Trump soundly mocked for demanding speedy resolution to impeachment: ‘You don’t get to dictate terms’

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump broke with his Republican defenders, who say impeachment is moving too fast, and demanded a quick resolution to the constitutional process.

House Democrats moved the impeachment process from the Intelligence Committee to the Judiciary Committee after nearly two weeks of testimony, and Trump called for a speedy end to the matter.

“The Do Nothing Democrats had a historically bad day yesterday in the House,” Trump tweeted. “They have no Impeachment case and are demeaning our Country. But nothing matters to them, they have gone crazy.”

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Pelosi says House will move to impeach President Trump

The Hill logoSpeaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced Thursday that the House will move forward with impeaching President Trump, saying his actions — as revealed by their weeks-long investigation — left them “no choice” but to pursue his removal from office.

The move erases any lingering doubt that Democrats view Trump’s dealings with Ukraine as a severe violation of the Constitution — and any question of whether they will take the next step of making him just the third president in the nation’s history to be impeached.

“The president’s actions have seriously violated the Constitution,” Pelosi said in a televised address against a backdrop of American flags. “Our democracy is at stake. The president leaves us no choice but to act.”

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GOP Expert Mistaken On Basic Impeachment Fact

A law professor Republicans called to testify at Wednesday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing got a basic fact wrong in trying to defend Donald Trump from impeachment, incorrectly saying that Democrats are running the fastest impeachment process in history.

“That’s the problem when you move towards impeachment on this abbreviated schedule that has not been explained to me why you want to set the record for the fastest impeachment,” Turley said. “Fast is not good for impeachment.”

That accusation is simply false.

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Scholars Call Trump’s Actions on Ukraine an Impeachable Abuse of Power

WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives on Wednesday opened a critical new phase of the impeachment proceedings against President Trump, featuring legal scholars vigorously debating whether his conduct and the available evidence rose to the constitutional threshold necessary for his removal from office.

In a daylong hearing convened by the Judiciary Committee, three constitutional scholars invited by Democrats testified that evidence of Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine for political gain clearly met the definition of an impeachable abuse of power. They said his defiance of Congress’s investigative requests was further grounds for charging him.

A fourth scholar invited by Republicans disagreed, warning that Democrats were barreling forward with a shoddy case for the president’s removal based on inadequate evidence, and risked damaging the integrity of a sacred process enshrined in the Constitution.

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Legal scholar calls Sondland testimony ‘most chilling’ evidence Trump used power of office for private ‘political benefit’

AlterNet logoStanford Law School professor Pamela Karlan on Wednesday told House impeachment investigators that the “most chilling” evidence that President Donald Trump was pursuing his own political gain in Ukraine came from the November 20 testimony of Gordon Sondland, the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union.

Karlan, one of four legal scholars to testify during Wednesday’s Judiciary Committee hearing, said she spent her entire Thanksgiving break reading transcripts from previous public impeachment hearings in the House Intelligence Committee.

The “most striking” line from the witness testimony, said Karlan, was Sondland’s claim that Trump did not care whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky actually opened an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden.

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Democrats debate scope of impeachment charges

The Hill logoDemocrats are debating how broadly to make their impeachment case against President Trump, with some lawmakers seeking to expand the list of charges even as House Judiciary Committee members signal a relatively narrow approach.

House Democrats at the first Judiciary Committee impeachment hearing on Wednesday gave the clearest sign yet of the scope of their likely articles by unveiling posters featuring three possible charges: abuse of power and bribery, obstruction of Congress and obstruction of justice.

“I’m for a keep-it-simple scope,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), a Judiciary Committee member, told The Hill during a brief break from the Wednesday hearing.

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Scholar rains hell on Republican who questioned her integrity at impeachment hearing: ‘I’m insulted!’

AlterNet logoStanford Law School professor Pamela Karlan hammered Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) on Wednesday after he had questioned whether she and other House Judiciary Committee witnesses had bothered to read transcripts and reports about the House impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump.

In her opening statement, Karlan immediately took issue with Collins’ claim that witnesses called before today’s hearings did not have time to read and digest all the relevant information about Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political opponents.

“Here Mr. Collins, I would like to say to you, sir, that I read transcripts of every one of the witnesses who appeared in the live hearing because I would not speak about these things without reviewing the facts,” she said. “So I’m insulted by the suggestion that, as a law professor, I don’t care about those facts.”

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Constitutional law experts refute GOP witness’ claim Trump associates can refuse to comply with congressional subpoenas: ‘That is the act of obstruction’

AlterNet logoWhen public hearings in the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump moved to the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Republicans brought on constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley to make a case against impeaching the president. Turley, unlike the three legal scholars featured by House Democrats, was highly critical of the way Democrats have handled the impeachment inquiry — and one of Turley’s criticisms had to do with subpoenas. House Democrats, Turley argued during his testimony, should go through the courts to subpoena potential witnesses. But some legal experts vehemently disagree.

Turley testified that if House Democrats “actually subpoena witnesses and go to court, then you have an obstruction case — because a court issues an order. And unless they stay that order, by a higher court, then you have obstruction.”

Much of the criticism of Turley’s testimony has come from Democrats, but some of it came from Fox News’ Judge Andrew Napolitano — a right-wing libertarian who isn’t shy about criticizing Trump at times. And according to Napolitano, Turley’s testimony underestimated the amount of subpoena powers the U.S. House of Representatives has.

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Impeachment trial timing hangs over 2020 Senate calendar

January schedule is filled with question marks

The Senate has released its calendar for 2020, but the year will begin with a giant question mark because of a possible impeachment trial.

The month of January is missing from the schedule entirely.

A copy of the calendar, obtained by CQ Roll Call, also includes a notation that the weeklong Presidents Day recess is “subject to Senate floor activity.”

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How Schiff Used Trump And Mulvaney’s Own Words To Impeach Them

With the release of the Ukraine report from the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, Chair Adam Schiff and his colleagues laid out the damning case for impeaching President Donald Trump in excruciating detail. Much of it, however, has been publicly known as transcripts of the inquiry depositions and public hearings revealed the key facts of Trump’s effort to induce Ukraine into investigating his political rivals while withholding military aid and White House meeting.

But because of Trump’s stonewalling — which itself features as a pillar of the president’s misconduct in the report — Republicans have argued that Schiff and the Democrats haven’t persuasively made the case that Trump was a part of the effort to leverage official acts in exchange for the political investigations. While extensive evidence strongly suggests that Trump was at the center of the scheme, not one witness’ testimony tied Trump directly to the quid pro quo.

The Ukraine report, however, gets around this fact by pointing to key statements not as a part of the inquiry itself, but made in public by White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and Trump himself.

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