Tag: Richard Nixon

‘This is unacceptable’: Ex-congresswoman who voted to impeach Nixon says Trump is a rogue president

AlterNet logoThe public phase of the impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump began Wednesday, with testimonies from two witnesses: George Kent, a deputy assistant secretary of state, and William Taylor, a former ambassador and the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine. The hearing brought forth new details about a previously unknown phone call in July between President Trump and Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union. Both Kent and Taylor expressed concern over the role President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani had in dictating U.S. policy on Ukraine. We speak with Elizabeth Holtzman, a former U.S. congressmember from New York who served on the House Judiciary Committee that voted to impeach Richard Nixon.

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Our guest is Elizabeth Holtzman, former U.S. congresswoman from New York. She served on the House Judiciary Committee that voted to impeach Richard Nixon. At that time, she was the youngest woman elected to Congress. Interestingly, she was replaced in that record by Congressmember Stefanik, who now serves as a Republican on the House Intelligence Committee and was questioning the speakers yesterday. Liz Holtzman’s recent book is The Case for Impeaching Trump.

Liz Holtzman, welcome back to Democracy Now!

ELIZABETH HOLTZMAN: It’s great to be here.

View the complete November 15 article by Amy Goodman from Democracy Now on the AlterNet website here.

Pelosi: Trump bribed Ukraine, makes Nixon’s offenses ‘look almost small’

The Hill logoSpeaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday accused President Trump of “bribery” in his dealings with Ukrainian leaders, linking the president’s actions to the Constitution’s impeachment clause even while emphasizing that Democrats remain undecided on whether they’ll draft impeachment articles.

“That is in the Constitution, attached to the impeachment proceedings,” Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol.

She then explained the basis for the charge, which stems from a whistleblower’s complaint that has since been supported by numerous government officials, that Trump leveraged U.S. military aid to Kyiv to secure political favors from Ukrainian leaders.

View the complete November 14 article by Mike Lillis on The Hill website here.

Fox News Exists To Protect A Crooked Republican President

NOTE:  We posted this earlier this year. With the current situation, it’s important we keep this in mind.

Forty-five years ago, President Richard Nixon resigned. His impeachment at the time seemed almost certain, as key Republican senators had signaled they would no longer support him. But Nixon’s acolytes did not blame their president for his gross corruption and mind-boggling criminality. Instead, they blamed the press — the “enemy,” as Nixon had described it — for hounding him out of office.

Over two decades later, Roger Ailes, one of those Nixon retainers, founded Fox News. As the network has gained power and influence, it has played many roles — an attack dog that savages progressive policies and individuals, a counterweight to a media that conservatives consider unbearably liberal, a radicalization engine that brings a bigoted ideology from the fringes into the homes of millions of Americans, and a propaganda machine that champions conservative politicians.

Over the past week, we’ve seen another one of Fox’s roles. As it has become clear that President Donald Trump used the office of the presidency to suborn a foreign government to investigate one of his political opponents — triggering a formal impeachment inquiry — Fox has been serving as a bulwark against the repetition of Nixon’s fall.

View the complete September 26 article by Matt Gertz from Media Matters on the National Memo website here.

Veteran GOP conservative who called for Nixon’s resignation now champions Trump impeachment inquiry: ‘It was a pure shakedown’

AlterNet logoIn March 1974 — when the Watergate scandal was getting worse and worse for President Richard Nixon — conservative Republican Slade Gorton called for Nixon’s resignation. Five months later, Gorton (who was serving as attorney general for Washington State at the time) got his wish: Nixon resigned in August 1974, and Vice President Gerald R. Ford was sworn in as president of the United States. Gorton is now 91, and he is once again in favor of an impeachment inquiry against a Republican president — only this time, it’s President Donald Trump.

Gorton discussed the House impeachment inquiry against Trump during an interview with the Seattle Times. Many Republicans in Congress are insisting that Trump did nothing wrong on July 25, when he tried to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. But Gorton (who represented Washington State in the U.S. Senate in the 1980s and 1990s) strongly disagrees, joining House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats in asserting that Trump seriously crossed the line by encouraging a foreign leader to investigate a political rival.

“I reached the conclusion that there are a dozen actions on this president’s part that warrant a vote of impeachment in the House,” Gorton told the Seattle Times’ Jim Brunner.

View the complete October 31 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

History professor explains how ‘racial resentment and brooding white anger’ have defined the GOP for decades

AlterNet logoMore than half a century has passed since President Richard Nixon launched his infamous “southern strategy,” which found the Republican Party pursuing the votes of white racists who had angrily left the Democratic Party because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And after all these years, history professor Leonard Steinhorn asserts in an October 30 op-ed for the Washington Post, the GOP is still grappling with its racism problem.

The GOP certainly didn’t start out as the party of racism. The first Republican president was Abraham Lincoln, who became an ally of the abolitionist movement. And when Republican Teddy Roosevelt was president in the 1900s, African-American neighborhoods in northern cities like New York, Philadelphia and Boston leaned GOP. However, the Democratic Party made a lot of inroads with black voters under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal in the 1930s.

In the 1960s, Steinhorn explains, Nixon saw a golden opportunity for his party: appealing to a sense of white grievance. The professor recalls, “Nixon inflamed the ‘silent majority’ and ‘forgotten Americans’ with coded language about race and ‘law and order’ that played to their sense of grievance and victimization.”

View the complete October 30 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Worse Than Watergate

Center for American Progress logoWatergate has long been the standard by which other political scandals are judged. Commentators use the suffix “-gate” and talk about how contemporary events mirror those that occurred during the Watergate investigation.

But the country is now confronted with a presidential scandal that presents an unprecedented danger to American democracy and national security. Evidence that has been released—by the White House no less—shows that President Donald Trump abused his authority to attempt to extort a foreign country to intervene in the 2020 election. And recent reporting shows that he withheld vital military aid to Ukraine as part of his unlawful pressure campaign.

While Trump’s actions follow the basic arc of President Richard Nixon’s misconduct—abusing authority to attack political opponents followed by a desperate cover-up attempt—there is a critical difference. Trump’s misconduct is worse because it involves an effort to pressure a foreign country to interfere in American democracy, undermining our national security.

View the complete October 3 article by Sam Berger on the Center for American Progress website here.

Donald Trump is much worse than Richard Nixon. He may even have committed treason.

The Russians attacked us. If the commander in chief who swore to defend us said it didn’t bother him, this was ‘giving them aid and comfort.’

Let’s say we had a president who did the following: Redistributed wealth by taxing the rich and giving to the poor. Boosted entitlements. Signed a law to strengthen workplace safety. Poured money into cleaning up the environment. Even helped finance National Public Radio. Liberals would be pleased, right?

We did have such a president. His name was Richard Nixon.

Of course, all this is largely forgotten today, overshadowed by Nixon’s involvement in Watergate — the scandal that drove him from office in 1974, as impeachment and possibly even Senate conviction were nipping at his heels.

View the complete commentary by Paul Brandus on The USA Today website here.

The IRS turned over Nixon’s tax returns the same day a congressional panel asked for them

Washington Post logoThe Internal Revenue Service turned President Richard Nixon’s tax returns over to a congressional committee the same day in 1973 that the panel requested them for a review, according to letters released by House Democrats on Thursday.

The newly released documents appear to contradict the Trump administration’s claims that House Democrats’ demands for the president’s tax returns are “unprecedented,” and suggest a split between this administration and past IRS officials over the interpretation of the law.

Congressional Republicans denied any similarity between the two episodes, pointing out that Nixon requested the investigation into his returns while Trump has not.

View the complete July 25 article by Jeff Stein on The Washington Post website here.

Why Trump Is Worse — Yes, Much Worse — Than Nixon

Historians of the modern presidency keep a special shelf for Richard Nixon — a noted place for a corrupt, power-mad and paranoid man who trampled constitutional ideals in his quest to hang onto his office. But Nixon must relinquish his title as modern history’s most corrupt president to a man who would leave him in the dust: President Donald J. Trump. Even Nixon would likely be alarmed by his behavior.

For all his conniving, all of his cover-ups, all of his lies, Nixon had an appropriate appreciation for foreign rivals, an understanding of the existential threats represented by our adversaries. Not so Trump. He would gladly hand over the keys to the kingdom to Russia — or North Korea, for that matter — as long as their strongmen showed him the deference which he craves.

In an alarming display of ignorance and arrogance, Trump told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last week that he would accept any incriminating information about his political opponents that Russia or any other foreign country might provide. Casually referring to such intrusions as “opposition research,” Trump said: “I think you might want to listen. There’s nothing wrong with listening … It’s not interference.”

View the complete June 16 article by Cynthia Tucker on the National Memo website here.

An Open Memo On Impeachment: Nixon, Clinton, and Trump

Some commentators and politicians have suggested that any movement that leads to President Donald Trump’s impeachment will necessarily follow the straight and narrow political path of the Clinton impeachment in which the president’s popularity inexorably rose. President Bill Clinton’s case is widely assumed to set the terms for understanding Trump’s. But the facts and history instead indicate that the Clinton case bears little if any relevance to the Trump one, while the Nixon case shows similarity to Trump’s, including how President Richard Nixon, a far more popular president than the abysmally rated Trump, collapsed in public opinion as the drive to his impeachment unfolded.

In 1973 and 1974, the Democrats attacked a once-mighty but now badly weakened president with a strong case for impeachment. Nixon resigned.

In 1998 and 1999, the Republicans attacked a mightily popular president on a political upswing in his second term with a politically contrived and feeble case for impeachment. Republicans lost.

View the complete May 18 article by Sidney Blumenthal on the National Memo website here.