Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

kenberg · January 25, 2020

The basic problem we face is that there's just enough "plausible deniability" for the GOP to make an argument against removal that will satisfy their constituents. On the phone call he says "do us a favor" -- is that the "royal us" or does he mean the country? Trump supporters maintain the latter, and say that the favor is rooting out corruption, not digging up dirt on Biden. When Trump says "read the transcripts", he means to read them with the appropriate color of glasses to make this all seem "perfect".

Sure, we have all known people who are very resistant to evidence. But the answer is clear. Don't waste time trying to move the unmovable. I am speaking of how to address those who, under some circumstances, might re-assess a position. Any position, on any matter. The simpler the better. Then a person might say "I am not prepared to agree with you, but I will give it some thought". Not much maybe, and maybe not enough, but what else? A long-winded diatribe is not going to get a hearing. A simple declaration of the obvious, in this case that we really cannot have a president holding up allocated military funds for a country that badly needs those funds, holding up the funds until the country does a political favor.

An argument that this is really being done for the country is ridiculous in many ways, a person can see this for himself, once he chooses to give it some thought.

It's not that I am so optimistic about this, rather I see no better option. If a simple straightforward argument does not get the other person to give the matter some thought, then what?

Winstonm · January 25, 2020

Sure, we have all known people who are very resistant to evidence. But the answer is clear. Don't waste time trying to move the unmovable. I am speaking of how to address those who, under some circumstances, might re-assess a position. Any position, on any matter. The simpler the better. Then a person might say "I am not prepared to agree with you, but I will give it some thought". Not much maybe, and maybe not enough, but what else? A long-winded diatribe is not going to get a hearing. A simple declaration of the obvious, in this case that we really cannot have a president holding up allocated military funds for a country that badly needs those funds, holding up the funds until the country does a political favor.

An argument that this is really being done for the country is ridiculous in many ways, a person can see this for himself, once he chooses to give it some thought.

It's not that I am so optimistic about this, rather I see no better option. If a simple straightforward argument does not get the other person to give the matter some thought, then what?

The "then what?" is getting out the voters who are against Donald Trump while also convincing those who won't vote Democrat to stay at home. That's how far down the rabbit hole we have traveled.

y66 · January 26, 2020

From The Darkness Where the Future Should Be by Michelle Goldberg at NYT:

What happens to a society that loses its capacity for awe and wonder at things to come?

William Gibson, the writer who coined the term “cyberspace” and whose novel “Neuromancer” heavily influenced the film “The Matrix,” has spent a lifetime imagining surreal and noirish possibilities for human development. But Donald Trump’s victory threw him off balance. “I think it took me about three months to come out of the shock of his actually having been elected,” Gibson told me. And when he finally did come out of it, Gibson still wasn’t quite sure what to do with the manuscript he’d been working on, about a young woman in modern-day San Francisco, since the world he’d situated her in seemed to have suddenly disappeared.

“If I had somehow been able to finish it, by the time it was published, it would have just been this lost thing,” he said, “completely out of time and unconcerned with what I immediately saw as being the beginning of something extraordinary, and almost certainly something extraordinarily bad.”

In the end, he turned the new book into a sequel to his 2014 novel, “The Peripheral.” Part of “The Peripheral” is set in a 22nd century where the world as we know it has been wiped out by a confluence of events known as “The Jackpot,” which is, as Gibson put it to me, “all the bad stuff that we’re worried about now coming true.” Eighty percent of the population has died, and many of the survivors live under the authority of a hereditary oligarchy descended from Russian kleptocrats. People in that future have developed the ability to use data to reach back in time, but when they do, rather than changing the course of events, they inaugurate new, parallel continuums, called “stubs.”

Much of the new book, “Agency,” takes place in a stub where Hillary Clinton won the election and Brexit never happened. Characters from the future — from Gibson’s extrapolated version of our own dark timeline — try to help people in the alternate past avoid a similarly cataclysmic fate. The question looming over the book is not whether the future will be horrifying but whether there’s even the possibility of a future that isn’t.

Gibson is famed for his sensitivity to the zeitgeist, and I asked him if he thought that part of what he’d picked up on here is a growing sense of the future as an abyss. “In my childhood, the 21st century was constantly referenced,” he said. “You’d see it once every day, and it often had an exclamation point.” The sense, he said, was that postwar America was headed somewhere amazing. Now that we’re actually in the 21st century, however, the 22nd century is never evoked with excitement. “We don’t seem to have, culturally, a sense of futurism that way anymore,” he said. “It sort of evaporated.”

The dearth of optimistic visions of the future, at least in the United States, is central to the psychic atmosphere of this bleak era. Pessimism is everywhere: in opinion polls, in rising suicide rates and falling birthrates, and in the downwardly mobile trajectory of millennials. It’s political and it’s cultural: At some point in the last few years, a feeling has set in that the future is being foreclosed. When, in the 1970s, the Sex Pistols sang “There is no future,” there was at least a confrontational relish to it. Now there’s just dread.

The right and the left share a sense of creeping doom, though for different reasons. For people on the right, it’s sparked by horror at changing demographics and gender roles. For those on the left, a primary source of foreboding is climate change, which makes speculation about what the world will look like decades hence so terrifying that it’s often easier not to think about it at all.

But it’s not just climate change. In his forthcoming book, “The Decadent Society,” my colleague Ross Douthat mourns the death of the “technological sublime,” writing that our era “for all its digital wonders has lost the experience of awe-inspiring technological progress that prior modern generations came to take for granted.” This is true, but doesn’t go nearly far enough. Our problem is not just that new technologies regularly fail to thrill. It’s that, from artificial intelligence to genetic engineering to mass surveillance, they are frequently sources of horror.

Consider some recent headlines. The New York Times reported on Clearview AI, a start-up whose facial-matching technology could give strangers access to the identity and biographical information of anyone seen in public. (“Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it,” one investor said.) Reuters described classes in South Korea that teach people how to arrange their features for job interviews performed by computers that use “facial recognition technology to analyze character.” Wired had a story about “smart contact lenses” that could overlay digital interfaces on everything you see, which is not so different from the visual feeds that the post-Jackpot characters have in “The Peripheral” and “Agency.”

Around the world, the social media technologies that were supposed to expand democracy and human connection have instead fueled authoritarianism and ethnic cleansing. Andrew Yang is running a remarkably successful insurgent presidential campaign premised on the threat that automation and robots pose to the social order.

Fear of the future doesn’t pose much of a political problem for conservatism. Reactionary politics feed on cultural despair; the right is usually happy to look backward. In his 1955 mission statement for National Review, William F. Buckley Jr. famously wrote that the magazine “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”

It’s a bigger problem for the left, which by definition needs to believe in progress. In 2013, Alyssa Battistoni wrote in the socialist magazine Jacobin about the challenge that climate change poses to left politics, asking, “What should the orientation be of a politics that’s playing the long game when the arc of the universe is starting to feel frighteningly short?”

I suspect that one reason Pete Buttigieg, the 38-year-old former mayor of a Midwestern city, has vaulted into the top tier of presidential candidates is that he speaks so confidently about the future. He asks voters to picture the day after the last day of Trump’s presidency and discusses how the world might be when he’s nearly as old as his septuagenarian competitors. “You just have a certain mind-set based on the fact that — to put it a little bluntly — you plan to be here in 2050,” he once said. But his forward-looking technocratic pitch has mostly failed to resonate with his own generation. Instead, it appears that the people most soothed by Buttigieg’s ideas about what America might look like decades hence are those who won’t be here to experience it.

The candidate who polls show has the most support among young people is Bernie Sanders, the oldest person in the race. Clearly, Sanders fills his followers with hope and makes them feel that a transformed world is possible, but he also speaks to their terrors. Recently Sanders backers released one of the more moving campaign videos of this cycle. Set to a mournful cover of “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” it features inspirational scenes of the senator and his supporters, but also flooded streets, wildfires and an emaciated polar bear; in one scene protesters hang a banner that says, “We deserve a future.” It’s an ad that speaks to the desperate longing for kindness and solidarity to replace the cruelties of a society devouring itself, but also a grief-stricken apprehension of what’s in store if they don’t.

Writing about the future is usually just a way of writing about the present, and were it not for climate change, one might see widespread anxiety about what’s coming as just an expression of despair about what’s here. It’s still possible, of course, that someday people will look back on the dawn of the 2020s as a menacing moment after which the world’s potential opened up once again. But that would seem to require political and scientific leaps that are hard to envision right now, much less stake one’s faith in.

Though Gibson’s older work is frequently described as dystopian, he used to consider himself an optimist. “Neuromancer,” he pointed out, was written in the early 1980s and posited a future in which the Cold War hadn’t led to apocalypse, something far from guaranteed at the time. “Since the end of the Cold War, I’ve prided myself on being the guy who says, eh, don’t worry, it’s not going to happen tomorrow,” he said. “And now I’ve lost that.” This darkness where the future should be, he said, “makes my creative life much, much more difficult,” since he doesn’t simply want to surrender to gloom. Gibson is a man renowned for his prophetic creativity, but he can’t imagine his way out of our civilizational predicament. No wonder so many others are struggling to do so.

kenberg · January 26, 2020

From The Darkness Where the Future Should Be by Michelle Goldberg at NYT:

I found this very interesting, partly for the social views, partly for the comments about William Gibson, a person I was unaware of. He is younger than I am, but close enough that I recognize him as "of my era". He read William Burroughs when 13, I read George Gamow, to each his own.

Perhaps one way of looking at the optimism/pessimism shift is this: In the Kennedy years, we decided to go to the moon. Now we are to fight climate change. That is, we have gone from supporting a project we can be enthusiastic about to trying to deal with a problem we are fearful of.

Of course it is more complicated than that.

Anyway, I found the article interesting. It speaks of how Gibson's work led to The Matrix. I found The Matrix boring. But maybe Gibson? I'll see.

awm · January 26, 2020

For many years in the US there was quite a lot of fear of nuclear war. They had drills against nuclear attacks, escalations over things like the Cuban missile crisis, and a war in Vietnam in which many Americans (and even more Vietnamese) died. It wasn’t all sunshine and roses! But somehow these challenges did seem to bring the country together in many ways.

The thing is, everyone agreed on what the problems were and wanted to work together (even being willing to make some sacrifices) to try and fix them.

The big difference now is that we no longer agree on what the problems are. Many of us are terrified of climate change but almost half the country doesn’t think it’s even a real thing (and is seemingly more afraid of sharia law or a war on Christmas or something). This makes the situation pretty gloomy. I do think if we manage to implement a green new deal (in a way that helps rather than hurts the pocketbooks of most of the country) the future will look a lot brighter.

y66 · January 27, 2020

From Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

Trump’s lawyers began with a misstep, rehashing their flimsy claim that there’s some kind of significance to the fact that Schiff paraphrased, instead of directly quoting, the words Trump used in the July 25 phone call in which he pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to participate in a smear of a leading Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.

But they didn’t rely on emotion in their presentation. Instead, they did what defense attorneys do. They floated alternative interpretations of the evidence the House managers, serving as prosecutors in the Senate trial, had presented in support of the articles of impeachment accusing Trump of abusing his power by trying to coerce that country’s interference on his behalf in his 2020 re-election effort. They pointed out that some of the witnesses who testified on the House side were not entirely reliable on some questions. And they added a bunch of mostly irrelevant points, such as the administration’s overall support for Ukraine (which in fact only makes Trump’s decisions to pause congressionally approved military aid and refuse to schedule an Oval Office meeting with Zelenskiy harder to understand as anything but elements of a pressure campaign) and the fact that previous presidents had also put foreign aid on hold (which no one denies, but the question is why it happened this time).

I’m not sure I’d call the first few hours of their presentation strong, but then again if they are constrained by their client to pretend that the Zelenskiy call was “perfect,” they have a difficult hand to play. It could have been worse.

And then, Sunday night, it fell apart. The New York Times reported that former National Security Adviser John Bolton has written in his upcoming book that Trump made explicit the quid pro quo that his lawyers are denying: that Trump told him directly that he wanted to keep the military aid frozen until the Ukrainian government agreed to help with investigations of Democrats. Not only that, but apparently the White House has had Bolton’s manuscript all month. Trump’s team knew this was coming.

While I certainly don’t expect the president’s support in Congress to collapse, it’s impossible not to see close parallels to the “smoking gun” tape that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency in 1974. That tape, proving that Nixon ordered his staff to have the Central Intelligence Agency block the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s inquiry into the Watergate scandal and released to Congress and the public after the House Judiciary Committee had passed articles of impeachment, was so devastating for Nixon not so much because it was proof of his crimes; plenty of proof of plenty of crimes had long since been placed in the record. Instead, it became the moment when conservative Republicans realized that Nixon had deliberately set them up with false arguments even though Nixon knew that the evidence, if released, would undermine those arguments and make them look like liars and fools.

That is exactly what appears to have happened with the Bolton book. Trump knew that Bolton’s testimony and supporting notes, if they ever surfaced, would undermine the claims of his supporters. In some ways, it’s not quite as strong as Nixon’s smoking gun, since there’s no tape (as far as we know!) furnishing absolute proof of what Trump said to Bolton. But in some ways, it’s worse. Nixon knew what was on the tapes, but until the Supreme Court ruled against him he might at least have hoped that he could keep them secret. Apparently in the Trump case, at least some people in the White House have known for weeks that Bolton was going to release this book, and yet they still encouraged their allies to say things that were about to be shown to be false.

So far, it appears that Republican politicians would rather look like liars and fools — following ever-less-plausible White House lines, perhaps hoping that no one notices — than dare to oppose Trump and his still-loyal allies in the Republican-aligned media. Maybe they’ll all stay on message, even after this episode. Some of them, I’m sure, are either such blind partisans or so far inside the conservative information feedback loop that they may not even notice. But I have to believe that, whatever they do about it, a lot of Republican politicians are feeling more uncomfortable than ever.

kenberg · January 27, 2020

From Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

The only defense they have was summed up by Melania Trump in 2018: "I really don't care, do you".

That's it, that's their defense, there is nothing else.

So far it appears to be working, With some, at least.

Winstonm · January 27, 2020

The only defense they have was summed up by Melania Trump in 2018: "I really don't care, do you".

That's it, that's their defense, there is nothing else.

So far it appears to be working, With some, at least.

It would take 20 Republicans plus all the Democrats to vote to remove. A foregone conclusion that it won't happen. The impeachment now is all about the 2020 elections, forcing the Republicans to take a stand for or against.

barmar · January 27, 2020

The only defense they have was summed up by Melania Trump in 2018: "I really don't care, do you".

That's it, that's their defense, there is nothing else.

So far it appears to be working, With some, at least.

And much of the defense seems to be "Even if he did what they say, it's not an impeachable offense." Dershowitz has reversed what he said during the Clinton impeachment (he claims he was wrong then, and has done more research -- what a coincidence that this happens to support his client), now he says there has to be an actual crime (AFAIK, this is not the concensus of Constitutional scholars).

Winstonm · January 27, 2020

And much of the defense seems to be "Even if he did what they say, it's not an impeachable offense." Dershowitz has reversed what he said during the Clinton impeachment (he claims he was wrong then, and has done more research -- what a coincidence that this happens to support his client), now he says there has to be an actual crime (AFAIK, this is not the concensus of Constitutional scholars).

Obviously, a defense attorney for an impeached president would disagree, but I found the following a fairly convincing argument about "high crimes and misdemeanors" by tracing it back to English common law:

by Jon Roland, Constitution Society

The question of impeachment turns on the meaning of the phrase in the Constitution at Art. II Sec. 4, "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors". I have carefully researched the origin of the phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors" and its meaning to the Framers, and found that the key to understanding it is the word "high". It does not mean "more serious". It refers to those punishable offenses that only apply to high persons, that is, to public officials, those who, because of their official status, are under special obligations that ordinary persons are not under, and which could not be meaningfully applied or justly punished if committed by ordinary persons.

Under the English common law tradition, crimes were defined through a legacy of court proceedings and decisions that punished offenses not because they were prohibited by statutes, but because they offended the sense of justice of the people and the court. Whether an offense could qualify as punishable depended largely on the obligations of the offender, and the obligations of a person holding a high position meant that some actions, or inactions, could be punishable if he did them, even though they would not be if done by an ordinary person.

Offenses of this kind survive today in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It recognizes as punishable offenses such things as perjury of oath, refusal to obey orders, abuse of authority, dereliction of duty, failure to supervise, moral turpitude, and conduct unbecoming. These would not be offenses if committed by a civilian with no official position, but they are offenses which bear on the subject's fitness for the duties he holds, which he is bound by oath or affirmation to perform.

y66 · January 27, 2020

The only defense they have was summed up by Melania Trump in 2018: "I really don't care, do you".

That's it, that's their defense, there is nothing else.

So far it appears to be working, With some, at least.

Mike Pompeo used a similar strategy to downplay the seriousness of Trump's Ukraine ploy.

William Taylor explains why we should care.

As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo prepares to meet President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in Kyiv later this week, he has reportedly asked, “Do Americans care about Ukraine?”

Here’s why the answer should be yes: Ukraine is defending itself and the West against Russian attack. If Ukraine succeeds, we succeed. The relationship between the United States and Ukraine is key to our national security, and Americans should care about Ukraine.

Russia is fighting a hybrid war against Ukraine, Europe and the United States. This war has many components: armed military aggression, energy supply, cyber attacks, disinformation and election interference. On each of these battlegrounds, Ukraine is the front line.

For the last seven months, I represented the United States in Ukraine and regularly visited the front line of the military conflict. After its occupation of Crimea, Russia sent its army, security forces, undercover agents, weapons, funding and political instruction into Ukraine’s southeastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, a region known as the Donbas. The 280-mile line of contact between Russian-led forces and Ukrainian forces has stabilized but has not gone quiet.

To the contrary, the front line in the Donbas region marks the only shooting war in Europe. Every week Russian-led forces kill Ukrainian soldiers — and take casualties in return. During the 12 hours of my last visit, in November, a Ukrainian soldier was killed and another wounded. Since the Russians invaded in 2014, 14,000 Ukrainians have died in this war.

The United States and our allies support Ukraine in this war by providing the Ukrainian armed forces with weapons, training and support. American security assistance to Ukraine regularly receives broad, bipartisan support in Congress; the importance of that assistance to Ukraine — and to U.S. national security — is not at issue.

On the energy battlefield, the Kremlin is trying to bypass Ukraine and increase German and European dependence on Russia by spending billions on an unnecessary underwater natural gas pipeline, a political project without economic justification. In another show of bipartisan political support for Ukraine, Congress late last year passed sanctions on companies attempting to complete the pipeline, forcing a significant delay in the project.

Russia’s hybrid war is also an information war. Starting at home, Russian media is dominated by the state, leading its citizens to believe they are under threat from a hostile West and convincing them that President Vladimir Putin protects them from corrupt enemies. Russia’s trolls and internet hackers target Ukrainian, European and American political and social fault lines, exaggerating differences and fomenting dissension. They seek to weaken Western alliances, undermine confidence in democratic institutions, and turn citizens against citizens. We and other NATO allies are working with Ukraine to counter this malign influence.

The Russians interfered in our elections in 2016 — but not before interfering in Ukraine’s elections in 2014, and Britain’s Brexit referendum earlier in 2016. Because Ukraine is the front line, we assisted the Ukrainian central election commission in its preparations for their 2019 elections to defend against further Russian interference. Their efforts, with our assistance, successfully frustrated Russian attacks.

But the Russian challenge is even broader than hybrid warfare. The Kremlin is attacking the rules that have guided relations among nations since World War II, rules that kept the peace among major European powers for 70 years. With their invasion of Ukraine in 2014, Mr. Putin trashed those rules, spurned international consensus, violated the treaties and principles that even previous Russian and Soviet leaders had respected — even in the breach.

Mr. Putin seems to want to return to the law of the jungle that characterized relations among nations for centuries before 1945, where powerful nations dominated and invaded less powerful nations, where nations established spheres of influence that oppressed neighbors, leading to war and suffering. That was how the Russian Empire and Soviet Union conducted international relations — dominate, control and absorb neighboring lands. A return to jungle rules threatens not just Ukraine and the United States, but global stability itself.

Until Russia withdraws from Ukraine — both Donbas and Crimea — and recognizes that Ukraine is an independent, sovereign nation, other nations cannot be secure. Until Russia recommits to a rules-based international order, Western nations are in jeopardy. Ukraine is the front line.

In an even broader sense, Russia’s attack on Ukraine and the West is an attack on democracy. The question of how nations govern themselves — democracy versus autocracy — is being fought out among and within nations. Russia, China, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, the Philippines, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria — all are autocracies, all are unfree. In the contest between democracies and autocracies, the contest between freedom and unfreedom, Ukraine is the front line.

To support Ukraine means to support a young democracy, fighting to regain sovereignty over its internationally recognized borders. It is to support a nation that has broken from its troubled past to embrace European and Western values and that seeks to join European and North Atlantic institutions, to defeat post-Soviet corruption, and to give its citizens the chance to prosper in a normal country.

To support Ukraine is to support a rules-based international order that enabled major powers in Europe to avoid war for seven decades. It is to support democracy over autocracy. It is to support freedom over unfreedom. Most Americans do.

johnu · January 27, 2020

Mike Pompeo used a similar strategy to downplay the seriousness of Trump's Ukraine ploy.

William Taylor explains why we should care.

Speaking of Pompeo, if he has major disagreements with Ukrainian leaders on his upcoming Ukraine trip, is he going to curse them out and challenge them to find Ukraine on a world map?

Reporter says Mike Pompeo cursed and demanded she find Ukraine on a map after interview

Winstonm · January 27, 2020

Does this:

Support for impeachment had grown slowly over the course of 1974, but there still wasn’t an overwhelming public consensus behind it until right before Nixon left office in early August. And Republican support for Nixon had remained mostly strong, even in the face of a scandal that consumed his second term. As the truth about the scope of Nixon’s misconduct emerged, though, impeachment became increasingly popular and the president lost even his most fervent defenders in Congress.

rhyme with this?

Mitt Romney told reporters Monday morning that he thinks new revelations from former Trump national security adviser John Bolton will increase the number of Republican senators who will vote in favor of calling at least Bolton to testify in the Senate impeachment trial.

"I think it’s increasingly likely that other Republicans will join those of us who think we should hear from John Bolton. Whether there are other witnesses and documents, that’s another matter,” Romney, a Republican senator from Utah, said in the Capitol.

Romney, asked if he was making this comment based on conversations with other senators, said he had “spoken with others who have opined on this as well.”

"I think the story that came out yesterday, it’s increasingly apparent that it would be important to hear from John Bolton,” Romney said.

kenberg · January 28, 2020

Speaking of Pompeo, if he has major disagreements with Ukrainian leaders on his upcoming Ukraine trip, is he going to curse them out and challenge them to find Ukraine on a world map?

Reporter says Mike Pompeo cursed and demanded she find Ukraine on a map after interview

The part of the cited story that I especially appreciated was:

In response, NPR stood by its reporting.

"Mary Louise Kelly has always conducted herself with the utmost integrity, and we stand behind this report," Nancy Barnes, NPR's senior vice president of news, said in a statement.

It is very good to see someone speaking of a person displaying utmost integrity without everyone else collapsing in derisive laughter. A vote of thanks to NPR and Ms. Kelly. We are in need of this.

barmar · January 29, 2020

The interesting thing is that if Pompeo hadn't gotten so upset about this, the interview might never even have seen air. It took place while NPR was broadcasting the impeachment trial, so All Things Considered was being preempted. They aired it instead the next morning on Morning Edition, but the big story was Pompeo's explosion at the end.

y66 · January 29, 2020

From The Ugliest Part of Trump’s Impeachment Defense by Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

President Donald Trump’s legal team wrapped up its three-day defense presentation in the Senate impeachment trial on Tuesday. The president’s lawyers wound up taking up less than half of their allotted time, which doesn’t necessarily mean anything — after all, the House managers who played the prosecutorial role took up all 24 hours in part by making many of their points multiple times. Keeping the defense short might be thought of as a strategy, rather than an indication of a lack of anything useful to say.

In this case, however? It’s really astonishing how unimpressive their overall case turned out to be.

It might have been different if persuasion had really been required, but there simply aren’t 20 Republican senators who might even consider voting to remove Trump from office (so that along with all 47 Democrats they could reach the required two-thirds), let alone the 30 or more who realistically are needed to provide cover for each other. And of the 53 Republicans, few seem to feel the need for strong reasons to stick with the president.

In part, the problem is that the defense lawyers’ attempt to knock down the factual case against Trump just didn’t work to begin with. And to the extent that a case against the House’s accusations might have been viable — the first article of impeachment says that Trump withheld congressionally approved security assistance and a presidential White House meeting to pressure Ukraine to announce two investigations, one of some fantastical Ukrainian scheme to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and the other of a top Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son — it was fatally undermined by the news of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s confirmation of Trump’s direct participation in the plot in his upcoming book.

In fact, that track was so unsuccessful that by Tuesday night, some Republican Senators were willing to abandon it and accept that, yes, Trump did what he obviously did.

This gets us to what remains of the president’s defense: the claim on Monday night by defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz that abuse of power is not an impeachable offense. As a serious position, it falls flat. Deputy White House Counsel Patrick Philbin recapped the argument on Tuesday, and it boiled down to two preposterous assertions. One is that by eliminating “maladministration” from the constitutional grounds for impeachment, the framers were also removing “abuse of power,” even though — and I’ll admit I’m not a scholar of 18th-century legal terms, but neither are they — “maladministration” means something completely different. The framers removed it because they didn’t want a president impeached for incompetence; that is, for bad administration of the government. Rightly so: President Jimmy Carter should not have been impeached and removed for being bad at presidenting. For that matter, Trump should not be impeached and removed for being bad at presidenting. What that has to do with abuse of power, I couldn’t guess.

And then Philbin argued that the framers went with “treason, bribery, and high crimes and misdemeanors” because they always chose precise terms, not vague ones, in drafting the Constitution. C’mon. That would obviously be news to anyone who has read the document, especially the incredibly vague Article II, the part that sets up the presidency. And of course the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the relevant passage here, doesn’t have any precise obvious meaning. What’s worse for the president’s case is that scholars who have studied the historical meaning of “high crimes and misdemeanors” wind up with something that looks a lot like “abuse of power.” High crimes and misdemeanors are important ones against the nation, and ones that pertain specifically to the use — the misuse — of the president’s formal powers.

Dershowitz and Philbin are free to disagree, and Republican senators looking for any available lifeboat are free to clamber onto this one, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to take it seriously. Of course “abuse of power” is grounds, if anything is grounds, for removing a president through the impeachment and conviction process. Indeed, the notion of abuse of power is the powerful answer to those who complain about thwarting the will of the people by removing the duly elected president. After all, by electing a president, the nation confers on him or her certain constitutional and statutory powers, but only those powers. If the president misuses them, that’s a form of overstepping that grant of authority. It means the president is not governing as elected, but instead is governing unconstitutionally. Then, and especially then, it becomes necessary to do something about it, with impeachment and removal the ultimate way to ensure that a president is only doing what he or she is authorized to do.

And, yes, that abuse of power could take the form of doing things that would otherwise be allowed under the constitution but doing them improperly. That is what “abuse of power” means!

Dershowitz and others also made the case that many presidents have abused the powers of the office, and under that standard would have been subject to impeachment and removal. That’s correct. President Lyndon Johnson deceived the nation about a naval incident in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 to win congressional authorization for the Vietnam War; President Ronald Reagan sold arms to Iran despite a U.S. trade embargo and improperly funneled the money to Nicaraguan Contra rebels fighting that country’s communist government; President George W. Bush presided over the the decision to use interrogation techniques considered torture under international law and at least stretched the truth to justify the invasion of Iraq; fill in your own favorite. I’d guess that all 45 U.S. presidents have probably abused the power of the office in some way. But only three, or four if we count President Richard Nixon’s resignation before an impeachment trial could begin, have been impeached and only Nixon was forced out of office. That’s because impeachment and removal is a political standard, not a legal one, and Congress has correctly proven reluctant to wield it if there were good alternatives.

The classic example was the Iran-Contra affair. It may well have been impeachable. But Reagan took responsibility, rid his administration of several of those involved, accepted a new White House chief of staff foisted on him by Congress and changed his own behavior, all of which was sufficient to deflate any serious drive for impeachment. It’s not hard to imagine that had Trump taken similar steps, the House would have settled for oversight hearings and at most a censure resolution. Instead … well, this one turned out differently.

Fortunately, I doubt that many people outside of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue take this argument seriously, including those who are going to hide behind it right now, because the idea that a president can abuse the powers of the office and there’s just nothing anyone can do about it (and remember, like all recent presidents, Trump maintains that he can’t be indicted while in office) is a scary one indeed. But it’s not healthy to have a political party making the claim. On the whole, I’d rather have Republicans pretend that the facts are not the facts than to pretend that they believe that the presidency is above the law.

y66 · January 29, 2020

It's looking increasingly unlikely that witnesses will be called. Now it's up to Dems and voters to do the right thing in November which includes taking back the Senate.

johnu · January 30, 2020

The Manchurian President's wall falls in an expression of sympathy for his collapsing and now on life support impeachment defense arguments.

Segment Of Trump’s Border Wall Falls Over Into Mexico Due To Wind

The lying, hypocritical Republican senators have already demonstrated that their oath of impartiality at the start of the impeachment trial was a total fraud and have pretty much agreed to avoid calling witnesses like Bolton after caving to Individual-1 and Moscow Mitch demands and threats. I initially thought that there was a possibility that close to 2/3 of the senate would vote for removal of the president, but the impeachment would fail. The chance that even a single Republican senator would vote to convict is probably 0% at this time. You know that every single Republican would have voted to convict Obama if he had done the same thing as the Manchurian President.

Winstonm · January 30, 2020

The Manchurian President's wall falls in an expression of sympathy for his collapsing and now on life support impeachment defense arguments.

Segment Of Trump’s Border Wall Falls Over Into Mexico Due To Wind

The lying, hypocritical Republican senators have already demonstrated that their oath of impartiality at the start of the impeachment trial was a total fraud and have pretty much agreed to avoid calling witnesses like Bolton after caving to Individual-1 and Moscow Mitch demands and threats. I initially thought that there was a possibility that close to 2/3 of the senate would vote for removal of the president, but the impeachment would fail. The chance that even a single Republican senator would vote to convict is probably 0% at this time. You know that every single Republican would have voted to convict Obama if he had done the same thing as the Manchurian President.

But you know the really important question for the sake of the country moving forward is this: if Obama had done what Trump did, how many Democrats would vote to convict?

barmar · January 30, 2020

I don't remember if I posted it here or in politics.stackexchange.com, but I suggested the same argument that Dershowitz came up with this week: POTUS considers their reelection to be good for the country, so doing something to support it is not just for personal or political gain, it's fulfilling their oath of office.

kenberg · January 30, 2020

I don't remember if I posted it here or in politics.stackexchange.com, but I suggested the same argument that Dershowitz came up with this week: POTUS considers their reelection to be good for the country, so doing something to support it is not just for personal or political gain, it's fulfilling their oath of office.

I hadn't posted it, but when they first started speaking of multiple motives I said to Becky "Sure. Electing me is good, for the country, this will help elect me, so I am acting on behalf of the country"

It's hard to know what to say when a remark made in jest becomes an actual position of the defense. I would expect there to be some limit on what a person is willing to say. Apparently not.

Winstonm · January 30, 2020

I don't remember if I posted it here or in politics.stackexchange.com, but I suggested the same argument that Dershowitz came up with this week: POTUS considers their reelection to be good for the country, so doing something to support it is not just for personal or political gain, it's fulfilling their oath of office.

The problem with that argument is that it applies only to roughly half the country's population; whether it is good for one person or even one political party does not make it good for the country as a whole.

To genuinely believe this argument (as Barr and other seem to) means that you view only your positions as "right", therefore, it is mandatory in order to protect "your" country to prevent - with any means - the other views from winning.

This is not democracy in action; this is warfare.

y66 · January 30, 2020

From Trump Signs Trade Deal With Canada and Mexico (Jan 29) by Ana Swanson and Emily Cochrane at NYT:

WASHINGTON — President Trump signed the revised North American Free Trade Agreement into law on Wednesday, fulfilling a key campaign promise and bringing more than two years of tumultuous negotiations over the continent’s trade rules to a close.

The trade deal, now called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, updates the quarter-century-old NAFTA, with stronger protections for workers and the digital economy, expanded markets for American farmers and new rules to encourage auto manufacturing in North America.

“Today we are finally ending the NAFTA nightmare and signing into law the brand-new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement,” Mr. Trump said during a signing ceremony at the White House.

“For the first time in American history, we have replaced a disastrous trade deal that rewarded outsourcing with a truly fair and reciprocal trade deal that will keep jobs, wealth and growth right here in America,” he said.

The deal will restore certainty about the direction of the North American economy for the multitude of companies that depend on the rules to carry out their businesses. While the Trump administration reached an agreement with Canada and Mexico more than a year ago, it came after months of tense negotiations that included a threat by the president to leave Canada out of the deal completely.

And the agreement’s fate remained in question for most of the past year, given concerns among congressional Democrats, whose support was needed to approve the pact, that the new deal had not included strong enough provisions related to labor, the environment and access to pharmaceuticals.

* * *

The deal constitutes an important political victory for Mr. Trump and his second trade win of the month. The president signed an initial trade pact with China at the White House just two weeks ago, giving him crucial talking points as he heads into his re-election campaign. While his deals with China and other countries like Japan and South Korea are smaller than traditional trade agreements, Mr. Trump will be able to claim that he has renegotiated trade terms with countries responsible for more than half of American trade.

The president wasted little time in touting the new North American trade deal, calling it a “colossal victory” for farmers and factory workers and the “largest, fairest, most balanced and modern trade agreement ever achieved.”

Mr. Trump has long derided the original NAFTA, and he frequently threatened to rip it up entirely if Canada, Mexico or congressional Democrats would not agree to his new rules.

He came into office with an executive order drafted to begin the process of withdrawing from NAFTA and nearly signed it on several occasions. But more moderate advisers and business contacts repeatedly dissuaded the president from scrapping the deal.

The 26-year-old agreement, which was negotiated by the George Bush administration and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, has since become a political target, derided for encouraging American companies to move factories and jobs to Mexico.

Many economists have a more sanguine view of NAFTA’s legacy, saying the deal provided a positive, if small, benefit to American wages and employment. It allowed industries to reorganize their supply chains around North America and take advantage of the differing resources and strengths of the three countries. The deal helped to more than triple America’s trade with Canada and Mexico.

But the opening of borders has come at a cost. Some Americans, particularly those with less education, lost out as factories moved to Mexico, taking jobs with them.

Gordon Hanson, an economist at the Harvard Kennedy School, said studies have found that average incomes rose in all three countries as a result of the trade deal, though by a small magnitude. But the deal’s benefits were very unevenly distributed around the United States.

“We can certainly find places where jobs are lost as a result of increased trade with Mexico, as well as places where jobs were gained as a result of increased trade with Mexico,” Mr. Hanson said.

The government programs that were designed to help workers adjust to these changes proved to be a Band-Aid for a deep wound that never healed. As China’s 2001 entry into the global economy accelerated the loss of American factory jobs, NAFTA became a potent symbol for labor unions, many Democrats and Mr. Trump of where American trade policy went wrong.

The Trump administration began its renegotiation of NAFTA in August 2017 with harsh words for Canada and Mexico, with the president’s top trade adviser saying the pact had “fundamentally failed many, many Americans and needs major improvement.”

Talks were initially expected to wrap up by the end of 2017, but negotiations lingered well into the next year as officials from all three countries scrabbled over issues like dairy-market access, federal-government contracts and systems for settling trade disputes. Business groups were alarmed by several of Mr. Trump’s proposals, including the idea of injecting a “sunset provision” into the deal that could cause it to automatically expire.

* * *

Some Democrats were quick to point out that the deal being celebrated by Republicans at the White House was far more in line with Democratic priorities than with traditional conservative ones.

“It actually kind of puts a smile on my face,” said Representative Jimmy Gomez, Democrat of California, in an interview. “It’s ironic. They’re lauding the most progressive trade deal in the history of this country.”

“They should send her a box of chocolates,” Mr. Gomez said of Ms. Pelosi, who has a famous penchant for chocolate, particularly from California. “Dark. Ghirardelli.”

The new trade deal faces one final hurdle before it can go into effect: It still needs to be approved in Canada.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government’s first action when Parliament resumed after an extended break on Monday was introducing legislation to carry out the trade pact, which it calls the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement.

Because Mr. Trudeau’s Liberal Party does not hold a voting majority in the House of Commons, the bill will require opposition support to pass. All three major opposition parties have various complaints. But many local and provincial politicians, labor and business leaders are calling for quick approval, making the legislation’s defeat unlikely.

Chrystia Freeland, the deputy prime minister, urged the opposition parties to work with the government to pass the bill swiftly.

“This is a victory for all Canadians of every political persuasion and from all regions of our great country,” she said in a news conference.

Winstonm · January 30, 2020

Can you sing Day-O, Harry?

Pompe-o, Pompe-o

Pompeo come and he wan’ to please Trump

Pom, me say Pom, me say Pom, me say Pom

Me say Pom, me say Pompe-o

Pompe-o come and he wan’ please Trump

Duck Ukraine questions from NPR reporter