Nancy Pelosi caved in to pressure from even the more conservative members of her House caucus and announced she approved pressing for impeachment. (Ryan Grim, Why the House Democratic Caucus Was Able to Move So Rapidly Toward Impeachment The Intercept 09/256/2019) But lest anyone think she might aggressively push for it, she almost immediately stepped on her own message by trying to limit the focus of impeachment to the Ukraine-Trump scandal and his conversation Zelensky that recently broke. (Kyle Cheney et al, Democrats look to narrow impeachment focus to Trump-Ukraine scandal Politico 09/25/2019)
This not only gives credence to this suggestion by Peter Daou:
TIME FOR REAL TALK— Peter Daou (@peterdaou) September 26, 2019
I'm very relieved to see Dem leaders give in to massive grassroots pressure on #impeachment. But it wasn't until Trump came for #Biden that the establishment finally woke up. Apparently torturing brown babies wasn't enough to #impeach him.
So let's be real.
When Pelosi made such of a mess by caving in to Trump on the concentration camp funding this past summer, I pretty much lost hope in her ability to lead the impeachment inquiry. At least for a few hours this week, she seemed to rise to the task, however reluctantly. But she may still sabotage the whole thing.
Jeet Heer makes a case for the Ukraine-only approach to impeachment here, The Case for Keeping Impeachment Clean and Simple The Nation 09/25/2019.
David Dayen has a good analogy on why even a stubbornly reluctant Nancy Pelosi decided to move ahead with impeachment (Trump’s Impeachment and the Era of No Accountability The American Prospect 04/24/2019):
Here’s the best way of putting it: Trump is Wells Fargo.It's hard to imagine enough Republican Senators voting to remove him. But if the House impeaches him, the Senators will have a choice to make. If the House does the impeachment inquiry even half right, especially if they make public a small fraction of Trump's financial dealings with Russian entities, it will put huge pressure even on Republicans Senators not facing election to show they are not entirely subservient to Trump. Bob Kuttner predicts, "As flat-out illegal behavior is documented, expect more Republicans to defect." (Trump’s Death by Self-Regard The American Prospect 09725/2019)
The big bank was among those who contributed to the near implosion of the entire U.S. economy in 2008, and despite that, none of its top executives were held accountable. And Wells Fargo, consciously or unconsciously, got the message that they could continue their practices with relative impunity. And they did. They signed up customers to fake accounts, falsified records in mortgage cases, charged people for junk auto insurance they didn’t ask for, and even charged overdraft fees on accounts that were closed.
Why did this unending series of scandals cease to end? Why did the overt PR promises from Wells Fargo add up to nothing, as the corporate culture still trended toward ripping off customers? Well, what would be the point of Wells Fargo changing its policies? Nobody went to jail, no executive had their assets seized and ended up destitute, and no penalty served as anything more than giving away a small cut of ill-gotten profits. Amid this lack of deterrence, the crime spree continued, and continues.
I hope he's right. But the Mueller report documented multiple instances of Trump's obstructive justice. And the Republicans didn't turn on him over that. The Democrats, on the other hand, do already have that documentation of multiple impeachable offenses, so it would be silly and irresponsible not to use those in impeachment proceedings.
If the Democrats do blow the impeachment process by, for instance, limiting the charges only to the appeal to Ukraine to make up dirt on Joe Biden, it's will really be time for progressive Democrats to start thinkig seriously about some way to effectively refound the Democratic Party.
Impeachment is a political process, not a judicial one. As Alexander Hamilton explained it Federalist 65:
A well constituted court for the trial of impeachments, is an object notmore to be desired, than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective. The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offences which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself. The prosecution of them, for this reason, will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties, more or less friendly, or inimical, to the accused. In many cases, it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions, and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side, or on the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger, that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.But I also really think the House has a responsibility to act when an official is so brazenly breaking the law, and even admitting it publicly, as Trump did again this week. I think impeachment will actually help the Democrats politically in 2016, not least by showing people that they are actually willing to fight for their own side. But even if it hurts them politically, I really do believe the House has a Constitutional responsibility to impeach him.
Joe and Hunter Biden
James Risen recalls his own story from 2015 about Joe Biden and Ukrainian corruption investigations in I Wrote About the Bidens and Ukraine Years Ago. Then the Right-Wing Spin Machine Turned the Story Upside Down. The Intercept 09/25/2019
The original story was Joe Biden, His Son and the Case Against a Ukrainian Oligarch New York Times 12/08/2015
Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holding in April 2014, i.e., the month after Russia formally annexed Crimea. (See Ukraine crisis: Timeline BBC News 11/13/2014) Risen's Times article described it as "one of Ukraine's largest natural gas companies." It was headed by
But as Risen also reported, Joe Biden was encouraging more aggressive anti-corruption prosecution at a time when one of the main cases of apparent neglect of corruption involved Burisma Holding and Mykola Zlochevsky. If Joe Biden was trying to shield the company with which Hunter Biden was connected, on the surface it seems a strange way to go about it. Risen wrote, "The refusal by the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office to cooperate [in a British investigation of bank accounts they claimed were connected to Zlochevsky] was the target of a stinging attack by the American ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, who called out Burisma’s owner by name in a speech in September."
Risen's article did not mention any evidence of illegal action by either Joe or Hunter Biden. It just pointed out that it was an awkward aspect of Joe Biden's push on behalf of the US Government for Ukraine to be more diligent in enforcing its anti-corruption laws. Which, for any rightwing trolls who may be reading, is an entirely legitimate foreign policy goal for the US.
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