Tag: GOP now the party of corruption

‘Weak’: Former White House counsel breaks down why McConnell’s arguments on impeachment ‘precedent’ are deeply flawed

AlterNet logoSenate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t consider himself an “impartial juror” in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial and that he will be coordinating with Trump in the weeks ahead. One of the Kentucky Republican’s arguments is that Trump’s impeachment, unlike the impeachment of Present Bill Clinton in the late 1990s, has not been handled in a fair way. But former White House Counsel Bob Bauer, in a January 16 article for Benjamin Wittes’ Lawfare website, lays out some of reasons why McConnell’s arguments on impeachment “precedent” are misleading.

McConnell has argued that Trump’s impeachment in the U.S. House of Representatives was handled in an overtly “partisan” manner by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and other Democrats — while Clinton’s impeachment in the late 1990s was not. Bauer totally disagrees.

“McConnell’s history is weak,” Bauer asserts. “More than 90% of the House Republicans voted for Clinton’s impeachment; more than 90% of Republican senators voted for convicting him. By any measure, among lawmakers, there was overwhelming Republican Party support for ousting a Democratic president from office. McConnell’s professed claims of historically unprecedented partisanship is founded on the pointless distinction between fully party-line and just-over-90% party-line support.” Continue reading.

New allegations, watchdog report complicate GOP position on impeachment trial

The Hill logoA flood of captivating new details surrounding President Trump‘s dealings with Ukraine has spilled out into the public just as the Senate begins the impeachment trial, putting fresh pressure on GOP leaders to consider witnesses and new documents.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) on Thursday issued a stunning report, accusing the White House budget office of breaking the law by withholding military aid to Ukraine — the very issue at the heart of the Democrats’ impeachment effort.

Separately, a close associate of Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, has delivered a trove of information to House Democrats related to Giuliani’s campaign to pressure Ukrainian leaders to find dirt on the president’s political rivals. Lev Parnas, a Soviet-born Florida businessman facing unrelated campaign-finance charges in New York, is also making the media rounds to deliver a damning message: Trump, he says, was privy to the pressure campaign from the start. Continue reading.

Impeachment Trial Witnesses: Who the Senate Should Call and What They Know

Center for American Progress logoPresident Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) are engaged in a cover-up by trying to prevent the Senate from holding a fair impeachment trial. They are attempting to block witnesses from testifying because it is clear that these witnesses will provide damning evidence against the president.

Most of what we know about these potential witnesses’ roles has come from testimony or press reports. In some cases, such as those of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, it also comes from public statements they themselves have made.

Pompeo, Mulvaney, former national security adviser John Bolton, and Vice President Mike Pence can testify to the president’s direct involvement in the plot to extort Ukraine. The other witnesses, who played roles in implementing the White House’s scheme, can shed light on what they did and on whose orders they did it. Furthermore, the documents they possess could corroborate the allegations against Trump. It is vital that Congress and the American public learn the truth—which means it is vital that the Senate hold a full trial and demand that the administration produce the witnesses and documents it is trying desperately to hide. Continue reading.

Legal experts perplexed why Trump-appointed judge who donated to Trump’s campaign refuses to rule on Trump tax case

AlterNet logoLegal experts are scratching their heads after a federal judge appointed by President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday he is delaying handing down his decision in a Trump tax returns case until other federal judges hand down their decisions in other Trump cases. That judge is a former Trump transition team volunteer and has donated to the Trump campaign.

District Judge Trevor McFadden of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia announced he will hold up his ruling in a case brought by the House Ways and Means Committee against the U.S. Treasury Dept. The case involves gaining access to six years of Trump’s tax returns. The law clearly says the IRS “shall” hand them over to Congress. The Trump administration says Congress has no right to investigate. Continue reading “Legal experts perplexed why Trump-appointed judge who donated to Trump’s campaign refuses to rule on Trump tax case”

A GOP congressman tweeted a fake image of Obama with the Iranian President. They never met.

Washington Post logoRep. Paul A. Gosar, an Arizona Republican whose history of inflammatory social media posts has made him Internet infamous, tweeted a doctored picture of President Barack Obama shaking hands with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in an apparent effort to criticize the former U.S. leader’s Iran policy.

The tweet, sent Monday afternoon, is captioned: “The world is a better place without these guys in power.” It features a fake photo that was debunked more than four years ago. In the falsified image, Obama and Rouhani are posing, hands clasped and smiling, in front of two American flags and a poorly altered Iranian one.

But Obama and Rouhani never met in person, and, while Obama left office in 2017, Rouhani is still in power. The real photo was taken at a 2011 meeting between Obama and then-Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Continue reading.

The decade Republicans hijacked our democracy — via the gerrymander

AlterNet logoAs this decade comes to a close, 59 million Americans live in a state where one or both chambers of the state legislature is controlled by the party that got fewer votes in the 2018 election.

In Wisconsin in 2018, voters elected a Democratic U.S. senator, defeated an incumbent Republican governor, picked Democrats for every statewide office, and favored Democratic candidates for the state assembly by more than 200,000 ballots. Republicans nevertheless controlled more than 63 percent of the seats.

We end the 2020s with voter purges in Ohio, Wisconsin and Georgia, with precinct closures weaponized to lower voter participation across the South, with Texas, Tennessee and Florida making it harder to register new voters. The ball drops on the 2010s with state legislatures in Florida, Michigan and Missouri willing to undo voting reforms approved by upwards of 60 percent of the people via initiative. Continue reading

Top House Republican gets slammed for blatantly lying about the FBI investigation of Trump campaign aides

AlterNet logoHouse Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy pushed blatantly false allegations about the FBI investigation into four associates of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign over the weekend — lies that were retweeted more than 34,000 times at the time of this writing.

He claimed that the recent Justice Department inspector general report showed that “The FBI broke into President Trump’s campaign, spied on him, then tried to cover it up.” In fact, the report demonstrated clearly that McCarthy’s claim wasn’t true.

In the Fox News video clip accompanying the tweet, McCarthy explained what he meant by saying the FBI “broke into” the campaign: “They broke into his campaign by bringing people into it. They have been trying to cover it up for the whole time.” Continue reading

Former GOP senator warns Republicans they must ‘put country over party’ — ‘before it’s too late’

AlterNet logoWhen Arizona Republican Jeff Flake was serving in the U.S. Senate, he could be critical of President Donald Trump at times yet wasn’t a full-fledged Never Trump conservative like Washington Post columnist Max Boot, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough or GOP strategists Rick Wilson and Ana Navarro. And in an op-ed for the Washington Post, he addresses his former colleagues and urges them to “put country over party” when the time comes to serve as jurors in President Donald Trump’s Senate trial.

With Trump having been indicted on two articles of impeachment by the Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can send them to the Senate for a trial —although she is holding onto them for now over concerns that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has no intention of honestly evaluating the articles.

Flake tells Republicans he used to serve with in the Senate, “I don’t envy you…. President Trump is on trial. But in a very real sense, so are you. And so is the political party to which we belong.” Continue reading

Former GOP lawmaker admits party members forced to agree with ‘psychologically unfit’ Trump — or consider retirement

AlterNet logoIn interviews with the New York Times, Republican lawmakers past and present admit that Donald Trump has such a hold on the party that there is little choice but to go along with his policies and defend him or face his wrath and consider retirement.

The report notes, “Just under four years after he began his takeover of a party to which he had little connection, Mr. Trump enters 2020 burdened with the ignominy of being the first sitting president to seek re-election after being impeached,” adding, “But he does so wearing a political coat of armor built on total loyalty from G.O.P. activists and their representatives in Congress. If he does not enjoy the broad admiration Republicans afforded Ronald Reagan, he is more feared by his party’s lawmakers than any occupant of the Oval Office since at least Lyndon Johnson.”According to one former GOP lawmaker from Michigan, he was faced with the dilemma of bucking the president in 2017, and knew what would happen if he did. Continue reading “Former GOP lawmaker admits party members forced to agree with ‘psychologically unfit’ Trump — or consider retirement”

Among The Republicans, Debauchery And Blasphemy Reign

Since Nov. 8, 2016, I have stumbled about in a country I do not recognize — a mean and narrow place where toddlers are snatched from their mothers’ arms as they try desperately to find sanctuary, where NATO is denounced but Russia is courted, where the president mocks children, the dead and the disabled to the rapturous cheers of his cult following. The recent impeachment proceedings have left me more profoundly confused.

President Donald Trump has so remade the Republican Party that it, too, is unrecognizable — a clown car of lapdogs whose use of the English language would likely startle even George Orwell. Up is not merely down; gravity no longer exists. Neither do facts.

Trumpists have resorted not only to distortions and fabrications but also to nonsensical demands to show their loyalty to dear leader. Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-AL) offered the sole amendment to the articles of impeachment in the House Rules Committee, insisting that Trump’s behavior was no different from that of President Barack Obama. If Trump is to be impeached, Byrne argued, so Obama should have been, as well.

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