Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with an occasional afternoon shower and a high of seventy-one. Sunrise is 5:56 AM and sunset 7:48 PM, for 13h 52m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 64.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred ninety-eighth day.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM and the Fire Department Board in closed session at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1996, Gov. Tommy Thompson signs W-2 (Wisconsin Works) into law.
Recommended for reading in full:
The Washington Post editorial board writes Sorry, Mr. President. Congress has every right to investigate you:
“THERE IS no reason to go any further, and especially in Congress,” President Trump told Post reporters Tuesday, explaining why he was preparing to stonewall congressional requests for administration documents and testimony, possibly by invoking executive privilege. “We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” Trump said on Wednesday. “These aren’t like impartial people.”
If that were the standard, then Congress could never investigate anything. Mr. Trump’s Republican colleagues must remember the battles they fought with President Barack Obama over transparency only a few years ago when they ran the House. Mr. Obama asserted executive privilege to prevent then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. from turning over documents on the “Fast and Furious” gun-running scheme. Republicans held Mr. Holder in contempt of Congress.
As we said at the time, “No doubt a lot of congressional investigations are partisan fishing expeditions. For better or worse, that comes with the democratic territory. Absent very strong countervailing considerations — stronger than some of those the administration has asserted in this case — Congress is generally entitled to disclosure.” Democrats, too, are entitled to disclosure, particularly as they ask weighty questions about the potentially severe abuse of power in the top reaches of the White House.
Law professor J.W. Verret writes The Mueller Report Was My Tipping Point (“I was a Trump transition staffer, and I’ve seen enough. It’s time for impeachment”):
Depending on how you count, roughly a dozen separate instances of obstruction of justice are contained in the Mueller report. The president dangled pardons in front of witnesses to encourage them to lie to the special counsel, and directly ordered people to lie to throw the special counsel off the scent.
This elaborate pattern of obstruction may have successfully impeded the Mueller investigation from uncovering a conspiracy to commit more serious crimes. At a minimum, there’s enough here to get the impeachment process started. In impeachment proceedings, the House serves as a sort of grand jury and the Senate conducts the trial. There is enough in the Mueller report to commence the Constitution’s version of a grand-jury investigation in the form of impeachment proceedings.
The Founders knew that impeachment would be, in part, a political exercise. They decided that the legislative branch would operate as the best check on the president by channeling the people’s will. Congress has an opportunity to shape that public sentiment with the hearings ahead.