It’s happening folks. Isn’t it obvious?
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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
The DC Appeals Court is not insane
Finally we have some clarity on a subject that anyone with common sense could have said was obvious since the moment the constitution was ratified:
A federal appeals court on Tuesday rejected former President Donald J. Trump’s claim that he was immune to charges of plotting to subvert the results of the 2020 election, ruling that he must go to trial on a criminal indictment accusing him of seeking to overturn his loss to President Biden.
The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit handed Mr. Trump a significant defeat, but was unlikely to be the final word on his claims of executive immunity. Mr. Trump, who is on a path to locking up the Republican presidential nomination, is expected to continue his appeal to the Supreme Court.
Still, the panel’s 57-page ruling signaled an important moment in American jurisprudence, answering a question that had never been addressed by an appeals court: Can former presidents escape being held accountable by the criminal justice system for things they did while in office?
Read the ruling by a federal appeals panel rejecting former President Donald J. Trump’s claim of absolute immunity.
The question is novel because no former president until Mr. Trump had been indicted, so there was never an opportunity for a defendant to make — and courts to consider — the sweeping claim of executive immunity that he put forward.
The panel, composed of two judges appointed by Democrats and one Republican appointee, said in its decision that, despite the privileges of the office he once held, Mr. Trump was subject to federal criminal law like any other American.
“For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant,” the panel wrote. “But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as president no longer protects him against this prosecution.”
They also did an end run around his delay tactics by saying they will lift the stay and start the clock running unless Trump files an appeal with the Supremes by February 12th, effectively precluding an en banc appeal.
Here’s Andrew Weissman on the ruling:
Update — the response:
Repent at leisure? Hell, no.
It’s rare that I bother with a Thomas Friedman column. He’s usually full of himself and his breathless “deepisms.” But the headline on his piece today grabbed me. It’s bumper-sticker messaging about Republican efforts to kill the border security deal, and it’s absent Friedman’s usual verbal filigree.
The G.O.P. Bumper Sticker: Trump First. Putin Second. America Third.
Every so often there is a piece of legislation on Capitol Hill that defines America and its values — that shows what kind of country we want to be. I would argue that when it comes to the $118.3 billion bipartisan compromise bill in the Senate to repair our broken immigration system and supply vital aid to Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel, its passage or failure won’t define just America but also the world that we’re going to inhabit.
There are hinges in history, and this is one of them. What Washington does — or does not do — this year to support its allies and secure our border will say so much about our approach to security and stability in this new post-post-Cold War era. Will America carry the red, white and blue flag into the future — or just a white flag? Given the pessimistic talk coming out of the Capitol, it is looking more and more like the white flag — autographed by Donald Trump.
Republicans have abandoned any “America First” pretense. When they say America they mean Mr. L’État, c’est moi. These are not serious people:
“The United States has for some time ceased to be a serious country. Our extreme polarization combined with institutional rules that privilege minorities makes it impossible for us to meet our international obligations,” the political theorist Francis Fukuyama remarked on the American Purpose website. “The Republican Party has grown very adept at hostage holding. … The hard-core MAGA wing represents a minority within a minority, yet our institutional rules permit them to veto decisions clearly favored by a majority of Americans.”
The WWII and Cold War generations are passing away, and the soberness they learned through hard experience with them, Friedman suggests. Joe Biden is one of the few. Although just a few years older than Trump the Unserious never held an office in public service until he was 70. And then just to boost his brand and make another buck.
Trump’s GOP is a throwback, U.S. foreign policy historian Michael Mandelbaum tells Friedman, “to the interwar period between World War I and World War II, when a whole segment of the elite felt World War I was a failure and a mistake — the equivalent today of Iraq and Afghanistan — and then approached the dawn of World War II as isolationists and protectionists, seeing our allies as either hopeless or leeches.”
If they’re not making money for Trump, that’s just what America’s allies are to him. His pre-White House dalliance with Russian President Vladimir Putin was about getting a Trump Tower-Moscow deal. Then Trump got a shot of real power up his nose and acquired a taste for something money couldn’t buy. He/they will sacrifice the world for more of it.
“Being president,” Michelle Obama said, “doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are.”
Who Trump is was nakedly visible for those with eyes to see well before his election. Trump is emotionally stunted, mentally unstable, amoral, deeply insecure, needy, venal, vain and vengeful, a pathological liar and con man who has lived his life on the edge of the law (and outside it) using his father’s fortune to shield himself, and now his former office. The law may or may not finally catch up to him before the fall election.
But in how willingly MAGA Republicans have been baptized into Trumpism, they have revealed who they are. These are people without honor, bad people. Not just misguided. Bad. Except Friedman will not say so in the pages of The New York Times.
Where the First Church of Trumpism will lead the U.S. and the world is predictable, Friedman will say:
As Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman just reported, “the ammunition shortage” in Ukraine “has already led to an increase in Ukrainian casualties. … The shortage of weaponry is also having an effect on the willingness of Ukrainians to volunteer for military service. The mounting pressure on the Kyiv government is part of the explanation for the public falling-out between President Volodymyr Zelensky and his commander in chief, Valeriy Zaluzhny.”
If this is the future, and our friends from Europe to the Middle East to Asia sense that we are going into hibernation, they will all start to cut deals — European allies with Putin, Arab allies with Iran, Asian allies with China. We won’t feel the change overnight, but, unless we pass this bill or something close to it, we will feel it over time.
America’s ability to assemble alliances against the probes of Russia, China and Iran will gradually be diminished. Our ability to sustain sanctions on “pariah nations” like North Korea will erode. The rules governing trade, banking and the sanctity of borders being violated by force — rules that America set, enforced and benefited from since World War II — will increasingly be set by others, and by their interests.
Ater Trump is gone and the hangover sets in, cultists will have time to repent at their leisure. They won’t, of course.
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Trump’s GOP won’t take yes for an answer
The French famously supported Americans’ fight to win freedom from England and its king. But Republicans won’t support Ukraine’s fight to secure theirs against invading Russians. Republicans won’t take yes for an answer on a bill to enhance U.S. border security after hissing and spitting about it for years. They don’t want to govern, they want to rule, yet have no idea how to do it. But kowtowing before Donald “91 Counts” Trump? They’re hell at bowing and scraping.
Christian conservatives make up a sizable percentage of the GOP base. They are conditioned from childhood to serve a heavenly king and to long for his return. But since Jesus Christ has been delayed now for two thousand years, they’ve grown impatient. They are ready to settle. For Trump.
With President Joe Biden’s economy going gangbusters (even Fox News admits it); with the inflation Republicans expected to run on falling; with unemployment at historic lows and the stock market at historic highs; with the end of Roe following him like a dark cloud; and with the U.S. justice system breathing down his neck about insurrection and other crimes, Trump has no weapons left for waging his 2024 war on America except fearmongering about border security.
Trump wants his war. On nonwhite immigrants and, ultimately, on the freedoms the French helped us win in the eighteenth century.
His enablers in Congress will bow and oblige. They won’t take yes for an answer on the border security bill they’ve ranted about for years (Catherine Rampell, Washington Post):
A hard-won, bipartisan Senate deal dropped Sunday evening, with tons of items on conservatives’ border-policy bucket list, including many that former president Donald Trump had begged for. These include:
- beefing up border security as a condition for giving any more aid to Ukraine (check!)
- a tougher and faster asylum-processing system so that those who don’t meet asylum criteria cannot stay and work for years while their cases crawl through the courts (check!)
- hiring more personnel for Customs and Border Protection as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (1,500 and 1,200, respectively — so, check, check!)
- huge investments in fentanyl detection technologies and other anti-trafficking enforcement (check!)
- reviving something like Title 42 restrictions, wherein the president can “shut down” most of the asylum system (though this version doesn’t require a public health pretext and has more severe consequences for border-crossers — so, check-plus, perhaps).
House Republicans should have been pinching themselves in disbelief. Yet within hours of this 370-page bill dropping, House GOP leaders ruled out letting their chamber vote on any of it.
“I’ve seen enough,” Speaker Mike Johnson (La.) said, later adding that it was “a waste of time.” He just can’t take yes for an answer, it seems.
Speaker Johnson denies he’s taking orders from the indicted former president, but that’s beyond laughable in this former political party.
“I do not think we should do a Border Deal, at all, unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION of Millions & Millions of people, many from parts unknown, into our once great, but soon to be great again, Country!” Trump posted to Truth Social. Give him everything and he’ll insist it’s wrong.
Only he can fix it. His cult is willing to see Ukraine fall and the “chaos” they claim is occuring on the border (and the MAGA convoy in Texas could not find) continue until Trump is back in the White House. They will misinform the public about the proposed bill to justify killing it.
Maybe House lawmakers are genuinely confused about how immigration law works. After all, they keep insisting that President Biden take actions that courts have ruled would be illegal. They also appear to misunderstand (misrepresent?) an aspect of the bipartisan Senate deal, in suggesting that it “accepts 5,000 illegal immigrants a day.” This is not, in fact, what the bill would do; rather, it would force the United States to block anyone crossing between ports of entry from even applying for asylum when that threshold has recently been met (as is the case right now).
Maybe House Republicans have convinced themselves that any legislation that could appeal to Democrats must, ipso facto, be too reasonable for them to consider. In a twist on the Groucho Marx line, they’d never belong to a club that would have anyone else as a member.
Hard-line Republicans had already begun efforts to punish their own party members who worked on this bipartisan deal, including lead GOP negotiator Sen. James Lankford(Okla.). Poor Lankford reportedly didn’t want this job at all, but he caught the falling knife anyway — and then got stabbed in the back with it.
The bill is too conservative for many Democrats, yet Biden is willing to accept it to get more ammunition to Ukraine’s defenders as part of the package. But Trump wants his political war. The Ukrainians have a real, one on their hands.
Trump is no Marquis de Lafayette, and the Republicans no allies of freedom like the French.
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The border convoy is getting crispy
Or better yet, terrorism
These people are very stupid, so you can’t expect most of them to know history or understand basic governing requirements. The ones that do obviously don’t give a damn. They’ve been taking hostages for years on budget deals. Now they are using the security of the United States and the world as a weapon to get their way:
It is not unusual for Washington Republicans to receive visitors — candidates, lobbyists, political donors — who boast about their commitment to securing the border and cutting taxes.
It’s not every day that one of those visitors used to run Denmark.
Yet on a recent Thursday afternoon, several hard-line members of the House found themselves listening to Anders Fogh Rasmussen as the former Danish prime minister emphasized his small-government values. As a head of government, Rasmussen told them, he had restricted migration and held down taxes — stances even the conservative Freedom Caucus might admire.
“He was trying to draw parallels with Republican ideology,” recalled Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, who helped convene the meeting.
Then Rasmussen addressed his real agenda: a passionate appeal for aiding Ukraine.
The meeting between a statesman of the West and outspoken voices of the American right captured the tensions at the heart of the transatlantic security relationship — and served, perhaps, as a preview of just how strained old alliances could grow under a second Trump presidency. For Rasmussen, who is also a former head of NATO, it was a brief immersion in the brute transactional politics that now governs the U.S. Congress, even on the most sensitive matters of national security.
The group that met with Rasmussen, which included at least two Freedom Caucus members, heard him out politely and even sympathetically, according to Buck and others in the room. They liked his argument that holding the line against Russia would send a message to China about American resolve. Even more resonant was Rasmussen’s scathing criticism of the Biden administration’s pullout from Afghanistan — a costly error, he said, that emboldened the enemies of democracy and invited the invasion of Ukraine.
Then the pushback came.
Rep. Greg Murphy of North Carolina, a 60-year-old urologist by training, was the most direct voice in the room, laying out his raw political calculus in unperfumed terms.
Murphy told Rasmussen that the price for backing Ukraine must be a crackdown at the border with Mexico. Murphy said he agreed with Rasmussen about the Ukraine war, on the merits, but saw war funding as crucial leverage in a separate policy negotiation with President Joe Biden.
When I spoke with Murphy about the meeting, he echoed those lines. Blaming Biden for having “invited his own country to be invaded” by migrants, he said the Ukraine issue was the best tool for forcing the president’s hand.
“When you have fulcrums, you have to use them,” he said. “We have to use what we can — sadly enough, with the conflict in Ukraine.”
That theory of governing is not new to Washington. It has been a regular feature of legislative politics for decades. But this mode of brinkmanship has become more ordinary and more dangerous. The demands of recalcitrant lawmakers have grown. So have the risks they are willing to take with the real-world consequences of their actions.
It used to be considered radical to shut down the government over a spending dispute. Now, the future of European security is a bargaining chip in an unrelated policy battle.
Now these people are refusing to take yes for an answer. Joe Biden could agree to enact the entire Trump immigration agenda including his stupid wall and they would still not do it. Trump wants the issue for the election and they agree with him.
But lets face facts, they are also objectively pro-Russia and they hate Europe and would be fine if it fell to Vladimir Putin. It’s impossible now to see any other explanation.
As it stands today, they are tanking the border bill and have no plans to pass Ukraine aide despite their demands being met on the former but Speaker Johnson is rushing to put a stand alone Israel aid bill on the floor. They are 100% bad faith actors in every way.
Luckily Biden is calling their bluff on that last one:
Uhm…
He told Bongino, “I won 77 out of 77 counties [in Oklahoma]. Ronald Reagan is second with 56.” Bush ’04, McCain and Romney swept all 77 as well. The GOP hasn’t lost a county in Oklahoma since the 20th Century. In other words, Trump is nothing special in Oklahoma. It is a dyed in the wool red state.
It appears that Lankford, a far right GOPer, has decided that he wants to do the job of being a far right legislator instead of a full time MAGA sycophant. I wonder how well that’s going to work out for him.
CNN’s Manu Raju spoke with Sen. James Lankford about the GOP opposition to his border deal.
“I’m frustrated when people put out intentionally false information. I expect more. There are policy disagreements on that, I get that,” he said. “If people think that politics are wrong, and now we’re in a presidential year, so let’s not help Biden in the process, we’re just going to disagree on that. I get frustrated when people put out things that are intentionally false, that they know are false, because I expect more of Americans.”
Lankford: “It was funny for me just to be able to watch some of their conversation last night from members that I’ve talked to that have said to me, ‘Hey, I really need weeks to be able to review this. It’s really complicated.’ And then within an hour they were coming out in opposition,” he said. “It was like, so much for the weeks I need to review it. I can tell now the weeks of review wasn’t actually to review, it was just to try to kill it, stall it.”
Asked him if he were frustrated with Trump. “His job is to run for president. My job is to serve the nation,” Lankford said. “I’m in the Senate right now on Homeland Security, doing border management, I’m doing my job. He’s doing his job, he’s running for president.”
Lankford said that the law needs to changed — and more must be done besides just administrative action. He pointed to House GOP passing HR2
“If there really is a problem on the border – which there is a problem on the border, it’s not like just enforcement, which clearly Biden’s not enforcing the border – but it’s also a problem in the law,” he said. “Which is why they put out H.R. 2 because they saw the problems in the law, which is why we said in October we need to change the law to be able to deal with these things. We see a change in law, then the House needs to be able to put out a bipartisan proposal that’ll pass the House and the Senate.”
It even appears that he might be a human being. How novel:
Unfortunately, for Lankford, I’m afraid this is The Kiss Of Death:
People would like to know if a jury of Trump’s peers find that he has committed crimes before they vote next November. It’s not too much to ask:
Most Americans want to see a verdict on the federal charges former President Donald Trump faces related to election subversion in 2020 before this year’s presidential election, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS. And looking ahead, most expect Trump to pardon himself of any federal crimes he’s convicted of if he wins the presidency – or to refuse to concede if he loses in November.
About half of Americans, 48%, say it’s essential that a verdict is reached before the 2024 presidential election, and another 16% that they’d prefer to see one. Just 11% say that a trial on the charges should be postponed until following the election, with another quarter saying the trial’s timing doesn’t matter to them. A 72% majority of Democrats and 52% of independents say it’s essential that a verdict is reached pre-election. Republicans are more split. While 38% say that a verdict should be reached before the presidential election, including 20% who call that essential, another 39% say it doesn’t matter when the trial is held, and 23% that they think the trial should be held after this election.
It’s absurd that the Republicans are so far gone that they refuse to find someone other than a man under 91 criminal indictments in several different jurisdictions to nominate for president of the United States. Personally, I think that’s enough to disqualify him, along with dozens of other acts of corruption and malfeasance before and after he was president. It terrifying that almost half the country seems prepared to put such a person back into the the White House. But if some of them need to see a jury verdict before they can decide that he is unfit then they damned well should have one. It’s outrageous that the courts are dragging their feet on this.
Trump will be very busy exacting revenge on his enemies so he won’t even know what’s going on elsewhere in his administration. Also he’s learned that he can just lie and say up is down and black is white and tens of millions of people will believe him so he can do whatever he wants without ever having to be accountable for the horrors he inflicts.
You can bet this will happen if he wins. It’s been one of the fundamental goals of the Republican Party for decades and they will shove the sharpie in his hand and he will sign it:
LAST YEAR, FOR the first time ever, a majority of Americans eligible for Medicare were on privatized Medicare Advantage plans. If Republicans win the presidential race this year, the push to fully privatize Medicare, the government health insurance program for seniors and people with disabilities, will only intensify.
Conservative operatives have already sketched out what the GOP’s policy agenda would look like in the early days of a new Donald Trump presidency. As Rolling Stone has detailed, the proposed Project 2025 agenda is radically right-wing. One item buried in the 887-page blueprint has attracted little attention thus far, but would have a monumental impact on the health of America’s seniors and the future of one of America’s most popular social programs: a call to “make Medicare Advantage the default enrollment option” for people who are newly eligible for Medicare.
Such a policy would hasten the end of the traditional Medicare program, as well as its foundational premise: that seniors can go to any doctor or provider they choose. The change would be a boon for private health insurers — which generate massive profits and growing portions of their revenues from Medicare Advantage plans — and further consolidate corporate control over the United States health care system.
He’s going to do many horrible things and this is one of them.
The House is only getting started
As usual these days, the GOP congress is a burbling cauldron of chaos and dysfunction with wild hearings, inexplicable strategy and internal strife. They are all fighting among themselves trying to curry favor with their party’s leader, Donald Trump, and jockeying for power. And it’s an election year, which even in placid times turns politicians into preening posers desperate for money and attention. It is a combustible situation.
The budget is still not settled although they managed to extend the deadlines for a short while as they try to hammer out deals on taxes, national security and the border. And they have a lot of work to do on all the investigations they are currently pursuing, which to this point are utter embarrassments.
The big show was supposed to be the impeachment of Joe Biden, promised to Donald Trump as payback for the two impeachments he endured. That one’s not looking good at the moment. The House oversight committee chairman. James Comer, who is running the Hunter Biden investigation keeps punching holes in his own narrative every time he interviews another witness. Just last week, another presumed “whistle blower”, Eric Schwerin, a former business associate of the president’s son, was interviewed in closed door testimony and swore under penalty of perjury that the president was not involved at all in Hunter’s business dealings.
This is how Chairman Comer lamely explained all this:
CNN reported that the GOP is finally seeing the writing on the wall
[O]ne GOP lawmaker estimated there are around 20 House Republicans who are not convinced there is evidence for impeachment, and Republicans can only lose two votes in the current House margins…
“You’d be hard pressed to say it’s going well,” said a GOP source closely following that investigation. “It’s a jumbled mess.”
It appears that Biden’s impeachment is going nowhere fast but all is not lost. In the next few days we should see a vote in the House to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as part of their current election year border extravaganza. If they go through with it, it will be the second impeachment of a cabinet secretary in history, the last one happening 150 years ago. Why are they doing it? They are opposed to the administration’s immigration policies, something which has never before been the basis for impeachment which is defined as treason, bribery and high crimes or misdemeanors.
They know this is bogus, of course. It’s all for effect, much like the dozen or so different Benghazi hearings in the run-up to the 2016 election. Rather than have Judiciary Committee handle the matter as is usual, they opted for the Homeland Security Committee run the inquiry which opted to only hold two sham hearings before releasing the articles of impeachment last week. They charged him with two articles: “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and a “breach of public trust” claiming that he failed to detain enough migrants and lying to congress and the American people. These are vague allegations that don’t even come close to meeting the constitutional definition of impeachable offenses.
Even the Wall Street Journal editorial board, hardly a friend of the administration tried to wave them off:
House Republicans are marking up articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and the question is why? As much as we share the frustration with the Biden border mess, impeaching Mr. Mayorkas won’t change enforcement policy and is a bad precedent that will open the gates to more cabinet impeachments by both parties.
Perhaps most galling is the fact that DHS claims that if enough migrants are not being detained, it’s because the congress has failed to provide the funding to do so. And now, even with Democrats and the White House capitulating to most of their demands, they are refusing to take yes for an answer.
On Sunday night Senate negotiators released the details of their hard fought bipartisan border agreement which is harsher than we would have seen under any Democratic administration or congressional majority in the last 40 years. (There are some policy improvements as well as laid out here by Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy) They agreed to the terms as the price House Republicans demanded in order to fund other vital national security priorities. So naturally, the House Republicans immediately declared it dead on arrival. This was expected since they’ve been saying that for weeks despite not knowing what was in it.
Republican House leaders immediately launched into bad faith interpretations of the bill with the Speaker even lying to the media and suggesting that he wasn’t ever consulted on the negotiations (a contention refuted by the principal GOP negotiator, Sen. James Lankford, R-Ok., who said that Speaker Johnson declined his invitation to participate.)
Now the larger bill, which also contains funding for Ukraine, Israel, and humanitarian aid for Gaza, will have to pass the Senate which, according to some observers, is why the House is rejecting it outright in the hopes that it will influence the Senate to kill the bill:
I don’t know what those means are but it would be quite something to see Donald Trump’s howl at his orders being rejected. It’s hard to see exactly how that will come to pass but the House GOP is so dysfunctional and working with such a tiny majority that I suppose anything is possible.
We know that Trump and the Republicans don’t want to pass any border legislation because they have told us they want to use the “crisis” to beat up Democrats in the election. This is no secret. They also don’t want to pass any more Ukraine funding for reasons that are simply inexplicable unless their apparent attraction to Russian president Vladimir Putin is more than simply for show. Speaker Johnson said over the weekend that he plans to take care of Israel in a separate bill (so his evangelical buddies and the hard right Israeli leadership don’t need to worry about that.)
It would be nice to think that the American people will see through all this and realize how utterly craven and irresponsible the Republicans are being but with all the noise out there it’s impossible to know if they can hear it even if they’re paying attention. The one person we know for sure the Republicans have to fear is Donald Trump who is going to be very, very angry if they don’t follow through on the impeachment of his nemesis Joe Biden. He made himself crystal clear on that and I won’t be surprised if they go through with a perfunctory impeachment vote regardless, just to make him happy. If there’s one thing they are terrified of doing it’s pissing off Dear Leader.