Thank you, Joe! 🏛 Biden Undoing Donald Trump's Presidency and Unsound GOP Policies🗽
The Undoing of Donald Trump's Presidency
When Sen. Patrick Leahy gavels in the impeachment trial of the 45th President of the United States Tuesday, the 46th President will be nearly three weeks into his four-year term. Whether or not the Senate convicts Donald Trump of "high crimes and misdemeanors," Joe Biden is already well on his way to undoing much of what his predecessor did.
Biden is pushing for a massive $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package amid debate about whether it's what the Covid-scarred economy needs. Lanhee J. Chen urged Biden to take seriously a proposal by Republican senators for a much smaller relief package if he wants to gain bipartisan support for other legislative priorities and in light of a slowly recovering economy. "Recent economic data makes the case for more targeted relief," Chen wrote. "Unemployment is slowly but steadily declining and the size of the civilian labor market should be in 2022 what it was before the pandemic."
Vicky Chávez is paying close attention to the change of government in Washington. She has been living with her two children in a Salt Lake City church that offered her sanctuary three years ago when an immigration judge rejected her request for asylum. Her family faced deportation to Honduras. Watching Biden's inauguration, her 3-year-old daughter asked, "Does this mean we can go to Disneyland?" As Anna Lekas Miller wrote, Chavez answered, "Not yet. But hopefully soon."
"If Biden really wants to send a message to asylum-seekers that his administration is the new beginning that he promised," Miller observed, "he should also grant those living in sanctuary the protection they need to leave church safely and ensure that they will be able to stay in the country until they are on a viable path to citizenship."
On trial...again
Donald Trump's trial in the Senate over the Capitol riot begins a year and four days after he was acquitted in that chamber of using his power to press Ukraine's president to launch an investigation of Biden. The lone Republican who voted to convict Trump, Mitt Romney, said then, in words that turned out to be prophetic, "Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one's oath of office that I can imagine."
The Republican-controlled Senate refused to call witnesses in the trial. Democrats, who now run the chamber, shouldn't make the same mistake, wrote Michael D'Antonio. "Failure to call witnesses who could offer first-person accounts of the Trump insurrection would be prosecutorial misconduct. Including them would likely draw a bigger TV audience among Americans who want to hear fellow citizens, not politicians, explain how Trump incited the mob that then waged a bloody attack and occupation of the US Capitol."
Trump's home is now Mar-a-Lago instead of the White House, and the odds that 67 senators will vote to convict him are slim, but the trial is vital anyway to establish for history's sake the rightful curbs on presidential power, wrote Julian Zelizer. "Through Twitter and rallies, the former president filled our airwaves with lies about voter fraud and spurious claims of his victory. This was an extraordinarily dangerous use of the bully pulpit that aimed to do nothing less than overturn the legitimate results of an election by stoking anger, hatred and distrust in the electorate."
Five of Trump's impeachment lawyers withdrew amid reports that Trump wanted to re-up his discredited claim that massive voter fraud accounted for his defeat in November. "There are limits on what a defense attorney can argue," wrote Elie Honig. "For example, per the American Bar Association, it would be unethical for any attorney to raise an argument 'that he knows to be false.' The 'rigged election' narrative certainly fits that description."
Senate Republicans have signaled that a more politically palatable defense will be to argue that the Constitution never envisioned a former official being tried after leaving office. The one counter-example was the 1876 impeachment trial on corruption allegations of former Secretary of War William Belknap, who served in President Ulysses S. Grant's administration.
As the Senate's website notes, "On March 2, 1876, just minutes before the House of Representatives was scheduled to vote on articles of impeachment, Belknap raced to the White House, handed Grant his resignation, and burst into tears."
As Tim Naftali noted, when the Belknap trial came to the Senate, then under a Republican majority, "the issue of whether it was constitutional gave the president's supporters, along with senators who were against outlawing official corruption, an easy out." There's a danger of a similar outcome this time, he wrote, warning the Trump case could result in "a zombie Senate trial that mindlessly sleepwalks to an acquittal."
What happens to Trump after the trial? Larry Tye suggested that an apt parallel is the fate of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the red-baiter who terrorized public life in the early 1950s until he chose "an enemy too big to bully, the mighty US Army, the most stouthearted and sacrosanct institution in America, and which had just waged a lethal war on the Korean Peninsula against Communists."
The Senate voted to condemn McCarthy. "Newspapers banished him to page 25, next to the corset ads, or wrote him out entirely. So did his Senate colleagues. Being subjected to a punishment so extreme that it had been meted out just five times in that chamber's 165 years, meant trading in the badge of the outlier, which McCarthy had proudly worn from his first days in office, for the stigmata of the shunned that made him the butt of even the president's jokes."
Marjorie Taylor Greene
For the moment though, Trump's influence remains strong within the Republican Party. The House GOP conference refused to strip extremist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments after CNN's KFile revealed the lies and incendiary language the freshman Congresswoman from northwest Georgia had been spreading on social media.
The House Democrats who are in the majority then voted to remove Greene's committee roles, with the support of 11 Republicans.
"Greene's toxic talk creates a huge headache for the GOP," wrote Republican Alice Stewart, "and it's about time the party hit the reset button... We need to turn the page on the Trump brand of outlandish and embarrassing leadership, and Thursday's vote was a step in the right direction. We need to focus on conservative policies, not a cult of personalities."
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke out against "loony lies and conspiracy theories" this week, calling them a "cancer for the Republican Party," while praising Rep. Liz Cheney, a GOP leader who voted to impeach Trump. Richard N. Bond, who formerly headed the Republican National Committee, wrote that "McConnell knows that the GOP is at a tipping point. Republicans can continue to embrace Trump's toxicity and big-lie tactics and continue to coddle extremists. Or, they can, like the fictional newscaster Howard Beale in 'Network,' declare that they are mad as hell, are not going to take it anymore, and are going to change their ways and reclaim their party."
This is not just a Republican problem, observed Frida Ghitis. "It is a flashing red light for the entire country, warning America that if it continues on this path, it will become a country without guardrails against extremist ideologies. We have seen how that has played out in other countries and it doesn't bode well for the US."
History provides a parallel, wrote Zachary Karabell in Politico. In the mid-19th century, he noted, "The American Party, popularly referred to as the 'Know-Nothings,' " controlled statehouses and had more than 40 members in the House. "Most of them supported stringent nativist, anti-immigrant legislation; all emerged from conspiratorial clubs that had spread theories about possible Papist aggression and plots against the sovereignty of the United States." But then the movement fractured.
"The sudden implosion of the Know-Nothings should also serve as a warning to Republicans that the forces that have propelled them to the apex of American politics, helping Donald Trump win the White House, can also tear them apart, leaving barely a trace."
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