Do-Nothing Democrats?

If there's one thing that Trump's good at (other than shameless self-promotion) it's sticking insulting nicknames on people. It may sound childish, and it is, but when you're dealing with followers with such a low average IQ, then you'd better keep it simple. One of his recurring insults is to refer to the Democrats as the "Do-Nothing Democrats". This is demonstrably false.  The legislation passed by either house of Congress is public record. There have been hundreds of bills passed by the House of Representatives and sent over to the Senate this year. Most of them are moldering in Mitch McConnell's office, likely never to see a Senate vote. The Senate under McConnell, especially now that the opposition party holds a majority in the House, is nothing but a confirmation mill, existing primarily to fill the over one hundred judicial vacancies left over from the Obama presidency. Vacancies that existed because McConnell's plan as Senate Majority Leader  was very simple: obstruct Obama.

During the impeachment inquiry, the term "Do-Nothing Democrats" got a lot more use. The Democrats were accused of abandoning their job, governing, instead focusing exclusively on impeachment. Even McConnell, who wouldn't recognize hypocrisy if it were tattooed on his face, threw the slur around regularly. 

But impeachment wasn't the only thing the House was doing. Legislation continued to be drafted and voted on. Committees continued to meet. Negotiations with the Republicans and with the White House on various matters didn't stop. In fact, two omnibus spending bills, which required months of behind-the-scenes horse trading, were voted on and passed by both the House and the Senate. Also passed was NAFTA 2.0, which Trump likes to call USMCA, as if it's a completely different trade agreement. Trump had been harping about this for months, accusing Speaker Pelosi of sitting on it because she hated American workers, all the while knowing that she and the House leadership were negotiating with his trade representatives about revisions. 

Then, when the House passed it, with the changes that they asked for, Trump couldn't bear to give them any credit, suggesting that Pelosi didn't understand the agreement and only passed it to make it look like they were getting something done. What's sad is not that he pulls these maneuvers, but that so many people fall for it.

Make no mistake about it, the Democrats can walk and chew gum at the same time

Really? The CIRCLE game?

Cadets at the Army-Navy annual football game were recorded flashing a symbol that has become associated with "white power". Most of us would recognize the hand symbol on the right as the "okay" gesture and as such, pretty harmless. But in 2017, hoaxers on the website 4chan, as part of one of their juvenile plans to "trigger the liberals", started falsely claiming that the position of the fingers corresponded to the letters "W" and "P" (image on left). Their goal, was to instigate an overreaction in the media and among liberals in general to the innocuous use of the "okay" symbol.

They succeeded all too well. Actual white supremacists started using the symbol un-ironically to identify themselves to like-minded individuals.

But the use of the gesture to mean "okay" has not gone away. Then there's the "circle game". It's something that I had never heard of until the proliferation of usage of the symbol by racists. Apparently you make a circle with your thumb and forefinger and hold it by your crotch and when someone looks, you punch them. Sure.

But despite the origins as a hoax, the "okay" gesture as a symbol of white supremacy and racism has taken hold. In most cases, when not used as the traditional indication of "okay", the orientation of the hand is not as shown in the upper right, but more like how it appears to the left, or horizontally displayed.

What we are left with is a symbol that racists can use to signal their racism, but at the same time, provide plausible deniability of racist intent if challenged.

Like at the Army-Navy game.

Notwithstanding the football game being a "fun" event, these cadets were in uniform and representing the armed forces of the United States.

There is absolutely no reason for them to be signalling that something was "okay", so we default to dubious explanation that they were playing the "circle game".

I'm going to rule this "explanation" as bullshit.

The plausible deniability becomes less plausible when you consider that the right has effectively co-opted the sign and anyone using it is either using it because they are a white supremacist, or they think it's humorous to "trigger the snowflakes" by pretending to be a white supremacist. The various excuses are analogous to displaying a swastika and claiming that you're actually honoring ancient Hindu traditions or you think an SS uniform makes a cool Halloween costume.

Yes, I think it's a safe bet to conclude that those future military officers were either white supremacists or thought it was clever to openly display a white supremacist symbol.  Or were too damn stupid to see that

Circle game? I think not.

Why Impeachment Wasn't a Waste of Time

One of the honest questions that people have asked in the wake of this, the third impeachment of a president in our history, is "If the Senate will not convict, what was the point?". It's a good question. In the world of criminal prosecution, often we hear of a District Attorney declining to prosecute someone who has been arrested. If there's no chance that the accused will be convicted, why go through the time and expense of a trial? What this scenario doesn't take into account is that the decision to not prosecute is usually made due to lack of evidence. Despite what the Trumpublicans are saying, there is  a lot of evidence. I can't think of a scenario where a criminal trial is taken off the table due to the lack of impartiality on the part of either the judge or the jurors, so the analogy comparing a Senate impeachment to a courtroom is not very strong.

Since Trump was elected there has been talk about impeachable offenses. There have even been a few frivolous motions by individual Democratic House members to impeach Trump for various reasons. Not, as the Republicans would have you believe, because the Democrats didn't accept the results of the election. It was Trump, not Clinton, who suggested that he would not accept the results if he lost. Not because the Democrats were orchestrating a coup.1 Ever since Trump took office, he has continually flouted rules and norms and acted as if the law did not apply to him. There have been a parade of actions that theoretically could have warranted impeachment, like violations of the emoluments clause, where foreign governments and domestic allies spend their money at Trump properties in order to gain favor with him. Trump himself pushes these properties, most recently his decision (later rescinded) to hold the 2020 G-7 conference at one of them. His behavior during the Mueller investigation certainly suggested  reasons for impeachment. While Mueller's team could not conclusively prove that there was a conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in Russia's election interference, it was established that the campaign was happy to accept assistance. Throughout the investigation Trump actively sought to undermine it. Incidents of obstruction of justice took place on an almost daily basis as Trump first fired the man overseeing the initial FBI investigation and regularly threatening to fire Mueller, and to fire Jeff Sessions for not firing Mueller. There is no doubt that Trump paid off two women with whom he had affairs, arguably because it would affect the election if they came forward.

Despite the Republican moaning about the impeachment being partisan payback for losing the 2016 election, Democratic support for impeachment was almost nonexistent until the Ukraine phone call. Democratic leadership knew that the litany of complaints about Trump were not solid enough to actually begin impeachment proceedings. Even after the Democrats won back a House majority in the 2018 mid-terms, it took an egregious flouting of the law for there to be overwhelming Democratic backing for impeachment.

So why, knowing that the Senate would almost certainly vote to acquit,  did the House proceed with an impeachment inquiry? Why, knowing that Trump would remain in office after impeachment, did they go through all the time and trouble of impeachment?

Because it was their Constitutional duty.

It is the responsibility of the House of Representatives to hold the President accountable when he runs off the rails; it is not their responsibility to only exercise that responsibility when the Senate is willing to do their Constitutional duty.

The phone call with the Ukrainian President and all of the skulduggery surrounding it, was only the latest and most blatant example of a pattern of lawlessness and authoritarianism that Trump has engaged in since before he was elected. Trump has acted with impunity, aided and abetted by his allies and enablers in his administration and in Congress. He has placed his loyalists in positions of authority, the better to shield him from consequences of his behavior, most infamously Attorney General William Barr, who has acted , not as the United States Attorney General, but as Trump's personal lawyer and protector. Republican Senators and House members, fearful that Trump's base would turn against them, defend him no matter what. Allowing this latest and most obvious violation to go unanswered would send a terrible message to the segment of the electorate not enamored by Trump: that Trump really is above the law.

The Ukrainian phone call, no matter what Trump and his sycophantic followers may say, was only perfect in that it was a perfect example of corruption. To put it in perspective, the phone call took place one day after the Mueller testified before Congress to discuss his report, where Trump escaped the judgement that he had colluded with a foreign government to interfere with the election by a technicality. His response, after being cleared of conspiracy because he only passively accepted foreign assistance, was to actively solicit foreign interference. How could the House of Representatives let this stand?

One of the arguments that I have heard is that impeachment is a waste of time and the House of Representatives should spend their time doing what they were elected to do: legislating. This ignores the fact that other business besides impeachment has been taking place. Two omnibus budget bills were passed after extensive negotiations among House Democrats, Senate Republicans and the White House. Trump has been regularly bragging about and taking credit for bills that he has signed, ignoring the fact that these bills came from Congress, including the House of Representatives. Trump has criticized Speaker Pelosi for supposedly sitting on NAFTA 2.0, which he has dubbed USMCA, even though the Democrats have been in negotiations with the White House for months over changes to the agreement. And even though Trump has dubbed the opposition the "Do-Nothing Democrats", they have passed hundreds of bills that are now on hold in the Senate due to McConnell's obstruction. The House Democrats can evidently walk and chew gum at the same time.

The Senate is going to have a trial and they're going to acquit. There's no way that 20 Republican Senators are going to vote to convict. Trump will still be the president. But, the Democrats have sent a message that as far as they're concerned, no one is above the law. This is an important message to send to the electorate as we move into the 2020 primaries in a few months. According to the website FiveThirtyEight's aggregate of various polls,  the support for removal is very close, 47.5% for and 46.1% against. But among Democrats, the support for removal is 83%! Even among Independents, support is 42.4%. These are the people that need to be convinced that the Democrats in Congress are doing their job and who will need to be persuaded to vote for a Democrat for president in November 2020.

The Democrats in the House of Representatives did their job, they did their Constitutional duty, even if the Senate Republicans refuse to do theirs.



1 The Republicans have been able to dig up one quote by an attorney who wrote "#coup has started. First of many steps. #rebellion. #Impeachment will follow" - where it is obvious from the context that he is talking about eventual impeachment - this was in response to the firing of Acting Attorney General Sally Yates

Representative Democracy

Democracy means "rule by the people". Are we a democracy? Are we ruled "by the people"? Kinda sorta. Democracy is a continuum. On one end is what we call "direct democracy". This is a polity where any decision that affects all the people is voted upon by all the people, and those decisions are then implemented by all of the people.  In a direct democracy there would be no leaders, and no government either. As you can imagine, this would only be workable in a small community of like-minded individuals. Most communities that we think of as democracies are representative democracies. There are various types of representative democracies. Some elect a few administrators who then appoint officials to carry out their mandates.  Others elect virtually everyone who has a public function. In the United States, the legislature, which makes the laws, is chosen by people in various districts based on either population or state boundaries. The whole country votes for the chief executive, the president, who executes the laws and oversees the administrative duties of government. The executive and the legislature together appoint judges who interpret the law and mediate disputes between the executive and the legislative branches. Citizens theoretically vote for candidates who they believe will best represent their interests. They trust that, once elected, their candidate will prove to be what they thought he was.

What elected officials aren't elected to do is to take a poll every time a decision needs to be made in order to do what the majority says that they should do. That's direct democracy, not representative democracy.

This surprises many people who believe that a representative is required to do what the majority of people in her district or state want. What the members of Congress are required to do is support and defend the Constitution of the United States against ALL ENEMIES, FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC. If what the folks back home want is at odds with the oath that was taken, the a member of Congress must defer to supporting and defending the Constitution. There is also the expectation that the member will act in an ethical and moral manner and support acts that are in accordance with that foundation. An educated voter will know what the moral foundation of a candidate is before casting a vote and should have a good idea how he will act once in office. Of course, a candidate may lie about her intentions, or succumb to special interests' campaign donations. The remedy is the next election.

The motivation for writing this article came from a video I saw of an angry crowd that was yelling at their member of Congress who was attempting to explain her reasons for voting to impeach Trump. She was a Democrat who represented a district that had voted for Trump in 2016. Twitter was full of angry denunciations (which was their right) and threats to vote her out of office in 2020 (also their right). A common thread throughout many of the tweets was the demand that she vote the way her district wanted to vote. This, as I have already stated, betrays a lack of understanding of the role of an elected representative.

I don't know why this district flipped from voting for Trump to electing a Democrat in 2018, but by electing a Democrat, the voters of this district should have known that they were not electing a Trump enabler. Many Democrats who ran for office in Trump districts vowed to work with the Republicans, but that requires some compromise on the part of the Republicans, compromise that has not materialized. The voters of this district should have known that a Democrat would look at the evidence and not mindlessly support Trump and McConnell. If they wanted a Trump apologist, there was probably one running against her. Obviously, the majority of the voters in that district didn't want more of the Trump Train Wreck.

On the other hand, a member of Congress from New Jersey, convinced that he would not be re-elected if he voted to impeach Trump, met with Trump at the White House and announced, not only that he would be voting "no" on impeachment, but that he would be switching parties. No word on what his constituents think, but most of his staff just resigned.

In both of these cases, the Representatives did what they thought was either right, or maybe just what they thought was expedient, but it was their decision. The voters in their districts can decide in 2020 whether or not they want them to stay on.

Are Politicians REALLY All Crooked?

There have always been disagreements among Americans about what this country should be. Immigration, social programs, foreign relations - every possible subject has been a source of impassioned argument. The main parties have taken differing positions over the decades as well, often switching back and forth between extremes. Regarding Democracy itself, or if you prefer, government in the form of a representative, constitutional republic, was for a long time, more talk than walk. Initially only white landowners could vote. Native tribes and descendants of Africans weren't even considered people according to the law. Once some of these hurdles were jumped and all adults theoretically had a say in government, there were still many laws that were designed to disenfranchise black citizens, beatings and lynchings took place when the laws weren't restrictive enough. In many big cities, political machines had votes bought and paid for. But by the last half of the twentieth century we had convinced ourselves that we really were a democracy and that "one person, one vote" was a reality, not a pipe dream.

Unlike in past eras when the "wrong" people were simply not allowed to vote, or votes were coerced or purchased by the local political parties, today we have the illusion that we live in a Democracy.  (and anyone who "corrects me with "no, it's a Republic" gets a smack in the head) The form of democracy is there. People aren't, by law prevented from voting due to their gender or race; the majority theoretically gets to elect representatives to carry out their will; those elected representatives get to carry out their political agenda while their term lasts.

However, one of our two main political parties has made it their mission to subvert democracy. I'm talking about the Republican Party. There was a period of time when the Democrats and the Republicans, while opposed on many fronts, could work together, or at least achieve workable consensus on important issues. There was once such a thing as compromise, whereby one side would give a little to get something that they wanted, where the other party wasn't viewed as the enemy. The beginnings of this attitude on the part of the modern Republican party appeared during Bill Clinton's presidency when Newt Gingrich orchestrated a Republican electoral takeover of the House of Representatives. It didn't come to a head, however, until President Barack Obama was elected. Obama enjoyed a Democratic majority in the House and a veto-proof majority in the Senate. But at the time, Senator Mitch McConnell, who was the Senate Minority Leader, publicly stated that his main goal was to deny Obama a second term. Part of this plan was to block everything that Obama tried to accomplish, no matter what it was.

The Senate has a rule called the filibuster, which is a procedure whereby a member can delay a vote by simply talking...for a long, long time. The filibuster can be ended by a 3/5 vote, called cloture, that ends debate. In the Senate, 3/5 has been 60 members, the number of Democratic Senators that Obama started with. The Democrats lost that filibuster-proof majority when Scott Brown, a Republican, was elected in 2009 to fill the seat vacated when Ted Kennedy died. This allowed McConnell and the Republicans to effectively block everything that Obama wanted to do. Obama's signature achievement, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA - or simply ACA), was only possible because, at the time, the Republicans had no mechanism for obstruction. And not only was it legislation that was being blocked, but judicial appointments. Starting in 2010 McConnell mounted a campaign to, in many cases, deny Obama the ability to appoint federal judges by mounting filibusters. This went on until Senate Majority Leader at the time Harry Reid changed the filibuster rule as it applied to federal judges, eliminating the need for minority buy-in. This however, was only a brief respite, since the Republicans gained the Senate majority after the 2014 elections and resumed their obstruction of federal judgeship appointments. At the time this did not apply to Supreme Court appointments, but McConnell got around that by refusing to even consider Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the seat vacated by the death of Antonin Scalia.

In case you were wondering if Trump was lying about appointing a record number of federal judges: this is one of the rare cases where he was not lying. McConnell's obstruction prevented president Obama from appointing many judges during his last two years. Technically, the president's constitutional authority to appoint federal judges is tied to "the advice and consent" of the Senate, but historically, very seldom is this "consent" withheld.

But McConnell is only the most visible of the Republicans who labor to overturn "the will of the people". Here are a few examples of Republicans ignoring what the people voted for:

• Wisconsin voters elected a Democrat as governor. Before he could take office, the Republican legislature voted to strip the governor of many of his powers
• North Carolina did the same thing
• The Democratic North Carolina governor vetoed a budget that the legislature with a Republican majority submitted, but they didn't have enough votes to override. They waited until the entire Democratic caucus was at a 9-11 memorial and voted to  override the veto, since the 2/3 override threshold wasn't 2/3 of the entire legislature, but 2/3 of those present
• Several states, including my own state of Nebraska, voted to expand Medicaid coverage. The Republican governor has instructed state agencies to delay implementation and to throw up roadblocks to prevent people from actually utilizing it
• The same Nebraska governor, when faced with Republican legislators (in a ostensibly non-partisan legislature) who did not vote with him, he bankrolled primary challenges to those "disloyal" Republicans. 
• Lincoln Nebraska Republicans bankrolled a ballot initiative to term limit a Democratic mayor who had already announced that he was running for another term
• In Maine, South Dakota, Nevada and Oklahoma citizen ballot initiatives were overturned by the Republican governors and the legislatures
• In Florida, a ballot initiative restored voting rights to convicted felons who had served their sentences. The Republican governor and legislature instituted roadblocks that would prevent most from actually being able to vote (this was overturned by the courts)
• Let's not forget voter suppression laws. They require identification, and then close DMV's and other places where ID can be secured. 

And all of this brings us to the current impeachment process. Let's stipulate that there can be legitimate differences of opinion regarding whether Trump should be impeached and removed from office. (I don't really believe that, but stick with me) One would expect both Republicans and Democrats to listen to the evidence and make their decisions based on the evidence. But was it happening is that the House Republicans have made no pretense of listening to the evidence, but their "defense" is shouting irrelevant nonsense. The other day McConnell stated in a television interview that he would be coordinating with the White House during the probable upcoming Senate trial. Other top Republican Senators have also stated that they have already made up their minds. While the Democrats have agonized over the last almost three years over whether Trump's increasingly long list of impeachable actions is in fact impeachable, the Republicans have had no similar crisis of the soul. 

The difference is that Democrats, no matter what you think of their actual policies, naively believe that you have to play fair, that you have to respect the will of the people. When they lose, they do a lot of naval gazing and try to figure out how they failed, usually blaming themselves, then try like hell to get back in power...by way of the next election. Republicans, on the other hand, will do whatever is necessary to put their policies in place and maintain their positions of power. It doesn't matter what the voters say or do, it doesn't matter what the law says, it doesn't matter what's ethical, they will ignore it all to stay in office and get their vision implemented. This goes a long way to explaining why Republicans, who used to be all about family and God and fiscal responsibility and solid foreign alliances and free trade have hitched their wagons to Trump, who is none of those things. Trump, they have discovered, can deliver voters, many of whom don't care about the Republican agenda, so they put up with him in order to put conservative judges on the bench and cut taxes for the rich. 

So, when you dismissively say that all politicians are corrupt and that there's no difference between the two parties, take a look at what the Republicans are doing and get back to me when you've taken the blinders off. 

Inspector General's Report

One of Trump's go-to arguments about the Mueller Investigation and its predecessor investigation overseen by the FBI and its director, James Comey, was that it was a politically motivated hit job. It was either ordered by President Obama or the so-called Deep State, depending on the day of the week. He and his supporters assert that there was no legal reason to start the investigation and that his campaign had been "spied upon". He characterized the investigations as unconstitutional and treasonous.
According to his circuitous reasoning, the whole investigation was predicated on the "Steele Dossier" (which it wasn't) which turned out to be unreliable (it was) so therefore the whole investigation was illegal. Anyone other than a brainwashed Trump Cultist could see that there were ample reasons to at least investigate. U.S. Intelligence agencies had determined that Russia was interfering with and attempting to influence our election; several members of Trump's campaign, including family members, had an inordinate amount of unexplained contact with Russians; Wikileaks was releasing emails and other documents that had been stolen by Russians; Trump was publicly praising Wikileaks and publicly asking Russia to find Clinton's supposedly missing emails; Trump fired the guy who was overseeing the investigation, Director James Comey and bragged to visiting Russian diplomats that firing Comey took the pressure off him. None of this proved anything, but just what we the public knew was certainly grounds to look into it!

Mueller eventually concluded that the evidence did not support a charge of conspiracy, or that the campaign had actively coordinated with Russia, while acknowledging that the Trump campaign was happy to passively accept the help. They also neglected to notify the FBI of attempts by Russians to coordinate with Trump staffers (including Don Junior). In my view they were saved by laziness.

Once it was clear that Mueller's report contained no "smocking" gun, Trump falsely claimed to have been exonerated (even though the report specifically stated that it did not exonerate him) he continued to attack the investigatory team, threatening to charge them with treason and to "investigate the investigators". Two investigations eventually were started. The first was the investigation that just concluded, by the Justice Department Inspector General authorized by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Internal investigations are what inspector generals of cabinet departments do. Possibly worried that the independent Inspector General might reach conclusions that he and Trump did not like, current Attorney General Barr authorized another investigation. Barr has made statements in line with Trump's paranoid rantings, seemingly concluding that the original investigation was tainted before either investigation was completed.

But enough background.

The Justice Department's Inspector General's report, although identifying a long list of problems with how the investigation was conducted, nonetheless concluded that the Russia investigation was not politically motivated and had an adequate legal basis. Furthermore, no political bias was present in the way it was carried out. Most of the problems that were identified fell within standard FBI procedure; Director Wray is looking at making procedural changes to ensure similar problems do not occur in the future. The biggest issue is the way FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) were obtained. The report indicates that important details were omitted from the warrant applications and in one case an email was altered to omit exculpatory information.

added note:
After rereading the executive summary, the problems identified by the Inspector General can be summarized as follows:

• The application to the FISA court for surveillance of Carter Page was based in part on the "Steele Dossier"
• The application represented Steele, and by extension, his reporting, as reliable, even though Steele himself expressed reservation about at least one of his sources
• The application omitted exculpatory statements by Carter Page
• After Steele provided Mother Jones with information from his report, his status as an official source with the FBI was terminated, but he continued to unofficially provide information to the FBI through Bruce Ohr
• There was a possible perception of conflict of interest in that Bruce Ohr's wife had worked for Fusion GPS, which had hired Michael Steele

Despite allegations that the FISA application neglected to mention that Steele had been hired to do opposition research on Trump by the DNC, the applications contained a footnote to that effect. 

With one exception (an investigator altering an email to delete exculpatory information) the issues identified were mainly procedural, i.e. the investigators were not acting outside of FBI/DOJ procedures, but that the policies and procedures should be tightened up and better oversight of investigations should be included in these changes. 

To reiterate, the Inspector General report debunks the Trumpist conspiracy theory that the Russia investigation was a "Witch Hunt" initiated by Trump's enemies, either the Obama Administration, or some imaginary "Deep State", including twelve, or sixteen, or seventeen "angry Democrats".