Where Does This End?

Nancy Pelosi’s “Aha” moment, as she describes it, came two weeks ago when she perceived the continuing pattern of Trumps’s behavior and finally affirmed that action must be taken immediately to attempt to stop further illegal corrupt behavior.  Once she saw enough of the landscape she knew that to delay will risk further damage to our democracy.

It is compelling to finally understand that the Constitutional obligation to protect our system and the rule of law is perhaps the fundamental issue we should all be concerned with.  The rather elemental realization is that if we do not attempt to stop this destructive situation, Trump and his administration will continue and double down on the illegal behaviors.  The condition of our republic and democracy will be further, perhaps irreparably, degraded.

Even while impeachment proceeds, Trump is still pushing Giuliani to continue the corrupt behavior!  Guiliani is currently in Ukraine, still attempting to undermine Biden’s reputation and further coddle corrupt politicians in Ukraine.  Why is he doing that??  Trump and Giuliani are continuing to brazenly try to influence our electoral process for 2020!  We simply cannot let that continue!

When you examine Trump’s decision tree and policy directions over the course of his presidency, you see a consistent pattern of undermining our rule of law, celebrating authoritarian leaders, attempting to further Russian conceived conspiracy theories, and pushing cruel and destructive actions across the entire spectrum of administrative actions.  Our leader is the laughing stock of the world as demonstrated at the recent NATO meeting in London.  The stature and reliability of the United States as an ally is being crushed.  We are being represented by a criminal buffoon.

Incredibly, our Republican representatives in our Congress are condoning the obstruction of the Executive Branch.  They are violating their Constitutional oath to protect our government’s concept of separation of power.  They are supporting debunked conspiracy theories being promoted by AG Barr, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump and his acolytes, and the Russian intelligence services who apparently are fomenting a constant stream of lies and fake news.  It is incredible that a major portion of our government is parroting this false information.

The Republican party at large seems to have lost their way in the most egregious way.  They are willing to surrender to the nefarious will of someone they believe will hurt them at the ballot box at the first sign of disloyalty.  In the process they have sacrificed their loyalty to the oath they took to protect and defend the US Constitution.  If the electorate does not see this imminent danger to our further existence as a republic, then all is lost.  Trump might actually be re-elected and all safeguards will be removed.  His second term will be a headlong rush to destruction.

The Democratic party, and the House of Representatives will complete their Constitutional obligation to impeach this lawless President, but the Senate is another story. 

Mitch McConnell is perhaps going to be remembered as the single most destructive individual ever to hold the Majority Leader position in the US Senate.  Not only has he stalled over 240 bills sent to the Senate by the House for consideration as legislation, but he has taken illegal steps for years to constipate the process of legislative movement on various fronts.  He has made it possible for the Trump administration to stuff the courts with conservative judges, many of whom are not qualified to sit on the bench.  McConnell will be directly responsible for altering our country’s orientation to the rule of law in a way that is truly sad.   He has single handedly corrupted the process for confirming appointments to the Supreme Court by unilaterally rejecting President Obama’s right to appoint a Supreme Court judge as mandated by the US Constitution.  He has therefore violated his oath of office and should be impeached.  He is supporting the President’s orientation to accept Russian conspiracy theories, and will in all probability corrupt the Senate’s obligation to provide a fair and lawful trial for the Trump impeachment.  Watch and see how he will behave during the next month or so as the Republicans prepare to defend the indefensible. 

And the trial will be a McConnell sham.  Trump’s defense will harangue the process, but will not be able to provide any ‘fact’ witnesses or arguments to rebut the accusations, mainly because there are none.  They will turn a blind eye to the constant and prolonged illegal obstruction of Congress by the administration.   That will result in the ignoring of legal subpoenas for fact witnesses demanded by the House Intelligence Committee.  I frankly don’t understand why the Democrats are not being aggressive about getting court mandates for testimony by the witnesses who can offer the essential facts of the case for impeachment:  McGahn, Giuliani, Pompeo, Mulvaney, Bolton, Kupperman, Isenberg and a host of others who supported the conspiracy to obstruct.  They should all be charged with contempt of Congress and locked up until they testify.

So where does this end?  Well, if Trump is acquitted, you can expect he could be re-elected, and if that happens, I would not be surprised to see Russian type autocracy emerge as a real threat to our basic freedoms over the next four years.  Our lives as citizens will change into something we could never have expected.  There will most probably be trials of journalists, trials of opposition politicians, promotion of new conspiracies and a deconstruction and morphing of the United States of America into an empty vessel of what it once stood for.  Our children and grandchildren will not know the blessings of true liberty as we have known them…and one day people like John Kennedy from Louisiana, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, and all the Republicans who are in denial now will wake up and wonder where things went wrong.  By then it will be too late…….

Finding the Way Forward.....

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As the hearings came to an end last week, we all realized that we had been holding our collective breaths, and so we slowly exhaled and tried to figure out where we were going next.  To many of us, it was so clear that the evidence was there to impeach, and yet, here were the Republicans who simply refused to evaluate the evidence.  Even though their faulty defenses crumbled day after day as the testimonies shattered them, apparently all Republicans simply ignored the facts as presented in the testimonies.

It is clear that Trump’s supporters are fighting a political battle and the Democrats are fighting a legal battle.  There simply is no intersection between the two points of view.  But more than that, the attitude and aggressive attack tactics during questioning revealed the Republican’s bias.  Any type of inquiry of this type should be approached by all parties as a somber exercise in trying to uncover the truth. 

Instead what we got from Nunes and Jordan and all the rest was character assassination, devaluing and undermining of a whole roster of patriotic State Department employees, and promotion of fallacious conspiracy theories without presentation of any evidence.  The Republicans were simply mean!  There was no interest in finding out what really happened.

Make no mistake, what is at stake here is nothing less than the future of our democracy.  The Republicans in Congress apparently endorse obstruction of legal requests for documents and the testimony of key figures who have first-hand information as to the facts of the case against President Trump  .  Moreover, they are endorsing the ignoring of constitutional mandates to obey subpoenas issued by Congress in its constitutionally mandated oversight responsibilities.  If that is allowed to stand, then there is no oversight of the Executive Branch.  That means that that responsibility of Congress is nullified and the Constitution of the United States is nullified.  That is a bad thing.  That is why this exercise is important to complete.

To return to the question of what happens next, we must keep the preceding notion in mind.  The Democrats, and more specifically the House of Representatives, need to proceed to present Articles of Impeachment if the House has evidence of High Crimes, Treason or Misdemeanors.  To abandon this process at this point is to surrender the Constitutional right to oversight, which then makes the occurrence of these types of behaviors by the President more likely to continue by this President and future Presidents.  It also rejects the concept of the rule of law and deconstructs the US Constitution.

And more to the point, it needs to be on the record that this man was impeached for innumerable reasons.  He needs to be ‘stained’ with this badge of impeachable wrongdoing so as to mitigate what will surely be his claims of total exoneration when he is most probably acquitted by the Senate.  There will not be much else the majority of us can do.

Then we must steel ourselves for the difficult and perilous path to election day in November 2020.  That will most assuredly be the last chance to reverse the course that Trumpism has set us on since 2015 when he announced his candidacy.  The majority of Americans must coalesce into a force of rejection to sweep Trump and his sycophantic supporters from the scene so we can restore rationality and the rule of law to the United States.

 

And, it will be a prolonged period of restoration and reconstruction from the pervasive damage he and his advocates have wrought upon our Republic.

Applause

They wanted to know why she was even there testifying, since she wasn’t even our ambassador when the infamous phone call was made on July 25^th.  I can answer that:  because she was part of a story of which the phone call was only one incident half way through a much longer story.

Marie Yovanovich taught us what true diplomatic work is.  Her description of how she approached her job and why diplomacy is important in the furtherance of the policies of the United States was inspiring.  It also showed all of us how important diplomacy is to the security of our country when done properly. ‘ Masha’s’ quiet sincerity, innocence and competence shone through the haze of corruption and misdirection being spewed across the hearing room by the Republicans on the committee every time they opened their mouths.

And then, as if on cue, the ‘bully’ weighed in from afar with his fetid attack on her while she was actually testifying!  His claims of not being interested enough to even watch the hearings were shattered in that one clarifying moment.  She was dangerous to him.

This is a story about a conspiracy that started many months before that infamous phone call in July.  When the cabal of Trump, Giuliani, Parnas, Fruman, Perry, Lutsenko, et. al. began planning the corruption of the Ukrainian government in the interest of using a foreign government to enhance Trump’s run in the 2020 US elections, it was even before the outcome of the Mueller probe.  They started spreading lies about Ukraine’s purported role meddling in the 2016 elections in the US, while working with known corrupt Ukrainian politicians/state prosecutors to spread conspiracy theories about Burisma and Joe Biden’s son Hunter. 

Since Yovanovich was actually working to clean up the corruption that Ukraine was suffering from, she was in the way of this nefarious backchannel plan.  The only option was to get rid of her, which is why Giuliani and his henchman were in Ukraine in the first place.  So, they initiated the smear campaign and engineered her removal just prior to the elections when the new Ukrainian President arrived on the scene. 

All Zelenskiyy wanted was to assure the United States’ continued military support in his dealing with a ‘hot war’ with the Russians on his eastern front.  After Yovanovich was gone, Giuliani and his cronies had an open field to manage and misdirect Zelenskiyy’s attention and create the conditions for the July 25^th phone call.  You know the rest of the story.

As I listened to the Republican’s insidious attempts to misdirect and interrupt her testimony, and watched Ambassador Yovanovich during the hearing; heard her recounting the events leading up to her dismissal, I was overcome with anger.  That all of these creeps would devalue this incredibly competent and loyal patriot and undermine her efforts while sabotaging the mission of our democracy is a crime.  That they were operating in my name as an American is despicable!

This tawdry story is being revealed piece by piece, and we are learning just how corrupt our own government has become at the hands of perhaps the most detestable person to ever set foot in the White House.  If we are unable to rid ourselves of his degenerate presence in 2020, there will be no redemption for the US.

If he survives a vote in the Senate to remove him, and somehow wins the next election, he will be unbridled.  The damage done thus far will be insignificant compared to what will ensue for the next four years.  Our precious America that we all grew up believing in will be over.  Even if he loses, the struggle to get him out of the White House will be monumental since he will claim the election was rigged and unfair.  Unless he is beaten soundly, the country is in for an excruciating effort to rid ourselves of him and his minions.

Perhaps the most welcome moment of yesterday's hearing was when Yovanovich's testimony ended and she was showered with an unsolicited standing ovation.  That applause, for a moment anyway, shattered the lies and said more than any spoken word.