acting Intelligence Chief Refuses to Testify, Prompting Standoff With Congress" by Julian Barnes and Nicholas Fandos). The Trump administration is refusing to turn over a whistle-blower complaint on the Ukrainian affair to Adam Schiff's House Intelligence Committee.

The law is clear on this. Congress is entitled to see the report. Congress has an oversight function. What Trump is doing is a violation of the separation of powers.

But Trump is playing Br'er Rabbitt here. He wants to be impeached. He'll split the careerist neoliberal Dems from the progressive Dems and highlight the party leadership's fecklessness -- something he has already accomplished. Plus, he'll spotlight Joe Biden's corruption, not to mention the coup swamp politics of the Obama administration in Ukraine.

Trump Must be Impeached for Waging an Undeclared War in Yemen

The story is a week old, but Conor Friedersdorf's "Saudi Arabia First" is worth checking out. A bevy of constitutional scholars, not to mention congressional representatives, want Nancy Pelosi to sue the White House over the U.S. waging war in Yemen, or, better yet, begin impeachment proceedings:

On its own, waging war after an official call from Congress to stop doing so ought to be regarded as a violation of the Constitution that warrants impeachment.

[snip]

Perhaps a lawsuit of the sort urged by some legal scholars who believe votes against wars cannot be constitutionally vetoed by the president would prove effective.

“I’m confident these new arms sales provides new momentum for pursuing legal action and legislation that would end U.S. involvement in the war,” Democratic Representative Ro Khanna stated on Twitter. “The lawsuit is important to uphold Congress’ constitutional War Powers & challenge President Trump’s veto of our Yemen WPR.”

But there is a more direct remedy available to Congress. So long as some of its members are invoking alleged obstruction of justice to justify impeachment proceedings, they ought to invoke abuse of the war power, too. The prospect of being removed from office is far more likely than even a successful lawsuit to deter this president and his successors from usurping the legislature’s authority.

Democrats Adrift: There Will Be No Impeachment

It is obvious at this point that Pelosi is not going to change her tune about impeachment (see Lisa Mascaro's "Speaker Nancy Pelosi remains cautious on impeachment talk"). A reading of Mueller's statement reveals that he is not urging congress to begin impeachment proceedings; rather, he says that the special counsel cannot bring the president to justice for obstructing justice: “[T]he Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting President of wrongdoing.”

That's it. Not much of a ringing endorsement of all the breathless reporting in the mainstream media about Trump being a Kremlin stooge. Even the truly odious Adam Schiff, singing from the Pelosi hymn book, declines to support impeachment.

Mueller does uphold the basic narrative though. He asserts Russia interfered in the 2016 election. Mueller just couldn't uncover any evidence that the Trump campaign worked with Russian agents, and he doesn't absolve the president of wrongdoing for impeding his investigation.

So basically we are back to where we started, which is nowhere. Democrats concocted a "stab in the back" hypothesis to explain Trump's victory. But they never bothered to explain how revealing Hillary's speech to Goldman Sachs or the DNC's systematic efforts to torpedo Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign or the fake Facebook accounts illuminating the Clinton record on criminal justice actually led to her loss of the White House. To do so would be to admit that their candidate is truly horrible and didn't deserve to be anointed.

Now the Democratic rank'n'file feel set adrift. They have been told to resist, to fight the stab in the back, but now their leaders refuse to fight.

Rank'n'File Democrats Rueing Anew Pelosi's Leadership

Democratic dithering over impeachment (see Nicholas Fandos' "Democratic Calls for Impeachment Inquiry Grow as Leaders Instead Vow to Toughen Tactics") is splitting its caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives. The latest humiliation is former White House counsel Donald McGahn ignoring a subpoena to appear being the House Judiciary Committee.

Trump is on firm footing here. Congress is significantly more unpopular than the president. Trump can continue to defy the feckless Democratic leadership of the House and the result will be a widening split between Pelosi and the rank'n'file of her party because Pelosi will do everything in her power to slow-walk any confrontation with the White House.

Interestingly, Fandos reports that the Dems have yet to bring contempt charges against AG Barr to a vote of the full House:

Mr. McGahn may become a test case. He skipped the Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday after being instructed to do so by the White House, leaving an empty chair where Democrats had hoped he could serve as a star eyewitness. In ordering him not to appear, the president cited a Justice Department legal opinion that the Constitution gives senior presidential aides “absolute immunity” from congressional subpoenas compelling them to testify about their official work.

In addition to fighting those claims in court, Democrats indicated that they would swiftly move to hold Mr. McGahn in contempt, perhaps taking the case straight to the House floor rather than waiting for a committee vote. They are newly considering altering House rules to allow for so-called inherent contempt penalties, like fines, people familiar with internal discussions said.

The Judiciary Committee has already voted to recommend that the full House hold Attorney General William P. Barr in contempt for his defiance of another subpoena asking for Mr. Mueller’s full report and underlying evidence. Democratic leaders had been stalling on bringing the contempt citation to the floor of the full House, but have not indicated they will accelerate a vote when they return in June from the Memorial Day recess.

Ms. Pelosi is said to be newly open to pulling Mr. Trump’s policy priorities into the fray, too. Thus far, she had refused to touch some of Congress’s traditional leverage buttons, like government appropriations bills. They could force Mr. Trump to reassess his approach, but also run the risk of backfiring on Democrats.

Pelosi is trying to thread the needle. She needs to keep all popular agitation within the caucus to a minimum while maintaining voter motivation going into a presidential election year. The endgame is to keep the Democratic Party in the thrall of large donors. It's not that impeachment hearings will guarantee Trump's reelection; it's that impeachment will accelerate the leftward shift of the party, create new leaders, mobilize a hungry, activist base that will not be Obama-ized this turn of the wheel.

Trump knows how rotten the Democratic Party is at the top, and he's playing the moribund leadership for all its worth.

Trump Guarantees Himself a One-Term Presidency if He Vetoes the War Powers Act Resolution on Yemen

AP has an extensive story (see Ahmed al-Haj's "Cholera is surging once again in war-ravaged Yemen") about a doubling of reported cholera cases in Yemen.

It took a while but yesterday the U.S. House of Representatives voted to end military involvement in Yemen (see Catie Edmondson's "U.S. Role in Yemen War Will End Unless Trump Issues Second Veto"),

What was particularly encouraging about the vote is that the GOP's ultimate nullifier, crying wolf over anti-Semitism in form of an anti-BDS amendment, failed to work this go-round. There was Democratic unity. The War Powers Act resolution passed 247-to-176, "with 16 Republicans joining all House Democrats."

Now it is on to the White House for a promised Trump veto, which will amount to a new presidential power to declare war unilaterally with a mere one-third support in either chamber of congress.

The silver lining of a veto is that it will be political suicide for Trump; it will box him in with his hard-shell minority, a base from which he cannot win a national election.

A veto will also create a legitimate, non-Mueller-oriented movement to impeach Trump for waging an illegal war.

There Will be Impeachment

Given that the Democrats were going to take back the House anyway prior to Trump consigliere Michael Cohen pleading guilty to, among other things, violating federal campaign finance law by paying hush money to two of Trump's former paramours; and given that there was going to be a leadership battle in the House Democratic caucus; now it is inevitable that there will be impeachment. A zombie-like Nancy Pelosi, on record of being reticent about pursuing impeachment, will have to pledge allegiance to the cause if she is to have any hope of becoming Speaker again.

What makes it interesting is that if articles of impeachment manage to clear the House, the Republicans in the Senate will be placed on a very hot seat -- all in the run up to a presidential election. It is going to be hard to apply the brakes. It could be a runaway train.

From "Legal noose tightens around Trump White House" by Patrick Martin:

The logic of the Cohen case was best summed up by one of his own lawyers, Lanny J Davis, a veteran of the Clinton White House during its defense against impeachment. If what Cohen did in relation to the payoffs to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal was a crime, Davis argued, and he did it on behalf of and for the benefit of candidate Donald Trump, then Trump is also guilty of a crime. Last month Davis released an audio recording Cohen had made of Trump admitting to knowing of the payment made to silence McDougal.

From "A One-Two Punch Puts Trump Back on His Heels" by Mark Landler, Michael Shear and Maggie Haberman:

Still, Mr. Cohen was blunt about the president’s culpability as he stood in court and admitted his guilt: “In coordination with, and at the direction of, a candidate for federal office,” Mr. Cohen said he conspired with a media company to keep secret Mr. Trump’s affair with Stephanie Clifford, a pornographic film actress known as Stormy Daniels.

“Mr. Cohen, when you took all of these acts that you’ve described, did you know that what you were doing was wrong and illegal?” the judge asked. Mr. Cohen answered, “Yes, your honor.”

The startling charge directed at Mr. Trump carried echoes of President Richard M. Nixon, who was named an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the special prosecutor’s investigation of Watergate.

And it raised the prospect that Mr. Trump’s presidency could be at risk by impeachment in Congress even if the sprawling Russia investigation never definitively concludes that there was collusion or obstruction of justice.

[snip]

“I think impeachment is now squarely going to define the midterms,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist who has been critical of Mr. Trump. “It’s inescapable now that Democrats can legitimately raise that issue.”

He added, “There’s a lot of Republican members of Congress sitting in tough districts that are going to have to really think hard about how they’re going to finesse this in the days ahead.”

What makes it harder for Republicans, he said, is that this did not emerge from the Mueller inquiry. “This isn’t something from the deep state,” he said. “This is a classic B-team type of bumbling screw-up of covering up mistresses.”

And, he added, “It’ll be very hard to distance the president. You would assume that there’s legitimate evidence that the president was aware that those invoices were not for services rendered. You already have the one tape.”

Russophobia Alone is Not Going to Work for Democrats

Yesterday afternoon I was ready to declare that Trump is in real trouble based on a reading of Nate Silver's article from Wednesday, "Donald Trump’s Base Is Shrinking":

...Trump’s base seems to be eroding. There’s been a considerable decline in the number of Americans who strongly approve of Trump, from a peak of around 30 percent in February to just 21 or 22 percent of the electorate now. (The decline in Trump’s strong approval ratings is larger than the overall decline in his approval ratings, in fact.) Far from having unconditional love from his base, Trump has already lost almost a third of his strong support. And voters who strongly disapprove of Trump outnumber those who strongly approve of him by about a 2-to-1 ratio, which could presage an “enthusiasm gap” that works against Trump at the midterms. The data suggests, in particular, that the GOP’s initial attempt (and failure) in March to pass its unpopular health care bill may have cost Trump with his core supporters.

But then this morning there is the news that Republican Greg Gianforte handily beat Rob Quist, darling of the Bernistas, in the Montana special election to fill Ryan Zinke's at-large congressional district seat, and this despite Gianforte being charged with assault on the eve of the election.

The anti-Trump mainstream press is spinning the result by closing the barn door after the pony has departed the farm, saying that, well, Quist never really had a chance to win. Here's a sample from Nate Silver's "What Went Down In The Montana Special Election":

Our vantage point is that we’re mostly looking at special elections in terms of how they might predict 2018. A night where Democrats are losing Montana by “only” 6 or 7 points is consistent with the sort of map you might see if Democrats were either taking over the House, or coming pretty close to it.

On the other hand, our expectations were already pretty high for Democrats. The opposition party — the party that doesn’t hold the White House — usually does well in midterm elections. And Trump is not a popular guy. The Democrats have plenty of issues, like the GOP’s unpopular health care bill, to campaign upon. This isn’t complicated stuff. You’d expect them to do pretty well under such circumstances, and to have a decent shot — let’s call it 50 to 60 percent — of taking over the House.

This result in Montana doesn’t change our priors much, therefore. Furthermore, it’s a somewhat quirky race, given that Quist and (especially) Gianforte both have their issues as candidates, and that Montana has been a little bit more competitive in Congressional and statewide races than in races for the presidency. Quist winning by 1 or losing by 13 might have called for a recalibration of our assumptions; we don’t think this result does.

We have a situation where Trump is losing his true believers at the same time the Democrats are trying to find true believers based on a new McCarthyism. It is a race to the bottom. While the touts at FiveThirtyEight are proclaiming, based on the numbers, that control of the House should shift to the Democrats. The problem with this is all the Dems are offering voters is an infantile, delusional complaint that it is all Russia's fault.

Look at this morning's lede unsigned editorial "President Trump Fails NATO," in the "newspaper of record":

That Mr. Trump and the allies were unable to agree on a common approach toward Russia was also worrisome. Moscow has become increasingly aggressive as Mr. Putin annexed Crimea, waged war in eastern Ukraine, meddled in the American and European elections and intervened militarily in Syria. The most that emerged from a meeting between Mr. Trump and Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, was that the two shared the “same line” on Ukraine.

All told, Mr. Trump’s commitment to NATO and America’s tradition of leadership remain very much up in the air. Should the president abdicate both, no one would be happier than Vladimir Putin.

If Russia were an aggressive power, shattering states right and left, forever on the offensive, this pitch might find an eager audience. Instead it's an upside-down view of the world. Russia is acting overwhelming in a defensive manner. The deep-state Democratic Party is asking voters to embrace a Bizarro World. That's a tough sell.

Trump is peddling a similar product. Rather than Russophobia, Trump is pitching Wahhabi-philia. It is not just the reality of Trumpcare upsetting his true believers; it's Trump's cavorting with the sheikhs and failing to collaborate with Russia to role up ISIS that is prompting his die-hard supporters to calve off from the base. Once this happens, once your vanguard crumbles, the rout is on. (A modified form of this happened with Obama in 2013.)

It surprised me that on Tuesday David Brooks, "The Alienated Mind," nonchalantly referred to Trump's impeachment as inevitable:

As the impeachment investigation proceeds, it’ll be important for us Trump critics to not set our hair on fire every day, to evaluate the evidence as if it were against a president we ourselves voted for. Would we really throw our own candidate out of office for this?

But in order for that to happen, Democrats have to take back the House next year. Russophobia alone is not going to get that done.

Democrats Likely to Take Back the House in 2018

It's looking good for the shiftless, Russophobic Democrats to reclaim the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms. Harry Enten ran the numbers in "Democrats Don’t Need Trump’s Voters To Retake The House":

[O]pinions of the incumbent president and House voting patterns have become more closely linked in recent midterms. The president’s party has lost at least 83 percent of voters who disapprove of the president’s job in every midterm since 1994. In none did the president’s party win more than 87 percent of those who approved of the president’s job.² These statistics are not good news for Republicans if Trump’s current approval rating (40 percent among voters) and current disapproval rating (55 percent) holds through the midterm. Even if Trump’s Republican Party wins the recent high water mark of 87 percent of those who approve of the job the president is doing and loses only 83 percent of those who disapprove, Republicans would still lose the House popular vote by 7 percentage points.³ That could be enough for them to lose the House.

Then in 2019, with Democrats controlling the House and a base thirsty for blood, we can look forward to impeachment proceedings.

I consider the Watergate Era a cultural high point for the nation (if only because it produced Neil Young's Ditch Trilogy). So I'm hoping that another impeachment of a Republican president will get the body politic's creative juices flowing again.

Keystone XL, Ukraine and the Disconnect of Ruling Elites

The United States is a nation in crisis. This is clear from the reaction to what is happening in Ukraine. The animal-like shrieking set off by Russia's move to establish control of the Crimean peninsula is evidence of a country seriously off its rocker. And mind you, it is not the masses who have set up this wail. There is more evidence of mass mobilization over Obama's pending approval of the Keystone XL pipeline than anything having to do with what is going on in Ukraine. But you wouldn't know that from reading "the paper of record." Despite the fact that 300 people were arrested this past Sunday protesting Keystone XL in front of the White House, the Gray Lady chose to focus Monday morning on a pro-putsch rally of less than 300, mostly Ukrainian-Americans, that took place the previous day in midtown Manhattan.

The shrieking is coming from the elite. This is clearly on display each day in the pages of the New York Times. Take for instance today's story by Peter Baker, "Debate Over Who, in U.S., Is to Blame for Ukraine":

Most provocative, perhaps, was Senator Lindsey Graham, who faces a Republican primary challenge from the right in South Carolina. He traced the Ukrainian crisis to the 2012 attack on the United States diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, that killed the envoy to Libya and three other Americans. “It started with Benghazi,” Mr. Graham said on Twitter. “When you kill Americans and nobody pays a price, you invite this type of aggression.” He added in another post: “Putin basically came to the conclusion after Benghazi, Syria, Egypt — everything Obama has been engaged in — he’s a weak indecisive leader.”

This is the same Lindsey Graham who threatened punishing consequences for the Karzai government if it went ahead with a release of prisoners suspected of being affiliated with the Taliban. Well, the prisoners were released and as of yet no punishment.

Senator Graham might be forgiven since slapping around the black guy in the White House plays well to the Tea Party primary voters. But what about the U.S. State Department releasing a tendentious reply to Putin's press conference the other day? "10 False Claims About Ukraine" is an embarrassing attempt to staunch the daily information war losses to U.S. credibility. It is somewhat effective in creating the impressive that ethnic Russians are not under direct assault from their Ukrainian brethren. Of course, it never directly engages in the unpleasant facts regarding the looting of the arsenal in Lviv by Banderists, which prompted Yanukovych to flee Kiev after his security detail deserted, nor the prompt rescinding of the official status of the Russian language by the putsch parliament.

Today C.J. Chivers has a story, "One Goal in Hand, Kiev’s Demonstrators Vow to Stay ‘Until the End’," where he strolls the Maidan and describes the continuing mobilization of street fighters. What's noteworthy is how he airbrushes the history of collaboration with the Nazis and participation in the Holocaust by ultranationalist groups from Ukraine's west who hail Stepan Bandera as their patron saint:

The sotni formed in the tradition of western Ukraine’s World War II-era guerrillas, men who fought for Ukrainian independence even after the war, fighting the Soviets well into the 1950s. Some of the groups are nationalistic to the point of being ultra-right-wing. Among them, at least on the margins, are factions that many fellow Ukrainians regard as anti-Semitic and reactionary, including Right Sector, which commands Sotnya No. 23.

Back to the State Department's rebuttal of Putin, what is particularly weak is its defense of the legitimacy of the putsch government:

Mr. Putin says: Ukraine’s government is illegitimate. Yanukovych is still the legitimate leader of Ukraine. 

The Facts: On March 4, President Putin himself acknowledged the reality that Yanukovych “has no political future.” After Yanukovych fled Ukraine, even his own Party of Regions turned against him, voting to confirm his withdrawal from office and to support the new government. Ukraine’s new government was approved by the democratically elected Ukrainian Parliament, with 371 votes – more than an 82% majority. The interim government of Ukraine is a government of the people, which will shepherd the country toward democratic elections on May 25th – elections that will allow all Ukrainians to have a voice in the future of their country.

Ukraine has a constitutional process for removing a sitting president. It is called impeachment. We have it in the United States too. A trial must be conducted. It takes time. The States Department knows this. The State Department knows the the putsch government is illegitimate. The State Department is lying.

But let's return to the top of the post and those young college students who are willing to go to jail to prevent the export of tar sands via pipeline from Canada to port terminals in Texas. The U.S. strategy to weaken Russia is to speed the export of North America's natural gas bonanza by means of rapid construction of liquefied natural gas terminals at the nation's ports. Coral Davenport and Steven Erlanger have the story, "U.S. Hopes Boom in Natural Gas Can Curb Putin." Thomas Friedman indulged this fantasy in his column yesterday. The idea is that if the U.S. can flood overseas markets with natural gas, Europe will not be so vulnerably dependent on Gazprom and Putin will be neutered.

Of course there is hardly any mention how controversial this method, fracking, is that led to the current U.S. abundance of natural gas. Los Angeles recently banned it in the city limits.

Once again, governmental elites are totally disconnected from reality. Given the current trajectory, the situation cannot be maintained for too much longer.