Only The Best

Impeach, Impeach, Impeach: The Impeachment trial is on.  The wily and malevolent Senate Majority Leader McConnell is doing his best to muddy up the works “Merrick Garland” style.  His objective is to speed the impeachment trial to its all but certain conclusion, positioning Trump to be able to loudly and repeatedly exhort that he’s been fully  exonerated during the State of the Union address scheduled to take place on February 4^th.  To that end McConnell’s original plan called for each side to get only two days to present their allotted 24 hours of arguments.  However after some of his more moderate, or moderate by Republican standards, caucus members pushed back, he relented just a smidge, giving each side three days instead of two to present their cases.  McConnell’s initial plan would have required a vote before any of the evidence from the House inquiry was admitted but under pressure from those moderates who don’t want the trial to look so obviously rigged he’s backed down from that as well and is now allowing evidence from the House inquiry to be admitted automatically though senators can still attempt to strike any evidence that they don’t like.  We know that both those changes were made at the very last minute because they were handwritten into the rules that are now guiding the impeachment trial.  As to the rest, the admission of additional evidence and the calling of witnesses, the Democrats spent yesterday putting up amendment after amendment, eleven in total, in an attempt to get some Republicans on board and to press their point to the public that there’s more there there.  Despite some pretty eloquent arguments from their team they were voted down each and every time on a party line basis.  No Republicans or Democrats crossed the aisle though Trump’s lawyers Pat Cipollone and Jay Sekulow did manage to toss a few lies and insult their Democratic counterparts. Presiding Chief Justice John Roberts, didn’t do much, but did admonish both sides to be civil.   

The voting down of all of the Democrats’ proposed amendments doesn’t mean that there will be no witnesses, some of those so-called Republican moderates, including the usual suspects Romney, Collins, Murkowski, Alexander and maybe even Portman, Gardner and whoever else cares about his or her future electability or legacies might vote for evidence and or witnesses after the cases are presented, but there are no guarantees, especially since McConnell is likely to throw as many impediments as possible into the works and Trump has already said that, at least with regard to John Bolton, the witness he most fears, he intends to claim executive privilege. As to Republicans, if you are into meltdowns, keep an eye on Arizona’s appointed Senator, Martha McSally, she’s already showing signs of imploding.  Last week she snapped at a CNN reporter, calling him a liberal hack for asking her a run of the mill, standard question. She followed up that unfortunate onscreen performance with another one on Fox where she bragged about her ugliness.  She is trailing her likely Democratic opponent, former astronaut Mark Kelly, in the polls and appears incredibly desperate. More entertaining fireworks are likely to follow.                      

Democrats: Following in the McSally mold some of the Democratic candidates are eating each other alive as well.  Bernie’s crowd of Berniacs are doing what they did in 2016, attacking his closest competitors but giving Bernie space to claim that they are doing so without his permission even though everyone knows he’s fully on board.  He’s followed up his did he or didn’t he say that a woman couldn’t win the election tiff with Elizabeth Warren with a doctored ad that made it seem like Joe Biden has long advocated  cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits.  And then there’s Hillary Clinton who has decided to express her views of Bernie, saying that it’s not just her, no one likes him.  Though it’s understandable that Clinton feels burned and Berned from her 2016 experience, we’d all be better off if she saved her primal screams for the woods around her Westchester conclave.  And I’d be remiss if I didn’t say anything about the NY Times and their dual endorsement of Senators Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren. Maybe they felt compelled to endorse a woman, their way of compensating for endlessly harping on Clinton’s email woes back in 2016?  But two, who are so far apart in their views?  And two who like them or not, absent a minor miracle, are unlikely to go the distance?  Sigh.

Et Cetera:  In other news Trump spent day one of the impeachment trial at the World Economic Forum in Davos bragging about his economy and his America first strategy and saying that he wasn’t all that concerned about the Chinese coronavirus that has already landed on our shores because he trusts his good friend Premier Xi and he, the scientist in chief,  has it under control, whatever that means.  Climate activist Greta Thunberg hit back at his climate ignorance.   And, though we still don’t have the details, late Friday Andrew Peek, the White House’s Russia expert who replaced Tim Morrison who replaced Fiona Hill, was “escorted” out of the White House and put on indefinite leave.  Something that may or may not have involved the kinds of indiscretions that Trump has himself committed.  #OnlyTheBest