The White House refuses to send witnesses to the House inquiry. Talk of obstruction grows. Experts say a crisis is at hand
Source: Impeachment: how Trump’s hardball tactics put the constitution in peril | US news | The Guardian
Tag: US politics
Experts on Trump’s conduct: ‘Plainly an abuse of power, plainly impeachable’ | US news | The Guardian
Was what he did really so bad? And even if it was bad – was it truly impeachable?
As Democrats hit the gas on impeachment this week, Donald Trump exhorted Republicans to defend him on the substance of his actions in the Ukraine scandal, instead of sniping about the process.
“Rupublicans [sic],” Trump tweeted “go with Substance and close it out!”
Trump’s misconduct, critics say, includes using the power of the presidency to solicit foreign intervention in the 2020 US election, by trying to force Ukraine to help conduct a political hit on Joe Biden.
Trump denies all wrongdoing and most of his defenders do too. But there is a (slightly) subtler version of Trump defense that Republicans are trying out which says that while Trump’s conduct has not been irreproachable, neither has it been impeachable.
The argument, according to constitutional experts and historians of impeachment, is not a strong one. In fact, Trump’s conduct, according to analysts interviewed by the Guardian, hews more closely than any previous conduct by any other president to what scholars conceive as a concrete example of impeachable behavior.
Frank O Bowman III, author of High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump and a professor at the University of Missouri school of law, said that Trump’s having extorted actions with no legitimate US national purpose from a foreign country that is “literally at risk of losing its political and territorial independence” without US support was impeachable.
“It’s plainly an abuse of power, and it’s plainly impeachable,” Bowman said.
“I think these are quite clearly, precisely the type of high crimes and misdemeanors that the founders not only feared but actually discussed at the constitutional convention,” said Jeffrey A Engel, co-author of Impeachment: An American History and director of the center for presidential history at Southern Methodist University.
“The high crime is the trade – give me dirt on Joe Biden and his son, and I’ll give you in return military aid and help with your economy – I think that is certainly impeachable,” said Corey Brettschneider, author of The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents and a professor of constitutional law at Brown University.
Many are finding defending Trump difficult at the moment. Republican lawmakers spent Thursday fleeing reporters trying to ask the question, “Do you think it’s OK for the president to pressure foreign governments to interfere in our elections?”. One lawmaker even headbutted a camera rather than reply.
The reason Trump’s alleged conduct is plainly impeachable, historians say, has to do with US impeachment precedent and with what the authors of the US constitution meant when they provisioned impeachment for “high crimes and misdemeanors”.
“If we look at history both British and American – and it’s important to look at British history, because our Framers were of course rebel Englishmen and they adopted the phrase ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ in full recognition of the fact that that was a parliamentary term of art, and that therefore they were adopting to some degree, by reference, previous usages of that term – all of that leads to really the inescapable conclusion that one of the grounds for impeachment has always been abuse of power,” said Bowman.
‘Peculiar, irrational, self-destructive’: Trump’s week of impeachment rage | US news | The Guardian
But inside Donald Trump’s head, there was no calm. The storm was a firestorm.
The president’s behaviour broke boundaries so stupendously that the fact he congratulated communist China on its 70th birthday, reportedly demanded alligators or snakes and flesh-piercing spikes for his border wall and wrote the unpresidential word “BULLSHIT” on social media were soon relegated to historical footnotes.
Instead, as the walls of an impeachment inquiry closed in, it will be remembered as Trump’s week of rage. His incoherent, wacky statements raised new fears over his state of mind. His brazen invitation to foreign powers to interfere in American elections raised new fears over his moral nihilism.
“It is without parallel,” said Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “I have never seen a president behave in such a peculiar, irrational and self-destructive way as Trump in the last week.”
Source: ‘Peculiar, irrational, self-destructive’: Trump’s week of impeachment rage | US news | The Guardian
‘A simple pattern’: how Trump claims victory when facts suggest otherwise | US news | The Guardian
Another drama, another cliffhanger, another disaster averted at the last minute. Donald Trump had saved the world. Again.
The strange saga of the US-Mexico trade war that never was serves up the latest example of Trump’s reality-television presidency. Time and again he has manufactured crises, set deadlines, made threats, pulled back from the brink and claimed victory while keeping the details notoriously vague.
The cycle of razzle-dazzle enables Trump to galvanise his support base, selling himself as a man of action, and keeps the media mesmerised while his government pushes reforms or slashes regulations on the quiet. When the smoke clears, however, not much of substance has really changed.
Source: ‘A simple pattern’: how Trump claims victory when facts suggest otherwise | US news | The Guardian
William Barr is acting like Trump’s henchman | Austin Sarat | Opinion | The Guardian
William Barr has shown himself to be a loyal foot soldier for the president who appointed him. From his 24 March summary of the “principal conclusions” of the Mueller report to his press conference on the day he released a redacted version of the Mueller report to Congress, to his testimony on Wednesday before the Senate judiciary committee, Barr’s recent performances have demonstrated the extreme loyalty Donald Trump found wanting in his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions.
And what is good for the president is bad for America.
Barr’s appearance before the Senate judiciary committee and his refusal to appear on Thursday at a House judiciary committee hearing were just the latest disappointments for those who hoped his nomination and confirmation would once again make the office of attorney general a bulwark of the rule of law.
Source: William Barr is acting like Trump’s henchman | Austin Sarat | Opinion | The Guardian
All the president’s men and women: how disobedient aides saved Trump | US news | The Guardian
The myth of Donald Trump presents him as a man of authority, a leader loved and feared, a boss who demands loyalty – and gets it.
In fact, nobody much listens to what Trump says and that fact might have saved his presidency, according to one of the more startling passages in the 448-page report by special counsel Robert Mueller that was released on Thursday.
“The president’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful,” Mueller writes, describing potential criminal obstruction of justice, “but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”
If all the president’s men failed Richard Nixon by losing a grip on their conspiracy, this president’s men and women may have helped Trump by treating his conspiratorial orders as exactly what they were, invitations to likely criminal conduct, and duly ignoring them.
“It’s more than a little ironic, for all the talk of the ‘unitary executive’ and the ‘deep state conspiracy’, that the refusal by Trump’s own staffers and subordinates to do much of his bidding may have helped to insulate the president from a firmer conclusion about obstruction,” tweeted Steve Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law.
Source: All the president’s men and women: how disobedient aides saved Trump | US news | The Guardian
Trump administration sabotages major conservation effort, defying Congress | Environment | The Guardian
Scientists and officials around the US have told the Guardian that the Trump administration has withdrawn funding for a large, successful conservation program – in direct contradiction of instructions from Congress.
Unique in scale and ambition, the program comprises 22 research centers that tackle big-picture issues affecting huge swaths of the US, such as climate change, flooding and species extinction. They are known as Landscape Conservation Cooperatives – or were, because 16 of them are now on indefinite hiatus or have dissolved.
“I just haven’t seen anything like this in my almost 30 years of working with the federal government,” said a scientist at the Fish and Wildlife Service who worked for one of the LCCs and wished to remain anonymous, because federal employees were instructed not to speak with the Guardian for this story. “There is this lack of accountability.”
Alarm over leaked US database targeting journalists and immigration activists | US news | The Guardian
Photojournalist Ariana Drehsler was stopped for a secondary screening three separate times in one week while crossing the US-Mexico border to cover the migrant caravan in Tijuana this winter – unaware that the journey she had taken countless times before was suddenly more complicated because her name was logged in a secret government database.
That database, part of something called Operation Secure Line, listed 59 advocates and journalists tied to the migrant caravan, according to leaked documents obtained by local news station NBC 7.
“I am an observer, I am actually kind of shy, I don’t know what I could’ve done to be put on a watchlist,” Drehsler, a freelancer based in San Diego, told the Guardian.
Drehsler was grouped in the database as “media/journalist”, alongside others identified as “instigator” and “organizer”. Her image in the database, like those of several others, is marked with a bright green X on her face to indicate an alert has been placed on her passport. NBC 7 reported that the database included a dossier on each person.
Civil rights activists and members of Congress have expressed alarm about this database, as well as the arrest of more than 37 other immigration activists by Donald Trump’s administration. They see it as a politically motivated crackdown on media and campaigners as Trump seeks to ramp up the pressure to build a border wall.
“I have not seen this kind of systematic targeting of journalists and advocates in this way,” said the ACLU staff attorney Esha Bhandari. “I think it is very troubling, very disturbing.”
Bhandari said there was a link between the database and the Trump administration’s arrests of immigrant activists and advocates, which could have a chilling effect on people exercising their right to free speech.
Trump attacks ‘Wacky Nut Job’ Ann Coulter over border wall criticism | US news | The Guardian
Donald Trump will be making a significant request for border wall funds and seeking money to stand up his “Space Force” as a new branch of the military in the White House budget being released next week, an administration official said on Saturday.
As the official did so, the president was on Twitter calling the hard-right commentator Ann Coulter a “Wacky Nut Job” for questioning his success on the wall.
Coulter, previously a supporter of the president and the author of a book entitled In Trump We Trust, has turned on him over his failure to secure funding for the wall by conventional means.
Late on Saturday, after a day’s golf in Florida, the president tweeted that “Wacky Nut Job Ann Coulter … still hasn’t figured out that, despite all odds and an entire Democrat Party of Far Left Radicals against me (not to mention certain Republicans who are sadly unwilling to fight), I am winning on the Border.
“Major sections of Wall are being built and renovated, with MUCH MORE to follow shortly. Tens of thousands of illegals are being apprehended (captured) at the Border and NOT allowed into our Country. With another President, millions would be pouring in. I am stopping an invasion as the Wall gets built.”
The tweets from Trump represented a harshening of rhetoric since January, during the record-breaking government shutdown over his demands for a wall. Then, the president mused that Coulter might have turned against him because he did not return her calls. On Saturday, Coulter did not immediately return his tweet.
The official who spoke anonymously about the budget, to the Associated Press, said the White House would propose serious cuts in safety net programs used by many Americans and other non-defense accounts. That will probably trigger a showdown with Congress.
It is unclear how much more money the president will seek to build the wall on the border with Mexico. The request is coming on top of the $8.1bn Trump already has access to, which includes some $3.6bn he has trying to shift from military accounts after declaring a national emergency. Trump invoked the emergency declaration last month after Congress denied his request for $5.7bn. Instead, Congress approved nearly $1.4bn for the border barriers, far less than he wanted.
The president’s Republican allies in the Senate, uneasy over the emergency declaration, are poised next week to debate terminating it. Some view it as an overreach of executive power. Congress appears to have enough votes to reject Trump’s declaration, but not to overturn his expected veto of their action.
Source: Trump attacks ‘Wacky Nut Job’ Ann Coulter over border wall criticism | US news | The Guardian
Trump’s private talks with Putin may contain clues to his Russia romance | US news | The Guardian
Since Donald Trump was sworn in as president he has met his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, five times. The details of their conversations remain unknown to the public, and in most cases even to senior administration officials.
Democrats in Congress are now demanding more details of communications between the two leaders. Secrecy around such meetings, they say, raises fresh questions about the nature of Trump’s relationship with Putin at a time when his ties to Russia are the subject of several investigations.
The meetings with Putin are not the only subject of such Democratic demands. House leaders left little room for doubt this week that they will utilize their newly minted majority to cast a wide net around the president, his family and their businesses.
The judiciary committee issued document requests to 81 individuals and entities, seeking information on everything from contacts between Trump aides and Moscow to hush money payments to women and possible obstruction of justice.
It all came a week after Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, testified before Congress and implicated the president in alleged criminal activity spanning decades.
Source: Trump’s private talks with Putin may contain clues to his Russia romance | US news | The Guardian
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