As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.
Top Constitutional and First Amendment scholars (144 of them) wrote a letter to Congress undercutting much of the expected legal defense of existential threat Donald "Mango Mussolini" Trump's impeachment lawyers, including:
The First Amendment is no bar to the Senate convicting former President Trump and disqualifying him from holding future office. Although we differ from one another in our politics and disagree on many questions of constitutional law (including First Amendment law), we agree that any First Amendment defense raised by President Trump’s attorneys would be legally frivolous. The First Amendment does not apply in impeachment proceedings. And even if it did, President Trump’s alleged actions—if proven by the Impeachment Managers at trial—would fall well outside the protections of the First Amendment.
Trump's lawyers and the spineless weasels in the Senate know this, but their defense will follow the aphorism that “If you have the law, hammer the law. If you have the facts, hammer the facts. If you have neither the law nor the facts, hammer the table”.
Meanwhile, one of those spineless weasels is out floating an insane diversionary conspiracy that could only spring from the fevered swamp that is Sen. Ron "Tiny" Johnson's (R-Trump) "brain":
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) argued that 45 Republican senators already believe the Senate trial is “unconstitutional,” when speaking with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on Sunday. He was referring to the vote total on the Senate motion brought by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) in January to dismiss the impeachment trial on the basis that it’s unconstitutional to hold an impeachment trial for a private citizen. Five Republicans joined the Democrats in rejecting the motion, but every other Republican voted in favor of it. (Many legal scholars believe that such a trial is perfectly constitutional — more on that later.)
But Johnson’s subsequent comments on Fox took a more shocking turn — he floated the baseless idea that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was to blame in some sense for the violent assault on the Capitol.
“Is this another diversionary operation? Is this meant to deflect away from potentially what the speaker knew and when she knew it? I don’t know, but I’m suspicious,” Johnson said.
That Wisconsin voters chose this lump of stupid over Russ Feingold twice(!) is a disgrace and a permanent stain on the state that birthed the progressive movement and Sens. Gaylord Nelson, Herb Kohl, Tammy Baldwin, and Feingold.
But he wasn't the only Republican weasel making frivolous or outrageous claims in support of Trump's acquittal, as James Downie reports:
On the mainstream Sunday shows, Republican senators complained instead about the process, the precedents and their political rivals. On “Fox News Sunday,” Paul tried to change the subject, complaining that Sen. Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) had never been held accountable when he warned antiabortion Supreme Court justices last March that decisions that limiting a woman’s right to choose would release “the whirlwind.” Whatever one thinks of Schumer’s comments, though, invoking “the whirlwind” is a far cry from telling people “we’re going to walk down” to the Capitol on the day of electoral college certification.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) complained that “under the Watergate, under the Clinton impeachments, there were truckloads of information. Here, there was a video. There was no process.” Yes, previous impeachments came with detailed reports of special committees and counsels. In this case, the video of Trump on the Ellipse was the only report the world needed to see.
As for the constitutionality of the trial, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) argued on ABC’s “This Week” that “overwhelming weight of history and also precedent indicates that this is not proper.” But he almost immediately admitted that “constitutional lawyers can make an argument on either side.” Paul tried a similar argument on Fox News, only to backpedal when host Chris Wallace pointed out that in 1876 the Senate conducted an impeachment trial of an ex-official.
Keeping anti- democracy jackholes like Johnson out of government should be a prime objective for all of us. Stacy Abrams writes about how to revive our democracy after its near- death experience:
One of the first steps must be an overhaul of the Senate filibuster, which has long been wielded as a cudgel against the needs of millions who struggle. Today, the parliamentary trick creates a more sinister threat to our nation: the ability of a minority of senators, who represent 41.5 million fewer people than the Senate majority, to block progress favored by most Americans.
Democrats in Congress must fully embrace their mandate to fast-track democracy reforms that give voters a fair fight, rather than allowing undemocratic systems to be used as tools and excuses to perpetuate that same system. This is a moment of both historic imperative and, with unified Democratic control of the White House and Congress, historic opportunity.
Further, fixing our democracy requires we finally allow our fellow Americans in D.C. and Puerto Rico, the vast majority of whom are people of color, to have full access to our democracy. That means D.C. statehood and binding self-determination for Puerto Rico.The agenda to restore democracy also includes passing the For the People Act to protect and expand voting rights, fight gerrymandering and reduce the influence of money in politics; the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to restore the full protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act; and the Protecting Our Democracy Act to constrain the corruption of future presidents who deem themselves above the law. These landmark bills have broad-based support, and would have passed long ago were it not for obstructionist leaders who fear losing their own influence if the American people have more power of their own.
(ICYMI, check out Infidel 753's essay on "Ten Criteria for Success" for the Biden Administration, which includes several of the points made by Abrams, and more. Take a look if you haven't already.)
Dana Milbank writes about the Republican Party's embrace of anti-Semitism and violence:
... One hundred ninety-nine Republican members of Congress rallied to the defense of a vile, unapologetic anti-Semite in their ranks who calls for assassination of her opponents.
This is more than a Republican problem; it’s an American problem. You don’t have to be a scholar of 20th-century Europe to know what happens when the elected leaders of a democracy condone violence as a political tool and blame the country’s ills on the Jews. [snip]
House Republicans refused to sanction her for her outrages, and on Thursday, all but 11 House Republicans voted against a successful Democratic measure to remove her from House committees.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene will be remembered for breaking new ground for her wild anti-Semitism,” Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, told me after the vote. Greenblatt, whose group has tracked all-time-high levels of anti-Jewish incidents during the Trump years, wrote three letters to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) about Greene since her nomination, and he urged McCarthy to remove her from committees. Greenblatt received no reply.
Greene’s ugly pronouncements about Muslims and Black people, and her harassment of school-shooting survivors and families of victims, are no less reprehensible. But the rallying around this unrepentant anti-Semite by Republicans is an ominous new frontier. The Republican Jewish Coalition said it is “offended and appalled by [Greene’s] comments and her actions.”
He's right that it's an American problem, and it's one more reason why the party that supports this evil needs to be crushed at every election from now on.
Once again, we close by recommending a trip over to Infidel 753's link round- up. It's one of the first places we go every Sunday morning for an array of reading options on many topics.
