Tag Archives: US Senate

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.

national news

Will he resign or stay … and get pummeled?

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reportedly wants to serve in the U.S. Senate. How does he do that if he is serving in the Donald Trump administration? Obviously, he cannot.

He also is being dragged feet first into the impeachment inquiry sausage grinder that has cranked up in the House of Representatives.

Pompeo hails from Kansas. He once served in the House from that state. Sen. Pat Roberts is retiring at the end of 2020. Pompeo wants to succeed him.

Does he stay on at State or does he enter the campaign from Kansas? He ought to run for the Senate. I don’t believe he needs to be elected from that state, given that I believe he has disserved his fellow diplomats at State. How? By not standing behind one of his more stellar ambassadors, Marie Yovanovitch, who has been smeared by Donald Trump, who fired her from her post as ambassador to Ukraine.

The impeachment inquiry is getting messy for Pompeo. He now has been revealed to have been in on that phone call Trump made to Ukraine’s president in which he asked for a favor in return for weapons sent to Ukraine to use against rebels backed by Russia.

Yahoo.com reported that Pompeo wants out, that he wants to run for the Senate. The State Department denies it … naturally!

Since the denial comes from the Trump administration, I cannot accept it at face value.

I tend to believe the reports that Donald Trump is going to look for the third secretary of state who is willing to endure the misery the president seems all too willing to inflict on those he selects to serve.

national news

Sessions seeks to become Sen. Suck Up

Jeff Sessions’ announcement the other day that he intends to run for the U.S. Senate seat in Alabama was one of the most pathetic examples of senatorial slobbering I think I’ve ever seen.

Let’s review some history for a moment:

Sessions served for 20 years before joining the Trump administration as attorney general. He then recused himself from the Russia investigation because, he said, he couldn’t investigate his own role in alleged Russian collusion with the Trump campaign; he was a key player in the campaign.

Trump fired Sessions as AG. He then called nominating Sessions “the worst mistake” of his presidency. He skewered Sessions’ intelligence. He mocked his Southern accent. He humiliated the former AG simply for taking a principled stand against potential conflict of interest.

Now the former AG and former senator wants his old seat back. Did he extol his record as a lawmaker from Alabama? Did he tout his conservative principles? Did the Republican offer a clue as to what kind of senator he would be if voters returned him?

No. He called himself one of Trump’s biggest fans. He asked rhetorically whether he wrote a tell-all book, or did he show up “on CNN” to speak ill of Trump, or whether he has ever said a “cross” word about the president.

My goodness. What a craven example of slavish fealty to someone who, if the tables were turned, wouldn’t do anything of the sort.

Disgusting.

national news, State news

Beto wipes out on wave he hoped would win the White House

Beto O’Rourke rode a huge wave to a near win in a 2018 campaign for the U.S. Senate in Texas.

Then the former El Paso congressman decided he would ride that wave in search of a bigger prize: the White House.

Today, though, he called it quits. He is no longer running for president of the United States. Indeed, O’Rourke never quite caught the same wave that excited so many Democrats in Texas and for a time got ’em pumped up in many other parts of the country.

I’ll admit to being disappointed. I had hoped to cast my ballot for O’Rourke once the Democratic Party primary parade marched its way toward Texas. However, O’Rourke never quite ignited the same level of interest in his presidential campaign that he did while he challenged Sen. Ted Cruz a year ago.

Oh, I wanted him to win the Senate seat in the worst way. He campaigned in all of Texas’s 254 counties. He took his message to progressive bastions such as Travis, Dallas and Bexar counties as well as conservative strongholds in the Panhandle, the Permian Basin and Deep East Texas.

O’Rourke finished Election Night 2018 less than 3 percent short of victory. In Texas, that constituted some sort of “moral victory” for Democrats who have lusted for a statewide election victory for more than two decades.

Alas, it wasn’t meant to be as O’Rourke sought his party’s presidential nomination.

There might be another elected office in O’Rourke’s future. Just not this next year.

Nice try, Beto. Many of us still want to see you stay in the game, even if you’re no longer a candidate for public office.

national news

Here is a tale of two impeachments

While the president of the United States keeps taking a victory lap after authorizing the mission that killed the Islamic State’s founder, it is time look at another matter that should concern Donald J. Trump.

The president is going to be impeached by the House of Representatives. The Senate will put him on trial eventually and likely will fail to convict him.

It will be the second presidential impeachment in 20 years. The House impeached President Clinton in 1998 and the Senate put him on trial the following year.

Is there a difference between these two matters? Let’s examine a critical difference.

Bill Clinton’s impeachment had everything to do with boorish personal conduct. The Republican-led House was looking for a reason to impeach Clinton, a Democrat. The president handed it to the House by lying under oath to a grand jury about a relationship he was having with a White House intern. Clinton denied the relationship. The House had evidence to the contrary.

The House impeached the president on perjury and on obstruction of justice.

Back to my point: Clinton’s impeachment had next to nothing to do with the job he was doing as president. In fact, he proved to be an effective and highly successful president. He worked with Congress to balance the federal budget and the economy was booming.

His impeachment was based on a disastrous personal decision he made. Clinton paid the price politically for that decision. He stands forever as an “impeached president.”

What about Donald Trump? The allegations staring this president down have everything to do with the conduct of his office. He has been accused of violating his oath of office by accepting foreign government assistance for personal political gain. He allegedly withheld military assistance to an ally in exchange for dirt on political foes.

There might be even more to be revealed before it’s done.

Donald Trump’s troubles far exceed in relevance to the conduct of his elected office anything that Bill Clinton did.

Clinton got impeached because he lied about marital infidelity. Donald Trump is going to be impeached over allegations that he has abused the immense power of his office.

The irony is that Trump likes to boast about doing things in fashions that dwarf his presidential predecessors. On this impeachment matter, what Donald Trump reportedly has done lends a certain quaintness to whatever it was that got Bill Clinton into so much trouble.