Will Wilkinson/NY Times:
Has Trump Handed Democrats an Opening in Red America?
The G.O.P. has left soybean fields littered with $20 bills for enterprising Democratic presidential hopefuls to pick
Yet the travails of America’s struggling red regions, and practical ideas about might be done to alleviate them, are barely mentioned in right-leaning policy circles. For example, “The Once and Future Worker,” a widely discussed book by Oren Cass, a former economic policy adviser to Mitt Romney now at the Manhattan Institute, focuses on initiatives to expand employment and wages for American workers but largely neglects the changing geography of economic output and opportunity behind the woes of heartland workers.
Worse, the Republican Party under Mr. Trump has blundered into a positively anti-rural economic agenda, leaving the soybean fields littered with $20 bills for enterprising Democratic presidential hopefuls to pick up. The president’s nativist immigration agenda deprives farms and small factories of workers local economies can’t otherwise supply, while the administration’s latest budget proposal continues the Republican assault on the health care and social insurance programs rural populations increasingly rely on to survive.
Analyzing 2018:
Politico:
‘We’re getting back on track’: Dems ready Mueller strategy shift
Democrats are aiming to highlight the substance of Mueller's 448-page report
After returning from a weeklong Memorial Day recess, Democrats envision a wave of hearings on the substance of Mueller’s report.
The Intelligence Committee is exploring potential hearings on parts of Mueller’s report that chronicled a complex Russian plot to help elect Trump. The committee may soon revisit testimony from one Mueller witness — longtime Trump associate Felix Sater — who had been slated to appear in March. Sater was the chief negotiator of the Trump Tower Moscow project, which the committee is investigating.
The Judiciary Committee, meanwhile, anticipates a renewed focus on the dozen examples of potential obstruction of justice that Mueller described in his report. The committee has been consumed over the past two months with fights for access to Mueller’s key witnesses — like former White House counsel Don McGahn, whom the White House has instructed to defy the committee’s subpoena for his testimony and related documents — as well as Mueller himself.
Those fights, they say, are necessary because of the Trump administration’s resistance to their subpoenas for documents and witness testimony. Raskin said that lawmakers didn’t anticipate the degree to which Trump would resist their demands.
Interesting video from Tremaine Lee and MSNBC, in Waterloo IA:
Amber Phillips/WaPo:
All the congressional investigations of Trump that aren’t related to the Mueller report
Many go way beyond the scope of the special counsel’s investigation; some seek out entirely new bits of information
Of course, even if you accept Trump’s premise that Congress is beating a dead horse on Russian interference in U.S. elections, it’s part of Congress’s job to pick up where special counsel Robert S. Mueller III left off. (Or, as in the case of the ongoing Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee, to retrace some of his steps.) The Mueller report was necessarily narrow, looking specifically at whether any crimes were committed as Russia interfered in the 2016 election. It’s Congress’s job to fill in the picture.
Below are the questions congressional investigations are trying to answer, categorized into Mueller-related and non-Mueller-related. For more, The Washington Post’s Rachael Bade and Seung Min Kim have more details on 20 congressional investigations that Trump is blocking in some way. I have ranked the six most potentially damaging Trump investigations. Finally, here’s a regularly updated reader’s guide to the big fights between Trump and Congress.
Meanwhile Theresa May resigned as a failure. And now it gets worse.
Here are some anti-impeachment arguments (me, I’m ‘go slow’ pro):
John Harwood/CNBC:
Nancy Pelosi frustrates Democratic activists on impeachment – but party strategists like what she’s doing
- In the rising Congressional impeachment debate, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi occupies the hottest seat. Some think she’s burning herself, writes CNBC’s John Harwood.
- But those seeking to elect a Democratic president and Congress in 2020 feel something different: A deft strategy to temper impeachment fires without extinguishing them.
- Pelosi has handled impeachment “brilliantly,” says one Democratic pollster [Celinda Lake].
“She’s doing a very good job of moving the caucus to a place that works the best for the most members,” adds Democratic strategist Geoff Garin. Buffeted by competing interests, “She’s balancing those things as well as anybody could.”
Even if Pelosi approved, it’s unclear impeachment could currently muster the 218 votes needed in the House, much less the 67 required for conviction and removal from office in the Republican-led Senate. The Democratic caucus contains 235 members – 31 representing districts Trump won in 2016.
Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:
Democrats Should Keep Impeachment Threat Hanging Over Trump
There's some leverage to be gained from the party's calls to impeach, and little to be lost as long as the speaker declines to proceed.
However, there are other considerations at work here. One is that a formal impeachment inquiry would give the president new procedural advantages, at least if the Judiciary Committee followed precedent – as it should. Molly Reynolds and Margaret Taylor note that in 1974 and 1998 “the president and his counsel were invited to attend all executive session and open committee hearings, and the president’s counsel was entitled to cross-examine witnesses, make objections regarding the pertinence of evidence, respond to the evidence produced and even suggest additional evidence the committee should receive.” None of that happens in the context of regular oversight hearings. Of course, Republican members of the relevant committees would be able to act on behalf of the White House, but that’s not quite the same thing.
There’s also an institutional question at stake. Congress should not be conceding to Trump’s preposterous argument against normal legislative oversight. Yes, it’s not quite as cut-and-dried as subpoenas in an impeachment context, but it’s still pretty well established that Congress can do these sorts of investigations, and it would be unfortunate if the House abandoned its prerogatives in this area without a fight. (If the five Republican-nominated Supreme Court justices would be willing to find for the White House in the legislative context, they might find some far-fetched reason to do so even in the more outlandish case of fact-finding for an impeachment inquiry.*
Overall, then, I don’t think the justification of helping the House’s legal position is a convincing reason to shift hearings and investigations to a formal impeachment inquiry, especially because the House’s legal position is winning, although that could change if court cases begin going the other way.
Brian L Ott/USA Today:
Donald Trump really is 'crying out' for impeachment. It's the ultimate victim card.
Impeachment would help Trump paint himself as a victim of the system he oversees. Voters must reject this dangerous, self-serving rhetoric in 2020.
Being the target of impeachment proceedings would give Trump dramatic fodder for his narrative of himself as a victim, which is exactly why Pelosi is not openly endorsing impeachment. A rhetoric of victimhood benefits the president in three principal ways.
President as victim of the system he oversees
First, it allows Trump, who has held the most powerful office in our nation for more than two years now, to continue to position himself as a Washington outsider under attack from establishment forces, namely the “deep state,” one of Trump’s favorite conspiracy theories. This is exceedingly appealing to Trump’s core followers who — having been fed a steady diet of propaganda by the president and Fox “News” — have lost trust in our most cherished democratic institutions, including a free and independent press, an independent judiciary, and a legislative branch responsible for oversight. Stunningly, Trump claims that he is the victim of the system he oversees.
Second, the rhetoric of victimhood allows Trump to continue to protect his overinflated ego in the face of overwhelming evidence that if he weren't president, he would be charged, at the very least, with obstruction of justice. As is typical of authoritarian and narcissistic leaders, Trump is incapable of admitting failures, shortcomings or wrongdoing. So, when confronted with direct evidence of criminal behavior, Trump lashes out at the credibility of those who have exposed his wrongdoing, going so far as to call for an investigation of the investigators. Trump will never admit he’s wrong, and so he plays the role of victim, and demonizes critics like Rep. Justin Amash, the only congressional Republican to call for impeachment.
Will Bunch/Philly.com:
Jay Inslee has a plan for saving Earth. So why is he at 0.8 percent in the polls?
Michael E. Mann, the prominent Penn State climatologist who runs the university’s Earth System Science Center, told me this week that “Inslee has certainly put forward the boldest, most ambitious and aggressive climate change plan among all of the current candidates vying to be the Democratic nominee for president.” Mann hasn’t endorsed a candidate but he sees Inslee as the one right now who really seems to understand the urgency of the crisis — right at the moment that carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the earth’s atmosphere have hit an all-time record….
“Defeating Trump isn’t enough, as a climate policy,” Mann said. “It isn’t enough to just get back to where we were two years ago. In the meantime there has been too much water under the bridge—or, rather, carbon pollution added to the atmosphere—for that to be adequate.”
Inslee won’t be the one defeating Trump, though, if he stays below 1 percent in the Democratic polls. That could change after next month’s free-for-all initial debates in Miami — assuming that the Washington governor makes the cut. Young voters seeing Inslee for the first time might decide that charisma is trivial when compared to a detailed plan for making sure that, in Guenther’s words, millions of people don’t die in floods, drought and the ensuing upheavals.
That campaign lift-off probably won’t happen, but Inslee has already produced an open-source document that any 2021 president who’s not named Donald Trump can crib from. I’m sure Inslee wouldn’t mind that, nor would he likely object — with his term in Olympia set to expire at the end of 2020 — to a call to become climate “czar” in any Democratic administration. There may be 23 candidates in the Democratic field, but Inslee’s the only one who can make a case that he’s already won.
The article (American voters don’t care about the economy, Economist) is paywalled, but:
Elaina Plott/Atlantic:
How Trump Broke the Freedom Caucus
Its members were once champions of ideological purity. But as their treatment of Justin Amash suggests, they’re now whatever the president wants them to be.
Some caucus members and aides contended to me, however, that the Freedom Caucus’s issue with Amash wasn’t so much his opinion as it was the way he expressed it. “Justin didn’t give them any advance warning,” said one senior aide to a caucus member, who, like others I talked with for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to share private discussions. “It wasn’t solely the fact that they disagreed; it was not giving them the courtesy of a heads-up that frustrated them.” Amash did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
“We have healthy debates on every kind of issue you could imagine,”Davidson told me, adding that Amash hasn’t been to many group meetings lately. “I think that’s why so many Freedom Caucus people were like, Hey, where are you coming from on this?”
Nevertheless, it was hard not to see the parallels to the Sanford episode when, following Trump’s tweet calling Amash a “loser,” and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s claim that Amash was “just looking for attention,” Freedom Caucus members either stayed silent or continued levying their own criticisms.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
The wall of concealment Trump built around his finances is beginning to crumble
Look at what happened to Trump just in the past few days:
- On Wednesday, a federal judge in New York rejected Trump’s attempt to block Deutsche Bank and Capital One from complying with a congressional subpoena for records relating to his dealings with the banks, and Deutsche Bank said that it would abide by the court order and supply the requested documents. Deutsche Bank might be the real mother lode here, since for years it was the only major bank that would lend to Trump, under circumstances that appear shady at best. It was recently reported that officers in the bank flagged transactions by legal entities controlled by both Trump and Jared Kushner as suspicious, saying they should be reported to the government as potentially involving money laundering, but more senior bank officials overruled them.
- NBC reports that Wells Fargo and TD Bank have already turned over records to the House Financial Services Committee regarding their dealings with Trump.
- Also on Wednesday, the New York state legislature passed a bill to turn over Trump’s state tax returns to congressional committees upon request.
- On Monday, another federal judge rejected Trump’s suit attempting to block his accounting firm, Mazars USA, from complying with a congressional subpoena for his financial records.
Hey, the oppo research on Uncle Joe is already starting:
And then there’s the revelation that Elizabeth Warren was once a lawyer.
Charlie Cook/National Journal:
Trump Has Ceded the Middle. Can Democrats Grab It?
The age-old debate over whether it is better to nominate a candidate who can motivate the party base or one who reaches into the middle, appealing to independent and other swing voters, is presenting a choice of walking or chewing gum—you have to do both. Where these things come into conflict is that the issues that most motivate the base, whether within the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, are often ones that grate on the nonideological, or at least less ideology-driven, voters in the middle.
Trump has clearly picked the base-motivation model, effectively conceding the middle ground to Democrats—if they choose to take it.