Month: April 2019

Kush gives a preview

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

It appears the Trump White House has decided to stonewall every bit of congressional oversight hoping to either run out the clock until the election or have their handpicked Supreme Court majority rule in his favor. There was a time when I would have thought the second option was unthinkable even with a conservative majority, but after the court intervened in the 2000 Florida recount, I was disabused of that naive assumption. If they have to destroy the constitutional checks and balances to keep Trump in power, they may very well do it.

The president has put the Democrats on notice that they do not plan to respond to subpoenas or allow anyone to testify, even those people for whom they previously waived executive privilege. Under threat of holding witnesses in contempt of Congress, the White House has told them to take it up with the courts if they don’t like it. House oversight committee chairman Elijah Cummings, D-Ma, told MSNBC on Tuesday night, “to date, the White House has refused to produce a single piece of paper or a single witness in any of the Committee’s investigations this entire year.”

Trump may succeed in this strategy. After all, he has a plaint Attorney General and a subservient Republican Party that will back him to the hilt and the courts have been well-packed by the alleged hero of this drama, former White House Counsel Don McGahn. If they are unable to get any witnesses to testify,  Democrats may be forced to stage an interpretive dance of the Mueller Report and go directly to an impeachment vote.

As for the politics, the Trump inner circle is taking a rather novel approach. They are claiming total exoneration, of course, even as the president continues to demean and insult the investigation. But Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner have been road-testing some new lines, which are possibly the most aggressive form of gaslighting we’ve seen yet.

Last Sunday, Giuliani made the round of the morning talk shows and mostly kicked up a lot of dust that made little sense. But he did say one thing that took people by surprise. Responding to a comment from Utah Senator Mitt Romney, in which he said he was appalled that “fellow citizens working in a campaign for president had welcomed help from Russian including information that had been illegally obtained; that none of them acted to inform American law enforcement,” Giuliani replied, “there’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians.”

“There’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians,” Rudy Giuliani tells @jaketapper. #CNNSOTU https://t.co/Fe78m3aDWq pic.twitter.com/wfcU38vTWX

— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) April 21, 2019

When Tapper went on to point out that while it’s not expressly illegal it is unethical, Giuliani scoffed at the idea anyone cares about such things.

In a working democracy, the president would care because impeachment doesn’t require that a president must have violated a statute, merely that he is unfit for the office, if the Congress so determines. He is clearly unfit. But this is not a working democracy at the moment so they don’t fear such a consequence to their actions.

On Tuesday Jared Kushner made a rare public appearance at the TIME 100 Summit and when asked about the Russia Investigation he made a comment even more startling than Giuliani’s. After brushing off the investigation as “silly,” he said:

You look at what Russia did, buying some Facebook ads to try to sow dissent and do it, and it’s a terrible thing. But I think the investigations and all of the speculation that’s happened for the last two years has had a much harsher impact on our democracy than a couple of Facebook ads.

Here is the full comment:

Here’s video of Jared Kushner downplaying Russian interference as “a couple Facebook ads,” and saying he thinks “the ensuing investigations have been way more harmful to our country.” pic.twitter.com/JkiIjQng48

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 23, 2019

Perhaps Kushner hasn’t had time to keep up with the news or read the Mueller Report since his portfolio includes everything from office redecoration to Mideast Peace, but that is simply ridiculous. Indeed, calling the Russia interference “a couple of Facebook ads” shows that these people still refuse to admit what happened and it is not in dispute.

The House Intelligence Committee reported last year that Russia spent about a million dollars a month on Facebook ads reaching at least ten million users, all of it propaganda swill mostly on behalf of Donald Trump. But that was just one small part of their operation. TIME helpfully laid it all out:

The Mueller report described a wide-ranging Russian operation that included hacking Hillary Clinton, Sens. Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; attempting to hack the Republican National Committee; releasing stolen emails online; probing state voter databases for weaknesses and stealing hundreds of thousands of voters’ personal information; spreading propaganda aimed to sowing division and depressing the vote through fake accounts on social media; staging a handful of rallies in Florida, Pennsylvania and New York; and setting up multiple meetings with members of the Trump campaign, although the probe did not find that members of the Trump campaign actively coordinated or cooperated with Russia.

There was nothing “silly”, as Kushner said, about investigating all of that. And there was certainly nothing silly about investigating a president who seemed to be determined to cover it up. That silly investigation showed that he repeatedly broke the law in attempting to do that.  We still don’t know exactly why and Mueller didn’t answer the question in his report to the Attorney General. It’s possible that it will be found in the classified reports around the counter-intelligence investigation which presumably looked more closely at the threat to national security by Trump’s bumbling campaign and presidency.

Giuliani insists there’s nothing wrong with colluding with foreign adversaries to sabotage your political rival. Kushner says they just bought some Facebook ads and the real sabotage was the investigation. Trump himself has repeatedly denied that Russians had anything to do with it at all.

None of that adds up to a clear admission of guilt for what happened in 2016, but it certainly sounds as if the Trump 2020 campaign is open for business. It’s clear that if a foreign nation wants to intervene in the election they will once again welcome the help. What’s unclear is why they are so sure that it will always be to their benefit.

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See-no-people, hear-no-evil
by Tom Sullivan

“It is a dispute over who counts in America,” writes Mark Joseph Stern for Slate. The Supreme Court case over how the U.S. conducts its next decennial census is literally, fundamentally, about who America counts.

Critics and plaintiffs contend the Trump administration’s adding a citizenship question to the census will depress the count by at least 5.1 percent (with 11.9 percent a high estimate) as immigrant communities shy away from census takers. That is its underlying purpose, critics charge.

In his 277-page January ruling against the question’s inclusion, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman decided the Trump administration had violated the law six different ways in adding the citizenship question, Stern writes. The justices heard arguments Tuesday in the government’s appeal. The implications of the case for billions in federal funding across the land, and for tilting representation away from immigrant-heavy cities and states, will carry forward a decade or more.

In questioning attorneys, Stern alleges conservative justices “deployed credulity and hypocrisy in equal measure,” appearing to favor overturning Furman’s ruling in favor of Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross’s contention that the question meant to help the Department of Justice enforce the Voting Rights Act (the law justices gutted in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder). Federal officials in fact have enforced the Voting Rights Act for half a century “without needing block-by-block data on the citizenship of the residents.”

Furman ruled “the evidence is clear that Secretary Ross’s rationale was pretextual,” a “sham,” and a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. Furman believed Ross concealed the real reason behind adding the census question. Ross had asked the DOJ to provide a rationale for inserting the question.

But on Tuesday, court conservatives seemed prepared to ignore that and the three lower courts that had ruled against the Trump administration. Chief Justice Robert appeared to follow the “see-no-evil, hear-no-evil pattern” he set in Trump v. Hawaii, and simply presume Ross followed the law, Noah Feldman writes at Bloomberg.

Stern continues:

From a legal standpoint, Ross’ behavior is puzzling: The Constitution mandates the “actual enumeration” of people, not citizens; a citizenship question only makes that goal more difficult to accomplish. From a political standpoint, though, the secretary’s behavior is perfectly rational. If Hispanics and immigrants are undercounted, blue states like California will lose billions in federal funds, seats in the House of Representatives, and votes in the Electoral College. Yes, some diverse red states, like Texas, will be affected too. But the burden will fall primarily on urban areas where minorities and noncitizens live—areas, in other words, that lean Democratic. Rural regions populated primarily by whites—that is, Republican regions—won’t suffer. These rural, Republican regions will gain seats in the state legislature, while urban, Democratic areas will lose them.

From the calculus of a pure power grab—constitutional commands be damned—Ross, then, had no reason to listen to the experts who counseled against the citizenship question, and simply overruled them. So he ran roughshod over a series of legal obligations meant to limit the addition of unnecessary questions to the census—rules laid out by Congress, which the secretary ignored. Thus, not only did Ross conceal the real reason for his action, but he also repeatedly broke the law in his mad dash around statutory roadblocks designed to keep gratuitous and counterproductive questions out of the census. (To give two of many examples, Ross missed the deadline to report a new census question in Congress, and failed to comply with a requirement that the secretary exhaust all other options for data gathering before adding “direct inquiries” to the census.)

The census case is yet another gambit by Republicans to undercut the voting strength of populations that lean Democrat. “Defund the Left” is on its way to becoming “Depopulate the Left.” Just in North Carolina, if there’s an election-rigging scheme state Republicans haven’t tried, they haven’t thought of it yet. Undercounting non-citizens in the name of protecting against minority-vote dilution is a national version of the same cynical, anti-democratic, anti-American strategy by an extremist political party for preserving white power against demographic decline.

Another defector from the cult

by digby

Sadly, I doubt there are very many of these folks out there. But there might just be enough to tip the election away from Trump even when he cheats:

Let’s start at the end of this story. This weekend, I read Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report twice, and realized that enough was enough—I needed to do something. I’ve worked on every Republican presidential transition team for the past 10 years and recently served as counsel to the Republican-led House Financial Services Committee. My permanent job is as a law professor at the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School, which is not political, but where my colleagues have held many prime spots in Republican administrations.

If you think calling for the impeachment of a sitting Republican president would constitute career suicide for someone like me, you may end up being right. But I did exactly that this weekend, tweeting that it’s time to begin impeachment proceedings.

Let’s go back to the beginning. In August 2016, I interviewed to join the pre-transition team of Donald Trump. Since 2012, every presidential election stands up a pre-transition team for both candidates, so that the real transition will have had a six-month head start when the election is decided. I participated in a similar effort for Mitt Romney, and despite our defeat, it was a thrilling and rewarding experience. I walked into a conference room at Jones Day that Don McGahn had graciously arranged to lend to the folks interviewing for the transition team.

The question I feared inevitably opened the interview: “How do you feel about Donald Trump?” I could not honestly say I admired him. While working on Senator Marco Rubio’s primary campaign, I had watched Trump throw schoolyard nicknames at him. I gave the only honest answer I could: “I admire the advisers he’s chosen, like Larry Kudlow and David Malpass, and I admire his choice of VP.” That did the trick. I got the impression they’d heard that one before. I was one of the first 16 members of Trump’s transition team, as deputy director of economic policy.

In time, my work for the transition became awkward. I disagreed with Trump’s rhetoric on immigration and trade. I also had strong concerns about his policies in my area of financial regulation. The hostility to Russian sanctions from the policy team, particularly from those members picked by Paul Manafort, was even more unsettling.

I wasn’t very good at hiding my distaste. We parted ways in October amicably; I wasn’t the right fit. I wished many of my friends who worked on the transition well, and I respected their decision to stay on after Trump won. A few of them even arranged offers for policy jobs in the White House, which I nearly accepted but ultimately turned down, as I knew I’d be no better fit there than I had been on the transition.

I never considered joining the Never Trump Republican efforts. Their criticisms of President Trump’s lack of character and unfitness for office were spot-on, of course, but they didn’t seem very pragmatic. There was no avoiding the fact that he’d won, and like many others, I felt the focus should be on guiding his policy decisions in a constructive direction. The man whom I most admire in that regard is McGahn, Trump’s first White House counsel, who guided the president toward some amazing nominees for regulatory agencies and the judiciary.

I wanted to share my experience transitioning from Trump team member to pragmatist about Trump to advocate for his impeachment, because I think many other Republicans are starting a similar transition. Politics is a team sport, and if you actively work within a political party, there is some expectation that you will follow orders and rally behind the leader, even when you disagree. There is a point, though, at which that expectation turns from a mix of loyalty and pragmatism into something more sinister, a blind devotion that serves to enable criminal conduct.

The Mueller report was that tipping point for me, and it should be for Republican and independent voters, and for Republicans in Congress. In the face of a Department of Justice policy that prohibited him from indicting a sitting president, Mueller drafted what any reasonable reader would see as a referral to Congress to commence impeachment hearings.

Depending on how you count, roughly a dozen separate instances of obstruction of justice are contained in the Mueller report. The president dangled pardons in front of witnesses to encourage them to lie to the special counsel, and directly ordered people to lie to throw the special counsel off the scent.

This elaborate pattern of obstruction may have successfully impeded the Mueller investigation from uncovering a conspiracy to commit more serious crimes. At a minimum, there’s enough here to get the impeachment process started. In impeachment proceedings, the House serves as a sort of grand jury and the Senate conducts the trial. There is enough in the Mueller report to commence the Constitution’s version of a grand-jury investigation in the form of impeachment proceedings.

The Founders knew that impeachment would be, in part, a political exercise. They decided that the legislative branch would operate as the best check on the president by channeling the people’s will. Congress has an opportunity to shape that public sentiment with the hearings ahead. As sentiments shift, more and more Republicans in Congress will feel emboldened to stand up to the president. The nation has been through this drama before, with more than a year of hearings in the Richard Nixon scandal, which ultimately forced his resignation.

Republicans who stand up to Trump today may face some friendly fire. Today’s Republican electorate seems spellbound by the sound bites of Twitter and cable news, for which Trump is a born wizard. Yet, in time, we can help rebuild the Republican Party, enabling it to rise from the ashes of the post-Trump apocalypse into a party with renewed commitment to principles of liberty, opportunity, and the rule of law.

He’s not alone among a small minority of Republicans who not only find Trump distasteful but believe that he’s a serious danger to the American system and the constitution and should be removed. This group of conservative lawyers agrees with him.

BTW: I do wonder what he means when he meant when he mentioned in passing “the hostility to Russian sanctions from the policy team, particularly from those members picked by Paul Manafort, was even more unsettling.”

Who was chosen by Manafort?

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So scary. Don’t make trouble.

by digby

I just thought I’d put this up as a reminder of what a terrifying opponent Trump is:

Trump approval rating January 2017 to present

I guess there’s a possibility that as more people tune in to his crimes and corruption the more they will like him. But it seems … counterintuitive. The man has never cracked 45% approval since the first month of his presidency. It’s true that he’s hovered right around 40% for his entire term but it’s hard to see why Democrats find him so intimidating.

I guess those insulting tweets really hit home.

By the way, the  mid-term exit polls featured this finding last November:

Democrats’ current leader, Nancy Pelosi, has said she is not interested in moving to impeach Trump, but that won’t stop a lot of them from agitating for it; 77% of self-identified Democrats supported impeachment in the exit polls, compared with just 5% of Republicans and 33% of independents.

Support in the exit polls for impeaching Trump is nowhere near a majority, but as CNN has pointed out, 40% is much higher support for impeachment than most presidents face, including President Bill Clinton, who was actually impeached.

Support for impeachment is the highest in California, where 54% of 2018 voters back it, followed by New York with 52% support. The lowest is in North Dakota, Tennessee and West Virginia, where around a quarter of voters said they would support impeachment.

Well, if only 25% of West Virginia voters want Trump impeached you can see why Democrats would be reluctant to do it …

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“Just a couple of Facebook ads”

by digby

Here's video of Jared Kushner downplaying Russian interference as "a couple Facebook ads," and saying he thinks "the ensuing investigations have been way more harmful to our country." pic.twitter.com/JkiIjQng48— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 23, 2019

You will notice that he ignores the hacking and all the president’s ecstatic and repeated praise for Wikileaks and the ongoing insistence that Russia didn’t do it. Just a couple of Facebook ads. No biggie.

And then there is this:

Jared Kushner, asked at TIME 100 summit why the Trump campaign didn’t reject Russia’s overtures:

“In the campaign we didn’t know that Russia was doing what it was doing.”

“The notion of what they were doing didn’t even register to us as impactful.”— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) April 23, 2019

Yet he took meetings proposed as the Russian government promising to provide dirt on Hillary Clinton. Five days after that, on June 14th, the Washington Post reported this:

It didn’t occur to him then or any time later that something nefarious might be happening.

It’s all fine. The Mueller report found that they hadn’t entered into a conspiracy with the Russian government. So, the only conclusion that you can come to is that every last one of these people is an unethical, clueless, bumbler who shouldn’t be allowed to drive cars or look after small children much less run the most powerful nation on earth.

The most amazing thing about it is that even after all this time, they truly don’t seem to have even the slightest awareness of what people find so reckless and appalling about what they did. They are shameless morons, a very bad combination.

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Busting the norms and breaking the law in every way possible

by digby

Josh Marshall raises the alarm about Trump’s new tactic:

I’ve hinted at this in a few posts. It’s time to confront it head on. The White House isn’t doing the standard tussling with Congress about oversight: some stonewalling, some negotiation, taking some questions of privilege to court. It’s more accurately characterized as massive resistance. The Congress has a constitutionally mandated responsibility to oversee the executive branch. They are flatly refusing to comply with ordinary document production and testimonial requests across the board. It’s not a difference of degree but of kind. In itself it is an impeachment worthy refusal to follow the constitutionally mandated framework of American government. It’s up to Democrats to make this clear.

Now, what do the Democrats do? Some of it they’re already doing. Some of this will go to the Courts. They will need to request speedy resolution of open questions, while being careful not to forego the possibility of more positive decisions in the lower courts which might constrain, to some limited degree, Supreme Court adventurism.

The Congress will also need to try out some of its almost never used powers to literally compel testimony and document production.

But as much as anything else this is a political conflict: how to bring to heel a lawless President. The big error I see so far is that these joustings are being treated as legitimate legal processes which must be allowed to work their way through conventional processes and the courts. That’s not right and it gives the President free rein to try to run out the clock on any sort of oversight. Democrats need to find a language for the political debate that makes clear these are not tedious legal processes which will run their course. They are active cover-ups and law breaking, ones that confirm the President’s bad acting status and add to his and his top advisors legal vulnerability.

Sadly, it may just be that the Republicans and Democrats are on the same page. There is a school of thought in each party that says running out the clock will help them win in 2020. I can see how that helps Trump. I’m stymied as to why the Democrats would think it helps them.

But they’re the professionals so …

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This is what the Trump voters are seeing.

by digby

Hannity’s show last night:

Sean Hannity, April 22, 2019: “Hillary Clinton’s email server is a real threat to our safety and security” pic.twitter.com/AqaTC2IRKY

— John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) April 23, 2019

They plan to hold hearings in the Senate on all this.

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Make them take that vote

by digby

I don’t think anyone can accuse Elizabeth Warren of avoiding those “kitchen table issues” that all the timorous Dems believe are the only thing the citizens of this country care about. But she is also able to articulate some principles about how to deal with the corrupt ignoramus in the White House and the cowardly enablers in his party:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was the first 2020 presidential candidate to call for the House to impeach President Trump after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report was released Thursday. In a CNN town hall Monday night, she explained why impeachment is more important than politics, telling moderator Anderson Cooper, “There is no political inconvenience exception to the United States Constitution.”

Warren read the entire redacted Mueller report right away, she said, and “three things just totally jump off the page. The first is that a hostile foreign government attacked our 2016 election in order to help Donald Trump. … Part 2, Donald Trump welcomed that help,” and “Part 3 is when the federal government starts to investigate Part 1 and Part 2, Donald Trump took repeated steps, aggressively, to try to halt the investigation.” If any other American “had done what’s documented in the Mueller report, they would be arrested and put in jail,” she said.

Mueller decided he couldn’t charge Trump with a crime, saying “in effect, if there’s going to be any accountability, that accountability has to come from the Congress,” Warren said. “And the tool that we are given for that accountability is the impeachment process. This is not about politics; this is about principle.”

“I took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and so did everybody else in the Senate and in the House,” Warren said. “If there are people in the House or the Senate who want to say that’s what a president can do when the president is being investigated for his own wrongdoings or when a foreign government attacks our country, then they should have to take that vote and live with it for the rest of their lives.”

For some reason the Villagers and many of the Democrats are convinced that the American people as a whole have no principles and therefore really don’t care about Trump’s many crimes so the best thing to do is ignore them and just act as though it never happened. I appreciate Warren fighting that cynicism and saying out loud that this has to be fought head-on.

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What If They Don’t Impeach…And He Wins? 

by tristero

Stephen Collinson of CNN summarizes Pelosi’s political dilemma:

If she chooses to avoid impeachment and Democrats put a new president in the White House, she will be vindicated. But if Trump wins reelection despite the choking cloud of scandal around his White House, Democrats may question why they didn’t try to mortally wound him politically when they had the chance. 

Again, this is the political dilemma Pelosi finds herself in. But this is a dilemma of her own making because she is placing political calculation above the facts of his obstruction of justice; his campaign of active collusion with Russia by providing, among other things, polling information to them; his manifest incompetence; and his corruption.

And that is what we already know. If the Mueller report is ever completely released — it hasn’t been and arguments that “we have seen enough to know what the rest says” are absurdly easy to refute — this list will be both deepened and added to.

And the facts lead to one conclusion. Trump must be impeached. Warren is right:

To ignore a President’s repeated efforts to obstruct an investigation into his own disloyal behavior would inflict great and lasting damage on this country, and it would suggest that both the current and future Presidents would be free to abuse their power in similar ways.

It is that simple. Congress has to do its job:

But what if he wins despite impeachment? What if he uses the fact that the Senate did not vote to impeach as an excuse to make political hay and claim he was “acquitted of all charges?”

So what? He’s already claiming that and he will do so regardless of what they say. Even if he gets impeached by both houses of Congress, he’d claim he was acquitted. That is a fact.

What is also a fact is that Trump will do literally anything — anything — to get re-elected. Cheat? Collude with Russia? Of course, and it will be terrible. That will have a far greater impact on the 2020 results than whatever the Congress does.

Politically, the Democrats have nothing to lose if they impeach and everything to gain. Impeachment will not mitigate Trump’s behavior, change the Republicans’ insane devotion to him, or substantially influence the presidential election’s outcome. Regarding individual races, each candidate can support impeachment and craft messages of support for locally important issues. “Yes, I agree, I support a quick impeachment so we can get around to the far more important issue of protecting your healthcare from the Republicans’  obsession with eliminating pre-existing conditions. “

But if they impeach, Democrats will have done what’s right, both in the eyes of the country today and in history. And it will likely lead to uncovering much worse.

PS Until fairly recently, I did not think it was a wise idea to impeach mostly because a Pence presidency was just as unthinkable as a Trump presidency. I was wrong. Congress has to do its job and we will have to take our chances.

UPDATE: Joe Lockhart makes the case that if Democrats leave Trump in office, that could wreck the modern Republican party:

Trumpism equals Republicanism as long as Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket. And a real shift to progressivism in America will be delivered by a devastating rebuke of the president and his party, a rebuke that will return control of the Senate and state houses across the nation. Politics is always a gamble — and this is the best bet we’ve had in a long time.

First, Trump (and his team) committed multiple felonies while in office and to get into office. It is both un-American and extremely dangerous to let him get away with it because he will commit more crimes – and worse.

Secondly, Lockhart assumes that the election will be reasonably fair. That is a wildly generous assumption. Letting Trump get away with this will embolden him (and give him the time) to work hard to suborn 2020.

Third, even if Trump loses but he is not impeached, this will, as Digby has pointed out, create a catastrophic precedent. It is more than likely that future (and far more competent) presidents can and will collude with foreign powers to enrich themselves and do so in a completely rigged election system. The American people will permanently lose representation.

No, Joe, we must impeach.

Refuge of scoundrels
by Tom Sullivan

Such times feel like a battle for America’s soul. Those who have one wonder: Does the country? Half the country elected a president who seems devoid of one. His party sold its soul for tax cuts for the rich and control of the courts for a generation.

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” Samuel Johnson said famously. By which we might assume he meant false patriotism, not the genuine article. For years, I argued Republicans’ flag-waving, constitution-clutching, and America-hell-yeah posturing reflected a patriotism a mile wide and an inch deep. Lately, that characterization seems too generous.

Unwilling to abandon an unpopular agenda and facing a shrinking political base, Republicans refuse to bring their extremists to heel or to moderate an extremist agenda. Instead, in Donald Trump they double down. They have, Damon Linker argues, adopted asymmetric warfare, the classic approach a weaker force adopts to achieve and maintain power. They play dirty:

In the case of Trump, it has even included a willingness to rely on help from a foreign government’s intelligence service. But we can also see the asymmetrical approach at work in the right’s somewhat less flamboyant but still over-the-top efforts to promulgate a hyperbolic caricature of the opposition — efforts that are guaranteed to continue and intensify as the 2020 contest heats up. So the Democrats are bound to be portrayed as deranged socialists maniacally devoted to turning the U.S. into Venezuela, anti-religious lunatics who despise authentic Christianity and hope to wield state power to stamp it out, baby-killing abortion fanatics who swoon at the thought of infanticide, and anti-Israel bigots who not-so-secretly admire Islamic terrorists.

Facing the G.O.P., we have a Democratic Party still committed to traditional politics Republicans have abandoned except as theater. Facing creeping authoritarianism in an administration with no regard for the rule of law, Democrats on the whole and among their presidential candidates seem determined to move ahead as if this is all fine. Let’s have another election. Once the adults are back in charge, we will return government to working for the common good.

Damon Linker continues:

That’s because most Democrats genuinely, earnestly want to do things that they think will make the country better. They have a vision of the common good and a long list of policies they think will help to achieve it. That’s what motivates them, not just the prospect of smiting the right. Republicans increasingly define themselves by ferocious anti-liberalism, but Democrats affirm far more than anti-conservatism.

Yet, the Democrats’ approach feels more like the in-charge adults are trying to keep the children distracted and calm as the house burns down around them.

The president of the United States betrayed the country, Paul Krugman insists. No matter. He gave the big-money men what they wanted. They will stick with him even knowing Trump won office “in part thanks to Russian aid, that his financial entanglements with foreign governments pose huge conflicts of interest and that he consistently shows a preference for dictatorships over our democratic allies.”

It should be no surprise then that Republicans who abandoned the U.S. with their businesses have abandoned its principles as well. They can, as a paratrooper friend once said, “out-ass the AO,”* before it burns to ash. With private jets and yachts, they even have their own transportation.

Krugman cautions:

First, anyone expecting bipartisanship in dealing with the aftermath of the Mueller report — in particular, anyone suggesting that Democrats should wait for G.O.P. support before proceeding with investigations that might lead to impeachment — is being deluded. Trump is giving the Republican establishment what it wants, and it will stick with him no matter what.

Second, it’s later than you think for American democracy. Before 2016 you could have wondered whether Republicans would, in extremis, be willing to take a stand in defense of freedom and rule of law. At this point, however, they’ve already taken that test, and failed with flying colors.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham is Eugene Robinson’s Exhibit A.

“You don’t even have to be convicted of a crime to lose your job in this constitutional republic if this body [the Senate] determines that your conduct as a public official is clearly out of bounds in your role … because impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office,” Graham passionately argued for impeaching Bill Clinton two decades ago. Now Graham is Trump’s poodle.

Democrats hoping Americans will come to their senses and return them to power cannot cower like that in the face of Trumpish assaults. Or even self-censor. Rather than boldly charge ahead, Old Guard Democrats have for decades second-guessed themselves into irrelevancy. “What will the Republicans say?” they ask for fear of drawing Republican fire. The times require they charge into it.

Robinson replies, “Trump will mount this attack no matter what Democrats do. And strictly as a matter of practical politics, the best defense against Trump has to be a powerful offense.”

That was Col. Chamberlain’s choice at Little Round Top. Even without ammunition.

Update: Take a look at Trump’s morning tweets (a dozen so far). Do they make smoke alarms for nation states?

* [Proper usage is “unass the AO.” H/t reader BH.]