Heather Cox Richardson

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January 31, 2020 (Friday)

Today, as we suspected after Tennessee Republican Senator Lamar Alexander’s vote last night not to allow witnesses despite—or because of—the fact that it was so clear Trump was guilty, the Senate voted 49-51 not to hear witnesses or admit documents in the impeachment trial of President Donald J. Trump. This is the first impeachment trial in American history (the Senate also holds impeachment trials of federal judges) that does not have witnesses or documents.

Republican Senators scrambled to justify their votes. As I wrote last night, Alexander said that the Democrats had proven the charges against the president but those actions were not impeachable. Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) said that Alexander spoke for him, as well as for other senators. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said that the whole process was so bad she was just giving up and voting for it to be over. And tonight, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) went further. He said that the charges against Trump were both proven and impeachable, but “just because actions meet a standard of impeachment does not mean it is in the best interest of the country to remove a president from office.”

Huh?

What’s going on? It appears that Republican Senators are admitting Trump is guilty at the same time they are running away not just from conviction, but also from hearing witnesses and seeing key documents. What does this even mean?

It appears that Republican Senators and Representatives have decided their only course in the 2020 election is to hug Trump as tightly as they can. This will assure them the votes of Trump loyalists, even as it signals they are tossing aside the idea of appealing to moderates, so expect Republican campaigns to be vicious appeals to the Trump base by attacking everyone else.

Rumors suggest that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was facing a revolt and had to quell it to get to this point. That rumor, taken with the comments from congressmen like Mark Meadows that senators who did not stick with Trump would face retaliation, suggests that McConnell simply told senators to stick with Trump or they would get no money for their reelection campaigns. So they have made Trump the standard bearer for their party; he owns them now. Only two Republicans voted for witnesses in the impeachment trial: Susan Collins (R-ME), who appears to have had McConnell’s permission, and Mitt Romney (R-UT). As soon as news of his vote got out, the leaders of CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, announced he would not be welcome in their midst. And so it begins.

At the same time, Republicans know that most Americans wanted witnesses in the impeachment trial, at the very least, and do not believe the trial was fair, something we feel quite strongly about. So they are trying to justify their votes as best they can.

How good do they feel about where they are? Lindsey Graham did an interview tonight on the Fox News Channel in which he called impeachment “partisan bullshit” (sorry) that was going to blow up in the Democrats’ face. It would maybe have been more convincing if he had not appeared to be drunk.

Because, as House impeachment manager Adam Schiff repeatedly warned them, more and more information would continue to drop. And today it did, rather relentlessly. The day started with another leak from the manuscript by former National Security Advisor John Bolton. According to a story by Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt in the New York Times, in early May, more than two months before the infamous July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump asked Zelensky to announce an investigation into the Bidens in exchange for receiving US military aid, Trump told Bolton to call Zelensky and tell him to meet with Trump’s sometime lawyer Rudy Giuliani to talk over the proposed investigations. While Trump immediately denied this exchange, Bolton’s story matches with other witnesses’ accounts.

Worse, though, Bolton apparently alleges that the conversation included acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, already deeply linked into the Ukraine Scandal, Giuliani, and… the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, who is leading the president’s defense team in the impeachment trial. Ouch. Cipollone should have disclosed that he was, at the very least, a material witness to the events at hand, especially since Schiff and the other impeachment managers had written him a letter before the trial started warning him that “You may be a material witness to the charges against President Trump, even though you are also his advocate.”

But the revelations weren’t over. Lev Parnas’s lawyer Joseph A. Bondy published on Twitter a letter he wrote to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, outlining what Parnas would say if he were called to testify. Remember, Parnas, who is under indictment for campaign finance violations (he gave Russian money to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, among others) is an unreliable witness, but he also has little incentive to lie. Still, take all this with a grain—or rather a half teaspoon—of salt.

Bondy says that Parnas will lay out the entire scheme—as it’s written in the letter it reads much as we would expect based on what we already know—but, according to Bondy, Parnas is willing to testify that the Ukraine scheme involved not just Trump, but also Vice President Mike Pence, the GOP Super PAC America First, Former Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Attorney General Bill Barr, Senator Lindsey Graham, Congressman Devin Nunes, Nunes’s staffer Derek Harvey, journalist John Solomon (he was the one who printed articles attacking US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch in The Hill), attorneys Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing, and Giuliani. Bondy’s letter claims that Parnas has records and documents to prove his testimony is accurate.

In response to all this, tonight John Solomon, the reporter Parnas named, appeared on Laura Ingraham’s show on the Fox News Channel to accuse John Bolton of taking money from oligarchs in Ukraine. (There is no evidence at all that this is true.)

What has happened in the Senate is a travesty. But the Republicans are clearly aware that they have made a devil’s bargain that is going to weigh heavier as time passes. Remember, the Ukraine Scandal broke only four months ago. There are nine more months until the election for more revelations to drop, and Americans are already mad and vowing that they will not be counted out in 2020. In the short term, the Republicans have won. But even they appear to be worried about the longer term.

A couple of other loose ends to tie up tonight. Remember how I said that Trump can pay legal bills with campaign money, and that that’s why I thought he filed for reelection on Inauguration Day, the first president ever to do so? We learned today that Trump’s reelection campaign spent $1.4 million on legal fees in the fourth quarter of 2019 alone. The fees the campaign paid add up to roughly $12.4 million since Trump took office.

And today we learned that former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch has retired from the foreign service after 33 years. She has served America well at crucial postings, including, of course, Ukraine, as it transitioned away from Russia and toward Europe, the transition the Trump team worked to reverse. She is leaving the service at just 61 years old, and while she has certainly earned a respite from the chaos into which the Ukraine Scandal has thrown her, the loss of such an accomplished and principled diplomat significantly weakens America.

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That’s the bit I’m holding onto.

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Someone (NPR? WaPo) referred to it yesterday as Collins getting a ”hall pass” from McConnell, and suggested Lamar Alexander had been convinced to vote no so that Collins could vote yes. It all makes me feel tired and dirty and despondent.

ETA that since CPAC is publicly ditching Romney for his vote, maybe he should consider switching allegiances. He’ll get no support from his current side of the aisle.

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And he won’t get much support on this side either.

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America’s tombstone will just feature McConnell’s happy, pallid, boneless face in a smile.

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Granted it wouldn’t change anything, but all “fuck you” gestures directed at Mitch McConnell are welcome, and Romney’s at least as much a Democrat as Joe Manchin. More maybe, based on his record as governor of Massachusetts.

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Ah ha. Maybe this will push him over that edge (not likely, but maybe). I think he’d retain a lot of his voters, and acquire a lot of new ones. As well as a fuckton of attention in the process.

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I’m surprised he hasn’t already been automatically ejected from the party by it’s slow AI, like Justin Amash.

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Well, he’s a popular, oh so presidential looking Mormon politician, so he’s a safe Republican seat from Utah. The Party can still rely on him to cravenly toe the party line most of the time.

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download (1)

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See how dickless this dumbshit looks? That’s because I’m like Lyndon Johnson. I keep my enemy’s cocks in my pocket.

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February 1, 2020 (Saturday)

In the short term, Trump and his supporters appear to have won. The initial position of his defenders in his impeachment trial was that he had neither abused the power of his office by withholding military aid to Ukraine in exchange for help smearing his rival Joe Biden, nor obstructed Congress by covering the scandal up. But the House impeachment managers’ masterful presentation, along with the leaking of material from former National Security advisor John Bolton’s forthcoming book saying that Trump himself had tried to rope Bolton into the scheme killed that argument. So Republicans pivoted. Yes, they admitted, Trump did what he was accused of. But pressuring a foreign government to smear the president’s political opponent, they say, does not rise to the level of an impeachable offense.

The Senate will not vote on acquittal until Wednesday, but the vote on witnesses was widely seen as a proxy for that later vote. So it appears that Republican senators will support Trump. As House impeachment manager Adam Schiff warned them, if they acquit Trump, they will be part of the cover up, and they will be tied to Every. Single. Thing. That. Drops. From. Here. On. Out. And there will be plenty.

Last night, around midnight, just after Senate Republicans blocked testimony from witnesses and the admission of new documents, the Trump administration admitted in a court filing that it was withholding 24 emails from between June and September 2019 that describe “communications by either the President, the Vice President, or the President’s immediate advisors regarding Presidential decision-making about the scope, duration, and purpose of the hold on military assistance to Ukraine.”

There are nine months to go before the 2020 presidential election.

Congressional Republicans have chosen to double down on their association with Trump to help them win in 2020, throwing overboard any hope of appealing to moderates. They know it is a devil’s bargain. Next week, they will try to explain their votes in the record, and the Senate has decided not to vote on acquittal until Wednesday, making sure that Trump cannot use either the Super Bowl or his State of the Union Address in the House of Representatives on Tuesday night to crow. But, as never-Trump pundit Rick Wilson warned the Republicans, they are now complicit, and as more and more evidence comes out, Trump will turn on them.

People are saying this is the end for American democracy, but I see the opposite. Radical ideologues who want the government to do nothing but protect property, build a strong military, and advance Christianity took over the Republican Party in the 1990s. They have been manipulating our political system to their own ends ever since. They want to destroy the government regulation of business and social safety net we have enjoyed since the 1930s. But they have done so gradually, and not enough people seem to have noticed, even when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took the shocking step of refusing to permit a hearing for a Supreme Court nominee named by a Democrat. Now they have gone too far, out in the open, and it looks to me as if Americans are finally seeing the radicals currently in charge of the Republican Party for what they are, and are determined to take America back.

Americans are angry. On Wikipedia last night, the entry for “United States Senate” read briefly (before it was taken down): “The United States Senate was formerly the upper chamber of the United States Congress, which, along with the United States House of Representatives—the lower chamber—comprised the legislature of the United States. It died on January 31, 2020, when senators from the Republican Party refused to stand up to a corrupt autocrat calling himself the president of the United States, refusing to hear testimony that said individual blackmailed Ukraine in order to cheat in the 2020 presidential election.”

Ironically, this moment looks a lot like the moment that created the Republican Party. In the 1850s, elite slaveholders, who made up less than 1% of the population, took over the Democratic Party, which dominated national politics as their opponents kept squabbling amongst themselves. The slaveholders insisted that the government’s only job was to protect them and their property, and they stifled opposition as well as calls for government projects to spur the economy, getting poor white southerners to rally behind them with increasingly vicious racism.

Finally, in 1854, they went too far. In 1820, Congress had divided western lands evenly between slavery and freedom, but by 1854, the South had spread into all the lands reserved for slavery. So in 1854, planters demanded the right to take their enslaved workers into western land that was reserved for freedom. The proposed law, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, meant that rich planters would keep poor white men from moving west and taking up land. At the same time, adding new slave states in the West would break the balance in Congress. A few wealthy slaveowners would have the power to make slavery national. Free men would fall into poverty, and American democracy would end.

Surely, northerners thought, Congress would never pass such a dastardly law.

You know what’s coming, right?

It did. Under enormous pressure from the Democratic president Franklin Pierce, the Democrats passed the hated bill. Northern Democrats, who loathed the act, signed on, putting party before country.

In response, northerners came together to guarantee that the few rich slaveholders who had taken over the party would not destroy American democracy. Out in the frontier state of Illinois, Abraham Lincoln had given up politics for law, but the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act shocked him back into the political arena. The Democrats “took us by surprise—astounded us—by this measure. We were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion,” Lincoln later recalled. He came together with regular men and women from all parties to stop the takeover of the government, “[W]e rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver.”

In the elections held after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, voters decimated the northern Democrats who had put party over country. There were 142 northern seats in the House; they put “Anti-Nebraska” congressmen in 120 of them. By 1856, the movement against the takeover of the nation had coalesced into the Republican Party, and in 1860, it put Abraham Lincoln into the White House.

The party would do well to remember its beginnings.

Media personality Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out today that the 49 senators who lost the vote on witnesses represent 19 million more people than the 51 senators who won.

This morning Bill Kristol, a leader of the neoconservative movement, tweeted: “Not presumably forever; not perhaps for a day after Nov. 3, 2020; not on every issue or in every way until then. But for the time being one has to say: We are all Democrats now.”

Conservative writer Max Boot wrote: “I want nothing to do with a party led by the deluded and the dishonest. I fervently hope our democracy survives this debacle. I fervently hope the Republican Party does not,” then tweeted: “Will I ever rejoin the GOP? No. Trump will leave office some day (I hope!), but he will leave behind a quasi-authoritarian party that is as corrupt as he is. The failure to call witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trial revealed the GOP’s moral failure.”

The Senate adjourned Friday and is not due to resume business until Monday at 11:00, when both the House impeachment managers and the president’s lawyers will give closing statements.

Also available as a free newsletter at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com

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Worth quoting again. :fist:

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So if history is any judge, we’ve got a civil war to get through before we have any hope of seeing daylight again.

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I know it’s a good thing, but it kind of pisses me off that people like Kristol are primarily responsible for this shit show, and now they get to act all shocked that the party HE helped create is something he has nothing to do with. What utter bullshit from the man who insisted the McCain run with Sarah Palin! SARAH PALIN!

he should go shove his shock and dismay right up his ass.

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Right?

Though I will say that Sarah Palin is a nothingburger now, and if that was the price we had to pay to fully realize Tina Fey’s genius then it was worth it. :slight_smile:

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She is, but it was embracing Palin and what she represents that helped pull the party further to the right… she was Trump before Trump in the GOP, a grifter with no real talent who was only out for her own bottom line and attention.

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February 2, 2020 (Sunday)

It is my understanding that tonight two groups of large men engaged in a contest of athletic prowess, and that one of them prevailed over the other. If you were into this contest, I hope you are content with the outcome.

Some of you may have heard me say that I started these Letters quite inadvertently at a time when I was up to my eyeballs in the work of finishing a book. While America was watching the Super Bowl tonight, I finished the last of the last of the last page proofs on that book. We will have final pages later this week, and I will begin to read the audio version on Saturday. We will have books in hand by mid-March.

This book came from a very different place than these Letters, and you may or may not find it interesting. It covers all of American history from Shakespeare to Trump in 200 pages, and is probably the smartest thing I’ve ever written, but it is not an easy book to live with. It argues that our peculiar history has left our democracy vulnerable to oligarchs who can leverage racism and sexism to win power whenever it looks like women and people of color might become equal.

I have watched the news today as I worked, and there is nothing that cannot wait until tomorrow, when the Senate will convene to hear closing arguments in Trump’s impeachment trial.

So I am taking the night off. The end of a book is much like the peculiar triumph of childbirth. You are relieved, and know intuitively that you have produced something new and unique that will take on a life and a meaning of its own, and you know you are incredibly blessed to have been able to play a role in that new creation. But you are also drained beyond belief, and oh. so. tired.

Tomorrow we will pick it all up again. But tonight, we—or I, anyway-- rest.

The cover:

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I’m going to toodle over to amazon and put that on pre-order.

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