Month: July 2017

by digby

We have word today that Mitch McConnell is going to delay the August recess in order to ram through some kind of health care atrocity.

Meanwhile, the ACA is doing pretty well which, of course, explains why they have to destroy it:

A newly released study confirmed that the Affordable Care Act is not failing and in fact insurers are on track to have their “best year” yet under the ACA. However, Republicans are determined to pass a new health repeal bill that could derail insurance markets. If the ACA fails, it will be because of Republican sabotage. 

A new report confirmed what the CBO stated in its score of the Senate healthcare repeal bill: The Affordable Care Act is not failing. 

McClatchy: Death spiral? Obamacare insurers may be having ‘best year’ yet under ACA  

NBC News: Study: Obamacare Is Not Collapsing 

The Hill: Study: ObamaCare market ‘stabilizing,’ not collapsing 

Washington Examiner: Obamacare exchanges show signs of stabilizing: Study 

Los Angeles Times: More evidence shows Obamacare is getting healthier, but will that stop the GOP wrecking crew? 

Meanwhile, Ted Cruz is working hard to get people killed:

Politico: “Ted Cruz’s plan to give insurers freedom to sell plans that don’t comply with Obamacare’s insurance regulations may be conservatives’ last best chance to salvage the stalled Senate health care bill. But it might also send Obamacare insurance markets into a death spiral.”

This is a reminder to keep pushing hard on your Senators and House members on this. They would love nothing more if everyone let up on them in the dog days of summer.

Between the Trump administration’s Russia investigation and the people pressing these Republicans hard on health care, it is possible to stop this thing.

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by digby

Republicans in congress are rallying around Trump. They say it’s a distraction and they just don’t care. History will record their abdication of responsibility and lack of fundamental patriotism.

This piece by Ezra Klein explains more fully why getting rid of Trump would be no easy task. Mueller has limited ability to do anything about him although he could indict and prosecute everyone underneath him if he had the goods. The only real remedy for Trump is impeachment and that would require Paul Ryan to cooperate:

Yes, impeachment could theoretically proceed with mostly Democratic votes and some defecting Republicans. But in practice, both the Nixon and Clinton impeachment processes began with the full House voting to refer the matter to the House Judiciary Committee, and the Judiciary Committee approving articles of impeachment and sending them to the floor. 

You can’t hold those votes unless the majority party schedules them. “Impeachment happens in the House of Representatives, and since the House is run on majority rules, it’s really up the majority party to run the process as it sees fit,” my colleague Andrew Prokop explains.
And, of course, Republicans are the majority party in the House and Senate. In the three previous impeachment scenarios in US history, the president has been faced with a congressional majority of the opposing party. Andrew Johnson, a Democratic/National Union Party president, faced a huge Republican majority in both houses. Richard Nixon faced a Democratic majority in both houses. Bill Clinton faced a Republican majority in both houses. 

Trump, however, has co-partisans in charge of both houses. But surely, you may reply, Trump’s crimes top those of Johnson, Nixon, or Clinton! Maybe (I doubt it in the case of Johnson), but it doesn’t matter what you or I think. It matters what Ryan and McConnell think. And what they really want is a Republican president to sign their priorities, in particular slashing health care spending and other social programs and cutting taxes, into law. 

Impeachment proceedings are long and ugly and almost completely consume Congress’s time and energy. They take up months that Republicans desperately need to pass health care and tax legislation before the 2018 midterms, which could see them lose control of the House. Think about it from Ryan’s perspective. He has, by his own admission, wanted to cut health programs for poor people since he was drinking out of kegs in college. So he can either charge forward with that goal and push for final passage of a Republican health bill — or he can spend months and months impeaching the president and giving a massive political gift to Democrats instead. 

If you take the cause of cutting social programs and taxes as seriously as Ryan does, then why the hell would you ever choose the route of impeachment? He’d be left with very little time to enjoy the relative predictability and lower scandal output of President Mike Pence before the midterms put his House majority in danger. And if the 1974 midterms are any indication, having your party’s president leave under dint of scandal is a great way to lose an enormous number of seats in the House and Senate. After that, Ryan’s dream is dead. 

The much easier path for Ryan and McConnell is to continually minimize Trump’s wrongdoing and decline to investigate seriously, let alone look into removal.
Maybe it doesn’t require impeachment, though. Maybe Trump will voluntarily resign if the situation gets bad enough. I mean, maybe. But is there anything about Trump’s character and temperament that makes such an outcome seem plausible? Nixon refused to resign until his party’s leaders in Congress came to him and told him impeachment was inevitable. Would even that do it for Trump? Why would he give Ryan and McConnell the gift of an easy departure were they to betray him like that?
As political scientist Julia Azari notes, impeachment is not about the law. Not really. There’s no dispassionate prosecutor who weighs the evidence, takes it to a grand jury, gets indictments, and then has a normal trial. It’s a political proceeding. A president survives if fewer than 218 House members and 67 senators want him out; otherwise, he falls. 

For Trump to fall, for a scandal to end his presidency, what’s needed isn’t a new, massive scandal. What’s needed is for Ryan and McConnell to decide that investigating and prosecuting Trump is important, and the right thing to do. I hope they make that a priority. I hope they give Mueller greater statutory powers, including protection from removal, and push through impeachment charges if Mueller deems them warranted. 

But the matter is in Ryan and McConnell’s hands, and no one else’s. As long as they remain on Trump’s side, the president is going nowhere.

My money’s on them continuing to back Trump no matter what until it takes them down with him. So far Republican voters love Trump and don’t care at all if he was working with the Russian government to beat the witch Clinton. They would have sold the country out to ISIS if they would help them do that.  It’s what they live for.

So, I don’t see this as being something that leads to”the end.” Their own voters don’t care. Why should they?

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Fredo Trump, human sacrifice

by digby

I wrote about Don Jr for Salon this morning:

A big joke in political circles these days is that the Trumps are a mob family like the Corleones in “The Godfather” — except that they are all Fredo, the anemic and inferior brother who betrays the family in a fit of pique. But if you had to pick one member of the family who has truly lost himself in that role it would have to be Donald Trump Jr. In fact, according to the Daily Beast, members of the Trump administration have been referring to him as “Fredo” for quite some time:

Ever since the campaign, a popular, behind-his-back nickname for Trump Jr. among some in his father’s political inner circle has been “Fredo,” referring to Fredo Corleone, the insecure and weak failure of a son in the “Godfather” series who ends up causing major damage to the crime family and contributing little of value. This has been relayed to The Daily Beast in several stories by Team Trump veterans over the past several weeks.

Personally, I had always thought Junior was the Sonny Corleone of the family, hot-headed and impulsive, aligning himself with alt-right characters and using Twitter as his preferred method of beating down those who made him angry. During the campaign there was a lot of gossip about his youthful problems with alcohol and his difficult relationship with his father. He was a troubled young man who grew up to become an aggressive and nasty political operator during his father’s campaign. I wrote about his ugly affiliations and racist proclivities last September, expressing my concern that the thuggish firstborn was planning a political career of his own.

The good news is that it looks as if we won’t have to worry about that. The New York Times has published a series of reports over the weekend and on Monday revealing that in June of 2016, Donald Jr. had invited his brother-in-law Jared Kushner and the Trump campaign manager at the time, Paul Manafort, to a meeting with a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin who promised to deliver dirt on Hillary Clinton. The reason people are calling him Fredo in this case is that the Trump scion has clumsily explained what happened by repeatedly changing his story and basically implicating himself in possible collusion.

On June 9, 2016, just two weeks after Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination, Donald Jr. was contacted by a music publicist he’d met in Moscow who represented the “pop star” son of a Russian oligarch who had helped finance the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, which was owned at the time by the Trump Organization. The publicist, Rob Goldstone, told him that a Russian lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya had some “damaging information” on Hillary Clinton and wanted to meet with him.

Trump Jr. said that what Veselnitskaya offered was useless and vague and that she mainly wanted to talk about her mission to reverse the Magnitsky Act, a set of sanctions imposed on Russia as punishment for human rights violations. Those sanctions have made Russian President Vladimir Putin so angry that he blocked all American adoptions of Russian children.

When this meeting was reported by the Times, Donald Jr. first said the meeting had been called strictly to discuss the adoptions, which seemed an odd issue to require his attention. As the reporting developed, he changed his story to say that he took the meeting because he was told she would give him “information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee.” Veselnitskaya denies she ever said anything at all about Hillary Clinton or the Democratic National Committee.

The fact that one of Trump’s own sons, as well as his powerful White House adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner and former campaign manager Paul Manafort, had all taken a meeting with a Kremlin-affiliated lawyer who promised to deliver damaging information about the Democratic nominee — and had a specific request in return — looks very much like what we might suppose collusion would look like. Despite all the allegedly forgettable meetings with Russians among Trump’s inner circle, this is the first time we know there was an offer of campaign-related opposition research, along with a possible quid pro quo.

On Monday night the New York Times took this to a whole new level, reporting that several sources have said that Goldstone the publicist sent Trump Jr. an email that explicitly said the material Veselnitskaya was offering “was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy.” Trump Jr. had hired a lawyer earlier that day, who denied any wrongdoing on his client’s behalf. But if that email exists, it shows that for more than a year Donald Trump Jr. knew that the Russian government had wanted to help his father get elected. The idea that he would never have mentioned this to him seems … far-fetched.

There have been a lot of meetings with Russians that members of the Trump administration can’t seem to remember having. This one was belatedly disclosed by Kushner and Manafort when they filled out their amended disclosure forms, although nobody knew what had been discussed in the meeting until now. The congressional committee investigators were also aware and were undoubtedly on the case. So, the White House knew the information was not going to stay contained — which brings us to the Times’ three anonymous sources for this story, which it reports are all close to the White House.

That’s distinctly odd, and many observers have been getting a strange feeling about this story because of that. Who in the White House would want to hang Donald Trump Jr. out to dry? Chris Hayes and Sam Seder speculated on MSNBC’s “All In” on Monday night that this particular maneuver is meant as cover for Jared Kushner, who is the one with legal liability for failing to disclose this meeting. The case against Trump Jr. is less clear, since he did not have an official role in the campaign and doesn’t work for the government. So perhaps the White House figured that since the story was going to come out anyway he’d be a better choice to take the fall than Ivanka’s beloved Jared, the son Donald Trump never had.

We know what happened to Fredo in the end, don’t we?

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Won’t get ruled again
by Tom Sullivan

There has always been a muted desire among some of our neighbors, as there was during the American Revolution, for rule by hereditary royalty and landed gentry. Holding onto our republic against that impulse has always been problematic, as Benjamin Franklin hinted it would be. A yearning for a return to the old ways never seems far from the surface. It has seemed a little bit closer lately.

I’ve written repeatedly of my theory that members of the fringe right, alt-right or whatever are simply acting out a traditional murder ballad with their country. Facing demographic and economic changes that threaten to upend the traditional political and cultural dominance of white Christians in America, extremists among them are pursuing the slow murder of their lover because if they can’t have her, nobody can. Donald Trump is their hands around her throat. Those hands (insert your own joke here) got tighter last week at the G20 meeting.

But that frame applies more to the middle and working classes. For moneyed interests, what’s happening could be the denouement of a decades-old effort to roll back the New Deal and Civil Rights era projects that strengthened and broadened the middle class, flattened American society, and brought the country closer to (although still far from) the ideal of a society in which all its citizens are not just created equal, but treated that way. For the Caledon Hockleys who see themselves as society’s better or at least more productive half — 53 percent is surely not exclusive enough — that was never their ideal.

Still, one wonders just how much damage to the country from a Trump presidency the Republican leadership in Congress is prepared to endure to secure the blessings of tax cuts for themselves and their Hocklian benefactors. That has been the speculation, that as much as Trump has undercut America’s leadership position in the world (and, it seems, our national security interests), Republican leaders are going to grit their teeth and grin though it until they have driven a stake through the heart of Barack Obama’s legacy health care plan and moved on to the main event: another big tax cut for the moneyed class.

But it is not just their benefactors’ interests that concern them. Like allied extremists in the streets, securing their own power going forward is also of prime interest. To that end, voter suppression measures have spread across the country in GOP-dominated legislatures. Redistricting with “surgical precision” gives them representation disproportionate to their vote shares in state after state. What with the Russophile leanings of the Trump family and a broadening investigation into possible crimes involving election meddling by foreign adversaries, Republicans sticking with their man to ensure a conservative-friendly judiciary has received less press.

Bloomberg’s Paul Barrett and David Ingold report that Republican congressional aides are reviewing a large number of vacancies on the federal bench that only retention of the presidency and the Senate majority will allow Republicans to fill. Republicans “slow walked” Obama’s nominations to lower courts throughout his term and outright hijacked a Supreme Court seat in his last year. The seat vacated with the unexpected death of the Antonin Scalia should have been U.S. Circuit Judge Merrick Garland’s. Instead, it went to Trump’s choice, Neil Gorsuch, a consistent conservative who, the authors note, “doesn’t even turn 50 until August.” Keeping Trump right where he is, no matter the outcome of the Russia election hacking investigations, means Republicans will have more like Gorsuch coming and staying. Twelve percent of federal judgeships (107) were vacant when Donald Trump took office:

Those vacancies, and the ones to come as more judges retire (the number has already jumped to 136 in the six months since inauguration) offer Trump the chance to sculpt the courts to his liking. During the campaign, he said he would “appoint judges very much in the mold of Justice Scalia,” a forceful conservative who unexpectedly died in February 2016. Perhaps more than some of his liberal detractors gave him credit for, Trump, 71, understood the importance of the judiciary to Republicans who were reluctant to support him. “If you really like Donald Trump, that’s great, but if you don’t, you have to vote for me anyway,” he said at a rally in Iowa last July. “You know why? Supreme Court judges, Supreme Court judges.”

The Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society assembled for Trump a list of 21 Supreme Court picks from which he chose Gorsuch. With rumors swirling that Justice Kennedy could retire before the 2018 mid-term elections, more names on that list could get their shot at a seat there or on lower courts, for which Trump is using the same list.

Administration officials “know what they are looking for,” said Jonathan Adler, a conservative constitutional law professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “Most of the appellate court nominees are current or former academics. That shows a desire for judges who will have an intellectual influence on the courts they’re placed on.” Noah Feldman, a liberal professor at Harvard Law School and Bloomberg View columnist, volunteered that “these are better picks than one might have expected—maybe better than one could have hoped.” Feldman attributed the quality of these early nominees to the administration’s having “outsourced judicial selection” to “elite conservative lawyers.”

Bloomberg provides some handy graphics for getting a handle on where the judicial balance currently is nationwide and how it might tip under a Trump administration. They are worth viewing.

But just to give some sense of how retrograde a regime we now face, Trump aides are exploring ways to privatize war-fighting in Afghanistan:

Erik D. Prince, a founder of the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, and Stephen A. Feinberg, a billionaire financier who owns the giant military contractor DynCorp International, have developed proposals to rely on contractors instead of American troops in Afghanistan at the behest of Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, and Jared Kushner, his senior adviser and son-in-law, according to people briefed on the conversations.

On Saturday morning, Mr. Bannon sought out Defense Secretary Jim Mattis at the Pentagon to try to get a hearing for their ideas, an American official said. Mr. Mattis listened politely but declined to include the outside strategies in a review of Afghanistan policy that he is leading along with the national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster.

The highly unusual meeting dramatizes the divide between Mr. Trump’s generals and his political staff over Afghanistan, the lengths to which his aides will go to give their boss more options for dealing with it and the readiness of this White House to turn to business people for help with diplomatic and military problems.

Recall on whose side the Hessians fought.

Blast from the past

by digby

I’m so old I remember when Republicans went absolutely batshit insane over the notion that a foreign country had illegally funneled money into a presidential campaign. It was a huge scandal that landed some American citizens in major trouble for taking money from Chinese nationals and donating to President Clinton’s campaign.

Here’s how Bill Clinton handled it:

WASHINGTON (AllPolitics, Feb. 13) — President Bill Clinton called today for a “vigorous” and “thorough” investigation into reports that representatives of the People’s Republic of China tried to direct financial contributions from overseas sources to the Democratic National Committee.

At a press conference today with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the president stopped short of calling for an independent prosecutor, saying that was the decision of the Justice Department alone.

“This is a serious set of questions raised here, and the first I knew about any of it was last evening,” Clinton told reporters. “They obviously have to be thoroughly investigated and I do not want to speculate or accuse anyone of anything. I know nothing about it other than what I heard last night.

“But obviously it would be a very serious matter for the United States if any country were to attempt to funnel funds to one of our parties for any reason whatever,” Clinton added.

The Washington Post reported that Justice was reviewing U.S. intelligence obtained through electronic monitoring that suggests contributions to the DNC from foreign sources were coordinated at the Chinese embassy in Washington. Sources told the Post the evidence was “serious” and could raise the importance of the investigation of Democratic fund-raising practices.

Some people were charged in that investigation but there was no evidence of any quid pro quo or that any of the Democrats even knew where the money came from.

But look at the difference in the way the two presidents handled the scandal. Clinton asked for a thorough investigation and reiterated the view that it was unacceptable for foreign governments would try to influence elections. Trump calls the whole thing a witch hunt, fires the FBI director, smears everyone in sight and says that the whole thing is a partisan stunt to deny him legitimacy. And then he goes overseas and acts as though Vladimir Putin is the King of the world.

But then, in the end it was determined that Clinton wasn’t guilty of anything more than unauthorized blowjobs,for which they impeached him under a stretched out definition of perjury and obstruction. Clearly, Trump doesn’t have to worry about unauthorized blowjobs or conflicts of interest. He was elected even though he admitted to sexually assaulting numerous women. And he believes that there is no such thing as a presidential conflict of interest so that’s off the table. You’d think he’d be confident enough to say what Clinton said. But he isn’t.

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by digby

In fact, I don’t know I’ve ever seen anything quite like it:

This too:

Kellyanne shown a clip of herself saying “absolutely not” did anyone from campaign have contact w/ Russians, pivots pic.twitter.com/68u7wR1IrA

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) July 10, 2017

Note: The White House called CNN repeatedly to get them to take her off the air. 

CUOMO: “Your people say you have to go, by the way, so you make sure that the White House press office doesn’t yell at me.” 

CONWAY: “I’m not going to let this go.” 

CUOMO: “That’s fine, you can have all the time you want.” 

CONWAY: “Stop being so sensitive!” 

CUOMO: “Well, I’ve got people yelling at me in my ear that you have to go!” 

That exchange occurred 28 minutes into the interview and a full seven minutes after the first time Cuomo informed Conway that her people were trying to yank her. Despite the pleading of the White House press office in Cuomo’s ear, Conway continued for another seven minutes! 

The easy takeaway here is that Conway knew she was blowing it and was desperate to salvage some dignity after Cuomo’s Charbroil grilling. 

But the real takeaway here is that the White House press office was frantically trying to get Conway off the air because it knew what a disaster this whole thing was.

I don’t know if this story will turn out to be a big deal in the larger scheme of things although it certainly does add to the litany of lies about Russian contacts during the campaign.

But clearly, the White House is in a tizzy.

Mitch caught in a vice

by digby

An example of the headlines Republicans are facing back home

If you’re still at work madly refreshing your twitter feed for the latest on Don Jr’s shocking admission, take a minute to call your Senators and Representatives’ offices and register your complaint about the health care bill. The pressure is on since they all got an earful from constituents over the break. But don’t let up. They have 15 days before they break again and if hey don’t get it done during that time, it may be over.

This article in Vox lays out the state of play in detail. It’s not pretty for McConnell. He’s got about a dozen Senators balking. (It an ugly indictment of the Republican Party that there aren’t more. Every last one of these horrible people should be held to account for their failure to step up. ) Here’s the conclusion:

It adds up to what seems like an impossible task for McConnell. A critical mass of senators in the middle and on the right oppose the bill, and they are trying to pull the plan in dramatically different directions.

His best hope, it seems, is cosmetic changes to give any converts cover and the threat of failure if Republicans don’t undo Obamacare as they promised to do for seven years.

The Senate leader remarked last week that if Republicans fail to pass their own legislation, they would have to work with Democrats on a smaller bill to shore up the health care law.

It sounded like both a threat — and an admission that Republicans really might fall short.

I’ve said from the beginning that the smart move was to pass a fix for the exchanges, leave the rest of it alone (try to) rename it Trumpcare and go home. It sounds like that’s McConnell’s fallback. Whether his zombie caucus would go for it is unknown. And whether the orange weirdo would sign it is too. But it’s the best play and the best solution.

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Republicans will not be helping

by digby

David Frum issues a challenge to the GOP establishment:

The president Russia helped to install will not punish Russia for helping to install him.

The question now turns to the rest of the American political system. Senate Majority Leader McConnell warned Obama against taking action against Russia during the election. Whatever is said of Obama’s decisions, one of Obama’s motives for inaction was the knowledge that congressional Republicans would take Trump’s and Russia’s side if he tried to act. Congressional investigations into Russian meddling have been stalled (in the Senate) and outright sabotaged (in the House). Even as Trump in Hamburg absolved Putin of consequences for election interference, House Speaker Paul Ryan, at the behest of Trump, is stalling in the House the measures the Senate approved 97-2 to prevent Trump from lifting existing sanctions on Russia. It’s fine for Republicans like Senator Marco Rubio to tweet sarcastic comments about Trump’s plans for cyber cooperation with Russia. Congress can do more than tweet—if it chooses.

I do not feel that I’m being unduly pessimistic when I say, “not a snowball’s chance in hell” will that happen. They’re fine with it. And that’s because their voters are fine with it: according to the latest Marist Poll, 73% of Republicans believe he did nothing wrong, 82% of Trump voters believe he did nothing wrong. Why would GOP leaders go out on a limb and go against their own voters’ wishes? They don’t do that. I don’t think they want to do that.

And to quote a Republicans evangelical gun owner who loves the Russians from Richard Engel’s program on Friday night:

“We’re very similar people. In fact, you can take many Russians, put ’em in a room with people that are from Nashville, Tennessee. Everybody kind of looks the same.”

If you know what I mean.

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Cheap and dirty tricks


by digby

Trump has a close relationship with a Russian real estate billionaire and his “pop star” son. They had a big Trump Tower Moscow project planned that has been put on hold while Trump is president. It was through this connection that Don Junior was approached by a Russian emissary saying she had dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Trump was close enough that he made a music video with the son and a bunch of Miss Universe contestants. This is it:

I think the most disturbing thing about all this is that the apparent collusion, with the involvement of people like Peter Smith and Roger Stone and then these loons was just so … low down and cheap. But then that’s Trump in a nutshell isn’t it?

Here’s the story from last March about Trump’s close connection with this Russian oligarch.  He says he had no deals going in Russia. But that’s a lie, of course. Like everything else he says.

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Projection 101

by digby

Remember, whatever they accuse the other side of doing, it’s what conservatives themselves do:

Eight years ago, Senator Mitch McConnell, who is now leading the repeal effort in the Senate, complained that the Affordable Care Act was “being written behind closed doors, without input from anyone.”

But so far, Republican lawmakers have had just nine days of public activity on the repeal bill, compared with 43 for the Affordable Care Act during the same six-month period.

The House committees held four hearings and the Senate committees one related to health care changes, all before a bill was drafted. Neither the House Republicans nor their Senate counterparts held a hearing on their versions of the bill before unveiling the legislation.

“At the hearings, there are experts testifying who bring different points of view,” said Allison Hoffman, a health care policy expert and law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “You see problems that wouldn’t come up otherwise, problems that when you’re 13 men behind closed doors you may not surface on your own.”

Amid criticism even from his own party, Mr. McConnell, the Senate majority leader, created a 13-member working group consisting entirely of men to lead the health care overhaul. Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a member, said even he had not seen a draft of the bill two days before its release.

While lawmakers often draft major legislation in private, they usually refine, debate and amend it in open committee sessions.

This year, the two House committees involved in drafting legislation each held one markup session — the closest thing to a public writing and approval of a bill — with each lasting a day. In 2009, the Senate health committee spent a total of 13 days marking up the bill that became the Affordable Care Act, seven of them during Congress’s first six months.

Republican lawmakers have spent just two days debating policies related to their bill on the House floor. The Senate, so far, has spent none, and is planning to vote on the bill as soon as the leaders have enough votes to pass it. The Affordable Care Act was debated on the House and Senate floors for 31 days before the bill passed.

And, by the way, they get away with this because they have no shame and don’t care about their reputations. And neither do their voters. They just want to “win” by any means necessary.

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