Every Time Another Trump Lie Is Exposed, Another Republican-Held Seat In Congress Is Put In Jeopardy

Rhapsody In Blonde by Nancy Ohanian

Republicans favor Trump and Democrats don't. That's not news. The new poll from YouGov for The Economist breaks down Trump's favorable/unfavorable ratings among independent voters. And the news is bad for Trump. Among self-identified Independents 22% view him very favorably and 19% view him somewhat favorably for a total of 41%. Meanwhile 36% view him very unfavorably and 13% view him somewhat unfavorably (49%). Worse is that his momentum is all downward. Every single day the news grows worse and worse for him.

And voters are now aware that his defense is to lie and lie and lie. Few voters other than Republicans believe anything he says. Glenn Kseeler and his fact checking crew and the Washington Post wrote Monday morning that as Trump "approaches his 1,000th day in office Wednesday, he has significantly stepped up his pace of spouting exaggerated numbers, unwarranted boasts and outright falsehoods. As of Oct. 9, his 993rd day in office, he had made 13,435 false or misleading claims… That’s an average of almost 22 claims a day since our last update 65 days ago."

Greg Sargent made it clear in his Post column yesterday that there are machinations behind the barrage of lies and that Trump is attempting to shore up his base by assuring them that he is, basically above the law. Sargent wrote that "It’s worth stepping back and stating in plain language just how profoundly" Señor Trumpanzee "is corrupting our political system right now... his total defiance of oversight poses a massive challenge to our constitutional order. [But] that’s only half the story... Trump is not merely staking out an absolute refusal to cooperate with any and all lawful subpoenas, on the deeply absurd grounds that the House’s impeachment inquiry is illegitimate, as the White House counsel has argued. Rather, Trump is adopting that stance while simultaneously claiming the absolute right to bend large swaths of the government toward his goal of rigging the next election on his own behalf. Thus, Trump is declaring absolute authority to use extraordinarily corrupt means to avoid facing a fair election next year, while also declaring total immunity to any and all congressional efforts to prevent him from rigging that election, or even to hold him accountable for it. What Sragent is getting across is that "Trump’s explicitly declared position is that he is constrained by no existing legitimate mechanism of accountability.

Hole-in-One by Nancy Ohanian

“It’s now the official position of the White House that soliciting foreign election interference is appropriate,” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. The White House isn’t even contesting that this happened any longer: “The White House is saying, ‘Yeah, he did it, and it’s fine.'"

Let’s also note the multidimensional nature of this “appropriate” conduct. Trump is enlisting a foreign power both to falsify the corruption of the last election on his behalf-- by covering up the truth about it-- and to facilitate the corruption of the coming election on his behalf, as well.

Much of the government has been enlisted in this effort-- and to prevent the full truth about it from coming out. Attorney General William P. Barr is traveling the globe in pursuit of the first aspect of that mission. Barr’s Justice Department and the acting director of national intelligence tried to unlawfully bury the whistleblower account of the scheme. Now that it did come out, the State Department is defying legitimate subpoenas designed to get to the bottom of it.

Trump himself is now claiming absolute authority to do all of this. He says he has an “absolute right” to ask other countries to investigate “corruption,” while saying openly that the corruption he’s talking about involves Biden, thus claiming total authority to solicit foreign help in rigging the next election.

Add to this the fact that Trump’s lawyers argued that his extensive and likely criminal obstruction of justice could not constitute obstruction by definition, because Trump has the power to shut down any inquiry into himself, for any reason. Those obstruction efforts, too, constituted an effort to bury the truth about the corruption of the last election on his behalf, and to elude accountability for it.

All this is the larger context in which we should view Trump’s declaration that the impeachment inquiry is illegitimate.

As Josh Chafetz notes, this level of defiance of oversight probably amounts to contempt of Congress, which is a crime. Trump is declaring the authority to engage in bottomless corruption to prevent his removal in a legitimate election, while also declaring the authority to corruptly-- and perhaps illegally-- shut down the people’s last resort against it.

Trump’s effort to corrupt the election, and his placement of himself beyond all congressional oversight, are part of the same story: the attempted destruction of any and all mechanisms of accountability.

Meanwhile, David Leonhardt was tackling the question of who would be hurt worse by the impeachment process, Trump or the Democrats. "Trump," he wrote, "deserves to be impeached on the merits, and, if he is, it will probably further sully him in the eyes of swing voters, much as it did to Clinton. The big question now is how well will Democrats handle the process. They should move quickly to hold more public hearings, rather than the private sessions they held last week, so Americans can better understand how Trump has perverted American foreign policy and national security for his own benefit. Ultimately, impeachment may well hurt some Democrats from Trump-friendly districts, much as it hurt several Republicans 20 years ago. But it is also very likely to damage Trump-- as his own sullen reaction suggests that he realizes. That’s a trade-off worth making."

In real terms, that means the Republicans might pick up a tiny handful of seats held by utterly worthless Blue Dogs in red seats-- probably Kendra Horn in Oklahoma and Joe Cunningham in South Carolina-- while losing dozens of House seats to Democrats in districts where winning majorities is dependent on independent voters. The GOP might as well get ready to say goodbye to half a dozen seats in Texas alone. Trump is endangering reelection bids by Republicans who Trump would never be able to identify in a police lineup-- from Ross Spano, Vern Buchanan and Brian Mast in Florida and Republicans across the Midwest like Fred Upton (MI), Steve Chabot (OH), Steve King (IA), Rodney Davis (IL), Mike Bost (IL), Don Bacon (NE) and Tim Walberg (MI) to incumbents in the northeast like John Katko, Lee Zeldin and Peter King in New York and Brian Fitzpatrick, Scott Perry and Mike Kelly in Pennsylvania. Please consider helping Señor Trumpanzee clean out more congressional Republicans by clicking on the 2020 Blue America thermometer on the right and contributing what you can to the progressive candidates of your choice.