Tag Archives: US Senate

national news

Trial muzzles loquacious group of lawmakers

Hear ye! Hear ye!. All persons are commanded to keep silent, on pain of imprisonment.

One hundred Americans who now serve in the U.S. Senate got that command at the start of a trial to determine whether the current president of the United States, Donald John Trump, gets to keep his job.

Four of those 100 senators are running in a primary campaign for the right to face that president in an election later this year.

I am trying to imagine the difficulty it was for those senators, a group of men and women with enormous egos — many of whom are deeply in love with the sound of their own voices — to hear that mandate come from the Senate sergeant-at-arms.

The late Sen. George McGovern once said that the first prerequisite for a successful politician is to have a large ego. So the Senate is now sitting on its hands, its collective lips zipped while House members — from that “other” legislative branch — argue on behalf of the case that produced an impeachment of the Donald Trump.

My goodness. It’s bad enough for these men and women to have to sit there and not say a word. What makes it worse is that they are being forced to listen to House members talk for hours on end about a case they have brought to the “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body.” Senators tend, as I understand it, to look down on their colleagues in the House. Except for those few sparsely populated states that have just a single House member in Congress, senators represent their entire states while House members represent a “mere” congressional district. Senators have greater power, or so they believe, than their House colleagues.

The impeachment accuses Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

You and I are all quite certain that senators have plenty to say about those articles of impeachment. Except they cannot say a word about it, other than to comment — when the media ask them for their comment — on the presentation they are being forced to hear without being able to respond in real time.

In a strange sort of happenstance, we are witnessing the members of one legislative chamber elevating their profile to the same level as the members of the other.

I find it entertaining.

national news

‘Liberal hack’ attack is now the new normal?

U.S. Sen. Martha McSally is a supreme disappointment to me, as I once said something nice about the grace she exhibited in losing an earlier race for another vacant Senate seat in Arizona.

Now the Republican seeking election to a seat to which she was appointed is turning into, shall we say, a “conservative hack.” Why? Because she called a CNN reporter a “liberal hack” who had the temerity to ask her a straightforward question devoid of any political taint or bias.

CNN Capitol Hill reporter Manu Raju asked McSally if she supported calling for additional evidence and witnesses in the upcoming impeachment trial of Donald John Trump, the current president of the United States.

“You’re a liberal hack; I’m not talking to you,” McSally snapped at Raju. Huh? That’s how it goes? A working journalist asks a question that requires at minimum a “yes” or a “no.” She chose to bite back at someone who is merely doing his job as a correspondent for a major newsgathering organization.

This is the “media is the enemy of the people” strategy employed by Donald Trump against those in the media who continue to provide critical coverage of events and statements from the president and his allies — when it is deserved!

McSally, a backbench senator who was appointed to replace former Sen. Jon Kyl, who served briefly after the death of the great Sen. John McCain. She earlier had run against Democrat Kyrsten Sinema for a seat vacated by the retirement of Jeff Flake. That race was a nail-biter, but McSally conceded with grace and class to her opponent.

Thus, I had hope she would comport herself with dignity when she got the appointment to succeed Kyl. Silly me.

McSally doubled down on her slap back at Raju, recalling that she was “a fighter pilot.” Indeed, she is U.S. Air Force Academy grad who saw combat duty in Iraq.

Her petulant display, though, bodes grimly for the state of political discourse at least where it involves this federal legislator. Perhaps she is feeling the heat of sagging poll numbers in Arizona, where she is trailing possible Democratic challenger Mark Kelly, a former shuttle astronaut.

Whatever the case, Manu Raju — seeking a simple answer to a direct question — didn’t need the high-profile slap in the face by Sen. McSally. Bad call, senator.

national news

Acquittal doesn’t necessarily mean exoneration

Given what most of us out here in Flyover Country expect will happen — that the U.S. Senate won’t kick Donald Trump out of office — I want to offer a word of warning to fellow news junkies as to what we’re likely to hear from the president of the United States.

He will shout, scream and holler that the Senate has “exonerated!” him. He will declare that the Senate’s failure to clear the very high — justifiably so — bar set by the nation’s founders means that his impeachment was based on nothing at all.

That’s not how many of us see it.

The House of Representatives impeached Trump on allegations that he abused the power of his office and that he obstructed Congress. They made the case in convincing fashion; their evidence is enough to warrant his removal from office … in my view.

Trump sought political help from a foreign government and withheld military aid to that government until it provided a “favor, though” to him and his re-election team. He has instructed his staff to ignore congressional subpoenas. Abuse of power and obstruction of Congress? Done deal, man. Again, that’s my view.

The Senate won’t find 67 votes to convict Trump. So, he’s likely to say the Senate has “exonerated” him. No. It won’t. His expected acquittal only will signify that an insufficient number of senators saw fit to convict Trump of what I believe are impeachable offenses.

We need to hear from witnesses in this Senate trial. Yes, even if they are provide evidence that clears Trump of wrongdoing. Trump is fighting that idea, which tells me he is hiding something. Someone deserving of “exoneration” doesn’t go to Trump’s lengths to keep witnesses from testifying. Am I right?

The trial begins next week. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has named the “managers” who will prosecute this matter on behalf of the House. Senators will sit quietly in the chamber and listen to what everyone has to say.

Then they will vote. Trump will escape with a narrowly defined acquittal. He’ll holler he was “exonerated!”

The irony? That false claim will be yet another Donald Trump lie.

national news

Let the trial begin … with witnesses!

(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

It looks as though the U.S. Senate is going to convene a trial next week. The president of the United States is going to stand trial on charges that he abused his power and obstructed Congress.

The trial of Donald Trump isn’t a purely legal proceeding. It’s damn close to one, though. It’s close enough to a courtroom trial that there needs to be witnesses called who have something important to add to the issue at hand.

That issue is: What happened precisely during that “perfect phone call” that Trump had with the president of Ukraine? Then-national security adviser John Bolton was present when Trump talked to his Ukrainian colleague; so was acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. The Senate needs to hear from them. What they did hear? Did the president ask a foreign government to interfere in our 2020 election? Did he withhold military aid to Ukraine until it announced an investigation into Joe Biden, a potential Trump foe?

The nation does not know what they know. We have not heard it from them directly. I am one American who wants to know what they heard. I want to hear ’em say it out loud, in public, under oath.

Will that occur? Will the Senate summon them? We don’t know.

In return, of course, Trump wants the Senate to call Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, who worked for the energy company for a handsome sum of money. There are allegations of “corruption” involving Hunter Biden. Except that prosecutors have said time and again that the younger Biden did nothing illegal.

The president also wants to call House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff. Why? Beats the livin’ malarkey out of me!

Let’s not turn this trial into a sideshow. It is serious. It is a sober event. It should be conducted with utmost decorum and dignity.

I am awaiting the start of this trial. I hope we get to hear from Bolton and others with direct knowledge of what happened … allegedly!

We need a serious trial. Not a circus.

national news

Get on with Senate trial and then move on to the next fight

(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

My impeachment fatigue is worsening. It’s wearing me out. I am tiring of hearing the same news reports time and again about the upcoming trial of Donald John Trump.

Let’s get the trial done, shall we.

I believe my worsening case of impeachment fatigue is brought on the realization — which I have known for some time, truth be told — that the U.S. Senate will not toss Donald Trump out of the White House. It will not muster up the constitutionally mandated courage to do the right thing and convict him of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Trump is likely to keep enough Senate Republicans in tow to avoid being booted out with a two-thirds majority needed at the end of the trial.

I would say “that’s fine,” except that it isn’t. It’s just the way this hand will play out.

It appears, too, that Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who presided over Trump’s impeachment in the House of Representatives, caved in her demand that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell guarantee a “fair” trial before she sent the articles of impeachment to the Senate. I guess every politician has limits on his or her patience and I reckon Pelosi reached her limit.

So, what now? We get a trial. Trump stays in office. Then he runs for re-election as the first president ever to do so with the cloud of impeachment hanging over him. How that plays out depends on (a) how adroit Trump is in parlaying himself as a “victim” and (b) how well the Democratic Party nominee is able to articulate the case that an impeachment is a major scar on the president’s legacy.

I will devote much of this blog, therefore, to making the case as well as I can that Donald Trump needs to serve just a single term as president, that the next president will have some major cleanup work to do to restore the dignity of the office.

The impeachment fatigue, I am hoping, will dissipate once we get a Senate verdict. Then I’ll be ready to move on to the next battle.

Let’s all get ready.

national news

How is McConnell able to serve as a Senate ‘juror’?

I am baffled. The U.S. Senate majority leader is seeking to grease a pending Senate trial in favor of the president of the United States.

And this will occur after he takes an oath administered by the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court to be an impartial juror.

How does that work?

Mitch McConnell is working with the White House to ensure a favorable outcome for Donald Trump, who’s about to be impeached by the House of Representatives. The Senate will get the matter and will conduct a trial to determine whether Trump should be convicted of two high crimes and misdemeanors: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

All 100 senators will serve as jurors in a trial presided over by Chief Justice John Roberts. But how in the name of impartial juris prudence can Majority Leader McConnell perform the duties he will swear he will do if he’s attempting to rig the outcome in favor of the president?

This isn’t how you’re supposed to do it.

I get that the trial isn’t strictly a judicial affair, that it’s tinged with politics through and through. However, there is supposed to be a certain level of judicial decorum involved when the jurors take an oath to judge the evidence fairly and with an open mind.

For the leader of the Senate to work against that very oath is a serious violation of the duties he is supposed to perform.

national news

Sen. McConnell seeks to ‘rig’ Senate trial

(Photo by Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

So this is how you play the game. You’re in charge of a body that is about to launch a trial and you rig it so it rules favorably against a defendant?

Spoiler alert: I said I was considering a temporary end to impeachment commentary, but I am going to weigh in briefly here.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his 99 U.S. Senate colleagues are about to put Donald Trump on trial for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The House will impeach Trump in due course.

McConnell now says he will work to ensure smooth cooperation between the Senate and the White House, meaning he is going to orchestrate a not guilty verdict for the president when the time comes to take the roll among the 100 Senate “jurors.”

Isn’t that called tampering with the jury? Or some form of unseemly manipulation of the jury pool? If this matter isn’t supposed to be about politics, but about doing what’s right … what is so “right” about what McConnell is seeking to do?

 

national news

Irony awaits impeachment conclusion

There’s a certain sense of irony associated with what is about to happen in the U.S. House of Representatives and then in the U.S. Senate.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delayed an impeachment inquiry for as long as she could, believing that impeaching Donald Trump would divide the nation more than it is already divided.

Then came that infamous phone call of this past July and the request from the president for Ukraine to help him with a personal political favor. Trump wanted to hold up some key military aid to Ukraine — which wanted it to fight the Russian-backed rebels — until Ukraine delivered on the favor; he wanted to find dirt on a potential political foe, former Vice President Joe Biden.

That did it! said Pelosi. We have to impeach the president. More to the point, she said we had to look into whether there are sufficient grounds to impeach him.

To my way of thinking — and to the thinking of millions of other Americans — the House found sufficient reason to impeach him. House members came up with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. It’s as clear to me as the day is long.

Yet, the division remains. Democrats are virtually all in. Republican are virtually all opposed to what Democrats want to do.

So, the House will impeach Trump on two articles of impeachment. The Senate will conduct a trial. As near as anyone can tell, Democrats will have enough votes to send the matter to the Senate. Republicans, though, are in control of the upper chamber, so they’ll find Trump “not guilty.”

You see the irony? Pelosi’s fear of a divided nation is coming true — even in the face of what many of us consider to be overwhelming evidence that Donald Trump should be thrown out of office for putting his personal political fortunes ahead of the national interest.

State news

Will ‘Texodus’ cause loss of clout in Congress? Uhh, yes, it will

A headline in the Texas Tribune asks a question that borders on the preposterous.

“As experienced Texan congressmen retire, will the states’ sway in Congress decline?”

I have the answer: Yes. It will decline.

Both congressional chambers rely heavily on seniority. The more senior the members of the House and Senate, the more powerful committee assignments they get. They ascend to chairmanships or, if they’re in the House, they sit as “ranking members” of the minority party; a ranking member is deemed to be the senior member of the party that doesn’t control the chairmanship.

My former congressman, Republican Mac Thornberry of Clarendon, is retiring at the end of next year; he won’t seek re-election to his umpteenth term in the House. He serves as ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, a panel he chaired until Democrats took control of the House after the 2018 election.

Congressional power ebbs and flows. Texans who worry about such things need not fret over Texas’s loss of clout in the House. Indeed, if the state is turning into more of a “swing state,” Texas Democrats might find themselves elevated to positions of power formerly occupied by their Republican colleagues.

For the time being, though, the retirements of six Texas members of Congress does create a dwindling clout for the state on Capitol Hill.

However, it is likely far from a terminal ailment.

national news

Legal victory = political draw

One of the more fascinating talking points to emerge from the public hearings into the House of Representatives impeachment inquiry of Donald Trump’s presidency focuses on the legal vs. political aspects of the proceeding.

The argument goes something like this: If this were strictly a legal matter, House Democrats would have enough compelling evidence to convict Trump of the high crimes and misdemeanors that have been alleged against him. But it isn’t a legal proceeding. It’s a political battle and on that score, Trump is likely to survive impeachment and a trial that would occur in the U.S. Senate.

House and Senate Republicans seem to be aligned along a single thought: Yeah, the president did something wrong, but it’s not impeachable, let alone enough of a reason to convict him and toss him out of office.

Their Democratic colleagues, obviously, see it differently. They believe they have sufficient evidence in hand to impeach and convict Trump on crimes relating to his solicitation of political help from a foreign government and his efforts to cover it up and obstruct the pursuit of justice.

But … this isn’t a criminal matter. It’s a political one. Which is where Trump holds the winning hand.

He has bullied Senate and House Republicans into standing with him. To oppose Trump in this political fight would incur his wrath, which has proven to be quite formidable. They fear the president’s revenge and the support he continues to enjoy among that base of American voters in key states and congressional districts.

Were this a legal fight that operated under the rules of legal justice, in my view this wouldn’t even be a close call. Trump would be drummed out of office, sent packing to Mar-a-Lago … where he no doubt would launch a full frontal Twitter assault on a system that robbed him of the glory he believes he deserves.

Sadly, it is not. It’s a political fight that figures to last beyond the impeachment and trial and into the 2020 presidential election.

That is where this fight is likely to be decided.

Oh, I do hope Americans can snap out of their Trump-induced stupor to rid this nation of this poisonous politician.