By Refusing To Impeach Trump, Pelosi Is Normalizing, In An Historical Sense, His Aberrant Behavior

Hey, Nancy, turn around-- The House is on fire!

I actually hate to say it, but Pelosi, once a champion-- albeit not lately-- for progressive causes, is now the enemy, inadvertently-- an essential part of the Trumpist state. She funded his concentration camps. She's funding his wall. She's no longer fit-- not even a little-- to lead the Democratic Party in Congress and her entire leadership team (Steny Hoyer, Jim Clyburn, Ben Ray Luján, Hakeem Jeffries and Cheri Bustos) needs to be removed from leadership with her. House Democrats are jeopardizing their own credibility with the voters by supporting her. Jerry Nadler has wound up with a vigorous primary because of his bowing to her "no impeachment" demands. She no longer looks out for working families-- only for a handful of right-wing Blue Dogs who don't want to be forced into voting on the issues that won the Democrats the 2018 midterms. She's delivering on virtually nothing. And now her impeachment stand is imperiling how voters see the party.

Buzzflash e-mailed the Robert Kennedy meme above. They reminded people on their mailing list that "If Trump normalizes seeking dirt on political opponents through extortion of foreign governments and Nancy Pelosi still won't proceed with impeachment, she is enabling lawlessness."

This past week, Trump admitted that "he had talked with the president of Ukraine about digging up political dirt on Biden's son, Hunter, and Biden himself. It should not be a surprise because not long ago Trump stated that he did not see anything wrong with accepting 'kompromat' (compromising material) from a foreign power... Now, we are facing a Constitutional crisis because the inspector general for our intelligence services wants to turn over an 'urgent' whistleblower report to Congressional oversight committees. However, the Department of Justice (with what we can assume are directives from the White House) has informed the Director of National Intelligence not to release what is assumed to be a highly-damaging report.

What makes the potential revelations-- if Adam Schiff (D-CA), Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, can pry loose the whistleblower's report which by law his committee is entitled to-- is that Trump may have been dangling $250 million in military aid to Ukraine to extort them into muddying up Biden through his son's business dealings there. That is taxpayer money that the Grifter-in-Chief was very possibly using in a political shakedown scheme.

After word leaked to Congress of Trump's alarming behavior, he did finally release the $250 million to Ukraine, likely in an effort to protect himself from the assumed charges in the whistleblower's alarming document.

...The Wall Street Journal reported today that in the pivotal phone call on July 25 between Trump and the president of Ukraine, Trump mentioned obtaining "kompromat" on Biden at least eight times. The Washington Post wrote that its sources said that the whistleblower indicated that there may have been multiple calls.

As is is his common practice, Trump is trying to normalize his apparent illegal behavior. His trusted aide is none other than the dumbfounding master of jabberwocky, Rudolph Giuliani. In fact, BuzzFlash ran an article today headlined, Rudy Giuliani Lost His Mind on CNN and Admitted He Was A Co-Conspirator in Ukraine Deal.

Schiff is expressing outrage and promising action to get the whisteblower report released, but at the languid pace the House Dems move, don't hold your breath, even if Schiff appears a bit more stalwart than the other hapless Dem committee chairs.

Today, Nancy Pelosi proposed that a law that she is recommending be passed that would allow for the indictment of future presidents. However, it wouldn't apply to Trump... Given that Trump poses a threat to our national security on a regular basis, you would think that Pelosi would put the safety of the U.S. above her obsession with re-electing twenty representatives that won districts in 2018 that Trump won in 2016.

Moreover, if the whistleblower charges are revealed, not only would Trump have committed another act of obstructing justice, he would have heinously broken the law and imperiled our way of government-- which is nothing new, just in a more glaring way. Meanwhile, he said today, echoing Nixon, that he has the right to do whatever he wants as president.

...[Pelosi] can either try and protect her 2018 Trump district reps-- which assumes that the Dems can control the debate, but that hasn't been the case thus far given Trump's mastery of the media-- or she can stop enabling a chronic and endangering law breaker who holds the highest office in the land.

As an article in This Week was headlined, Trump Officials Are Reportedly Ignoring House Democrats Because They Know Nancy Pelosi Won't Impeach. Pelosi, in her implacable anti-impeachment stance is facilitary Trump's venal and illegal behavior.

To allow the president of the United States to regularly violate the rule of law is to call into question our whole system of justice for the rest of us. Why claim that every person should follow the law or face the consequences when the president of the United States has immunity from egregious crimes?

Pelosi only wants to say that she thinks Trump is deplorable, but she is enabling his law breaking by not holding him accountable. On top of that, she is making the Democrats in the House, such as Nadler, appear weak and ineffectual, which is not going to help the Dems in 2020.

It will be a bit longer before the "urgent" whistleblower crisis plays itself out, but it is already clear that Pelosi must take a stand on behalf of the rule of law or enable Trump's illegalities.

Indeed, her current intractable stance that Trump will not be held accountable may backfire and put the very Dem Reps that she is concerned about in serious jeopardy.

Foremost, however, is that Pelosi must uphold the rule of law, or our system of justice is in grave peril.

On Saturday morning, Tom Nichols, writing for The Atlantic, noted that If This Isn’t Impeachable, Nothing Is. He's right, of course; but it's crucial to remember that "this" is just one in a long series of impeachable offenses that Trump commits every single week. Maybe this is the worst of them... or maybe not. Pelosi is not up to finding out. Nichols asserts that if the reports about Ukraine-gate are true, Trump "should be impeached and removed from office immediately." He claims-- and he's wrong here-- that "Until now, there was room for reasonable disagreement over impeachment as both a matter of politics and a matter of tactics. The Mueller report revealed despicably unpatriotic behavior by Trump and his minions, but it did not trigger a political judgment with a majority of Americans that it warranted impeachment. The Democrats, for their part, remained unwilling to risk their new majority in Congress on a move destined to fail in a Republican-controlled Senate." Any of the claims against Trump would have triggered an impeachment of any pre-Pelosi president.

Now, however, we face an entirely new situation. In a call to the new president of Ukraine, Trump reportedly attempted to pressure the leader of a sovereign state into conducting an investigation-- a witch hunt, one might call it-- of a U.S. citizen, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden.

As the Ukrainian Interior Ministry official Anton Gerashchenko told the Daily Beast when asked about the president’s apparent requests, “Clearly, Trump is now looking for kompromat to discredit his opponent Biden, to take revenge for his friend Paul Manafort, who is serving seven years in prison.”

If this in itself is not impeachable, then the concept has no meaning. Trump’s grubby commandeering of the presidency’s fearsome and nearly uncheckable powers in foreign policy for his own ends is a gross abuse of power and an affront both to our constitutional order and to the integrity of our elections.

...There is no spin, no deflection, no alternative theory of the case that can get around the central fact that President Trump reportedly attempted to use his office for his own gain, and that he put the foreign policy and the national security of the United States at risk while doing so. He ignored his duty as the commander in chief by intentionally trying to place an American citizen in jeopardy with a foreign government. He abandoned his obligations to the Constitution by elevating his own interests over the national interest. By comparison, Watergate was a complicated judgment call.

In a better time and in a better country, Republicans would now join with Democrats and press for Trump’s impeachment. This won’t happen, of course; even many of Biden’s competitors for the presidency seem to be keeping their distance from this mess, perhaps in the hope that Biden and Trump will engage in a kind of mutually assured political destruction. (Elizabeth Warren, for one, renewed her call for impeachment—but without mentioning Biden.) This is to their shame. The Democratic candidates should now unite around a call for an impeachment investigation, not for Biden’s sake, but to protect the sanctity of our elections from a predatory president who has made it clear he will stop at nothing to stay in the White House... [I]f this kind of dangerous, unhinged hijacking of the powers of the presidency is not enough for either the citizens or their elected leaders to demand Trump’s removal, then we no longer have an accountable executive branch, and we might as well just admit that we have chosen to elect a monarch and be done with the illusion of constitutional order in the United States.

Lenore Taylor is the editor of the Australian version of The Guardian and she was in DC last week and watched the Trump press conference in California, near the Mexican border. She wrote that the whole spectacle stunned her. She suddenly realized "how much the reporting of Trump necessarily edits and parses his words, to force it into sequential paragraphs or impose meaning where it is difficult to detect."

She wrote that she "joined as the president was explaining at length how powerful the concrete was. Very powerful, it turns out. It was unlike any wall ever built, incorporating the most advanced 'concrete technology.' It was so exceptional that would-be wall-builders from three unnamed countries had visited to learn from it... The wall went very deep and could not be burrowed under. Prototypes had been tested by 20 'world-class mountain climbers-- That’s all they do, they love to climb mountains,' who had been unable to scale it. It was also 'wired, so that we will know if somebody is trying to break through,' although one of the attending officials declined a presidential invitation to discuss this wiring further, saying, 'Sir, there could be some merit in not discussing it,' which the president said was a 'very good answer.' The wall was 'amazing,' 'world class,' 'virtually impenetrable' and also 'a good, strong rust colour' that could later be painted. It was designed to absorb heat, so it was 'hot enough to fry an egg on,' There were no eggs to hand, but the president did sign his name on it and spoke for so long the TV feed eventually cut away, promising to return if news was ever made."

He did, at one point, concede that would-be immigrants, unable to scale, burrow, blow torch or risk being burned, could always walk around the incomplete structure, but that would require them walking a long way. This seemed to me to be an important point, but the monologue quickly returned to the concrete.

In writing about this not-especially-important or unusual press conference I’ve run into what US reporters must encounter every day. I’ve edited skittering, half-finished sentences to present them in some kind of consequential order and repeated remarks that made little sense.

In most circumstances, presenting information in as intelligible a form as possible is what we are trained for. But the shock I felt hearing half an hour of unfiltered meanderings from the president of the United States made me wonder whether the editing does our readers a disservice.

I’ve read so many stories about his bluster and boasting and ill-founded attacks, I’ve listened to speeches and hours of analysis, and yet I was still taken back by just how disjointed and meandering the unedited president could sound. Here he was trying to land the message that he had delivered at least something towards one of his biggest campaign promises and sounding like a construction manager with some long-winded and badly improvised sales lines.

I’d understood the dilemma of normalising Trump’s ideas and policies-- the racism, misogyny and demonisation of the free press. But watching just one press conference from Otay Mesa helped me understand how the process of reporting about this president can mask and normalise his full and alarming incoherence.