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Month: November 2022

Pelosi steps down

Published by digby on November 17, 2022

Wearing her white suffragist suit. Good for her. She was a real inspiration to a lot of women.

She is one of the greatest of all time, a major figure in American politics and I suspect the Democrats from all factions of the party are going to miss her. It’s a unique job with a special set of skills which not many people have. It’s not all about ideology, it’s about leading a very, very fractious coalition of disparate needs and wants. Let’s hope the next generation, whether Jeffries or another, will have watched and learned.

Marry who you love

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 17, 2022

Democrats defend marriage equality

Photo: Krista Guenin/Flickr/Creative Commons

The clock is ticking. Gridlock is coming. Democrats must protect real, freedom-loving Americans from authoritarians coming for their rights.

New York Times:

The Senate on Wednesday took a crucial step toward passing landmark legislation to provide federal protections for same-sex marriages, as 12 Republicans joined Democrats to advance the Respect for Marriage Act, putting it on track to become law in the twilight of the Democratic-held Congress.

The 62-to-37 vote, which came only days after the midterm elections in which Democrats retained control of the Senate but lost the House to Republicans, was a rare and notable last gasp of bipartisanship by a lame duck Congress as lawmakers looked toward an era of political gridlock.

It also signaled a remarkable shift in American politics and culture, demonstrating how same-sex marriage, once a divisive issue, has been so widely accepted that a law to protect the rights of same-sex couples across the country could gain decisive, bipartisan majorities in both the Senate and the House. Last summer, 47 House Republicans joined Democrats to pass a version of the bill.

Newly reinstated Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell voted against moving the legislation forward. He got blistered on Twitter.

“Truly stunning how these people don’t care about anyone but themselves,” tweeted Victor Shi, co-host of iGen Politics.

Next, Republicans are coming for your birth control and IVF, warns Huffington Post:

Anti-abortion activists cautioned Republican lawmakers in Tennessee against immediately campaigning to roll back access to in vitro fertilization and contraception, according to a conference call recording obtained by ProPublica.

Those types of attacks on reproductive freedoms should wait another year or two, an activist said on the Oct. 27 call, which ProPublica published on Tuesday.

The report illustrates how anti-abortion organizations are strategizing to put even more restrictions on reproductive health care in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

It’s plain where the religious fringe means to take the country. Back 50 years or more.

“Maybe your caucus gets to a point next year, two years from now, three years from now, where you do want to talk about IVF, and how to regulate it in a more ethical way, or deal with some of those contraceptive issues,” said Stephen Billy, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America’s vice president for state affairs. “But I don’t think that that’s the conversation that you need to have now.” 

It took the religious right decades to reverse Roe in the Supreme Court. They mean to go slow to go big on revanchism.

Throw charges of “culture war” back in their faces. The religious right is waging one against women. Women need reminding again and again because, as the recording shows, the religious right means to move next once the furor over banning abortion dies down.

Democrats had best make the most of their last two months in full control of Congress. Let’s do more than hope protecting women’s freedom to decide if and when to have children is next up for a vote. Demand it.

(h/t SM)

Better angels in America

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 17, 2022

Biden exhibited more faith than the commentariat

Was it groupthink? Being out of touch with “real America”? Pundits visiting the wrong red-state diners? Failure to read the room? Whatever. Once again, the Church of the Savvy misread the country ahead of a general election.

Scranton Joe did not, writes The Atlantic‘s Franklin Foer. Pundits adjudged President Biden’s closing argument on Nov. 3 “head-scratching” and “puzzling.” Biden had the advantage of being right. He asked Americans to save their democracy from authoritarians and they listened. He exhibited, writes Foer, “more faith in the American people than the commentariat or his political adversaries” who thought him naive.

Democrats would pay a price for “cultural extremism,” felt critics. A perceived leftward shift would allow Republicans to retake the suburbs and secure the traditional bounty of congressional seats opposition parties normally win in a president’s first midterm. The Democratic Congress would go the way of Glenn Youngkin’s Virginia, falling to culture war critiques. But Biden believed he could “lower the temperature in the country” by going low-key:

Unlike Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, he has avoided becoming a polarizing figure. By receding a bit more into the background, he has immunized himself against plots to make him into a villain. Even when Trumpists shouted “Let’s go Brandon,” they never really seemed to have their hearts in it. The joke went stale fast. The only scandal that Republicans have pursued with any vigor is the corrupt foreign activity of Hunter Biden. Even that they have tended to describe as a meta-scandal about the media’s failure to cover the wayward son’s purloined laptop.

Biden passed transformational legislation that drew much more fire than “Obamacare” or “Hillarycare.” Lowering the temperature allowed the affable Biden to defang accusations of being a “socialist” or worse. The right flung them, of course, but Americans outside the Beltway and right-wing bubbles weren’t buying it.

C’mon man. It’s Scranton Joe.

It helped that rather than defend himself with facts as other Democrats reflexively would, Biden attacked Republicans as anti-American. Biden enlisted Independence Hall in driving home his argument. Unaccustomed to being on the receiving end, the right howled. The louder they howled, the more the country was having Biden’s conversation, not theirs.

When the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs ruling, Biden spent several weeks on the receiving end of harsh criticism from his own base, who felt that he wasn’t acting aggressively enough to counteract the decision. Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pleaded with him to open abortion clinics on military bases and the fringes of national parks. But Biden’s instinct was to resist making himself (or his policies) the center of attention. He didn’t want to propose any executive action that the courts would slap down, or that would offend the sensibilities of moderate voters. His instinct was to step back and let the anger settle on its deserved target, the Republican Party.

Biden calls himself a “fingertip politician”—and it’s the second part of that label that helped him exceed electoral expectations. He’s made strategic choices to protect his coalition, even when those decisions earned him derision. To counteract inflation, or at least how it’s most directly experienced, he’s relentlessly exploited the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to tamp down prices at the pump. To win young voters and fulfill a campaign promise to Elizabeth Warren, he agreed to student-debt relief, even if it wasn’t a policy he especially liked.

Critiques of Biden were, Foer argues, “profound political misjudgment.” Biden appealed to Americans’ better angels. His repeated “never bet against America” and “nothing we can’t do if we do it together” lines that sound hackneyed to cynics landed differently outside the Beltway.

Democrats in the lame duck session might want to reality-check their own misjudgments about what sells in Scranton Joe’s America. Read the room, Joe Manchin. Read election results in Arizona, Kyrsten Sinema. Enough Americans have had their fill of crazytown that lowering the temperature by heading off the incoming Republican majority may be better politics than your instincts tell you.

Maybe Biden is not the crazy one.

Marjorie Taylor Green Shadow Speaker

Published by digby on November 16, 2022

The Republicans won it and probably will have a 2 or 3 vote margin. Woohoo……

McCarthy’s victory over internal critics on Tuesday marked the starting gun for a seven-week marathon. With his majority looking much thinner than many in both parties expected, he will need to persuade almost all of the 36 members who opposed him on Tuesday’s secret ballot to back him for the gavel in the public floor vote on Jan. 3.

While most of the conference’s anti-McCarthy votes went to Freedom Caucus challenger Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), five House Republicans wrote in a different name for speaker and one abstained for a total of 37 in opposition — drawing a map for the Californian’s rocky path ahead to 218 votes.

Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) remarked on the effect of the chamber’s narrow margins with a quip a Democrat might appreciate: “Everybody’s a Joe Manchin.” Fitzpatrick helped nominate McCarthy on Tuesday, however, and stressed that the current minority leader “has earned the right” to be speaker.

The House GOP on Wednesday moves on to proposed conference rules, with debate set to continue after Thanksgiving. And McCarthy now has less room to maneuver than he might have anticipated. As he edges toward offering institutional concessions to the Freedom Caucus, the Trump-aligned group that helped block his ascent to the speakership in 2015, emboldened moderates are growing uncomfortable with what they perceive as back-door deals with the party’s hardliners.

More than 50 members of the Republican Main Street Partnership met on Wednesday morning to discuss their legislative priorities and how they plan to flex their muscle as the second-largest GOP group on Capitol Hill, a Republican familiar with the sitdown told POLITICO.

Meanwhile, some GOP lawmakers who backed McCarthy on Tuesday might end up siding with Freedom Caucus members on the rules concessions they’re seeking. Among those requests: tools to undermine the GOP leader, including a restoration of the speaker-deposing move known as a “motion to vacate the chair”; and diluting the influence of McCarthy and his allies in doling out committee assignments. (The more influence McCarthy loses there, the fewer carrots he has to offer to his skeptics.)

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a onetime McCarthy opponent turned key ally, threw his support behind conservatives’ proposed rules changes, calling them “good, common-sense things.”

On top of that, some Republicans walked into Wednesday’s debate with a hangover from Tuesday. Four lawmakers, speaking on condition of anonymity, aired frustration after the leadership elections about what they described as a chaotic and poorly explained process of tallying votes.

Those private complaints about GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik’s (N.Y.) management of the voting were exacerbated by the fact that inside the room, she read out votes for McCarthy and Biggs but did not mention that six members chose neither candidate. According to conference staff, however, internal rules state that only formally nominated leadership candidates — in this case, McCarthy and Biggs — have their tallies publicly announced.

    Separately adding to the disarray, at least one GOP lawmaker mixed up planned votes for the first and second ballots in the highly competitive whip race, according to a senior Republican who was in the room. The lawmaker in question intended to choose Rep. Drew Ferguson (R-Ga.) for the first ballot, but instead put Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.).

    That one vote, had it been cast as intended, could have led to a different outcome in the whip battle — since Ferguson ended the first ballot one vote behind Emmer, eliminating him from the contest before the current National Republican Congressional Committee chair prevailed on the second ballot against Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.).

    Now Republicans hope to move beyond the drama — though it’s more likely they just start the second act — as McCarthy starts to try to lock down votes.

    He can’t lose more than a handful of members. Though the House hasn’t formally been called yet, Republicans are expected to have a single-digit majority. And McCarthy has already lost two: Shortly before Wednesday’s conference meeting, Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) appeared to put himself firmly in the “no” column.

    McCarthy is busy making deals with all these wingnut members. If you ask why I called Marjorie Taylor Green the Shadow Speaker, this is why:

    The deal has been made. She was bought with a promise to be on investigative committees. And she clearly knows how much power she has.

    Crazytown!

    Published by digby on November 16, 2022

    Democrats give up on lifting the debt ceiling in the lame duck

    I can hardly believe this. I guess Joe Manchin really has decided that he wants to work with Republicans to cut social security and Medicare — and god knows what else. Sinema and some others as well. So this is where we are:

    The White House has largely given up hope of Congress raising the nation’s debt limit during the lame-duck session that runs through late December, increasing the risk of a highly partisan, market-rattling fiscal confrontation next year.

    Senior administration officials see little chance of attracting any Republican votes for a bipartisan debt limit hike during the short session. And they don’t believe they have the 50 Democratic Senate votes needed to slam through a hike using the budget reconciliation process that would allow them to avoid a Republican filibuster.

    “We’d love to do the debt limit. That doesn’t magically create the votes to get the debt limit done,” said one frustrated senior White House official.

    The administration has determined that if it were to go the reconciliation route on the debt limit, it would face likely opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). And there could be other defectors. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has said he wants a bipartisan vote to raise the borrowing cap during the lame-duck session. But Republicans, many of whom are eager to use the limit as leverage to extract legislative concessions from Democrats in the next Congress, have shown no appetite for any such bipartisan approach.

    “I don’t think the debt limit issue is until sometime next year,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday in response to a question about whether he would address it in the lame duck.

    Apparently, Democratic leadership thinks this will work for them politically:

    That’s left White House officials to all but abandon efforts for a lame-duck move they once hoped might head off a potentially disastrous showdown with the House GOP majority next year. Instead, officials now predict Republicans will get blamed if a bitter fight on the issue harms already choppy markets and further damages an economy that many economists see as close to a recession.

    Oh I’m sure it will be super helpful to the Democrats if the world economy crashes. Super helpful. Because if there’s one thing you want in a fragile recovery is Marjorie Taylor Green and Tommy Turberville playing games with the full faith and credit of the United States.

    Maybe they have no choice because of Manchin and Sinema. But damn … this is very, very bad.

    About Kari ….

    Published by digby on November 16, 2022

    The Big Lie failure

    Vaughn Hillyard was on the trail with Kari Lake for over a year and saw more of her than any human should be required to see. He had this to say and I think it’s smart:

    “When you look at the slate of election deniers she was the latest one to fall making it a clean sweep of those candidates and secretary of state candidates and now Donald Trump will try to run on the message that they lost on.”

    If Trump seemed down last night it wasn’t about losing the election. He doesn’t care about anyone but himself. But it can’t have escaped him that his bedrock belief that the Big Lie was a super winning message failed miserably. In fact, it dragged down candidates all over the country,

    Trump didn’t dwell on it last night, which suggests that he knows he has to pivot back to the issues and rhetoric that won him the election in 2016. But it hurts him to have to do that since his loss in 2020 was obviously psychically unbearable and he needs for people to believe it was stolen from him. He knows that repetition is the best way to ensure that happens and now he is restrained. I wonder if he can keep it up?

    Don’t get your hopes up.

    Published by digby on November 16, 2022

    Yes, it’s possible the right wing media will finally abandon Trump. But I wouldn’t bet money on it.

    Look, this might be it. Maybe three lost elections is enough to make the GOP sober up and decide they really have had enough. And maybe Trump’s loyal flock will abandon him for a younger lover. It’s been known to happen. Personally I would love to see it. But I’m not holding my breath. It’s also very possible that they just haven’t lost quite enough and they will have to wait until Trump shuffles off his mortal coil before they can move on.

    Biden’s play

    Published by digby on November 16, 2022

    They have a plan. Will it work?

    The NY Times:

    With Donald J. Trump’s announcement that he is officially running to reclaim the Oval Office he falsely asserts was stolen from him, President Biden is ready to implement what some of his top aides refer to as “the Trump project.”

    Mr. Biden has spent much of the last year putting a fearsome face on the “ultra-MAGA” agenda, taking aim at Republican senators, governors and state lawmakers. Now, he will return the focus to his once and future foil — Mr. “Make America Great Again” himself.

    Inside the West Wing, a small group of presidential advisers has been working to develop a plan for how Mr. Biden and the White House will respond to what they expect will be a constant stream of invective from the former president now that he is formally a candidate.

    Mr. Trump started the attacks almost immediately in his speech on Tuesday night announcing his presidential run, as he complained about “Biden and the radical-left lunatics running our government right into the ground.”

    Mr. Biden will continue to underscore his belief that Mr. Trump is a threat to democracy, advisers say. But his political handlers are determined to show that Mr. Trump’s four years did not yield actual accomplishments for the American people.

    On Tuesday, just hours before Mr. Trump’s announcement, Mr. Biden’s political Twitter account posted a video mocking the former president’s claims that he was doing something about the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. The video, titled “The difference between talking and delivering,” showed Mr. Biden signing his $1 trillion infrastructure measure into law, juxtaposed with a compilation of clips of the former president using the word “infrastructure.”

    In the middle of Mr. Trump’s speech, the Twitter account posted another video, titled “Donald Trump failed America,” showing scenes of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot on Capitol Hill.

    The effort to coordinate the Trump response has involved months of research and is being led by Anita Dunn, one of Mr. Biden’s top communications strategists, and Jen O’Malley Dillon, who ran Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign and is now the deputy chief of staff at the White House.

    Mr. Biden said last week that he “intends” to run in 2024 but would talk with his family before announcing a decision early next year.

    Still, officials said Mr. Trump’s presence in the race would motivate him to run again. Mr. Biden views his predecessor as a danger that needs to be stopped. He regularly notes that he is the only person who has ever defeated Mr. Trump, implying that he would have the best chance of doing it again. He has publicly said he would “not be disappointed” to face Mr. Trump in a rematch.

    Be careful what you wish for …

    At the Democratic National Committee, officials have kept an eye on the former president, even after he left Washington for his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. The party has assembled about 40 researchers to catalog every speech, radio address, TV appearance and newspaper article featuring Mr. Trump and other Republican candidates, in an effort to assemble the most comprehensive case against the former president and Republicans in the upcoming campaigns.

    On Tuesday, the D.N.C. announced that it would begin hiring staff in New Hampshire, Florida and other early primary states to hold Republican presidential candidates like Mr. Trump accountable for what they say as they begin campaigning for the White House in 2024.

    It is the earliest the D.N.C. has started making local hires ahead of a presidential campaign, officials said.

    “Today is just the kickoff to what will be a messy Republican primary, with candidates competing to be the most extreme MAGA Republican in the race,” Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement. “The D.N.C. will be ready for them all.”

    Party officials said they would continue to highlight the actions of other potential Republican candidates, including Mr. DeSantis, along with longtime Trump supporters like Tucker Carlson, the right-wing Fox News host, and Mike Lindell, the owner of MyPillow, who backed Mr. Trump’s claims of election fraud.

    But Mr. Trump is a special case.

    […]

    White House officials remain coy about when Mr. Biden will formally announce his own decision about running for a second term. Once the president confirms his candidacy, new rules kick in about how he has to raise and spend money on his campaign. His advisers want to delay that until they are ready.

    But in the meantime, Mr. Biden himself has become increasingly convinced that his mission to remove Mr. Trump from office — and keep him out of the White House — is not yet over.

    I’m glad they’re planning. But I hope they remember that Trump is very unpredictable and they need to remain nimble.

    Trump’s soporific announcement speech

    Published by digby on November 16, 2022

    In one of the most predictable moves in American political history, Donald Trump announced the America First Vengeance Tour 2024 at his Mar-a-Lago beach club last night. Although commentators have been saying it’s the earliest notification of a presidential run in history, it actually isn’t. Trump himself announced his intention to run for re-election the day he took office in 2017. He has been champing at the bit to make it official this time, and only held back in order to collect as much unaccountable money as possible through his various PACs, which will now be subject to more stringent campaign finance rules.

    It’s pretty obvious that one of Trump’s prime motivations for going into campaign mode now (aside from his bottomless thirst for revenge) is so he can claim that the various criminal and civil cases against him are all political hit jobs. He seems to be under the impression that running for president conveys magical powers, as if the Justice Department rule against indicting a sitting president somehow applies to a candidate. It does not, although there is little doubt that even a criminal indictment will not stop him from running. In fact, he knows he can capitalize on any legal troubles by claiming he is being persecuted, and knows his followers will eat it up with a spoon. Last night’s speech even featured this rather pitiful lament:

    Trump’s speech itself was remarkably boring and perfunctory. He tried to follow through on the promise to be dignified and “buttoned up,” but couldn’t sustain it. The first 20 minutes or so were prepared remarks about how he turned over a country that was gloriously successful with a great economy and Joe Biden has turned it all into a barren hellscape. It was filled with lies, of course. When he finally slunk out of town in January 2021, unemployment was more than twice what it is now. America lost 87,222 people to COVID that month, the peak of the entire pandemic. The country has rarely been in such horrible shape, and the American people held him responsible for much of it.

    The hand-picked Mar-a-Lago crowd was straining to stay engaged as Trump rambled on. First CNN cut away and then Fox News followed suit — MSNBC didn’t cover it at all — switching to their pundit panels even as he was still talking. That was when we finally got a glimpse of how this pseudo-event was going to be received by the media.

    I had expected that he’d do at least a little better, and that mainstream media talking heads would feel free to pronounce that just maybe he had finally seen the light and become a serious politician. But after that stale and lifeless performance, most of them just sat there numbly, repeating their talking points from earlier in the day. On Fox News it was a different story, of course. On one side of the screen Trump droned on, while on the other Sean Hannity and his guests gushed like a bunch of tweens at their first Taylor Swift concert.

    Pete Hegseth exclaimed, “There is nothing like the original!” According to him, it was a “forward-looking speech that recognizes the disaster of the last two years.” He continued, “Trump is the best I’ve ever seen him. He is the standard-bearer!”

    Hegseth was just getting warmed up, calling Trump the “pre-eminent fighter for freedom of his generation” and asserting that “he delivered on every prerogative that any conservative Republican or America First supporter would have wanted.” Trump was “at the top of his game,” he announced, “the original is a flavor in and of itself. There are others who will leverage their relationship with Trump but there is only one original.”

    Hannity chimed in, saying it  was “a very serious, powerful speech. This is Donald Trump. It’s game time for him.” Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee — who had criticized the timing of Trump’s announcement less than a day earlier — said that “the construct of the speech is pitch perfect. He has made it about the American people. He is fighting for us. This was an absolutely brilliant speech. … If he stays on this, he is unbeatable.” Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of Trump’s most loyal acolytes in Congress, joined the chorus: “I think Pete and the governor have this exactly right. This is our campaign. I think of the great coaches. Something that athletes know [is] that their coach puts their athletes first. That’s something Americans know about Donald Trump. They know he puts their family’s interests first.”

    It went on like that as a muted Trump blathered on about God only knows what, while Joe Concha declaring that this flat, monotonous diatribe “felt more like a State of the Union address than a rally speech.”

    Rupert Murdoch has  supposedly said he won’t support Trump this time and is all-in on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, but his celebrity talkers apparently didn’t get the memo. (Furthermore, Murdoch has said that before and lost his nerve.) They were ecstatic, and one can only assume that ecstasy was transferred to their viewers. As Amanda Marcotte wrote for Salon, “while Republicans love to play-act the independent-minded freedom lovers, invariably they cannot wait to kneel before the biggest, loudest bully in the room. ” Nobody is louder than Donald Trump.

    Will this speech knock the Republicans’ Great White Hope of the midterms down a peg? Maybe. Last night Trump plopped himself right in front of DeSantis’ big victory lap and invited his faithful to join him. Fox dutifully complied as if the GOP’s midterm debacle had changed nothing.

    The mainstream media is no doubt still high on DeSantis. They seem very excited by his prospects. But Fox News hasn’t made that transition, at least not yet. Their star performers are still in thrall to Trump despite his dismal record of failure and a performance that could put a room full of colicky babies to sleep. So DeSantis has his work cut out for him. Without the right-wing media, all he’s got is the hollowed-out Republican establishment — and they are about as popular with the GOP grassroots as man-buns and vegan hot dogs. Good luck with that. 

    Salon

    If at first MAGAs don’t secede….

    Published by Tom Sullivan on November 16, 2022

    Re-upping the 14th Amendment

    A Florida man‘s announcement Tuesday night of his third campaign for president was so uncompelling that people felt compelled to leave. Florida Man’s staff compelled them to stay.

    Meanwhile, inside the Beltway:

    Via Politico:

    For your radar: Just minutes before his speech, our colleague Nick Wu scooped that some House Democrats, led by Rep. DAVID CICILLINE (D-R.I.), are exploring a last-ditch effort to block Trump from returning to the presidency by invoking the 14th amendment. In case you slept through civics class, that provision of the Constitution states that anyone who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” shall not hold public office. It’s an untested provision, to put it mildly, but watch this space in the coming days.

    No, Politico, Section 3 is not untested.

    After the Jan. 6 attacks, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and dozens of Democratic House cosponsors submitted a resolution aimed at expelling several Republicans who supported efforts to overturn the election of President Biden. It went to committee to die.

    Similar private efforts aimed at disqualifying Reps. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) also failed. Cawthorn lost his primary, rendering the case moot. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled that the provision does apply to participants in an insurrection. Greene challenged the lawsuit against her and won. A judge found “there is no evidence to show that Rep. Greene participated in the invasion itself.”

    A New Mexico District Court judge, however, ruled that an Otero County commissioner convicted of particpating in the Capitol attack on Jan. 6 was disqualified from holding office on 14th Amendment grounds. It was the first time since the Civil War that an official was removed under the provision, said Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW.

    Given evidence turned up by the Jan. 6 investigation, Cicelline is trying Section 3 again (Washington Examiner):

    “Tonight, Donald Trump is expected to announce his third bid for the Presidency of the United States even though he forfeited his right to ever hold federal office again for leading an insurrection against the United States,” wrote Cicilline, who led a previous impeachment against Trump for the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots. “The legislation details testimony and evidence demonstrating how Donald Trump engaged in insurrection.”

    One might think Trump is Democrats’ best fundraising and organizing asset going into 2024. Why attempt to disqualify him? Republicans would not if the situation were reversed. But Democrats actually mean to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” They consider that duty more important than political advantage.

    So yeah, watch this space.