Jeff Flake: The president is on trial. So are my Senate Republican colleagues.
By Jeff Flake
Dec. 20, 2019 at 4:40 p.m. CST
Jeff Flake, a Republican, represented Arizona in the U.S. Senate from 2013 to 2019. He is a resident fellow at Harvard University and a contributor to CBS News.
To my former Senate Republican colleagues,
I don’t envy you.
It might not be fair, but none of the successes, achievements and triumphs you’ve had in public office — whatever bills you’ve passed, hearings you’ve chaired, constituents you have had the privilege of helping — will matter more than your actions in the coming months.
President Trump is on trial. But in a very real sense, so are you. And so is the political party to which we belong.
As we approach the time when you do your constitutional duty and weigh the evidence arrayed against the president, I urge you to remember who we are when we are at our best. And I ask you to remember yourself at your most idealistic.
We are conservatives. The political impulses that compelled us all to enter public life were defined by sturdy pillars anchored deep in the American story. Chief among these is a realistic view of power and of human nature, and a corresponding and healthy mistrust of concentrated and impervious executive power. Mindful of the base human instincts that we all possess, the founders of our constitutional system designed its very architecture to curb excesses of power.
Those curbs are especially important when the power is wielded by a president who denies reality itself and calls his behavior not what it is, but “perfect.”
Personally, I have never met anyone whose behavior can be described as perfect, but so often has the president repeated this obvious untruth that it has become a form of dogma in our party. And sure enough, as dogma demands, there are members of our party denying objective reality by repeating the line that “the president did nothing wrong.” My colleagues, the danger of an untruthful president is compounded when an equal branch follows that president off the cliff, into the abyss of unreality and untruth.
Call it the founders’ blind spot: They simply could not have envisioned the Article I branch abetting and enabling such dangerous behavior in the Article II branch. And when we are complicit, we cede our constitutional responsibilities, we forever redefine the relationship between Congress and the White House, and we set the most dangerous of precedents.
My simple test for all of us: What if President Barack Obama had engaged in precisely the same behavior? I know the answer to that question with certainty, and so do you. You would have understood with striking clarity the threat it posed, and you would have known exactly what to do.
Regarding the articles of impeachment, you could reasonably conclude that the president’s actions warrant his removal. You might also determine that the president’s actions do not rise to the constitutional standard required for removal. There is no small amount of moral hazard with each option, but both positions can be defended.
But what is indefensible is echoing House Republicans who say that the president has not done anything wrong. He has.
The willingness of House Republicans to bend to the president’s will by attempting to shift blame with the promotion of bizarre and debunked conspiracy theories has been an appalling spectacle. It will have long-term ramifications for the country and the party, to say nothing of individual reputations.
Nearly all of you condemned the president’s behavior during the 2016 campaign. Nearly all of you refused to campaign with him. You knew then that doing so would be wrong — would be a stain on your reputation and the standing of the Republican Party, and would do lasting damage to the conservative cause.
Ask yourself today: Has the president changed his behavior? Has he grown in office? Has the mantle of the presidency altered his conduct? The answer is obvious. In fact, if the president’s political rally in Michigan on Wednesday is any measure, his language has only become more vulgar, his performance cruder, his behavior more boorish and unstable.
Next, ask yourself: If the president’s conduct hasn’t changed, has mine? Before President Trump came on the scene, would I have stood at a rally and cheered while supporters shouted “lock her up” or “send them back”? Would I have laughed along while the president demeaned and ridiculed my colleagues? Would I have ever thought to warm up the crowd for the president by saying of the House speaker: “It must suck to be that dumb”?
As I said above, I don’t envy you. You’re on a big stage now. Please don’t accept an alternate reality that would have us believe in things that obviously are not true, in the service of executive behavior that we never would have encouraged and a theory of executive power that we have always found abhorrent.
If there ever was a time to put country over party, it is now. And by putting country over party, you might just save the Grand Old Party before it’s too late.
Jeff Flake:
Jeff Flake: The president is on trial. So are my Senate Republican colleagues.
Fear and Loyalty: How Donald Trump Took Over the Republican Party
The president demands complete fealty, and as the impeachment hearings showed, he has largely attained it. To cross him is to risk a future in G.O.P. politics.
BIRMINGHAM, Mich. — By the summer of 2017, Dave Trott, a two-term Republican Congressman, was worried enough about President Trump’s erratic behavior and his flailing attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act that he criticized the president in a closed-door meeting with fellow G.O.P. lawmakers.
The response was instantaneous — but had nothing to do with the substance of Mr. Trott’s concerns. “Dave, you need to know somebody has already told the White House what you said,” he recalled a colleague telling him. “Be ready for a barrage of tweets.”
Mr. Trott got the message: To defy Mr. Trump is to invite the president’s wrath, ostracism within the party and a premature end to a career in Republican politics. Mr. Trott decided not to seek re-election in his suburban Detroit district, concluding that running as anti-Trump Republican was untenable, and joining a wave of Republican departures from Congress that has left those who remain more devoted to the president than ever.
“If I was still there and speaking out against the president, what would happen to me?” Mr. Trott said before answering his own question: Mr. Trump would have lashed out and pressured House G.O.P. leaders to punish him.
Just under four years after he began his takeover of a party to which he had little connection, Mr. Trump enters 2020 burdened with the ignominy of being the first sitting president to seek re-election after being impeached.
But he does so wearing a political coat of armor built on total loyalty from G.O.P. activists and their representatives in Congress. If he does not enjoy the broad admiration Republicans afforded Ronald Reagan, he is more feared by his party’s lawmakers than any occupant of the Oval Office since at least Lyndon Johnson.
His iron grip was never firmer than over the last two months, during the House inquiry that concluded Wednesday with Mr. Trump’s impeachment on charges of abuse of power and obstructing Congress. No House Republican supported either article, or even authorized the investigation in September, and in hearing after hearing into the president’s dealings with Ukraine, they defended him as a victim of partisan fervor. One Republican even said that Jesus had received fairer treatment before his crucifixion than Mr. Trump did during his impeachment.
Perhaps more revealing, some G.O.P. lawmakers who initially said Mr. Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine was inappropriate later dropped their criticism. People close to Mr. Trump attributed the shift both to his public defense of the call as “perfect’’ and to private discussions he and his allies had with concerned lawmakers.
This fealty hardly guarantees Mr. Trump re-election: He has never garnered a 50 percent approval rating as president and over half of voters tell pollsters they will oppose him no matter who the Democrats nominate.
But the shoulder-to-shoulder unity stands in contrast to Democrats at the moment, with their contentious moderate-versus-liberal primary that was on full display in Thursday night’s debate. And it is all the more striking given Mr. Trump’s deviations from longstanding party orthodoxy on issues like foreign policy and tariffs.
“He has a complete connection with the average Republican voter and that’s given him political power here,” said Representative Patrick McHenry, Republican of North Carolina, adding: “Trump has touched the nerve of my conservative base like no person in my lifetime.”
Interviews with current and former Republican lawmakers as well as party strategists, many of whom requested anonymity so as not to publicly cross the president, suggest that many elected officials are effectively faced with two choices. They can vote with their feet by retiring — and a remarkable 40 percent of Republican members of Congress have done so or have been defeated at the ballot box since Mr. Trump took office.
Or they can mute their criticism of him. All the incentives that shape political behavior — with voters, donors and the news media — compel Republicans to bow to Mr. Trump if they want to survive.
Sitting in a garland-bedecked hotel restaurant in his former district, Mr. Trott said that he did not want to seek re-election “as a Trumper” — and that he knew he had little future in the party as an opponent of the president.
There is no market, he said, for independence. Divergence from Trumpism will never be good enough for Democrats; Mr. Trump will target you among Republicans, Mr. Trott added, and the vanishing voters from the political middle will never have a chance to reward you because you would not make it through a primary. That will be ensured in part by the megaphone the president wields with the conservative news media.
“Trump is emotionally, intellectually and psychologically unfit for office, and I’m sure a lot of Republicans feel the same way,” Mr. Trott said. “But if they say that, the social media barrage will be overwhelming.” He added that he would be open to the presidential candidacy of former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York.
On the other hand, Mr. Trump dangles rewards to those who show loyalty — a favorable tweet, or a presidential visit to their state — and his heavy hand has assured victory for a number of Republican candidates in their primaries. That includes Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who did as many Fox News appearances as possible to draw the president’s attention.
“The greatest fear any member of Congress has these days is losing a primary,” said former Representative Carlos Curbelo, Republican of Florida, who lost his general election last year in a heavily Hispanic Miami-area district. “That’s the foremost motivator.”
The larger challenge with Mr. Trump is that all politics is personal with him, and he carefully tracks who on television is praising him or denouncing his latest rhetorical excess. “He is the White House political director,” Scott Reed, a longtime Republican consultant, said.
More conventional presidents may be more understanding of lawmakers who are pulled in a different direction by the political demands of their districts — but Mr. Trump has shown little tolerance for such dissent. Mr. Curbelo, for instance, occasionally spoke out against Mr. Trump, particularly over immigration policy, and the president took notice.
Riding with Mr. Trump in his limousine on Key West last year, Mr. Curbelo recalled in an interview that the president had noted that people were lining the streets to show their support for him, and asked Mr. Curbelo if they were in his district.
He said they were, prompting the president to turn to others in the car and say: “Maybe Carlos will stop saying such nasty things about me,” Mr. Curbelo recalled.
He said they all laughed but the “passive aggressive” comment, as he put it, was not lost on him.
Increasingly, though, Mr. Trump does not even have to make implied threats within his party — Republicans can ascertain the benefit of sticking with him.
Representative Elise Stefanik hails from an upstate New York district that the president carried by 14 points yet she had not previously hesitated to go her own way.
“I have one of the most independent records in the House,” Ms. Stefanik said. “And I have critiqued the president, have voted differently than the president.”
Yet after she vehemently criticized the impeachment hearings and found herself under attack by George Conway, the anti-Trump husband of the White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, she welcomed the embrace of the president, his family and news media allies such as the Fox News host Sean Hannity — and the campaign donations that poured in.
Ms. Stefanik said she opposed impeachment because Democrats failed to make a convincing case. But she said that she would not have even voted to censure the president, and that she was chiefly driven by wanting to “stand up for my district.”
And, Ms. Stefanik noted, since her “no” vote she had received “the most positive calls since I was sworn into office.”
The incentive to show fealty to Mr. Trump has become evident to the Club for Growth, a fiscal conservative group that was made famous for its willingness to tangle with Republican leaders and was hostile to Mr. Trump in 2016.
The group’s president, David McIntosh, said conservative voters had lost interest in punishing ideological heresies and were motivated by one overarching factor unrelated to policy.
“Poll after poll showed us that Republican primary voters wanted their nominees to support President Trump,” he said, “so in order to make sure they were viable and would get re-elected, they ended up being supporters of his.”
Mr. McIntosh and Republican lawmakers said Mr. Trump’s largely conservative record had made it easier to remain loyal, noting his tax cuts, deregulation and judicial appointments.
Lawmakers not seeking re-election are often the most candid about the slavish devotion Mr. Trump engenders with voters — and the pressure it puts on them.
“Public officials need to be held accountable, and I don’t think any governmental system works well with blind loyalty without reason,” said Representative Francis Rooney of Florida, who announced his intention to retire earlier this year after criticizing Mr. Trump for his conduct with Ukraine and suffering an immediate backlash.
Mr. Rooney ultimately voted against impeachment, but told colleagues he felt uneasy about it. Recalling an appearance on a Florida television station afterward, Mr. Rooney said: “They interviewed me after the vote and then they interviewed one of these Cape Coral Republican ladies and she said, ‘Well, it’s about time they came around to realize it’s a big media hoax.’ How do you argue with that? How do you reason with that?"
Many of the Republicans who may have considered impeaching Mr. Trump are gone. They were part of a 40-seat loss the party had in the House last year, which deprived the caucus of many of its most independent figures and left it more supportive of the president than ever.
So why was there no introspection within the party after the midterms about the damage Mr. Trump did to Republican candidates, particularly in the suburbs?
“If you go to any Republican event, you’re going to find more people at that event than ever before,” Mr. Trott said “and every single one of them to a person will be all in for President Trump. They’ll all have ‘Make America Great Again’ hats on and they’ll be saying what a tremendous president he is.”
Mr. Trott recounted one of his most vivid memories of his time serving with Mr. Trump. It was the day in 2017 when House Republicans voted to repeal the A.C.A. and celebrated afterward at the White House.
Mr. Trott was one of the first lawmakers to enter the Oval Office after the Rose Garden celebration and he stood behind the president’s desk when Mr. Trump pulled out a sheet of paper.
“He already had a list of 20 people who had voted against him two hours earlier,” he recalled.
To defy Mr. Trump is to invite the president’s wrath.....
Following the shock election of Donald Trump last fall. In a move that exacerbated the vast intra-party rift exposed during last year’s presidential primary between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez has stripped a number of longtime party officials of their “at-large” delegate status or leadership positions, while appointing a slate of 75 new members that include Clinton campaign veterans, lobbyists, and neophytes.
Perez revealed his picks this week, ahead of the D.N.C.’s first meeting since he was elected chairman. Upon perusing it, progressive party members were incensed to find that he had demoted a number of veteran delegates who’d backed either Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison in his bid for party chairman against Perez, or Sanders in 2016.
Nixon’s resignation inspired predictions that the Republican Party would be finished for a generation, at least at the presidential level. But the partisan consequences proved to be less severe than anticipated. In the 1974 midterms, reform-minded Democrats — known as the “Watergate babies” — swept to power in Congress, and the Democrat Jimmy Carter won the presidential contest two years later. By 1980, though, the Republican Ronald Reagan was heading to the White House, leader of a powerful conservative coalition that would set the terms of national politics for the next several decades.
Today, the same question arises: What might impeachment mean for partisan politics, especially the 2020 election? If Watergate suggests anything, it is just how hard it may be, in this fraught moment, to see what’s ahead. Over the long term, the fate of the parties — and of the country — will most likely be determined less by what happens with impeachment than by the larger political and cultural trends that brought us to this impasse. They’re not going away.
in the NYT
Boris Johnson has defended the controversial £4bn takeover of UK defence and aerospace company Cobham by a US private equity firm.
The government approved the sale of Cobham to Advent International on Friday, after the deal was delayed because of national security concerns.
Former First Sea Lord Admiral Lord West said Cobham holds defence technologies which are "critically important".
After three years in office, President Trump has remade the federal judiciary, ensuring a conservative tilt for decades and cementing his legacy no matter the outcome of November’s election.
Trump nominees make up 1 in 4 U.S. circuit court judges. Two of his picks sit on the Supreme Court. And this past week, as the House voted to impeach the president, the Republican-led Senate confirmed an additional 13 district court judges.
In total, Trump has installed 187 judges to the federal bench.
the Impeached 45th President of the United States.
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Trump on Saturday largely ignored that he had become the third impeached president in history as he rallied young conservative activists with campaign-style attacks on the “far-left ruling class” at the start of a two-week vacation.
Speaking for more than an hour to thousands of high school and college students at the Turning Point USA conference, Mr. Trump referred briefly to his impeachment, accusing Democrats of pursuing an “illegal, unconstitutional hyperpartisan impeachment” against him.
But he did not dwell on the historic vote or spend much time attacking the congressional Democrats who charged him with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress by pressuring a foreign government to assist him in smearing a political rival.
Instead, the president made it clear that he intended to seek re-election with the messages he has been delivering for years: a relentless attack on liberalism, promises of abortion restrictions and gun rights, denunciations of environmentalism, and a vow to secure the southwestern border against what he calls “criminal aliens.”
During his speech on Saturday, Mr. Trump received his loudest applause, and a standing ovation, when he bragged about turning away asylum seekers and exaggerated the amount of new border wall that his administration has built.
“We always remember the sacred truth,” the president said. “Our first duty, and our one true allegiance, is to you, the American citizen.”
Mr. Trump’s speech to the young supporters came just three days after the House impeachment votes, which set the stage for a trial in the Senate to determine whether he will be removed from office.
The timing of that trial remains uncertain. Lawmakers left Washington for the holidays without resolving a dispute over the procedures that will govern the trial and whether the Republican-led chamber will call witnesses Democrats have demanded.
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, has said senators should hear from senior administration officials who refused to testify during the House impeachment investigation. Those include Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, and John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser who, according to his lawyer, knows about “many relevant meetings and conversations” on Ukraine.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said this week that Democrats would not deliver the two approved articles of impeachment to the Senate until they agreed to fair procedures for the trial. As lawmakers left Washington in recent days, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said the two sides “remain at an impasse.”
Before arriving at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., late Friday, Mr. Trump denounced his impeachment on Twitter and vowed to seek vindication in the Senate. On Friday, he tweeted that he “never did anything wrong. Read the Transcripts. A Democrat Hoax!”
He also blasted a conservative Christian magazine for publishing an editorial calling for his removal from office. Mark Galli, the editor of the magazine, Christianity Today, wrote that Mr. Trump had tried to coerce a foreign leader to discredit one of his political opponents.
“That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral,” Mr. Galli wrote. On Twitter, the president excoriated the magazine as “far left,” saying it “would rather have a Radical Left nonbeliever, who wants to take your religion & your guns, than Donald Trump as your President.”
But in his remarks on Saturday, Mr. Trump appeared determined to dismiss the impeachment inquiry — which dominated much of the political debate over the last two months — as a failed political attack by his rivals.
“There’s no crime. There’s no nothing. How do you impeach when you have no crime?” the president asked the crowd, referring briefly to Ms. Pelosi as “crazy Nancy” and insisting that she had no case against him. “It’s so unfair.”
He briefly focused on Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., after an audience member yelled out “Where’s Hunter?” That prompted the president to spend a few minutes denouncing — without evidence — the elder Mr. Biden, his rival for the White House, for the very corruption that the Democrats accused him of during the impeachment inquiry.
But if Ms. Pelosi and others believed the vote this week would incite a long diatribe by the president about impeachment, they were wrong.
He pointed to the country’s economic success, noting that the stock market has hit record highs and unemployment among many groups is at long-term lows. He repeatedly took credit for appointing 187 judges, replacing what he said were “crazy partisans” on the federal bench.
The rest of the speech was a return to his greatest hits: attacking the “fake news” media; warning of the dangers of immigration; complaining about unsubstantiated claims of spying on his presidential campaign; and mocking the use of windmills and the Democratic plan for a “green new deal” to protect the planet.
“They are noisy. They kill the birds,” Mr. Trump said of windmills. “You want to see a bird graveyard, go under a windmill someday. You will see more dead birds than you’ve ever seen in your life.”
The crowd of young supporters — many decked out in red “Make America Great Again” hats — welcomed the president’s messaging. They repeatedly jumped to their feet, at one point chanting, “Four more years.” Mr. Trump joked that they should change the chant to drive his liberal adversaries crazy.
“From now on, start yelling 16 more years,” he said.
Also on Friday, Mr. Trump signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which establishes the Space Force, a new military branch that the president said would help the United States dominate the world’s “newest war-fighting domain” in the future.
“It’s a big moment. That’s a big moment, and we’re all here for it,” he told about 500 troops at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington. “Space. Going to be a lot of things happening in space.”
The president also signed two spending bills that will keep the government operating until Sept. 30, avoiding a shutdown.
On Saturday, Mr. Trump spent part of the day at the Trump International Golf Club near his estate.
Separately, the court announced that its presiding judge, Rosemary M. Collyer, is stepping down nine weeks earlier than planned for health reasons. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. of the Supreme Court has selected Judge James E. Boasberg to succeed her in that role in the new year. He will be the first judge appointed by a Democrat to lead the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court since 1995.
The developments underscored that the court has entered a period of turmoil and change after the report this month by the Justice Department inspector general that uncovered damning inaccuracies and omissions in applications to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page.
The report has raised questions about the system by which the F.B.I. obtains wiretap orders and search warrants targeting suspected spies and terrorists under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. The Justice Department must convince a judge on the FISA court that the target is probably an agent of a foreign power, and it is supposed to disclose any exculpatory information — not just facts that make the target look suspicious.
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- President Trump on Saturday largely ignored that he had become the third impeached president in history as he rallied young conservative activists with campaign-style attacks on the "far-left ruling class" at the start of a two-week vacation.
I guess some of you righties live in a different world with your own realities.
Luckily, the impeachment papers are in Pelosi hands.
Effort to freeze Ukraine aid began about 90 minutes after call between Trump and Zelensky
By Sara Murray, Katelyn Polantz and Tammy Kupperman, CNN
Updated 2:24 PM ET, Sun December 22, 2019
Washington (CNN)Roughly 90 minutes after President Donald Trump spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25, Trump's political appointees at the White House's budget office were already ordering the Pentagon to freeze security funding for Ukraine, newly released government documents show.
"Based on guidance I have received and in light of the Administration's plan to review assistance to Ukraine, including the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, please hold off on any additional DoD obligations of these funds, pending direction from that process," Mike Duffey, the White House official in the Office of Management and Budget responsible for overseeing national security money and a Trump political appointee, wrote to select OMB and Pentagon officials on July 25.
Duffey's email suggests that he knew the hold could raise concerns.
Given the sensitive nature of the request, I appreciate your keeping that information closely held to those who need to know to execute direction," Duffey said.
While a formal notification would be sent later that day, this was the first clear sign that the aid was being held -- a short time after the phone call in which Trump pressed Zelensky for investigations that could boost Trump politically.
