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.
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.
