Almost everybody assumes that, even if Democrats retake the House in November, impeachment is a non-starter because two-thirds of the Senate would have to vote in favor of removing him from office, and there’s been no sign so far that even overwhelming evidence would get enough Republicans to go along. Lucian Truscott, writing at Salon, begs to disagree. Few Senators have defended Trump, and those on the Senate Intelligence Committee, in stark contrast to their House counterparts, have given indications that they take this as seriously as the Democrats on the committee do. And they don’t like how Trump has treated their longtime colleague, Jeff Sessions.
While generally incompetent, Trump does know how to play the media, so it’s not surprising to learn that he told Cowboys owner Jerry Jones that the controversy over players protesting during the national anthem was a winning issue for him. This came out in court proceedings as part of Colin Kaepernick’s case alleging coordination among owners to blackball him from the NFL.
Eric Greitens, the ex-Navy Seal-turned-Missouri governor, abruptly resigned yesterday, and not because of lurid allegations that he blackmailed his mistress. He resigned, as Josh Marshall notes in a TPM Prime piece, on about an hour’s notice after a court ordered him to turn over documents from his dark money political group to the state House committee investigating wrongdoing for a potential impeachment trial. It’s not yet clear whether this will keep the records in the dark.
There have been suggestions that the outgoing South Carolina Congressman change his name to Even Trey Gowdy, as in “Even Trey Gowdy thinks “spygate” is bullshit.” Indeed, Gowdy’s blunt dismissal of the lie is one of the signs Truscott seizes on for his pro-impeachment argument.
Today’s schadenfreude moment comes courtesy of court proceedings in one of the Michael Cohen cases: Prosecutors told a judge that the FBI is reconstructing shredded documents seized in the raid on Cohen’s office
Democrats who think politicians can cozy up to corporations and still be progressive get a wakeup call from climate activist Bill McKibben, who notes that liberal darling Justin Trudeau just nationalized a pipeline from Alberta’s tar sands to the coast despite what that would do to hasten the doom of life on Earth. Why? The same reason corporate Democrats always do it: For the money.
But you can count on Democrats to keep their troops entertained with what they do best, the Grand Empty Gesture. To that end, the Illinois legislature did what Delaware’s General Assembly couldn’t and passed the Equal Rights Amendment, a mere 36 years after the deadline for it to matter. The importance was summed up thus by one lawmaker:
“The main reason for adopting the Equal Rights Amendment today … would be the symbolic importance of it. The rejection of it is in some ways insulting. So, the symbolic importance of it is to who we are as a nation — what our aspirations are, what our values are. That in itself is an important affirmation of who we are.”
It should be noted that the Illinois government is ranked as one of the most corrupt in the nation, but hey, the citizens now have an important affirmation of who they are. Which is nice.