Month: January 2021

The desperation was so extreme I’m beginning to wonder if there aren’t other, unknown, reasons Trump needed to stay in power. The insurrection was the most extreme, of course. But he really pulled out all the stops even before then:

The Justice Department’s top leaders listened in stunned silence this month: One of their peers, they were told, had devised a plan with President Donald J. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen as acting attorney general and wield the department’s power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results.

The unassuming lawyer who worked on the plan, Jeffrey Clark, had been devising ways to cast doubt on the election results and to bolster Mr. Trump’s continuing legal battles and the pressure on Georgia politicians. Because Mr. Rosen had refused the president’s entreaties to carry out those plans, Mr. Trump was about to decide whether to fire Mr. Rosen and replace him with Mr. Clark.

The department officials, convened on a conference call, then asked each other: What will you do if Mr. Rosen is dismissed?

The answer was unanimous. They would resign.

Their informal pact ultimately helped persuade Mr. Trump to keep Mr. Rosen in place, calculating that a furor over mass resignations at the top of the Justice Department would eclipse any attention on his baseless accusations of voter fraud. Mr. Trump’s decision came only after Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark made their competing cases to him in a bizarre White House meeting that two officials compared with an episode of Mr. Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice,” albeit one that could prompt a constitutional crisis.

The previously unknown chapter was the culmination of the president’s long-running effort to batter the Justice Department into advancing his personal agenda. He also pressed Mr. Rosen to appoint special counsels, including one who would look into Dominion Voting Systems, a maker of election equipment that Mr. Trump’s allies had falsely said was working with Venezuela to flip votes from Mr. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr. […]

When Mr. Trump said on Dec. 14 that Attorney General William P. Barr was leaving the department, some officials thought that he might allow Mr. Rosen a short reprieve before pressing him about voter fraud. After all, Mr. Barr would be around for another week.

Instead, Mr. Trump summoned Mr. Rosen to the Oval Office the next day. He wanted the Justice Department to file legal briefs supporting his allies’ lawsuits seeking to overturn his election loss. And he urged Mr. Rosen to appoint special counsels to investigate not only unfounded accusations of widespread voter fraud, but also Dominion, the voting machines firm.

(Dominion has sued the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, who inserted those accusations into four federal lawsuits about voter irregularities that were all dismissed.)

Mr. Rosen refused. He maintained that he would make decisions based on the facts and the law, and he reiterated what Mr. Barr had privately told Mr. Trump: The department had investigated voting irregularities and found no evidence of widespread fraud.

But Mr. Trump continued to press Mr. Rosen after the meeting — in phone calls and in person. He repeatedly said that he did not understand why the Justice Department had not found evidence that supported conspiracy theories about the election that some of his personal lawyers had espoused. He declared that the department was not fighting hard enough for him.

As Mr. Rosen and the deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, pushed back, they were unaware that Mr. Clark had been introduced to Mr. Trump by a Pennsylvania politician and had told the president that he agreed that fraud had affected the election results.

Mr. Trump quickly embraced Mr. Clark, who had been appointed the acting head of the civil division in September and was also the head of the department’s environmental and natural resources division.

As December wore on, Mr. Clark mentioned to Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue that he spent a lot of time reading on the internet — a comment that alarmed them because they inferred that he believed the unfounded conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump had won the election. Mr. Clark also told them that he wanted the department to hold a news conference announcing that it was investigating serious accusations of election fraud. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue rejected the proposal.

As Mr. Trump focused increasingly on Georgia, a state he lost narrowly to Mr. Biden, he complained to Justice Department leaders that the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, Byung J. Pak, was not trying to find evidence for false election claims pushed by Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and others. Mr. Donoghue warned Mr. Pak that the president was now fixated on his office, and that it might not be tenable for him to continue to lead it, according to two people familiar with the conversation.

That conversation and Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him votes compelled Mr. Pak to abruptly resign this month.

Mr. Clark was also focused on Georgia. He drafted a letter that he wanted Mr. Rosen to send to Georgia state legislators that wrongly said that the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in their state, and that they should move to void Mr. Biden’s win there.

Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue again rejected Mr. Clark’s proposal.

On New Year’s Eve, the trio met to discuss Mr. Clark’s refusal to hew to the department’s conclusion that the election results were valid. Mr. Donoghue flatly told Mr. Clark that what he was doing was wrong. The next day, Mr. Clark told Mr. Rosen — who had mentored him while they worked together at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis — that he was going to discuss his strategy with the president early the next week, just before Congress was set to certify Mr. Biden’s electoral victory.

Unbeknown to the acting attorney general, Mr. Clark’s timeline moved up. He met with Mr. Trump over the weekend, then informed Mr. Rosen midday on Sunday that the president intended to replace him with Mr. Clark, who could then try to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College results. He said that Mr. Rosen could stay on as his deputy attorney general, leaving Mr. Rosen speechless.

Unwilling to step down without a fight, Mr. Rosen said that he needed to hear straight from Mr. Trump and worked with the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, to convene a meeting for early that evening.

Even as Mr. Clark’s pronouncement was sinking in, stunning news broke out of Georgia: State officials had recorded an hourlong call, published by The Washington Post, during which Mr. Trump pressured them to manufacture enough votes to declare him the victor. As the fallout from the recording ricocheted through Washington, the president’s desperate bid to change the outcome in Georgia came into sharp focus.

Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue pressed ahead, informing Steven Engel, the head of the Justice Department’s office of legal counsel, about Mr. Clark’s latest maneuver. Mr. Donoghue convened a late-afternoon call with the department’s remaining senior leaders, laying out Mr. Clark’s efforts to replace Mr. Rosen.

Mr. Rosen planned to soon head to the White House to discuss his fate, Mr. Donoghue told the group. Should Mr. Rosen be fired, they all agreed to resign en masse. For some, the plan brought to mind the so-called Saturday Night Massacre of the Nixon era, where Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and his deputy resigned rather than carry out the president’s order to fire the special prosecutor investigating him.

The Clark plan, the officials concluded, would seriously harm the department, the government and the rule of law. For hours, they anxiously messaged and called one another as they awaited Mr. Rosen’s fate.

Around 6 p.m., Mr. Rosen, Mr. Donoghue and Mr. Clark met at the White House with Mr. Trump, Mr. Cipollone, his deputy Patrick Philbin and other lawyers. Mr. Trump had Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark present their arguments to him.

Mr. Cipollone advised the president not to fire Mr. Rosen and he reiterated, as he had for days, that he did not recommend sending the letter to Georgia lawmakers. Mr. Engel advised Mr. Trump that he and the department’s remaining top officials would resign if he fired Mr. Rosen, leaving Mr. Clark alone at the department.

Mr. Trump seemed somewhat swayed by the idea that firing Mr. Rosen would trigger not only chaos at the Justice Department, but also congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans and distract attention from his efforts to overturn the election results.

After nearly three hours, Mr. Trump ultimately decided that Mr. Clark’s plan would fail, and he allowed Mr. Rosen to stay.

We came this close to another Saturday NIght Massacre. And yet, the Republican are all sticking with this monster. Lindsey Graham has practically declared him Republican leader for life

Be sure to read Tom’s commentary on this story, below. It’s spot on.

By the way, this was a Trump guy through and through.:

According to federal court filings, Clark also served as one of the lead attorneys for Trump in the suit filed against him by E. Jean Carroll, an advice columnist who accuses him of defamation. Trump has denied Carroll’s claim that he raped her in a Manhattan department store decades ago.

The Justice Department made the controversial move in September to defend Trump in the lawsuit, which was filed against him in his personal capacity, saying Trump was “acting within the scope of his office as President of the United States.” Clark appears to have signed off personally on the decision for the DOJ to intervene, according to the court documents. Carroll wrote on Twitter Friday of Clark, “This is the chump who filed the DOJ case against me, saying it was the President’s job to slander women. The Trump Presidency was corrupt right down to the core of its spleen.”

How many of these people are burrowed into the Department of Justice I wonder? And can Garland get them out. Will he try?

With a Democrat in the White House, Republicans pretend to care about deficits again, writes Catherine Rampell. “It’s almost like clockwork.”

Just as predictably, they care about bipartisanship. Will Democrats “work across the aisle” for the American people, etc.?

Edward-Isaac Dovere explores at The Atlantic how Joe Biden expects to manage his base’s expectations while getting his legislative initiatives passed with or without the cooperation of Republicans:

The success of Biden’s agenda will of course depend on Congress, which is starting off the year having to finish Trump’s second impeachment. “We have to see the Senate as it is”—narrowly divided, with the Democrats’ majority dependent on moderates such as Joe Manchin of West Virginia—“not as we want it to be,” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut told me. He was in the House at the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency; he’s part of a generation of senators who were not in the chamber the last time Democrats had control of both houses of Congress and the White House, and have a different understanding of party politics than their predecessors did. “While I’m sure that Biden is going to want to spend some time trying to explore whether there’s bipartisan buy-in for his priorities, we all have to be willing to take no for an answer.”

[…]

“There’s a consensus that one of the mistakes of ’09 was playing footsie for a long time with Republicans who never had any intent to actually get to yes,” Murphy added. “And the dynamics in the Republican caucus have gotten worse since then, not better.”

If Dovere’s information is right, Biden has little interest in the kind of “performative bipartisanship” of the Obama years:

Biden doesn’t want Democrats to go it alone without first trying to make a deal. If the GOP is seriously interested in uniting the country, he will eagerly engage. But if they use calmer rhetoric as a feint for obstruction, he is prepared to call that out.

And if the Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election continue to push their claims of voter fraud, or if any are found to have had more direct involvement in the attack on the Capitol, that will change Democrats’ negotiating strategy, too. “There are so many moving parts to this that we still do not yet know in terms of people’s involvement,” Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware told me, after reflecting on her own traumatic experience in the riot. “I am a believer in healing, but I know that in order to get there, we have to go through it, not around it.”

Cynical progressive observers I know worry Biden has not absorbed the lessons of the Obama years and expect to see their hopes for progress dashed against Republican obstructionism. The proof will be in the doing, but these are signals that those lessons indeed have been learned.

“If Republican senators hold those bills up by filibustering,” Dovere writes, “Democrats would accuse them of standing in the way of helping Americans, or standing in the way of voting rights. Ending the filibuster would then be an easier sell.” Even “radical extremist” David Brooks thinks that if “Republicans go into full obstruction mode, Democrats should absolutely kill the filibuster.”

Sally Kohn was on MSNBC’s “The Beat” Friday night snickering about Newt Gingrich calling out Biden’s team as radical extremists because Republicans have trouble tagging Biden himself with that charge. Voters will need reminding who the real radicals are.

Perhaps someone could assemble clips of prominent Republicans making the “radicals” claim and “smash cut” to MAGA forces storming the Capitol and fighting police. The latter won’t be hard to find.

Osita Nwanevu, staff wrtiter at The New Republic , explored the history of bipartisanship in a long tweet thread on Friday.

https://twitter.com/OsitaNwanevu/status/1352707809046126594?s=20

A 1968 New York Times editorial stated, “Except in time of war…history suggests that self conscious bipartisanship does not work very well in this country…a peacetime coalition could only serve to blur the lines of responsibility.” It was a long and winding road from there to here that I invite you to read yourself.

Once the immediate past occupant had flown the Oval Office, it was inevitable that more shoes would drop. With lifts. The New York Times reported Friday night that in his desperation to overturn his election loss by any means necessary, Donald Trump schemed with a Department of Justice attorney to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen as acting attorney general. They planned to replace Rosen with said attorney, Jeffrey Clark, who might then exert enough pressure on Georgia lawmakers that they would overturn the state’s presidential election results to Trump’s advantage.

Confronted on a conference call with the prospect of Rosen’s ouster, department officials agreed they would resign, the Times reports in a story based on four former Trump officials who requested anonymity:

Their informal pact ultimately helped persuade Mr. Trump to keep Mr. Rosen in place, calculating that a furor over mass resignations at the top of the Justice Department would eclipse any attention on his baseless accusations of voter fraud. Mr. Trump’s decision came only after Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark made their competing cases to him in a bizarre White House meeting that two officials compared with an episode of Mr. Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice,” albeit one that could prompt a constitutional crisis.

Clark cited privilege in not commenting, but claims his advice was consistent with law. The Times lays out the timeline behind development of a plan driven, by pressure from Trump, for the department to find “rampant election fraud” that was not there. Clark believed it was and that the department should inform Georgia officials it was investigating Georgia election when it wasn’t.

What ultimately evolved required some Olympics-level chutzpah:

Mr. Rosen and [deputy attorney general, Richard P.] Donoghue again rejected Mr. Clark’s proposal.

On New Year’s Eve, the trio met to discuss Mr. Clark’s refusal to hew to the department’s conclusion that the election results were valid. Mr. Donoghue flatly told Mr. Clark that what he was doing was wrong. The next day, Mr. Clark told Mr. Rosen — who had mentored him while they worked together at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis — that he was going to discuss his strategy with the president early the next week, just before Congress was set to certify Mr. Biden’s electoral victory.

Unbeknown to the acting attorney general, Mr. Clark’s timeline moved up. He met with Mr. Trump over the weekend, then informed Mr. Rosen midday on Sunday that the president intended to replace him with Mr. Clark, who could then try to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College results. He said that Mr. Rosen could stay on as his deputy attorney general, leaving Mr. Rosen speechless.

It would be another Saturday Night Massacre and invite not only mass resignations at the department “but also congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans” and undermine Trump’s efforts to stay in office. After hours of discussion with a team of lawyers, Trump ultimately relented.

The Trump presidency ended after months of denial that he had lost the election decisively, after months of baseless accusations that he had been robbed, and after Trump’s incitement of an insurrection by MAGA/QAnon conspiracy theorists and white nationalists that ended in the sacking of the Capitol on Jan. 6.

After Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday, many let out a sigh of relief that democracy had survived a near-extinction-level event. Biden’s team has chops. They believe in governing. News hounds not having to watch for the latest atrocious Trump tweet could go the sleep early again. Dr. Fauci’s mood improved. Still, the Friday Night News Dump is forever.

It is exhausting even writing again about Trump’s bottomless pit of unprincipled neediness. Yet as expected, shoes like the Clark Affair will keep dropping in Imelda Marcos quantities for weeks, months, or years. Investigations will begin. Some will stall. Few will go to trial. Trump will retaliate against former officials who speaks out publicly. Any accountability coming his way will be a fraction of what he and his family business deserve. Historians will be analyzing this period for centuries.

Trump is gum on the soles of the republic.

Animals interrupting wildlife photographers. A thread:

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Originally tweeted by Joaquim Campa (@JoaquimCampa) on January 17, 2021.

I can’t say this surprises me except to the extent I would have thought the Capitol Police would have been vaccinated early:

Nearly 20 members of the U.S. Capitol Police are quarantining after testing positive for COVID-19, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Bloomberg’s Billy House reports 19 officers tested positive for the virus and additional cops were sent home due to contract tracing. House adds there’s no way to confirm the cases are related to the Jan. 6 riots.

A number of lawmakers have tested positive for the virus after being evacuated as rioters stormed the hallways of the building.

Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.), Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Brad Schneider (D-Ill.) and Lou Correa (D-Calif.) have all reported positive test results since January 6, according to ABC News.President Trump delivers recorded farewell address 

After seeing images and video from the event, experts quickly labeled it a superspreader. Many of the rioters were not wearing masks and were within 6 feet of each other.

“This was in so many ways an extraordinarily dangerous event…not only from the security aspects but from the public health aspects, and there will be a fair amount of disease that comes from it,” Eric Toner, senior scholar at the John Hopkins Center for Health Security, told the Washington Post.

Toner noted because of the scope of the event, the spread of COVID-19 would be nearly impossible to track.12 National Guard members removed from Biden inauguration after vetting 

“It is a very real possibility that this will lead to a major outbreak but one that we may or may not be able to recognize,” Toner added. “All the cases to likely derive from this event will likely be lost in the huge number of cases we have in the country right now.”

We won’t know how many additional deaths were caused by this outrageous riot the President of the United States called for on January 6th. But it’s pretty certain that somebody will die of COVID because these people spread it around.

Update:

Nearly 200 members of the National Guard deployed to Washington in the days leading up to the inauguration have tested positive for coronavirus. https://t.co/qSiWfuDmjA

— Rebecca Ballhaus (@rebeccaballhaus) January 22, 2021

This piece by Paul Waldman perfectly illustrates just how much Trump influenced the Republican aesthetic. Newt Gingrich and many of his ilk were assholes, of course, so that’s not new. But Gingrich did include some bad policies along with his venom. The new guard is just nothing but bile. There is no other there, there:

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the breakout stars of the newly elected freshman class of Republicans in the House of Representatives:

Rep. Madison Cawthorn (N.C), just 25 years old, earned a coveted speaking slot at the 2020 Republican convention. But parts of his history have been exaggerated or falsified. His campaign ads suggested he was on his way to the Naval Academy before the car accident that left him paralyzed (he had already been rejected by the Academy before his accident). And now the Nation reports that while Cawthorn has repeatedly claimed he was “training” for the Paralympics, he appears never to have competed in paralympic competition at all. When Cawthorn won his seat, his response was “Cry more, lib.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) was already well known as a onetime QAnon supporter (she says she no longer endorses the deranged conspiracy theory) who has claimed that there’s no evidence a plane crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. The liberal Media Matters has located Facebook exchanges in which Greene endorses the idea that the Parkland school shooting was staged by actors. On Thursday, Greene filed articles of impeachment against President Biden.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (Colo.), who has ties to right-wing militia members and owns a restaurant called Shooters Grill — where waitstaff visibly pack heat — has gotten into confrontations with Capitol Police over recently installed metal detectors members must pass through to enter the House floor. She also came under scrutiny when other members noted that the day before the assault on the Capitol, she was seen leading a tour of the building, leading some to suspect that she may have provided help to insurrectionists, knowingly or otherwise.

One way to look at these characters is that they’re nothing more than walking clickbait for liberal websites. Some politicians become famous because they’re beloved on their own side, and others become famous because the other side loves to hate them.

But if you were a serious-minded Republican who really did want to spend your time carefully studying issues and meticulously crafting legislation to address them, what would you think your party actually values right now?

The answer is pretty clear: What sells in today’s GOP is performative lib-owning. If you can find issues that activate grievance and tribal identification on the right, then put on a show of angrily channeling what the base is feeling, no matter how misinformed or absurd those beliefs, that’s how you draw attention to yourself.

The most ambitious Republicans, even those who are themselves quite smart and well-educated, see their path to success as pandering to the dumbest and most deluded people in their party. Witness Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas (Princeton, Harvard Law) and Josh Hawley of Missouri (Stanford, Yale Law), who made themselves leaders of the effort to overturn the presidential election, promoting what they absolutely, positively know are lies about widespread fraud.

But wait, you may say, aren’t there equivalents on the Democratic side? Don’t they have their own extremists? There’s a profound difference, which is that the people in Congress who are far to the left — especially those who get the most attention — spend more time thinking about policy in a given week than the likes of Cawthorn and Boebert have in their entire lives.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y), for instance, is a social media star, but she also has a lengthy policy agenda, including workers’ rights and the Green New Deal. Rep. Katie Porter (Calif.) has gone viral with videos in which she wields her whiteboard against hapless corporate executives in hearings, but those are confrontations in which she uses her deep understanding of economics and finance to show — with math! — how profiteering hurts consumers and workers.AD

This is particularly notable given that in the House these days, members who haven’t been around for long usually have very little input on legislation — pretty much everything is up to the leadership and committee chairs. But AOC and Porter found ways to do high-profile policy advocacy anyway, because it’s what Democrats care about.

Think back to the 2020 presidential primaries, where Democrats had a long discussion about whether their policy agenda should expand the welfare state or restructure government and its relationship to business. They spent months arguing vociferously about the merits of single-payer health care versus the public option. Can you even fathom something like that happening in the 2024 Republican primaries?

There are some Republican members of Congress who care a great deal about policy and would love to become media stars by showing off their creative ideas for trade agreements or tax reform. But that’s not going to get you on Fox News, because their voters don’t really care.

He doesn’t say this, but I will: they are also dumb as posts. Cawthorne has the kind of feral street smarts that made Trump a successful huckster and Taylor-Green is aggressively nasty. But really, they are all pretty stupid, certainly uneducated. Just like their Dear Leader.

They are little fascist storm troopers, nothing more.

I was on Majority Report this morning and we talked about the impending impeachment trial and McConnell’s maneuvers. I think they are still in flux about what to do about Trump without offending his followers. They are almost certainly watching his development with great interest:

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) is staring down just over a majority of House Republicans who support toppling the No. 3 House Republican from leadership after she voted to impeach now-former President Trump for inciting a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol earlier this month. 

According to reporting from Politico, at least 107 House Republicans have communicated to the leaders of that effort that they would support removing Cheney from leadership on a secret ballot, while others have threatened boycotting future conference meetings if she remains in power. 

The intensifying campaign against Cheney, who called her decision to impeach Trump a “vote of conscience,” signals that Trump’s ideological stronghold on the party continues to echo in the chamber since his departure from office on Wednesday.

Multiple GOP sources involved in the effort told the publication that after voting to impeach Trump last week, the highest-ranking woman in the House GOP put herself in hot water — risking not only her leadership but also facing a primary challenge from state Sen. Anthony Bouchard, and angering some of her Wyoming constituents. A local county Republican Party in Wyoming unanimously agreed to censure Cheney last weekend over her impeachment vote. The Wyoming GOP had previously put out a statement that essentially combed the party’s inbox and relayed angry messages aimed at Cheney after her support for impeaching Trump.

The news of a growing revolt against Cheney comes after House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) said they would continue to support Cheney as chair, even as loyalists to former President Trump in the lower chamber called for her removal as conference chair.

According to Politico, at least a dozen House Republicans expressed further frustrations with Cheney, who is in charge of the party’s messaging efforts, for providing fodder to Democrats a day before the impeachment trial, giving them ample time to use her statements, while also sheltering the few Republicans who stood behind her in voting to impeach the now former president. 

Cheney, for her part, seems to be brushing off the brouhaha.

Cheney has made a bet that the Trump cult will dissolve before 2022 and she will be fine. Ben Sasse has done the same in the Senate. Both have presidential aspirations. But it hasn’t happened yet. These GOPers are looking at the polls and see that around 75% of Republicans still worship Dear Leader.

But, there is a countervailing force in the Republican Party:

As the House prepares to send articles of impeachment to the Senate on Monday, CNN has learned that dozens of influential Republicans around Washington — including former top Trump administration officials — have been quietly lobbying GOP members of Congress to impeach and convict Donald Trump. The effort is not coordinated but reflects a wider battle inside the GOP between those loyal to Trump and those who want to sever ties and ensure he can never run for President again.

The lobbying started in the House after the January 6 attack on the Capitol and in the days leading up to impeachment. But it’s now more focused on Sen. Mitch McConnell, the powerful minority leader who has signaled he may support convicting Trump.”Mitch said to me he wants Trump gone,” one Republican member of Congress told CNN. “It is in his political interest to have him gone. It is in the GOP interest to have him gone. The question is, do we get there?”

McConnell had proposed delaying the trial until February, but with the articles coming to the Senate on Monday, the process will likely be set in motion sooner. It would take 17 Republicans to join all 50 Democrats in order to convict. While the bar is high, some GOP sources think there is more of an appetite to punish the former President than is publicly apparent.”There were 10 House Republicans who voted for impeachment. There were probably over 150 who supported it,” said Charlie Dent, a former Republican congressman and CNN contributor.

The ongoing Republican whisper campaign, according to more than a dozen sources who spoke to CNN, is based on a shared belief that a successful conviction is critical for the future of the Republican party. Multiple sources describe this moment as a reckoning for the party. “Trump created a cult of personality that is hard to dismantle,” said a former senior Republican official. “Conviction could do that.”

The lobbying effort has included behind-the-scenes pressure by Republican donors, calls from former top Trump White House officials, and a set of talking points circulating among Republicans arguing for Trump’s impeachment.

The 9-point memo charges that “it is difficult to find a more anti-conservative outburst by a U.S. president than Donald Trump the last two months.” Other points include that Trump “urged supporters from across the nation to come to Washington, DC, to disrupt” Congress on January 6 and egged on the crowd, which was “widely understood to include people who were planning to fight physically, and who were prepared to die in response to his false claims of a ‘stolen election.’

‘The memo goes on to point out Trump “tweeted and made other statements against the Vice President as the Secret Service was being forced to rush Mike Pence out of the Senate chamber and into a protective bunker.” It’s unclear how widely disseminated the memo is among Republicans in Washington.

It would appear that Republicans are in dissaray. Imagine that.

McConnell cares about one thing right now: maintaining his power whether in the majority or in the minority. He is looking at his caucus and seeing that he lost seats in almost all the purple states this last time and 2022 looks daunting. As Seder astutely pointed out this morning, his best bet may be to let Schumer nuke the filibuster so he can let his Senators go their own way and make the Democratic “centrists” have to take the tough votes. In any case, he’s having to dance as fast as he can to keep the crazy Trumpers happy while recognizing that a good part of the party has had it. It’s a tough position. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

I have a teacher friend who works in the Maryland public schools who is unable to get an appointment for a vaccine. And yet this is what she’s facing:

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan Thursday “urgently” called on local school systems to return to hybrid in-person learning by no later than March 1.

During a news conference at St. John’s College in Annapolis, the governor said there was “no public health reason” to keep kids out of schools due to COVID-19, adding virtual learning could lead to significant learning losses, especially among students of color and those from low-income families.

“I understand that in earlier stages of the pandemic, that this was a very difficult decision for county school boards to make,” Hogan said, “but we know so much more now than we did back then. There can no longer be any debate at all. It is abundantly clear that the toll of keeping students out of school far exceeds any potential risk having students in school where they belong.”

Actually there is plenty of dispute about this.

As an older teacher with some underlying conditions, my friend is frantic, and understandably so. She cannot get an appointment to get vaccinated anywhere and apparently the word is that Hogan is threatening to fire any teachers who refuse (although nobody knows how he can actually do that ) regardless of whether they’ve gotten their shots. March 1st leaves very little time to get them and have the required time elapse after the second shot even if they get the shot next week — which they can’t because there are no appointments available.

Maybe Hogan should concentrate on getting vaccines to teachers instead of acting as though teachers don’t care about the fact their students need to get back in the classrooms. They know this better than anyone, including the Governor. It’s as if people think teachers are just being lazy when, in fact, they are working more than ever. Virtual teaching is not easier than classroom teaching — it’s harder!

If he wants them back in the classroom this is an easy fix. Just make sure they are all vaccinated first. Easy peasy.

There is something so sick about the way public school teachers are treated in our culture, from insanely low pay to endless insults and degradation. No wonder they are having such trouble keeping people in the profession. I can’t help but wonder if the fact that it’s a majority female profession makes it an especially favorite target.

By the way, here is an important analysis about the risks for teachers and other adults who work in schools, which have been played down since the beginning of the pandemic. This assurance is false and it’s dangerous:

As a scientist, the spouse of a former K–12 educator, and a parent of two young children, I have closely followed the debate over whether children in America should attend in-person schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic. My interest in this topic piqued when a neighbor shared with me the Rockefeller Foundation’s recent plan for school reopening. This plan claimed that in-person schooling could resume as early as February 1st with no additional risk of COVID-19 spread both for students as well as school teachers and staff, if schools implement mitigation procedures, including testing and mask wearing. However, my analyses of updated data show that reopening schools now will put teachers and school staff at risk.

I understand the arguments claiming that in-person schooling is safe for children. But I remain concerned for America’s more than eight million school teachers and staff, who are likely to be more susceptible to COVID-19 than children.

The argument that in-person schooling is safe for teachers and school staff is based on the idea that these groups do not show greater COVID-19 case rates when schools are open. To support this claim, the Rockefeller proposal highlighted data showing similar COVID-19 case rates for teachers and school staff as compared to the baseline rates in their surrounding community. These data came from the COVID-19 School Response Dashboard, a project created by a team led by Dr. Emily Oster. The Dashboard consists of a public website that aggregates various datasets on COVID-19 infections across schools, including both voluntarily uploaded data from individual schools as well as government data. The Dashboard also provides tools for analyzing these data.

It seemed bold to suggest that infection rates for teachers and school staff would not be elevated during this pandemic, given recent observations of increased COVID-19 infections for people of all ages as well as new scientific research suggesting a link between in-person schooling and increased community transmission. Therefore, to test the robustness of these claims, I examined the data from the COVID-19 Dashboard myself using its own built-in analytic tools.

COVID-19 spread among the school staff over time

I specifically conducted these analyses to understand the claim that in-person schooling did not add COVID-19 infection risk for teachers and school staff. Dr. Oster made this claim in an article on November 20, and it was repeated more recently by the Rockefeller Foundation plan, as well as by politicians, academics, foundations, and others.

This claim was based on a comparision of COVID-19 case rates for in-person teachers and school staff versus matched community members. Oster’s analysis measured these numbers for New York state data from Oct. 12 through Nov 6. She found similar COVID-19 case rates for teachers and school staff compared with matched community members, which she interpreted as indicating that in-person schooling was safe for educators.

I wanted to confirm this result myself and to explore whether it was reliable over time, especially given the recent surge. I opened the Dashboard website and selected it to display data from schools in New York state that implemented mask wearing. The site looked like this:

On this page, the lines in the right plot show COVID-19 infection rates for different time periods; the black popup box highlights the New York case rates for the period of 10/26–11/8, which overlapped with the date range from Oster’s report. For these dates, the mean COVID-19 daily case rates (per 100,000 people) were 8, 12, & 12 for students, teachers and school staff, and the community, respectively. Because the case rates in this period were fairly similar for teachers and school staff compared with the community, it seemed consistent with her interpretation that in-person schooling was not associated with large additional risk for those groups.

I then focused on the rest of the plot, which showed that COVID-19 case rates began to rise on Nov. 9. To visualize these numbers, I entered the Dashboard’s numbers into a spreadsheet and plotted them over time:

In this plot, the colored lines show case rates among school teachers and staff for different school levels and the black line shows the community. Overall, the lines have a positive slope, matching the nationwide COVID-19 case surge during this period. But looking more closely, one sees that the colored lines show steeper increases than the black line. Thus, during mid November through December, COVID-19 case rates increased more sharply for in-person teachers and school staff compared to the rest of their community.

To directly quantify the additional COVID-19 case risk that teachers and staff face from in-person teaching, I computed their percent change in case rates relative to their community. As shown in Figure 3, for Nov. 30–Dec. 13 in-person teaching was associated with increased case rates for teachers and school staff at all levels. This increase was especially notable at the elementary-school level, where in-person teachers and school staff showed a 53% higher COVID-19 case rate.

Confirming these results with other state data and national data

To confirm these results, I expanded these analyses to examine the Dashboard’s data from Texas and from across the entire nation. I created the plot shown in Figure 4, which indicates the relative increase in COVID-19 case rates for school staff compared to communities, for each region.

This plot shows that this same pattern of results—increased COVID-19 cases for in-person school teachers and staff—was consistent geographically and not limited to New York.

Summarizing the above analyses, in December there was a consistent trend for school teachers and staff to show elevated COVID-19 case rates compared to their communities, despite the use of masking in their schools. Thus, the pattern that the Rockefeller Foundation plan and Oster emphasized, where teachers and school staff showed similar case rates as the community, disappeared in mid-November when the pandemic surged.

Comparing case rates across regions with different overall case rates

Finally, I wanted to evaluate the claim from Oster and the Rockefeller Foundation report, where they showed data that in-person schooling was safe for teachers and school staff across regions with both high and low overall levels of COVID-19 spread. I felt this was an interesting analysis because it could show whether any added risk for in-person teaching was limited to certain regions, such as those where COVID-19 was rampant or rare overall.

Figure 5 below shows the results of this analysis for two distinct time periods. The left plot, which I duplicated from Oster’s article, shows data from Oct. 12–Nov. 6. The right plot shows my own analysis of data from Nov. 30–Dec 13. In these plots, each dot represents a group of schools, with the position along the x axis indicating the community case rate and the position along the y axis indicating the in-person case rate. In these plots, if a datapoint is above the diagonal 45° line, it indicates that there are greater case rates for in-person school teachers and staff than the community. Datapoints near the diagonal indicate that case rates are similar between the in-school and community groups.

Critically, focusing on the orange points (which represent teachers and school staff), the left and right plots show very different results. In the left plot (Oct. 12–Nov. 6), the orange points are fairly close to the diagonal line (although slightly above it). As Oster noted, this indicates that case rates were relatively similar between in-person teachers and school staff compared with their communities, and that this pattern is maintained across regions with both high and low overall case rates. In contrast, the right plot illustrates a different pattern of results for Nov. 30–Dec. 13. Here, the orange points are all substantially above the 45° line. These deviations are sizable—note the change in axis scale. Thus, these results show that during December in-person teachers and school staff consistently show an elevated risk of contracting COVID-19 relative to their community baseline.

Conclusions

Overall, the data from the COVID-19 School Response Dashboard show that in late November and December, with the pandemic surging, in-person school teachers and staff experienced greater COVID-19 case rates compared to others in their communities. The magnitude of this increase was quite substantial, and in-person teaching consistently posed added risk across communities with high and low overall levels of virus spread. Together, this pattern shows an abrupt shift from the earlier numbers from the Dashboard and Oster, cited by the Rockefeller plan, which had suggested that in-person school teachers and staff would show no excess COVID-19 risk.

The results I presented above come from a relatively straightforward set of calculations I performed by entering the data from the COVID-19 Dashboard into a spreadsheet. An analysis is only as good as its data. If the COVID Dashboard numbers have issues then perhaps all the analyses that rely on it are problematic, both the ones described here as well as those shown by Oster and the Rockefeller report. But if the Dashboard numbers are reliable, then my analyses indicate that the teacher safety reported by Oster and the Rockefeller report has vanished during the winter surge.

These results illustrate the dynamic nature of the pandemic, where the rate of virus spread may change dramatically over time. The COVID-19 dashboard is a very useful resource and we should expand and improve these types of data-collection efforts. However, while we are collecting this type of rich, dynamic data, we should simultaneously monitor the numbers and tailor our public health policies accordingly. It seems to me that many of our current policies and messaging related to the safety of in-person schooling for teachers and school staff are based on inaccurate and outdated data. In this fast-moving pandemic, merely collecting data is not enough; we need to continuously analyze the data and update our conclusions accordingly.

We owe it to our school teachers and school staff to be clear and transparent about the fact that the most recent data indicate that they may experience a relatively increased risk of COVID-19 infection if schools open as planned for in-person schooling. The newer numbers indicate that the situation has changed from October and that in-person schooling is now a significant source of COVID-19 case spread for teachers and school staff.

Oakland's own. pic.twitter.com/j5dTtU1n2i

— Golden State Warriors (@warriors) January 20, 2021

Harris was born in Oakland, and spent the early part of her legal career as an assistant attorney general to Alameda County, before ascending to senator of California, and now to the White House. The video follows a young girl named Stella who is from Oakland, and is inspired by her — feeling like she can do anything.

The Warriors presented Harris with a signed No. 49 jersey to commemorate her being the 49th vice president of the United States. It came along with a message from Steph Curry, encouraging her to display the jersey in her office in the White House, which she said she plans to do proudly.

So, it turns out the Warriors visited the White House since Barack Obama left office after all.

This stuff matters, especially to kids. I’m so glad to see it.

It seems like only yesterday that we were all making jokes about 2020 being the worst and reassuring ourselves that 2021 was bound to be better. Looking forward to the departure of the most divisive president in U.S. history we slid into the new year relieved and a little bit complacent, secure in the knowledge that the country was soon to be rid of him. Instead, this has been the most tumultuous January in modern memory.

Each week of the new year has been momentous. Specifically, every Wednesday of the new year has been historic.

We started with the January 6th insurrection, of course, in which then-President Donald Trump incited an angry mob of thousands to storm the U.S. Capitol during a joint session of Congress to stop the constitutionally-mandated counting of the Electoral College votes for the next president, Joe Biden. That had never happened before, obviously. Until then, we never had a president so radical and so psychologically unbalanced that he would try to stop the peaceful transfer of power. But, of course, Trump was unlike any other and he persuaded tens of millions of people that they could believe him or they could believe their lying eyes and convinced them that the election had been stolen from them despite all evidence to the contrary.

That Wednesday is going to be one of those days that will be remembered like December 7th and 9/11. It will be commonly referred to as the January 6th insurrection or, more likely, just January 6th.

The nation was left reeling and in shock by what they saw unfold on their TVs, including the speech by a president who egged the mob on and then stood by and did nothing for hours, reportedly delighted by the mob violence. Members of Congress had been targeted by the murderous rioters and were left traumatized by the experience. It was so outrageous that on the very next Wednesday, the House of Representatives took the bold and unprecedented step of impeaching President Trump for a second time.

They had no choice. Five people died on January 6th and dozens were injured. The horrific pictures were beamed around the world leaving our allies shaken and our adversaries rubbing their hands together with glee. Despite the fact that Trump would be out of office in just one week, Congress had to take a stand and they did. Even ten Republicans voted to impeach, which is saying something considering their normally supine attitude when it comes to Trump.

So on the first Wednesday of January, the United States suffered a violent insurrection and on the second Wednesday, the House of Representatives impeached the President of the United States for his role in it. Then one week later, on the third Wednesday of the month, a new president was sworn in.

Suddenly this week, after what the nation went through the first few weeks of the new year, the government went back to normal, observing its usual quadrennial rituals, necessarily altered due to the raging pandemic, but nonetheless offered up to the public as a cheerful, optimistic event as if nothing had happened.

Ask yourself what you would think if you watched these events take place in another country. Would you call that a stable democracy?

These three major events happening in rapid succession was more surreal than anything that happened during Trump’s four years. And perhaps the weirdest part is the fact that the day after the Inauguration, he had vaporized. After dominating our political culture for almost five years, we are quite suddenly in a world in which he simply doesn’t exist. Sure, there are remnants of his reign to be dispensed with and his former collaborators are still throwing a few punches from the sidelines. But with Trump banned from social media and no longer commanding the attention of the press, we are watching the last four years already wash down the memory hole in record time.

Americans don’t have a great capacity for introspection and there is a great propensity for amnesia when it comes to our unpleasant past and inability to live up to our ideals. Leaders tend to prefer to sweep things under the rug with the excuse that we are a forward-looking culture that doesn’t wallow in nostalgia as some others do. (That’s bunk, of course – we valorize the founding as if the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are holy writs.) It’s a habit that has led to an America in the 21st century still having failed to deal adequately with the original sin of slavery and the racism that festers and creates much of the division that the right has been exploiting for decades and which finally exploded into the violence of January 6th.

Let’s face facts: Donald Trump ran two presidential campaigns on blatantly racist culture war themes and when he lost this time he told his supporters that Black voters in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Milwaukee and Detroit stole the election from him. And yet, just two days after the new president is sworn in it feels as if that clear realization is already slipping away.

The right is naturally doing what it always does. Its top voices are already energetically clutching their pearls at the mere mention of white supremacy and racism and fatuously insisting that Joe Biden is dividing the nation by even suggesting it might be a problem. As The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins put it, they plan to pretend it never happened:

People who spent years coddling the president will recast themselves as voices of conscience, or whitewash their relationship with Trump altogether. Policy makers who abandoned their dedication to “fiscal responsibility” and “limited government” will rediscover a passion for these timeless conservative principles. Some may dress up their revisionism in the rhetoric of “healing” and “moving forward,” but the strategy will be clear—to escape accountability by taking advantage of America’s notoriously short political memory.

And, as usual, a Democratic administration has been elected in the wake of catastrophe and they will have their hands full dealing with the urgent emergencies of the pandemic and consequent economic fallout as well existential long term problems that can no longer be put off. The temptation is going to be great to just pretend we are back to “normal” and write off this strange episode as an anomaly. But sweeping the radicalization of the faction of Americans that is organized around racism and resentment under the rug is what led us to January 6th and it won’t be the last time if we don’t face up to these problems.

We have one more Wednesday left in January. It should be the first day of Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial. It would be a good day to take the first step in a long, overdue process of accountability, restitution and reconciliation. There can be no healing or unity without it.

Salon