impeachment

Embarrassing days for Republican leadership? This one is pretty high on the list

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

February 6, 2024

MAGA Republicans appear to have killed the Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, after senators and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas spent four months writing the border security piece of the bill that the House MAGA Republicans themselves demanded. House Republicans insisted that border security be added to the supplemental national security bill that provided additional assistance to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan and provided humanitarian aid to Gaza. 

It turns out that they were apparently hoping to kill support for Ukraine, which is widely popular both in Congress and with voters across the country, and figured that Democrats would never agree to their demands for a border measure. Thus they could kill aid to Ukraine and hammer Democrats for leaving the border in crisis. 

But Democrats see aid to Ukraine as so fundamental to our national security that they were willing to give up even the path to citizenship for the Dreamers, those brought to the U.S. as children, a requirement on which they have previously stood firm, in order to get Republicans to pass the national security measure. The final compromise, released by the Senate negotiators late Sunday night, had much of what Republicans have wanted to impose on the border for a long time. 

But Trump, who wants to use the confusion on the border as a campaign issue, pressed the Republicans to reject the measure. While the Senate will vote tomorrow on whether to take it up, enough Republicans have now come out against it that it appears to have little hope of advancing. As the headline of Carl Hulse’s analysis in the New York Times puts it: “On the Border, Republicans Set a Trap, Then Fell Into It.”

In a speech at the White House today, President Joe Biden urged Congress to pass the bill. He thanked the negotiators who have worked so hard on it, and blamed Trump for shooting it down. Trump has been working the phones, calling Republican lawmakers to “threaten them and try to intimidate them to vote against this proposal,” Biden said. “And it looks like they’re caving.” 

Biden pointed out that “everyone from the Wall Street Journal to the Border Patrol [Union] to the…United States Chamber of Commerce support[s] this bill,” and that the Border Patrol Union endorsed Trump in 2020. 

“[I]f the bill fails,” Biden told Republicans, “I want to be absolutely clear about something: The American people are going to know why it failed. I’ll be taking this issue to the country, and the voters are going to know that…just at the moment we were going to secure the border and fund these other programs, Trump and the MAGA Republicans said no because they’re afraid of Donald Trump.”

“Every day between now and November, the American people are going to know that the only reason the border is not secure is Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican friends. It’s time for Republicans in the Congress to show a little courage, to show a little spine to make it clear to the American people that you work for them and not for anyone else.” 

Then, this afternoon, House leadership called a vote on the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas, who they insist is not enforcing the laws that should protect the border. Just to be clear, good leadership would never call such an important vote unless they were absolutely certain it had the votes to pass. 

You know where this is going, right?

It did not have the votes to pass. Three Republicans joined the Democrats to make up a majority of 216, while the Republicans could muster only 214. Republicans say they will bring the measure up again later. 

Then House leadership decided to bring to the House floor a standalone bill providing $17.6 billion to Israel, without aid for Ukraine or Taiwan, or humanitarian aid for the Palestinians. That, too, failed, by a vote of 250 to 180. 

Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News posted on social media: “I’ve seen a lot of embarrassing days for different House Republican leadership teams. This one is pretty high on the list. They lost a vote to impeach Mayorkas. And then they lost a vote to send $17.6 billion to Israel. They didn’t need to vote on the Israel bill today. They knew it would fail. They chose to.” 

News broke today that Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel is planning to leave her position under pressure from Trump, who wants a more fervent loyalist in the job—despite the unquestioned loyalty that had McDaniel participating in Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election—and is unhappy with the RNC’s dismal finances. The RNC’s chief of staff under McDaniel, Mike Reed, will also be stepping down.

Meanwhile, former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson released a video today confirming that he is in Moscow to interview Russian president Vladimir Putin. He says he plans to tell people the “truth” of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Carlson says that no U.S. journalist has tried to interview Putin since the conflict began, a comment that drew the astonishment of CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, who pointed out that real journalists (unlike Carlson, whose lawyers have successfully defended him in court from slander charges by saying he should not be expected to tell the truth) have been trying to get an interview with Putin since the war began but he will only talk to propaganda outlets.

Putin has, of course, imprisoned American journalists Evan Gershkovich of the Wall Street Journal and Alsu Kurmasheva of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. 

Carlson said Elon Musk is permitting him to post the interview on X, formerly Twitter.

And finally today, last but very much not least, the three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reviewing the question of whether Trump is immune from criminal prosecution for his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election released their decision. 

He is not immune.

The panel wrote: “We cannot accept former President Trump’s claim that a President has unbounded authority to commit crimes that would neutralize the most fundamental check on executive power—the recognition and implementation of election results. Nor can we sanction his apparent contention that the Executive has carte blanche to violate the rights of individual citizens to vote and to have their votes count….

“We cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter….

“For the purposes of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant. But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution….”

Trump’s lawyers say they will appeal the decision.

Trump received over $7 million from 20 different governments, including China and Saudi Arabia

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

January 4, 2023

The Democrats on the House Oversight Committee today released a 156-page report showing that when he was in the presidency, Trump received at least $7.8 million from 20 different governments, including those of China, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Malaysia, through businesses he owned. 

The Democrats brought receipts. 

According to the report—and the documents from Trump’s former accounting firm Mazars that are attached to it—the People’s Republic of China and companies substantially controlled by the PRC government paid at least $5,572,548 to Trump-owned properties while Trump was in office; Saudi Arabia paid at least $615,422; Qatar paid at least $465,744; Kuwait paid at least $300,000; India paid at least $282,764; Malaysia paid at least $248,962; Afghanistan paid at least $154,750; the Philippines paid at least $74,810; the United Arab Emirates paid at least $65,225. The list went on and on. 

The committee Democrats explained that these payments were likely only a fraction of the actual money exchanged, since they cover only four of more than 500 entities Trump owned at the time. When the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in January 2023, Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) stopped the investigation before Mazars had produced the documents the committee had asked for when Democrats were in charge of it. Those records included documents relating to Russia, South Korea, South Africa, and Brazil. 

Trump fought hard against the production of these documents, dragging out the court fight until September 2022. The committee worked on them for just four months before voters put Republicans in charge of the House and the investigation stopped. 

These are the first hard numbers that show how foreign governments funneled money to the president while policies involving their countries were in front of him. The report notes, for example, that Trump refused to impose sanctions on Chinese banks that were helping the North Korean government; one of those banks was paying him close to $2 million in rent annually for commercial office space in Trump Tower. 

The first article of the U.S. Constitution reads: “[N]o Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument [that is, salary, fee, or profit], Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” 

The report also contrasted powerfully with the attempt of Republicans on the Oversight Committee, led by Comer, to argue that Democratic Joe Biden has corruptly profited from the presidency. 

In the Washington Post on December 26, 2023, Philip Bump noted that just after voters elected a Republican majority, Comer told the Washington Post that as soon as he was in charge of the Oversight Committee, he would use his power to “determine if this president and this White House are compromised because of the millions of dollars that his family has received from our adversaries in China, Russia and Ukraine.”

For the past year, while he and the committee have made a number of highly misleading statements to make it sound as if there are Biden family businesses involving the president (there are not) and the president was involved in them (he was not), their claims were never backed by any evidence. Bump noted in a piece on December 14, 2023, for example, that Comer told Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo that “the Bidens” have “taken in” more than $24 million. In fact, Bump explained, Biden’s son Hunter and his business partners did receive such payments, but most of the money went to the business partners. About $7.5 million of it went to Hunter Biden. There is no evidence that any of it went to Joe Biden. 

All of the committee’s claims have similar reality checks. Jonathan Yerushalmy of The Guardian wrote that after nearly 40,000 pages of bank records and dozens of hours of testimony, “no evidence has emerged that Biden acted corruptly or accepted bribes in his current or previous role.”

Still, the constant hyping of their claims on right-wing media led then–House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to authorize an impeachment inquiry in mid-September, and in mid-December, Republicans in the House formalized the inquiry. 

There is more behind the attack on Biden than simply trying to even the score between him and Trump—who remains angry at his impeachments and has demanded Republicans retaliate—or to smear Biden through an “investigation,” which has been a standard technique of the Republicans since the mid-1990s.

Claiming that Biden is as corrupt as Trump undermines faith in our democracy. After all, if everyone is a crook, why does it matter which one is in office? And what makes American democracy any different from the authoritarian systems of Russia or Hungary or Venezuela, where leaders grab what they can for themselves and their followers?

Democracies are different from authoritarian governments because they have laws to prevent the corruption in which it appears Trump engaged. The fact that Republicans refuse to hold their own party members accountable to those laws while smearing their opponents says far more about them than it does about the nature of democracy.

It does, though, highlight that our democracy is in danger.

Quora asks: Why hasn’t Joe Biden been impeached?

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Quora is a social question-and-answer website. Users can collaborate by editing questions and commenting on answers that have been submitted by other users.  As of 2020, the website was visited by 300 million users a month.

Why hasn’t Joe Biden been impeached?

Randy responds:

“Several reasons.

  1. He hasn’t done anything impeachable
  2. Republicans don’t have enough numbers in the House to orchestrate a sham impeachment
  3. A sham impeachment would be political suicide for the GOP in the midterms
  4. If Republicans were able to execute a sham impeachment in the House, they know that effort would fail in the Senate.
  5. If Republicans could successfully execute a sham impeachment and actually remove Biden, then they would get President Kamala Harris.”

Thomas responds:

“Don’t worry when Republicans take control corrupt ‘Slow Joe’ will get his. And don’t worry btw Afghan withdrawal (13 dead and thousands abandoned), 10% for the ‘Big Guy’ or not enforcing the southern border there are plenty of things to impeach him on. But if those don’t work Republicans can make up a Quid pro quo phone call to get him.”

Randall responds:

“Does Quora have an annual award for the dumbest question asked?”

Guy responds:

“But he hasn’t even blackmailed an ally in a war with an enemy by illegally withholding US military aid? To get them to pretend to launch a fake investigation into a domestic political rival?

I mean, I can’t even remember the last time Biden tried to organise and instigate a violent attack on the US Capitol, you know, to overthrow democracy and install a fascist autocratic junta?

Did he fart in church or something?”

Source: Quora

What do you think?

Fight for the Vulnerable: The Eliza Orlins Interview

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GASLIT NATION WITH ANDREA CHALUPA AND SARAH KENDZIOR

We look forward to bringing you our coverage of the Second Trump Impeachment Trial which starts next week, including discussing the most vulnerable Republican Senators up for re-election in 2022. This week we highlight the urgent importance of fighting for the most vulnerable in our interview with New York City public defender Eliza Orlins, a staff attorney at The Legal Aid Society taking on Cy Vance for Manhattan District Attorney. Vance betrayed the American people and must go.

GasLit Nation Feb 3, 2021