Finally the 2024 election has a very "split screen" one side is dark while the other is hope and joy

Echo opinion by E.J. Dionne Jr., published in The Washington Post - Democracy Dies in Darkness....

The sudden and radical shift in the trajectory of the 2024, campaign owes to more than the replacement of President Joe Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate. To a degree that’s still not fully appreciated, Harris has embraced an entirely new strategy: She’s not just pushing back against Donald Trump’s politics of cultural division. She’s bidding to transcend it.

Choosing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate reinforces the move away from clichés about “coastal politics” and “cultural elites.” Instead, she wants to fight on specific, practical measures government can take to improve lives, from family leave to expansions of health coverage. Both Harris and Walz are speaking a soothing and — to pick up on Democrats’ favorite virtue these days — joyful language of patriotism and national unity.

You could tell the Trump campaign was thrown off by the Walz pick when the GOP’s vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, attacked the camo-wearing, gun-owning, small-town Midwestern schoolteacher as a “San Francisco-style liberal.”

Hopefully J.D. Vance signed a political "pre-nup"

Never mind that Vance lived in the Bay Area for about four years while Minnesota’s Walz visited the place for the first time only last month. The tired misfire speaks to how dependent the GOP is on stereotypes about who “liberals” are and what “liberalism” means.

Trump and Vance want liberals to be Ivy League-educated people (which describes both members of the Republican ticket but neither of the two Democrats) who look down their noses at “flyover country” and disrespect the values of small towns and the countryside. They absolutely do not want to deal with a liberalism that extols “community” and “freedom” (two of Harris’s favorite words) and favors a government active in areas where most voters favor more public action to ease their circumstances.

All the ink spilled about who was a more “centrist” or “liberal” pick for the VP job lost track of the fact that while Walz is, indeed, the second kind of liberal he is the very antithesis of the first, the variety that Republicans love to parody.

My favorite indicator of the campaign’s cultural revolution: For years, social scientists have noted that Starbucks drinkers are more liberal while Dunkin’ drinkers are more conservative. But the Harris campaign started selling T-shirts with “Harris-Walz” in the colors and typeface of Dunkin’. So much for “latte liberals.”

The contrast Harris is trying to bring home was underscored last Thursday in dueling appearances by the two nominees. Standing amid the faux-gilt of his Mar-a-Lago hotel, Trump, who has largely been homebound at a crucial point in the campaign, talked a lot about himself.

“Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” he said, returning again and again to a slew of false claims comparing the sizes of his rallies to historic gatherings, including the 1963, March on Washington at which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. described his dream for the nation.

Meanwhile, Harris was in Michigan at a United Auto Workers local flanked by Walz and Shawn Fain, the union’s visionary president, to extol “the dignity of work” and the value of collective action.

While Mar-a-Lago Trump called the United States as a “very, very sick country right now,” Harris spoke an actual populist language with a strong emphasis on patriotism.

“Our campaign is about saying, ‘We trust the people, we see the people, we know the people.’ You know one of the things I love about our country? We are a nation of people who believe in those ideals that were foundational to what made us so special as a nation. … We love our country.”

The (perhaps unfair) irony is that such sentiments seemed old-fashioned from Biden but sound fresh when put forward by a younger woman — from California, for goodness’ sake! — whom no one can think of as a fogey. In a way that an 81-year-old incumbent never could, she can make calls for a bit of political peace forward-looking (“We’re not going back”) and harness the nation’s exhaustion with Trump’s gloomy acrimony.

James Davison Hunter is the distinguished University of Virginia sociologist whose 1991 volume “Culture Wars” first brought that term to wide attention. His fascinating new book, “Democracy and Solidarity,” includes an observation essential not only to rebuilding the solidarity he rightly thinks we need but also to understanding what’s going on in the 2024 campaign. “It is critical,” Hunter writes, “that we rediscover human beings underneath the abstractions of our inflammatory symbolic politics.”

When a literally straight-shooting football coach like Walz becomes the adviser to his high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance because he doesn’t like seeing LGBTQ kids bullied, he moves discussions of sexual identity from academic gender theory to simple, small-town decency. When Harris says, “We love our country,” pay attention to those words “we” and “our.” Harris and Walz are waging war on “inflammatory symbolic politics.” And, yes, it’s a joy to watch.

Republican extremism has overtaken the former Grand Old Party

"We are also comforted by the words of the Book of Isaiah: “Do not fear, for I am with you. Do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” We thank you and pray for the continued safety and well-being of your family. Sincerely, NANCY PELOSI

Echo opinion essay by E.J. Dionne, published in The Washington Post:

"balance! looks awfully good when it’s put up against an extremism"

There was a time when an assault on the spouse of the speaker of the House with a hammer to the skull would have brought the country’s politicians together in horror. We don’t live in that country anymore.

Our politics are deformed, degraded and disgusting, but the problem is more specific than that. One of our major parties has given extremism free rein because the leader of the extremist forces is a former president whose support the party’s candidates desperately need in next week’s midterm elections.

Donald Trump was at it again on Tuesday, spouting lies to feed conspiracy theories about the attack last Friday on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, at their home in San Francisco.

“Weird things going on in that household in the last couple of weeks,” Trump said on a talk show. “The glass, it seems, was broken from the inside to the out — so it wasn’t a break-in, it was a break-out.” This was repulsive, deceitful nonsense.

The assault on the Democratic leader’s husband that was intended as violence against her should have been an opportunity for cheap grace in a GOP whose advertising makes Pelosi a favored punching bag. A dose of empathy would have signaled that politics aren’t everything.

A fair number of old-line politicians in the party understood this, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), who was unequivocal in his condemnation. 

But even Republicans who said the right things won’t go to the root of the party’s problem. They lack the courage to break with Trump, Trumpism and the fanatics who continue to lie about the outcome of the 2020 election and, in the case of the growing ranks of QAnon devotees, cast Democrats as Satanists and child molesters.

That’s because the Republicans’ strategy depends on heavy turnout among Trump’s most fervent supporters while getting moderate voters to ignore the ghoul in the room and cast their ballots to protest inflation. Never mind, as my Post colleague Catherine Rampell pointed out, that the GOP offers no solution to the problem and would, as former president Barack Obama has been arguing, make life more difficult for workers and retirees.

In fact, the accent on anger, resentment and wild falsehoods is closely linked to the party’s lack of a comprehensive program.

Solving public problems requires taking government’s role seriously: in making investments, lifting the incomes of the jobless and low-paid, and creating systems of social insurance that help those who fall on hard times. Some in the GOP admitted as much by supporting President Biden’s infrastructure bill and the Chips and Science Act.

But an open embrace of an active public sector within a market economy would fly in the face of the party’s long-standing claims that government is always the problem and never the solution. Republicans paper over their contradictions by walking away from policy talk. In this vacuum, conspiracy theorists roam free.

There was always a better way for the GOP, and few articulated it as well as President Dwight D. Eisenhower when he outlined “the need to maintain balance” in his remarkable 1961 farewell address.

Ike detailed what he had in mind: “balance between the private and the public economy; balance between cost and hoped-for advantage; balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between action of the moment and the national welfare of the future.”

“Good judgment seeks balance and progress,” he concluded. The alternative, he said, was “frustration.” A corollary: If you’re not seeking balance, you exploit the frustration you sow.

If you look at the campaigns actually happening on the ground, it’s Democrats who are hewing closer to the great Republican president’s vision. A prime example: Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) is running for the Senate by reaching out to the parts of the Trump electorate who backed the former president not to endorse lunacy but to protest their economic conditions. A Ryan victory would send a powerful signal that a different kind of politics is possible.

Appeals to balance are obvious in other Democratic campaigns. In New Hampshire, incumbent Sen. Maggie Hassan has practically made the word “bipartisan” her middle name. In North Carolina’s Senate race, former state Supreme Court chief justice Cheri Beasley emphasizes controls on pharmaceutical prices in the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as the Chips and Science Act’s investments in manufacturing and high tech. In Pennsylvania, Reps. Matthew Cartwright and Susan Wild — contrary to claims that Democrats are playing down the economy — focus almost entirely on bread and butter.

“Balance,” unfortunately, is not much of a rallying cry — one reason Eisenhower’s speech is not as widely remembered as it should be. But balance looks awfully good when it’s put up against an extremism that can’t even commiserate with a politician whose husband has been grievously assaulted.

Watch Senator John Hawley escaping the dam breaking on January 6th

January 6 insurrection:  Congressional hearings: The House committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol has conducted a series of hearings to share its findings with the U.S. public. The eighth hearing focused on Trump’s inaction on January 6. Here’s a guide to the biggest moments so far.

“The dam,” Cheney declared, “has begun to break.”

Opinion: Finally, the dam is breaking against Trump, opinion by columnist E.J. Dionne, published in The Washington Post: 

WASHINGTON, DC- During (July 21) Thursday’s prime-time session, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) summed up the explosive impact of this summer’s hearings by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

“The dam,” she declared, “has begun to break.”

Cheney, the committee’s vice chair, was speaking largely of new investigative opportunities that a parade of witnesses has opened into the former President Donald Trump’s illicit effort to maintain power. But her statement had much broader implications.

The January 6 committee has fundamentally altered public perceptions of Trump’s role in the violence at the Capitol.

More important, it has increased the likelihood that he will be prosecuted for his efforts — from Election Day to Jan. 7, 2021 — to overthrow the outcome of a free election. It has made the attack on our democracy a central issue in this fall’s midterm elections, and will keep it there with the September hearings the committee announced.

Also, it has  weakened Trump’s political position, within his party and with the broader electorate.

Convincingly, the committee lived up to the promise made at the outset by Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) that its evidence would demonstrate that the January 6 attack was the “culmination of an attempted coup,” not the work of an out-of-control crowd. The riot was of a piece with Trump’s creation of slates of fake electors, pressure on GOP legislatures to throw out valid election results and even a request to a Republican election official in Georgia to “find” votes for him that didn’t exist.

Trump harbored hopes that the mayhem would block or delay Congress’s certification of his defeat, as Thursday’s hearing made clear. Incredibly, the former guy was even prepared to endanger the life of his vice president, Mike Pence, for refusing to act illegally in obstructing Joe Biden’s victory. Against the counsel of aides and family members, Trump let the criminal assault — by a horde he knew was armed — continue for hours. He did not (grudgingly) call off the invaders until it was clear his stratagem had failed.

By wrongmindedly staying loyal to Trump, the committee’s presentation also showed that Republican politicians could pay a significant long-term price. 

Demonstrators steal a Metropolitan Police riot shield outside the US Capitol building during a riot in Washington, on Jan. 6, 2021.
Photographer: Eric Lee/Bloomberg

Trump’s mastery of the Republican Party has been underscored by the reluctance of leaders who denounced him immediately after Jan. 6 to press the matter any further. They either resigned themselves to his power in the party and fell silent or, in the case of House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and so many of his colleagues, reverted to pro-Trump sycophancy.

So it must have been very satisfying for Rep. Liz Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican who co-led Thursday’s hearing with Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), to show footage of McCarthy denouncing Trump shortly after the attack. 

Since he gave that convincing comment, McCarthy has subsequently led the internal party persecution of Cheney and Kinzinger for continuing to insist upon a truth that McCarthy himself once acknowledged.

The committee also called the bluff of the GOP’s Ivy League Fake Populist Caucus. After showing a photo of Sen. Josh Hawley (Republican of Missouri and Yale Law School) going into the Capitol with a fist raised in solidarity with the pro-Trump mob, they ran video of him fleeing in terror as the violent crowd surged through the hallways.

#WatchHawleyRun

Trump still has a hold on his party, and many of his election-denying candidates have prevailed in primaries. But recent polling in Michigan, New Hampshire and nationwide suggests that a large share of Republicans are searching for 2024 alternatives, growing weary of Trump and becoming exhausted by his refusal to let go of his 2020 election defeat. Footage of the taping of a Trump speech on Jan. 7 that captured his refusal to say “the election is over” brought home how lies about 2020 are now the heart of his political message.

By systematically calling on Republicans, including his former aides (not “his political enemies,” Cheney pointed out), to describe what Sarah Matthews, Trump’s former deputy press secretary, called his “indefensible” behavior, the committee sought to reach beyond a Democratic Party base that already despises the former president.

This, along with the committee’s commitment to hold more hearings this fall, is a message to the roughly one-fifth of Republicans who have an unfavorable view of Trump as well as independent voters: The imperative this year is to defeat GOP politicians who refuse to face up to Trump’s crimes against democracy.

"Crimes” is the key word used to the other major effect of the committee’s work: If the Justice Department might once have worried that prosecuting Trump would appear “political,” it now has reason to be far more concerned about the message it would send if it fails to investigate and indict a former president so eager to trample the law and to welcome violence.

The committee’s task was to ensure that Trump is held accountable — morally, politically and legally. On all these fronts, the dam really has broken.

Donald Trump's infectious incompetence needs a truth vaccine

There was a time when the common perception about the anesthetic in ether was called a truth serum.  Well, today what people need are truth vaccines.  In other words, the ability to create antibodies to protect the brain from being infected with Donald Trump's litanies of lies.

This opinion essay was written by the political columnist E.J. Dionne and published in The Washington Post.

We could all spend a lot of intellectual energy debating whether Donald Trump's failures are due primarily to corruption or incompetence, but it would be a waste of time.

Understanding that his incompetence flows from his corruption should animate the arguments against his reelection and inspire the work journalists do in making sense of the chaotic mess Trump has made of our government.

It won’t be easy. Trump has been involved in so many scandals and says so many reprehensible things that our country has developed a kind of herd immunity to the outrage that just one of his actions would have called forth in any previous administration. We have allowed Trump to fend off one scandal with . . . another scandal.

The key is seeing that Trump’s entirely selfish approach to the presidency has a measurable and material impact on the lives of citizens and on the policies he pursues — to the extent thathe is interested in policy at all. He cares above all about his own finances, his ego, his ratings and escaping accountability. Everything else falls by the wayside.

Trump’s opponents cannot assume, as they did in 2016, that if they drive home just how awful Trump is personally, voters will recoil in horror. This year, it is essential to make the case that Trump’s corruption means that most of the time he pays no attention to governing. And when he does, he governs in a way that subordinates the public interest to his own interests — and the interests of those who keep him in power.

Consider the past couple of days. The New York Times offered a jaw-dropping article that Trump instructed the U.S. ambassador to Britain, Robert Wood Johnson IV, to ask the British government to “help steer the world-famous and lucrative British Open golf tournament to the Trump Turnberry Resort in Scotland.”

This is the sort of corruption that would have made Boss Tweed proud — using our nation’s diplomats as fixers for Trump’s interest. But it also reflects Trump’s indifference to the idea that the State Department serves the national interest. Turning an ambassador into an errand boy for Trump’s money-losing golf course undercuts our envoys’ ability to carry out the work of the nation.

And there was this startling news on Tuesday at Trump’s first briefing on the pandemic since April: “I just wish her well, frankly,” Trump said when asked about Ghislaine Maxwell, who was arrested this month on charges that she aided convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, her onetime boyfriend, in his sexual exploitation and abuse of underage girls.

This is shocking on its face. But given Trump’s proven willingness to intervene in the criminal justice system and bandy about pardons to protect himself and his friends, it’s possible that Trump was sending a signal. Of course that’s not certain, but do we want a government where such a question naturally arises?

There was also Jane Mayer’s extraordinary reporting in the New Yorker this month about how weak federal regulation through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration during the pandemic has endangered the lives of thousands of poultry processing workers — and how Trump’s campaign has profited from industry contributions.


This is classic influence-peddling under the shroud of an anti-government ideology. But it underscores how Trump’s claim that he would govern on behalf of “the forgotten men and women of our country” was false — unless corporate CEOs were the “forgotten” people he had in mind.

Beyond the direct costs to Trump’s all-about-himself government, the indirect costs are just as large. Trump’s obsession with his interests pushes the consequential things aside.

It was astonishing that Trump thought he was saying a good thing when he declared at Tuesday’s coronavirus briefing that “we are in the process of developing a strategy.”

Really? The president is “in the process” of working on this after five months of catastrophe and more than 140,000 deaths?

And more than two months after Democrats passed an economic recovery bill in the House, Republicans in the Senate were in chaos this week as they tried to formulate an alternative. One reason, The Post reported, was “the White House’s failure to go into the talks with a preset strategy or a list of proposals they knew GOP lawmakers would rally behind.” Trump touts his economic genius but offers no leadership as the economy languishes.

A decade ago, in his powerful dissent in the Citizens United case, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that “it is fair to say” our country’s Founders “were obsessed with corruption.” They understood that corruption and bad government go hand in hand. It’s a shame our president is so eager to prove them right.

E.J. Dionne’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

Coronavirus response requires a solidarity revolution: Food for body and soul

Quotes by Dorothy Day

• "The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?"

• "Food for the body is not enough. There must be food for the soul."

Published in The Tablet, a British Jesuit journal, by Christopher White, National Correspondent 
Georgetown Panel: COVID-19 Crisis Shows Need for Solidarity, Community

NEW YORK — Addressing the world two weeks ago at the height of the global pandemic, Pope Francis paid tribute to the “forgotten people” – the grocery clerks, service industry workers, cleaners, and caregivers, the people that are frequently overlooked, yet are now keeping the world functioning.

Earlier this week, a virtual Georgetown University discussion examined how those individuals – and the tens of millions of people experiencing economic devastation from the pandemic – might best be supported by both the Church and the country in the pandemic’s aftermath.

The panel, “Life and Dignity, Justice and Solidarity: Moral Principles for Responding to the COVID-19 Economic Crisis,” was convened on Monday, by the university’s Initiative for Catholic Social Thought and Public Life and brought together a mix of policy experts, academics, and a community activist, with the aim of charting a path forward.

E.J. Dionne, who teaches at Georgetown and is a columnist for the Washington Post, kicked off the discussion by noting that while the government is rightfully calling for physical social distancing, he said that now, more than ever, is the time for social connection in order to ensure strong societal bonds to both get through the pandemic and to be united in the eventual rebuilding that will need to occur.

Similarly, New York Times columnist David Brooks highlighted the Catholic principle of solidarity as “an active virtue” that demands the participation of every single individual member of society. While Brooks is not a Catholic, he said that Catholic social teaching is the “most coherent philosophy that opposes a philosophy of rampant individualism” and should be relied on especially now.

The pandemic “exposes the fragmentation in our society,” Brooks continued, and saying that we can’t go back to way things were before.

Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute rebutted arguments made by some of his fellow conservatives in recent weeks that the cure to the pandemic “cannot be worse than the problem,” by arguing that the economy is meant to be in service of the common good.

While the decision to shutter many businesses in order to encourage social distancing is causing economic hardship, Strain said that economic loss must be tolerated in order to save human lives. Further, he said that there is good historical evidence for workers to be confident that this is not the end of the story and the economy will rebound.

Maru Bautista who works with the Center for Family Life in Brooklyn, New York promoting immigrant-led worker cooperatives said that she hopes that the crisis will lead to a reordering of our current system, including a greater opening to the possibility of Medicare for all to expand access to healthcare.

“We need to have the courage to see new possibilities that can create a different landscape for everybody,” she told the online audience.

Although most of the panelists cautiously praised the recent stimulus bill passed by Congress as a good and necessary first step at providing economic relief, they all agreed it would not be enough to provide long-term support.

Brooks said that he would have liked for a larger percentage of the money to go toward small businesses through the form of forgivable payroll loans rather than forcing businesses to layoff employees so that they can receive unemployment benefits. Bautista said that many immigrants will still have trouble accessing the funding programs, particularly highlighting that food stamps is a critical issue to many people in her community.

Dionne concurred, telling attendees that in Congress it’s hard to pass anything that helps non-citizen immigrants, but noting that if the nation is serious about wanting the economy to take off – and if it is concerned about justice – that must be remedied.

As the panel wrapped up, the discussion moved from economic concerns to communal ones, with Strain noting that even prior to the pandemic, loneliness and isolation was one the rise in America and he feared that this would only exacerbate the problem. He said that we should be particularly concerned about mental health issues, as well as that of heightened domestic abuse, in light of the pandemic.

Brooks said that the individualism that has defined the American system for the past sixty years has “had a good run,” but that he hopes that the nation is now at a turning point toward a great reliance on community.

John Carr, the director of Georgetown’s Initiative, concluded the program, which started at the beginning of Holy Week, but painfully acknowledging that “we’re doing passion and death pretty well, but I hope we can get to resurrection.”

“This is a time to go back to fundamentals,” said Carr, “as sisters and brothers made in the image of God.”
Tags: Catholic Church, Catholic Faith, Coronavirus Pandemic, Georgetown University

Why did Donald Trump call President Volodymyr Zelensky and what did he ask him to do?

"I would like for you to do us a favor, though...." Donald J. Trump.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/9/25/1887776/-Trump-I-would-like-you-to-do-us-a-favor

Donald Trump urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to contact Attorney General William Barr about initiating a potential corruption investigation tied to former Vice President Joe Biden, according to a newly-released memo of a phone call between the two world leaders.

A New Clarity: What Trump’s Betrayal Demands
By E. J. Dionne Jr.

https://www.salon.com/2019/09/25/trump-asked-ukraine-to-do-us-a-favor-and-urged-investigation-into-joe-biden-transcript-shows/

We now know the truth: President Trump asked the leader of Ukraine to investigate the man who was widely seen as his strongest potential opponent during a phone call in which he noted that “we do a lot for Ukraine.” 

He threw an invite for a White House visit into the bargain.

Let’s say this as simply and clearly as possible. Trump was using the inducement of American taxpayer dollars to get a foreign power to intervene in our politics on his behalf. That he didn’t specifically mention aid in the readout of one phone call the White House released Wednesday doesn’t change the message he was sending. Trump was subordinating our country’s national security interests to his selfish needs. He was willing to do anything to smear Joe Biden. And he was happy to offer up the services of our own Justice Department to advance the effort.

Trump spoke to Volodymyr Zelensky (“do us a favor,” the president said at one point) as if the newly elected foreign leader were the chairman of a planning board who could grant a variance for a Trump building project or a New York politician who could approve a tax break.

“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution, and a lot of people want to find out about that,” Trump said to Zelensky, according to a rough White House transcript of the call. “So whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great.”

It needs to be said often that there has been no credible charge that the former vice president did anything untoward when his son Hunter worked for a Ukrainian energy company. As The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake wrote Tuesday: “Ukraine’s current prosecutor general told Bloomberg he had no evidence of anything illegal or corrupt by either Joe or Hunter Biden.”

This is the kind of Trump hit job with which we are now depressingly familiar. No matter whom you favor for the Democratic presidential nomination, it’s an outrage that Biden is being hurt by reports of Trump’s own lawlessness.

There is nothing positive for Trump in the readout, which ratified House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to open a formal impeachment inquiry. “It’s interesting that the White House would release this thinking it would help the president,” Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., said in an interview. “They’re so far down the path of corruption that they wouldn’t see how it implicates the president.”

It was, by the way, hard to miss that Zelensky told Trump: “I stayed at the Trump Tower.” Zelensky was clearly well-briefed that Trump cares mightily about his economic interests, too.

That the Ukraine allegations abruptly and fundamentally altered the politics of impeachment means that House Democrats need to act in a precise, expeditious and disciplined way. Battles over who has jurisdiction over what, lengthy arguments over what should and should not be included in the articles of impeachment, personality clashes—none of these should complicate action on what is now a clear-cut case involving a deplorable abuse of power.

This is why many swing-district Democrats who had been reluctant to endorse a path to impeachment are now open to acting. “If I had never heard the words ‘Mueller report’ in my life, I would have had concerns about these current allegations,” Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., who represents a district Trump carried in 2016, told me. “They are concrete allegations that are clear abuses of public trust, clear abuses of power. If true, these allegations are deeply, deeply damaging to our country.”

Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., another first termer, said the Ukraine story “encapsulated all the things I was concerned about with this presidency.”

Malinowski—who in May became the first swing district freshman to call for an impeachment inquiry—said that while he believes that Trump had committed other impeachable acts, the effort to involve a foreign leader in our domestic politics is “an act that any patriotic American would agree is beyond the pale.”

“The more focused this can be,” Malinowski added, “the more likely it is to unify the country, and the more rapidly we can conclude.”

This new clarity of mission is why Pelosi’s announcement Tuesday came as such a relief. Democrats on both sides of the impeachment question were never in doubt about the depth of Trump’s venality, but they did not expect him to hand them so much ammunition to make their case. They dare not let internal politics get in the way of performing their duty.

Vote Blue No Matter Who: Anybody but Trump (ABT)

Echo opinion by E.J. Dionne, published in the Madison Wisconsin The Capital Times

Anybody but Donald Trump (ABT)

WASHINGTON — Nothing unites Democrats more than a deep belief that Donald Trump must be driven from office. And right now, nothing divides Democrats more than finding the best way to bring this about.

Trump is not a political genius. He is president because of our outdated and undemocratic Electoral College. What he is skilled at is taking advantage of his opponents' weaknesses and sowing division in their ranks.

Think about what the Russians, in alliance with the Trump campaign, did in 2016: They drove wedges between supporters of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton by feeding the sense of aggrievement in the Sanders camp. They worked to lower turnout among African Americans by pointing to the criminal justice policies of Bill Clinton's administration in fostering overincarceration.

Trump's strategy is thus not just about rallying his base. He also does everything he can to dispirit the Democratic base. He will be happy once again to use social media (and welcome foreign efforts in this direction) to assail the Democrats from the left. And since Democrats seem to relish attacking each other, they may give him a hand.

The efforts to divide are already unfolding. Consider the well-documented accounts by Michael Scherer and Amy B. Wang in The Washington Post and Rachelle Hampton in Slate. They reported on Twitter attacks against Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., that she is "not an American black" because her parents are immigrants. One version was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr. though he later took it down.

Hampton also wrote of an online campaign urging African Americans not to vote for any Democrat who refuses to endorse reparations for slavery. Trump and his lieutenants are eager for a despicable two-fer: To attack reparations to overtly win white voters, and to narrowcast messages to African Americans to depress Democratic turnout if the party's nominee declines to endorse reparations.

And former special counsel Robert Mueller's* testimony last week split House Democrats into very nearly equal halves.

Nearly one half — it could well grow to a narrow majority during Congress' August recess — argues that Mueller's account of Trump's lies, obstruction and the possibility that he has been compromised by Russia (among other issues) mean that failing to move toward impeachment would be a dereliction of constitutional duty. And let there be no doubt that if Trump were not a Republican, his GOP apologists in Congress would be clamoring to throw him out of office for running a campaign that cooperated with a Russian dictator's agents to win, and for lying about it.

But precisely because Republicans will provide few if any impeachment votes, the other half of the House Democratic caucus believes that Mueller's testimony made impeachment more problematic. With so many media reports focusing on Mueller's often-halting delivery, it's not surprising that members from competitive districts stressed the failure of the hearings to ignite opinion against Trump.

Democrats can make Trump gleeful by tearing each other apart over impeachment, or they can find a way collectively to press him much harder. There can be no August recess for the Judiciary Committee, and its chairman, Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., signaled on Friday there would not be.

Significantly, the committee's court filing on Friday to obtain release of grand jury materials specifically mentions impeachment. The argument is that the House needs access to documents (and eventually witnesses) to decide whether to impeach.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made clear at a Friday news conference that she has not ruled out impeachment, but she also knows there are not yet the votes in her own caucus to win a majority for it. The signals she and Nadler sent are clear: Democrats are escalating their fight. For now — given that Pelosi leads what she correctly said is not "a lockstep, rubber-stamp" caucus — this is the only plausible path forward.

In the meantime, Democrats might note that the hashtag #MoscowMitch, a phrase used by MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, went viral to protest Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's refusal to allow votes on bills to protect the 2020 election from foreign interference. Making life hell for McConnell and his party for blocking necessary and patriotic legislation would be a good use of August.

And, yes, the Democratic presidential candidates will debate this week. Judge them not by the points they score but by who among them best understands that removing this reprehensible president from office is far more important than any of their individual ambitions — and that nothing will make Trump happier than an opposition tearing itself to pieces.

E.J. Dionne Jr. is a columnist for The Washington Post. ejdionne@washpost.com and @EJDionne

*Maine Writer post script - I continue to be baffled by how the media and pundits ignore what Robert Mueller said during his testimonies when he spoke to Congress.  He said that Russia invaded the 2016 election.  When America thinks "invasion", Donald Trump has skillfully deflected the label to wrongly discriminate against innocent immigrants.  But, Robert Mueller identified the actual invader. Russia is the political invader!

Republicans are failed leaders - they must respond to protect Americans from gun violence

Echo opinion by E.J. Dionne published in The Las Vegas Sun

What has happened to Republicans? At one time, Republicans supported safety and security.

OPINION:
The right and wrong sides of guns, white nationalism

When one side proposes ways that human beings might begin to solve a deadly problem while the other side leaves it up to God, you know which side is right.

When one side proposes solution after solution to contain gun violence — and offers compromise after compromise to get something done — while the other side blocks action every time, you know which side is right.

When the president of the United States and his most incendiary media allies fuel hatred of those who are not white while his opponents say we should stand in solidarity with one another, you know which side is right.

When one side brushes aside the dangers of racist and white nationalist terrorism while the other side says we need to be vigilant against all forms of terrorism, you know which side is right.

"....America's democracy is failing.....and its moral compass is broken" - E.J. Dionne

And when Americans are gunned down in incident after incident, when we are numbed by repeating the same sorrowful words every time, when we move within a news cycle from “something must be done” to “the Senate will block action” or “the politics are too complicated,” you know America’s democracy is failing and its moral compass is broken.

Our rancid political culture is, quite literally, killing our nation. And the problem is not caused by some abstraction called “polarization” or by “the failure of both sides to understand each other.” Those are the alibis of timid souls so intent on sounding “balanced” that they turn their eyes from the truth.

What is that truth? When it comes to gun violence and the need to confront white nationalism, one side is right and one side is wrong.

Until we face this, even two mass shootings within 24 hours will do nothing to galvanize action. In El Paso, 22 people were killed at a shopping center Saturday and 26 were wounded by a gunman who, according to police, appears to have posted an anti-immigrant screed online before the shooting. Then at 1 a.m. Sunday in Dayton, Ohio, another mass shooter left nine dead and 27 injured in an area known for its lively nightlife that is heavily patrolled by police. The shooter was killed in less than a minute.


“Think about that minute,” said Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley. “The shooter was able to kill nine people and injure 26 in less than a minute.” (!)

The gun-permissiveness crowd wants us not to think about that minute. It puts the lie to the gun lobby’s claim that having armed people nearby when a mass killer strikes is all we need to keep us safe.

The wrong side in this debate does not want us to come together. On the contrary, its goal after every mass shooting is to deflect and divide. Here’s what Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said when asked by reporters what we should do about gun violence. “Listen, there are bodies that have not yet been recovered,” Abbott replied. “I think we need to focus more on memorials before we start the politics.”

But Abbott, reading from the National Rifle Association’s script, started “the politics” right at that moment, and it is an insidious form of politics. Simultaneously, he deflected by pretending it’s impolite to answer substantive questions and divided by saying that those who raise them disrespect the dead.

Nothing disrespects those who are slaughtered more than the political paralysis Abbott and those like him are encouraging.

Invoking God and calling for prayer should never seem obscene. But it is always obscene to use the Almighty to escape our own responsibility.

“God bless the people of El Paso Texas. God bless the people of Dayton, Ohio,” President Donald Trump said in a Sunday morning tweet from his New Jersey golf club.

Yes, may God bless them. But may God also judge Trump for a political strategy whose success depends on sowing racism, reaction and division. May God judge him for stoking false and incendiary fears about an immigrant “invasion,” the very word echoed by the manifesto that police suspect was the El Paso shooter’s. May God judge the president for cutting programs to fight white extremism at the very moment when the FBI is telling us that we are more at risk from white nationalist terrorists than Islamist terrorists.

In pursuit of a mythical middle ground, the faint-hearted will counsel against calling out the moral culpability of those who divide, deflect and evade. Meanwhile, the rationalizers of violence will continue to claim that only troubled individuals, not our genuinely insane gun policies, are responsible for waves of domestic terrorism that bring shame on our country before the world.

But sane gun laws are the middle ground, and most gun owners support them. Opposing the political exploitation of racism is a moral imperative. And refusing to acknowledge that only one side in this debate seeks intentionally to paralyze us is the path of cowardice.

E.J. Dionne is a columnist for The Washington Post.

Barfcart news (aka Breitbart) like a snake in a political basket

Donald Trump went to the "barfcart" news, named "Breitbart", and to his former White House adviser, the failed Navy Officer (passed over for advancement) Steve Bannon, to mesmerize his cult right wing base, like a snake charmer in a circus.  Between Trump and Bannon, they were able to hypnotize the right wing audience and command them to be loyal to the poisonous racist propaganda being spewed from "barfcart news" like vomit from an intestinal infection.

E.J. Dionne published this echo opinion in Commonweal Magazine: 

Stand up to Trump the rump? Don’t look to the GOP (growing old party)

Trump’s opponents typically treat him as a clown, a fool and a garden-variety bigot. They only occasionally pay enough attention—usually when he praises some foreign dictator—to the side of him that relishes autocracy and undercurrents of violence.

He really doesn’t seem to believe in democracy very much. For him, politics is always a clash between power on one side and power on the other. The institutions we have created to mediate conflicts matter not a whit.

There should be no more minimizing this side of Trump after the interview the president gave to Breitbart (aka "barfcart") last week in which he suggested a willingness on the part of his enthusiasts to resort to force against his enemies on “the left.”

“I can tell you, I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad,” Trump said. “But the left plays it cuter and tougher.”

Was this a form of incitement? Was Trump thinking about Spain in the 1930s, or Chile in 1973?

Quite suddenly, Trump’s interview came to wider attention after the slaughter of at least 49 people in two New Zealand mosques Friday morning by a white supremacist.

But what are Senator Ben Sasse and his Republican colleagues willing to do about Trump? For a majority of them: precious little.

Trump, it should be said, went on Twitter at 7:41 a.m. Friday to express his “warmest sympathy” to “the people of New Zealand,” although he mentioned nothing about the ethno-nationalist motivations of the (white supremicist) terrorist. And this came only after the president had posted a link to the Breitbart (aka "barfcart") homepage on Thursday night, U.S. time, just as news of the New Zealand attack was breaking.

It was unclear exactly what Trump was promoting in pushing Breitbart (aka "barfcart"), known for its anti-Muslim commentary. 

And he deleted the Breitbart (aka "barfcart") tweet early on Friday as the scale of the horror became known.

The New Zealand killings are generating widespread soul-searching about the role of social media in spreading hatred.

But what needs immediate attention is Trump’s willingness to play fast and loose with authoritarian sentiments and intimations of violence. Trump’s deleted tweet should put his Breitbart (aka "barfcart") interview front-and-center in our politics.

His provocations constitute a call to conscience in the Republican Party.

There was much celebration last week because enough Senate Republicans stood up to Trump to hand him twin defeats.

The 12 Republican senators who opposed the president’s abuse of national-emergency powers to pay for his border wall—despite Congress’ previous refusal to fund it—deserve our appreciation. So does the even hardier band of seven Republicans who voted to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen.

But the real takeaway here is the support Trump still won from the vast majority of Republicans—and, in particular, the abject capitulation of many who had suggested or said outright that they would oppose his invocation of emergency powers. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., wrote in The Washington Post last month that “I cannot justify providing the executive with more ways to bypass Congress.” Yet, when the roll was called, he did exactly that, supporting Trump’s “emergency.” The Post’s Aaron Blake rightly called it “a flip flop for the ages.”

The most disappointing vote came from Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., a principled Trump opponent from the earliest days of the 2016 primaries. Sasse issued an intellectually vacuous statement saying that as a “constitutional conservative,” he thinks the president’s emergency powers are too broad. But he justified his vote to go along with Trump by trashing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and “bare-knuckled politics.” This sounded like projection, since the “bare-knuckled politics” was on Trump’s side. Sasse, like Tillis, is on the ballot in 2020.

My first encounter with Sasse was in January 2016. He was in Iowa to speak on behalf of every major Republican running against Trump. I respected his gutsy willingness to see Trump as exactly who he is. “He’s a strongman with a will to power,” Sasse told me then. “Trump has been the only guy on the Republican side of the aisle that regularly campaigns and says things like, ‘If I’m elected president, I’ll be able to do whatever I want.’”  

(MaineWriter- Now Sasse has turned ass and licks Trump's rump!)

Three years on, we know that Sasse was right from the start. But what are he and his Republican colleagues willing to do about it? For a majority of them, sadly including Sasse himself, the answer is: precious little.

E. J. Dionne Jr. is a syndicated columnist, professor of government at Georgetown University, and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. 

Stop government shutdowns: witness Trump in defeat

Although I have little confidence in Donald Trump's ability to understand the meaning of the word "cave" now trending in dictionary searches, the fact is, this horrible episode in American history should never have happened.  Donald Trump created his own defeat on the border wall.  Even if he should somehow resurrect some part of a structure that he can point to as being "the wall that Mexico would pay for" (but didn't!), he brought Americans to the brink of a civic revolution, by claiming to own the shutdown. Never again should this tortuous hostage taking of American citizens, used as bargaining chips in a government shutdown, for political purposes, be allowed to happen! Donald Trump was defeated during his January 25, 2019, White House hate speech, but he should never have allowed himself to be boxed in by racism, against immigrants, put into effect by right wing extremists (RWE-RWEs), like Ann Colture.

There's nothing 'moderate' about caving in to Trump

E.J. Dionne Jr. on Jan 24, 2019 published in ArcaMax

WASHINGTON, DC-- This must be the last shutdown, ever. No politicians should be able to wreck government and inflict suffering on its employees as a form of brute force to get their way.

An E.J. Dionne echo opinion 

Any deal to end this nonsense must therefore include a measure akin to the no-more-shutdowns proposal from Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., disarming those who so disrespect government that they're willing to throw the country into chaos.

It also means that continuing to resist President Trump's intransigence is not a radical position. It is the moderate position.

There is longing for "moderates" of one kind or another to come up with a solution to this crisis. Yet what's more moderate than saying that everything related to border security should be on the table for negotiation, but in a considered, thoughtful way? A border wall should not be privileged just because we have a president obsessed with symbols that rally his base.

And, by the way, that base is shrinking, as a CBS News poll released on Wednesday showed.

The pollsters asked: "Do you think the issue of a border wall is worth the federal government shutdown or not?" Overall, 71 percent of Americans said that the border wall is not worth the shutdown, including 92 percent of Democrats, 71 percent of independents and 43 percent of Republicans. GOP senators facing Thursday's scheduled votes on competing proposals -- with and without Trump's $5.7 billion in wall money -- should note that this fight is uniting Democrats and dividing their own party. 

Let's be clear: Trump's opponents are not refusing to negotiate. In fact, House Democrats said on Wednesday that they're willing to offer additional money for border security, though not for the wall.

As Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said Tuesday in an interview with NPR's Rachel Martin: "Democrats -- I certainly am, and my colleagues are, too -- are glad to have the discussion about the elements in the president's proposal." All they are asking, he said, is to "treat it like every other item of business we have, rather than a take-it-or-leave-it."

In other words, don't let Trump use a shutdown to override the normal process of governing. "[Republicans are] saying people's lives are the leverage they want to use, and we want to discredit the use of government shutdown as a negotiating tactic," Kaine told Martin. "Why take paychecks away from FBI agents? Why shutter food-stamp offices because the president's not getting his way on border security?"

Why, indeed?

Let's be clear: Trump's opponents are not refusing to negotiate. In fact, House Democrats said on Wednesday that they're willing to offer additional money for border security, though not for the wall.

As Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said Tuesday in an interview with NPR's Rachel Martin: "Democrats -- I certainly am, and my colleagues are, too -- are glad to have the discussion about the elements in the president's proposal." All they are asking, he said, is to "treat it like every other item of business we have, rather than a take-it-or-leave-it."

In other words, don't let Trump use a shutdown to override the normal process of governing. "[Republicans are] saying people's lives are the leverage they want to use, and we want to discredit the use of government shutdown as a negotiating tactic," Kaine told Martin. "Why take paychecks away from FBI agents? Why shutter food-stamp offices because the president's not getting his way on border security?"

Why, indeed?

And Trump has shown that negotiating with him is a fool's errand. His proposal last Saturday was presented as a "compromise." It was no such thing. His "concession" to legalize -- temporarily -- the status of some 700,000 immigrants brought across our borders when they were children essentially ratifies the status quo forced on Trump by lower-court decisions that the Supreme Court left in place on Tuesday.

His supposed step toward more openness for asylum seekers turned out to be exactly the opposite, once its more stringent provisions were made clear. Trump's approach to negotiating is: Give me what I want, and if you don't, I'll ask for even more.

This is lunacy. It has to stop, which is why Warner's end-shutdowns bill is so important. As The Washington Post's Aaron Blake summarized it: "In the event of a lapse in government funding, the act would reinstate funding levels from the previous fiscal year -- except for Congress and the office of the president, which would not receive funding until they reached an agreement."

Warner calls his bill the "Stop STUPIDITY Act," standing for "Shutdowns Transferring Unnecessary Pain and Inflicting Damage in the Coming Years."

Trump wants rational people to be so horrified at the damage he's willing to inflict that they'll cave in. It's his M.O., as Damian Paletta and Josh Dawsey noted in The Post: "He creates -- or threatens to create -- a calamity, and then insists he will address the problem only if his adversary capitulates to a separate demand."

Giving in to such behavior is not moderate, reasonable, or sensible.