“It starts one hour, one hour,” said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), explaining how the questioning moves beyond one-hour blocks for each side. “Then it goes 45, 45, 45, 45, with breaks, occasionally, and breaks for lunch.”
View the complete October 16 article by Paul Kane on The Washignton Post website here.
GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel earned widespread mockery on Tuesday after she went on the attack against former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
Hunter Biden has faced scrutiny for his involvement with a Ukrainian oil company while his father served as vice president, who conducted diplomacy in the region. Hunter Biden gave something of a defense of his actions in a new interview with ABC, though he conceded he showed “poor judgment” by working with foreign companies while his father was in office.
McDaniel pilloried Hunter, but in doing so, she opened herself up to predictable accusations of hypocrisy:
“The notion that you can withhold information and documents from Congress” is “wrong,” Gowdy said in 2012.Former GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy — once an advocate of Congress’s oversight powers — has been tapped to join President Donald Trump’s personal legal team in its fight against the House impeachment inquiry.
“I am pleased to announce that former Congressman Trey Gowdy is joining our team as Counsel to the President,” Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow said in a statement Wednesday night. “I have known Trey for years and worked with him when he served in Congress. His legal skills and his advocacy will serve the President well. Trey’s command of the law is well known and his service on Capitol Hill will be a great asset as a member of our team.”
Trump told reporters on Thursday that Gowdy could not formally join the team until January 2020 due to lobbying restrictions.
View the complete October 9 article by Dareh Gregorian on the NBC News website here.
As Donald Trump finds himself at the center of an impeachment inquiry, his backers in right-wing media have been working overtime to play defense for the embattled president. From Fox & Friends in the morning to Hannity and Tucker Carlson Tonight in the evening, Fox News has remained (mostly) unwavering in its defense of Trump. Breitbart, The Daily Wire, the New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, and so many other constants of conservative commentary have dutifully deflected and defended their political champion.
However, it wasn’t so long ago that conservative media sang a different tune on impeachment. Barack Obama’s time in office marked a period of rapid-fire demands from right-wing media for the president’s removal from office. It’s instructive to see how much the bar for “high crimes and misdemeanors” has shifted since then, helping gauge how seriously we should take the words of conservative pundits when the president is a member of their own party.
Less than two months after Obama took office, right-wing radio host Michael Savage declared, “I think it is time to start talking about impeachment.” He was angry about Obama’s use of executive actions, and he called the American people “a bunch of schmucks” for sitting idly as they were “watching a dictatorship emerge in front of their eyes.” Despite occasional criticism, Savage has been largely supportive of Trump and recently accused Nancy Pelosi of being an “illegitimate speaker” of the House intent on destroying the Constitution by opening a Trump impeachment inquiry.
Despite pledging not to, Duffy voted to roll back the protections he will need to use after his ninth child is born.Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI) announced on Monday that he will soon resign his House seat, citing family reasons. He and his wife, Fox News contributor Rachel Campos-Duffy, said their soon-to-be born ninth child will require heart surgery soon after her birth.
On Tuesday, Duffy explained that he had made sure the child will have access to health insurance despite her pre-existing conditions.
It is laudable that the Duffy family is preparing to provide as much care as possible for a child with serious medical challenges. But as a congressman, Duffy voted to take away those same important protections for others with pre-existing conditions — directly contradicting his own campaign promises.
View the complete August 27 article by Josh Israel on the ThinkProgress website here.
The bipartisan congressional leadership and White House reached a two-year budget deal on Monday, seemingly averting another government shutdown and preventing a default on the national debt that has grown to an all-time high under President Donald Trump.
But despite previously backing the 2017 tax cuts for the rich that have helped fuel the largest monthly budget deficits in American history, several self-styled deficit hawks in Congress are now signaling their opposition based on claims of fiscal conservationism.
The deal — which Trump praised on Twitter as “a real compromise in order to give another big victory to our Great Military and Vets!” — will provide more than $1.3 trillion for agency spending for each of the next two years and suspend the nation’s debt limit until after the election. This will prevent the government from defaulting on its debt payments for the first time in history and avert some of the spending cuts agreed to in the 2011 Budget Control Act.
View the complete July 23 article by Josh Israel on the ThinkProgress website here.
Last week, before Trump’s buffoonish cave on his attempt to hijack the census, Greg Sargent wrote about Attorney General William Barr’s emerging role as Trump’s enabler in undermining the rule of law — first in the census case, then in the challenge to the Affordable Care Act.
The connection between the two is straightforward, according to University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley. “In both, Barr directed his lawyers to make bad-faith arguments, just because Trump said so,” Bagley told Sargent. “That’s a blow to the integrity of the Justice Department and a threat to the rule of law.”
As with much else about the Trump administration, the bad-faith arguments are nothing new; Republicans have long been the party of bad faith. The most notorious Supreme Court decisions of recent years — from Bush v. Gore through Shelby County, Citizens United and more — can all be attributed to bad faith arguments and actions by the justices involved.
View the complete July 14 article by Paul Rosenberg from Salon on the AlterNet website here.
President Trump on Monday said he would make a nomination to the Supreme Court if there’s a vacancy before the 2020 presidential election.
“Would I do that? Of course,” Trump said in an exclusive interview with The Hill when asked if he would try to fill a high court vacancy during election season.
The position is an apparent reversal for the president, who as a candidate in 2016 backed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) decision to block former President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the high court.
View the complete June 24 article by Jordan Fabian and Saagar Enjeti on The Hill website here.
The Democrats have held the majority in the House for five months and the only public oversight hearing to shine a light on the administration’s behavior happened four months ago. I’m speaking of Michael Cohen’s testimony in which he figuratively pointed a finger at the Republicans and said:
I’m responsible for your silliness, because I did the same thing that you’re doing now for 10 years — I protected Mr. Trump for 10 years. Everybody’s job at the Trump Organization is to protect Mr. Trump. Every day, most of us knew we were coming in and we were going to lie for him on something. And that became the norm. That’s exactly what’s happening right now in this country, and it’s exactly what’s happening here in government.
It was riveting testimony from a witness who was anxious to testify against the president. He was probably the last of those. Trump’s other accomplices have shown no inclination to see the error of their ways. As Cohen was when he worked for the Trump Organization, they are fully committed to protecting the boss. They also seem to be quite sure they won’t end up like Cohen if they refuse to cooperate with Congress and they don’t seem to fear of other legal consequences. If you didn’t know better you’d think they were part of a mob syndicate that has the system wired and all the important people in their pockets.
View the complete June 10 article by Heather Digby Parton from Salon on the AlterNet website here.
When Eric Holder was running the Justice Department, they were singing a different tune.The House Judiciary Committee will markup and likely advance a motion to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress on Wednesday, after he failed to comply with a subpoena for an unredacted copy of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
House Republicans are already denouncing the decision as an “illogical and disingenuous” move aimed at “smearing the attorney general.” But just a few years ago, when Eric Holder was in charge of the Justice Department, 238 House Republicans voted to hold him in contempt when he did not turn over requested documents related to a failed gunwalking sting called “Operation Fast and Furious.”
The 2012 contempt effort was spearheaded by then-House oversight chair Darrell Issa (R-CA). “I always believed that in time we would reach an accommodation sufficient to get the information needed for the American people while at the same time preserving the ongoing criminal investigations,” he lamented. But without the administration turning over the subpoenaed documents about the ATF program, he said, a contempt vote was necessary.
View the complete May 7 article by Josh Israel on the ThinkProgress website here.
Each morning Republicans, Democrats and staff gather in a secure conference room in the basement of the Capitol, huddling behind closed doors for depositions from witnesses in the fact-finding phase of the House’s impeachment inquiry of President Trump.