Impeachment

From the election in November to the presidential inauguration in January, media commentators took turns to pronounce the Trump “Resistance” dead. I know I did. The line was too tempting. As Trump stormed back into the White House, his power looked irresistible. His enemies seemed so broken and defeated. We all spoke too soon. “NeverTrumpism” is a reaction to Trumpism, as natural as magnetic repulsion and the urge to defy and destroy his presidency hasn’t vanished. In fact, look closely and you can see a “Resistance 2.0” gathering momentum in response to the second Trump administration.

House Republicans successfully impeached Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas by a 214-213 vote on Tuesday after an initial failed attempt last week. Mayorkas is the first cabinet official to be impeached since 1876. Speaker Mike Johnson said Mayorkas “deserves to be impeached,” arguing that Mayorkas lied to Congress, refused to comply with federal immigration law and violated his oath of office. Impeachment articles accused Mayorkas of a “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law.”To say it is extremely unlikely that Mayorkas would be convicted by the Democrat-controlled Senate is an understatement. This serves as more of a symbolic measure for Republicans.

Article II, Section Four, of the Constitution provides that “The President, Vice President, and all civil Officers of the United States shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Other sections give the House of Representatives the sole power of impeachment and the Senate the power to try impeachments and to convict with a two-thirds vote of senators present. But impeachment has been very rarely used in this country. Indeed the House has voted to impeach a federal official only twenty-one times in the 234 years the Constitution has been in effect.  No official has ever been accused of treason and only three of bribery, all federal judges.

She’s not even cold... Does anyone have Gavin Newsom’s number? The California governor’s phone must be blowing up today after the sad passing of his state’s senior senator Dianne Feinstein at the age of ninety. Feinstein was already set to retire this cycle, with three members of Congress in the running to replace her, who my comrade Cockburn characterizes as “fresh-faced seventy-seven-year-old Barbara Lee, boss-of-the-year Katie Porter and grown-up Caillou Adam Schiff.” Another option from the House comes in the form of Lee’s Senate campaign co-chair. Newsom had previously pledged to select a black woman to fill any future vacancies — which could indicate a preference for Lee.

Impeaching a president may not have the same power it once did in Washington. But the announcement of an official inquiry today by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is the first time Capitol Hill Republicans have seriously deployed impeachment in a quarter century. Much as Republicans hated Barack Obama, and much as they could have found a path to impeaching him with their large post-Tea Party Congressional majorities, they never went down this path. This is the new aggressive politics in an age of lawfare — but it’s also justified by what we already know, and what we’ve learned in the past year. “I’m directing our House committee to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden,” McCarthy announced.

“Everything’s bigger in Texas” is one of those clichés that happens to be entirely true. With the diminution of the importance of impeachment as a political issue on the federal level, the Lone Star State seems obliged to take up the slack — and the impeachment of controversial Attorney General Ken Paxton is turning into a process that pits the highest-paid power lawyers in Texas against each other in a duel to the death. There's been plenty of color in the proceedings, and not just from Paxton attorney Tony Buzbee, whose heavily tanned appearance led him to take to Instagram to accuse "reputable media organizations" of editing his skin tone in photographs (watchers had started passing around memes of Buzbee as an Oompa Loompa). "So you think the news isn’t bias [sic]?

The signals coming from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy are that his Republican majority will soon launch a formal impeachment investigation. The final decision hasn’t been announced — and an investigation is still a far cry from a full House vote. But setting up an impeachment committee is an essential first step. Most of his caucus wants to take it.  Most, but not all. The reservations of some Republicans and the calculations behind them are why McCarthy has moved slowly. The speaker’s problem is more than rounding up votes. The other problem is the investigation carries real risks as well as benefits.  The biggest benefit is a technical, legal one.

The gloves were off in the House of Representatives this week after Georgia congressman Marjorie Taylor Greene called her Colorado colleague Lauren Boebert “a little bitch.” The gruesome twosome used to be thick as thieves. What happened?  The fight erupted over impeachment articles that Boebert introduced Tuesday and tried unsuccessfully to force a vote on. Greene, who drafted her impeachment articles in 2021 and again this May, publicly accused Boebert of copying. On Wednesday, Boebert again tried unsuccessfully to force a vote on her impeachment resolution.  During the vote, Boebert confronted Greene over comments the congresswoman had made to the press. C-SPAN’s camera’s caught part of the exchange in a center aisle of the House floor.

What’s that flapping sound? Could it be the sound of chickens coming home to roost? Or maybe it’s just the grating noise of secretary of state Antony Blinken rolling himself into a ball and, pressing his eyes shut and cupping hands over his ears, repeating, mantra-like, “please make it stop”? I don’t know exactly what the noise is or whence it comes. But Thursday’s revelations from the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees about Blinken and Obama’s acting CIA director and all-round Democratic Mr. Fixit Michael Morell are certainly brewing up a storm.

Happy twenty-fifth anniversary of the greatest headline in world history! DRUDGE REPORT NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN BLOCKBUSTER REPORT: 23-YEAR OLD, FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT Thus began the nation's one-year slog through President Bill Clinton’s lies and calumnies, ending in his disgrace and impeachment. Now, that was an impeachment. You missed a good one, kids. President Trump was impeached for making an (allegedly) inappropriate call to the president of Ukraine? Oh please. To discuss what Clinton did in the Oval Office the whole country needed a V-chip.

If you thought the California nightmare was bad enough, things are about to get much worse. It pains Cockburn to tell you that Representative Adam Schiff is running to replace Dianne Feinstein in the US Senate. His announcement follows hot on the heels of his being booted from the House Intelligence Committee and the resulting wave of media attention. https://twitter.com/adamschiff/status/1618626586303160325 In the opening lines of his video announcement, Schiff says he “always believed that what’s right matters, that the truth matters — and that decency matters.” This is the same Adam Schiff who for years promised he had the goods on Trump’s Russia collusion, that some new conclusive evidence had been found that Trump was a Russian catspaw.

“President Biden should be impeached by the incoming House Republican majority over his ongoing destruction of the southern border,” proclaimed National Review columnist Andrew McCarthy on New Year’s Eve. Once the preserve of the GOP’s right wing, which introduced nine failed impeachment resolutions against Biden prior to the midterm elections, the idea of impeaching Joe Biden is gathering ground. Even staid moderates are beginning to realize that six million illegals pouring across the Rio Grande might not be such a blessing of liberty. Rank-and-file Republicans are hungering for revenge against Democrats for twice impeaching former president Donald Trump.

I first met Ken Starr in 1989. I was a Wall Street Journal editorial writer who was invited to speak at a conference held by the Federalist Society’s chapter at Cornell University. I met two very impressive people that day. One was Leonard Leo, the head of the Cornell Federalist Society. Only twenty-four, it was clear he had a natural genius for organizing, planning and networking. As the later head of the Federalist Society, he turned it into the premier farm team for conservative lawyers who wanted to become judges. In 2020, then-CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin told a group of lawyers that Leo had played a major role in the selection of a majority of the Supreme Court.

One of my kids is studying law, and I've read a bit over her shoulder as she preps for exams. Two critical things stand out. First, unlike in literature, words in the law have very specific meanings (lie, fraud, possess, assault). And second, intent matters quite a bit. That latter part is very important because people say things all the time they do not mean, such as "If Joe in Sales misses that deadline, I'm gonna kill him." No one's life is actually in danger, we all understand. Misunderstanding words when you pull them out of a conversation and try to bring them to court, and determining intent based on what you "believe," are at the root of the ever-growing string of failed legal actions against Donald Trump (there are some 19 still pending).

The Democrats' only possible path forward is to ensure that Trump does not run in 2024. So they want to lock him away in jail. With only three years left to go, the 2024 race is narrowing to Trump versus Some Democrat. By Election Day, President Biden will be a vaguely sentient eighty-two, VP Harris will likely have left the country, and the Dems' rainbow coalition of identity claimants will quickly winnow itself down to nobody as their collective lack of experience devalues their various claims of victimhood. What to do about Trump? You can convince some Americans for awhile that Trump is a Russian agent, or violated an Emoluments Clause thingie they'd never heard of before, just by saying it over and over.

In The Dark Knight, the only Batman movie I’ve ever watched and therefore the best one, Harvey Dent says, 'You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.' At this point in the Andrew Cuomo saga, most Americans have realized that the disgraced former governor of New York is just that — a villain. Just don’t tell Cuomo or his amen chorus of sycophantic dead-enders. This week, the suburban tabloid Newsday published an article by David H. Pikus headlined, 'Ousting Cuomo disenfranchised NY voters'. Thankfully for Pikus, Cuomo approved of his obsequious ass-kissery. The ex-Emmy award winner retweeted the puff piece and added, 'This was politics. Every step of the way.

Kemmerer, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney has the political brain of a sucked egg, as her egregiously self-destructive decision to join her Democratic colleagues in voting to impeach President Trump following the events at the US Capitol on January 6 showed. In terms of personability and charm, Cheney is the Republican equivalent of Hillary Clinton. And in a state with a population of 581,024 people spread across 97,914 square miles where politics has always been something like a family affair, she is very much an outsider, even a stranger. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, she lived in the Cowboy State for only a year or so when she was a sixth- and seventh-grade student in the 1970s.