Good morning.
Flag Day in Whitewater will see a probability of scattered thunderstorms and a high of eighty-five. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 19m 19s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 78.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred eighteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1777, the Second Continental Congress chooses a flag for America: “Resolved, That the flag of the thirteen United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.” On this day in 1855, Fighting Bob La Follette is born.
Recommended for reading in full —
Jonathan Chait observes that Kamala Harris Pummels Jeff Sessions So Badly That John McCain Has to Stop Her:
Harris: And you referred to a long-standing DOJ policy. Can you tell us what policy it is you’re talking about?
Sessions: Well, I think most cabinet people as the witnesses you had before you earlier, those individuals declined to comment. Because we were all about conversations with the president.
Harris: Sir, I’m just asking you about …
Sessions: Because that’s a long-standing policy …
Harris: the DOJ policy you referred to …
Sessions: a policy that goes beyond just the attorney general.
Harris: Is that policy in writing somewhere?
Sessions: I think so.
Harris: So did you not consult it before you came this committee knowing we’d ask questions about it?
Sessions: Well, we talked about it. The policy is based …
Harris: Did you asked that it would be shown to you?
Sessions: The policy is based on the principle that the president …
Harris: Sir, I’m not asking about the principle. I am asking when you knew …
Sessions: Well I am unable to answer the …
Harris: that you would be asked these …
Sessions: question.
Harris: questions and you would rely on that policy.
McCain: Chairman [inaudible].
[thumping noise]Harris: Did you not ask your staff to show you the policy that would be the basis for your refusing to answer the …
McCain: Chairman, the witness …
Harris: majority of questions that have been asked of you.
McCain: should be allowed to answer the question.
[Sessions laughs. Harris is not amused.]Chairman Burr: Senators will allow the chair to control the hearing. Senator Harris, let him answer.
Harris [to Sessions]: Please do. [To Burr]: Thank you.
Sessions: We talked about it. And we talked about the real principle at stake is one that I have some appreciation towards, having spent 15 years in the Department of Justice, 12 as United States attorney, and that principle is that the Constitution provides the head of the executive branch certain privileges. And that members — one of them is, confidentiality of communications — and it is improper for agents of any of the departments in the executive branch to waive that privilege without a clear approval …
Harris: Mr. Chairman …
Sessions: of the president.
Harris: I have asked …
Sessions: And that’s the situation we are in.
Harris: Mr. Sessions for a yes or no. Did you ask …
Sessions: Though the answer is yes.
Harris: …your staff to see the policy.
Sessions: I consulted …
Harris: Did you ask your staff to see the policy?
Burr: The senator’s time has expired.
Harris: Apparently not.
Burr: Senator Cornyn.
(If one is looking for competent lawyering in this exchange, it will be found with Harris, not Sessions, who’s embarrassingly weak. Hard to believe (for more than one reason) that Sessions is the Attorney General of the United States.)
Indeed, Sessions is so weak that he begs off that he can’t keep up with Harris, and that she makes him – a grown man with a lengthy career behind him — nervous:
Julia Ioffe asks Why Did Jeff Sessions Really Meet With [Russian Ambassador] Sergey Kislyak?:
Sessions called a press conference and publicly recused himself from the Russia investigation. “I did meet with this one Russian official a couple of times,” he said, referring to his encounters with Kislyak. But he insisted on the fine distinction he and Flores had drawn the previous day, saying he had “never had meetings with Russian operatives or government intermediaries about the Trump campaign.” That is, he claimed that when he met with Kislyak, he did so as a senator on the Armed Services Committee, not a Trump surrogate.
But an examination of Sessions’s activities in 2016 calls this defense of his testimony into question. It shows a significant spike in the frequency of his contacts with foreign officials after he joined the Trump campaign as a foreign-policy adviser in March. That was when the longtime member of the Armed Services Committee embarked on an intensive program of meetings and dinners with ambassadors and members of Washington’s foreign-policy establishment. His meeting with Kislyak took place during those months. And some of those who met with Sessions said they sought him out not because he was a senator, but precisely because of his role as a Trump campaign surrogate, tasked with advising the campaign on matters of national security.
Former Congressman Bob Inglis writes I helped draft Clinton’s impeachment articles. The charges against Trump are more serious:
I was on the House Judiciary Committee that began the consideration of impeaching of President Bill Clinton. Armed with information from independent counsel Kenneth Starr, we were convinced the president had lied under oath. We drafted articles of impeachment, and a majority of the House concurred with our assessment. The Senate subsequently determined that there wasn’t sufficient cause to remove him from office. In retrospect, a public censure or reprimand may have been more advisable.
Regardless, Clinton was impeached for charges less serious than the ones before us now. In the current case, Comey was exploring the possibility of American involvement in the Russian plot, a treasonous offense. While it’s not time to start drafting articles of impeachment, it is time to pursue this investigation into Russian meddling in our presidential election with vigor, without friends to reward and without enemies to punish.
Here’s why white noise helps us sleep:
Yeah…I watched the whole hearing.
I was left with the distinct impression that Sessions is a drawling crook. JeffBo is a little guy, but built a stone wall that puts the white cliffs of Dover in the garden-fence category. He is up there with John Mitchell for the worst memory in AG history. Mitchell, you may remember, spent some time in the slam over his leaky memory. Even Al Gonzalez remembered more, admittedly a low bar.
JeffBo made up, on the spot, an entirely new preemptive executive privilege. He wouldn’t talk about anything he communicated to Trump, or for that matter, anyone in the Justice Department. He said he was sure that the policy was written down somewhere, but he could not remember where. The general idea was that he was protecting the President’s power to assert privilege at any time in the future, even though Trump knew full well what the subject of the hearing was and could have asserted it at any time before Sessions testified. Sessions, like Rogers and Coats, is in clear contempt of congress, but will get away with it because the R-Team will protect them, and Trump, so they can get some more tax breaks.
The Republican party has turned into a feral blob of semi-differentiated protoplasm with the instinctual behavior of a rutting musk-ox. It ain’t all Trump. He is just another logical step in the devolution of the party, which is now reduced to sounding their barbaric yawps over the rooftops in high praise of their lord, savior, and begrizzled graven image, Grover Norquist.
Meanwhile:
• A fat, white, 50-year-old guy with an AR-15 shot up the R-team house baseball practice. No word on why, yet, but it is worth noting that VA is a completely gun-law free state. Any asshole can exercise his 2nd amendment right to shoot up congress. It does sound like there was some genuine heroism practiced by several congressmen crawling onto the field of fire to assist their wounded colleagues, and I salute them for that.
• Trump, after bussing the R-Team to the Rose Garden for a cheap-beer party after passing the AHCA, has now denounced the house version as “too mean”. He is correct, of course, but is a little late to having that epiphany.
• The Senate, meanwhile is “crafting” their version of dystopian health care completely in secret. No hearings, no amendments, and not a whisper of what is in the bill. I can hardly wait to see their work-product. I’ll probably have to wait until it gets voted on to find out, though. This whole health-care revision/repeal is drawing R-teamers to political disaster like Icarus to the sun. Dues will paid, come 2018.
• Trump is floating snuffing Mueller. That will be a spectacle. If he does so, he might just as well climb the Washington Monument and jump off the top. He will be nothing but a vaguely yam-colored spot on the concrete. His staff is begging him to back off, but they don’t have all that much influence over Trump’s towering ego.
• 200 Democrat congress-critters have filed suit against Trump on the emoluments clause, in an attempt to pry loose his tax returns via discovery. I’ve no idea how well it will work, but it is worth watching.
It’s hard to keep up, but the entire political situation seems to be coming to a head, with no obvious path back to sanity. I’ve said it many times: It ain’t gonna end well.
Thanks much – great stuff about bad stuff – quite the times we live in.
Sessions fares poorly when he’s confronted capably, but then he’s working to make sure he can’t be confronted capably (doesn’t have to remember, doesn’t have to be honest, doesn’t owe a coherent explanation, claims a new pre-cog executive privilege, as you note.)
The health-bill-in-secret is wrong, but wrong is the majority party’s starting position. I agree with Sarah Kendzior @sarahkendzior: “As I’ve been saying, they enjoy the flagrancy. Autocrat logic: “We know that you know what we did, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Instinctual behavior of a rutting musk-ox” – spot-on, and funny but sadly true, also.
In the end, will Trump be able to resist firing as many as necessary in the Justice Department until someone there fires Mueller? If one had to bet, constitutional crisis seems more likely than Trump’s exercise of normal, as-should-be-expected restraint. Yet, yam-colored spot he would be…
The emoluments lawsuit is intriguing, but how far up it will go I don’t know. Well worth watching and reading carefully.
The only thing worse than the long slog ahead? Failing to fight on to Trump’s ruin.
Saw that the Golden State Warriors may decline to appear at the White House. Good for them if they do decline. I was rooting for the Cavs, but the Warriors would be right to avoid Trump – he’s unworthy of their company.
I’m a complete florid prose slut. Thank you for hosting my ranting!
RE: Scalise (et al) shooting
The button-man appears to have been a Berniac from suburban St. Louis. I cut him no slack. Shooting up congressional baseball practice as a way of displaying displeasure with Trump is not excusable.
I do wonder if the shooting will sponsor any introspection on the right. There has always been an unspoken assumption amongst the gun-worshiping segment of the hard right that they would be the only ones armed when the revolution comes. “Freedom” to arm to the teeth was a perk reserved for the far right, they thought. As we just saw, any asshole, regardless of political affiliation, can shoot up a ballfield. I guess that lefties, because they are pussies, were not expected to buy guns and shoot people with them. How will the NRA treat this?
It’s getting ugly….
The shooting offers a moment for all concerned to think about policy. It reminds me of something that then-majority leader George Mitchell said in exasperation to his fellow Democrats: do you want to make a statement or do you want to make a law?
As a libertarian, I’d like fewer laws, but have never thought that no laws (and only mere statements) could be enough.
A time like this does give meaning to that question (what do you want?) and perhaps it’s jaded of me, but I don’t think the GOP will go beyond the statement route.
Listened again to Kamala Harris’s full time from yesterday. Admirable and (truly) comforting: we’ve many sharp and capable fellow citizens. Very reassuring.