The Brooks Brothers' Riot
(during the 2001 Florida election re-count)
Dirty Trickster Lee Atwater: The GOP SOB At The Heart Of Republican Barbarism (Hidden Mic)
Republican Presidential Candidate Pat Buchanan "Summarizes The Republican Philosophy"
"What Do We Want?"
"What Do We Want?"
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The House committees conducting the impeachment inquiry into President Trump have both Democratic and Republican members.
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That fact seems difficult for some people to comprehend, so I’ll repeat it with some italics: The House committees conducting the impeachment inquiry into President Trump have both Democratic and Republican members.
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The stunt that House Republicans pulled yesterday — storming a secure room in Congress, where sensitive national security matters are discussed, in order to halt an investigative hearing — was based on a falsehood. The Republicans claimed they were fed up with being shut out of the investigation. But they are not being shut out.
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As Politico put it: “More than 45 House Republicans — nearly a quarter of the House G.O.P. conference — already have full access to the depositions through their membership on one of the three panels leading the impeachment inquiry.” (The three are the Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs Committees.)
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Even some of the Republicans who stormed the room yesterday already had access, as Ursula Perano of Axios noted: “13 of the 41 Republican lawmakers who stormed a closed-door hearing Wednesday to protest an alleged lack of transparency in the impeachment inquiry sit on committees with the power to question witnesses and review documents.”
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So why are so many House Republicans claiming otherwise — and why did a few of them jeopardize national security by smuggling phones into the hearing room? Because they understand that the emerging evidence is extremely damaging to Trump. They’ve decided that they would rather try to protect him than exercise their constitutional duty as members of an equally powerful branch of government.
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It’s a sad and worrisome spectacle. But I don’t think it is likely to succeed in the end. Adam Schiff, the House Democrat leading the inquiry, has made clear that this phase of the investigation is happening behind close doors because that’s where all serious investigations are initially conducted. But Congress is eventually going to hold hearings where witnesses will testify publicly.
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When that happens, Trump’s enablers are going to need to come up with a better excuse than the one they tried yesterday.
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For more … |
The White House seems to lack a strategy to deal with impeachment, which helps explain why Republicans are pulling transparent stunts to distract from the revelations. From The Daily Beast: “One senior Senate aide said that there has been little that the White House has offered that has given members there either direction or confidence. ‘As far as I know, there are no emissaries on the Hill telling us what to say on this,’ said the senior Senate G.O.P. aide.”
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Henry Olsen, often a Trump supporter, in The Washington Post: “He needs to persuade a small but crucial share of the electorate who frequently disapproves of him but had hitherto opposed impeachment … His current strategy is the polar opposite of what those voters want. Those voters are predisposed to disbelieve Trump’s explanations because they are wise to his act. They see that the facts underlying the Ukraine investigation are fundamentally different from those Democrats have previously rested their impeachment hopes on.”
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The Wall Street Journal editorial board, on Trump’s use of the word “lynching” to describe the process: “The President keeps asking friends to defend the indefensible … The more he forces Republicans to defend words or actions that don’t deserve defending, the more their resentment will build and the more political trouble he will be in.”
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The Times editorial board: “As more and more testimony is disclosed, it becomes clearer that the president’s only defense against impeachment is to distract from the facts and complain about how unfairly he’s being treated. So many of the defenses he floated early on have crumbled under the weight of subsequent revelations.”
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