Section: New Republic (USA)
Don’t Embrace Originalism to Defend Trump’s Impeachment
In the pending congressional impeachment inquiry, the House Judiciary Committee is charged with (among other things) taking up the question of what the constitutional process of impeachment means. To aid them in this solemn task, committee chair Jerry Nadler and his colleagues on Wednesday summoned an impressive list of constitutional scholars to...
Tucker Carlson Debuts a New Ukrainegate Defense
Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, America’s least charismatic white supremacist, has apologized for covering the ongoing impeachment hearings, which he has deemed “tiresome,” “dumb,” and “boring.” As he declared in one recent broadcast: I’d like to open this evening with a breathless update on how some obscure diplomat you’ve...
Impeaching Trump Is About More Than Punishment
Impeachment is often understood as a punitive measure. When the president (or any other federal official) breaks their constitutional oath, Congress can step in and deprive the person of the office. But the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment report, released on Tuesday, makes clear that it can be a preventative one as well.“Having...
What Happened to Peter Daou?
In November, the liberal activist and Twitter personality Peter Daou got into a spat with an unlikely adversary: Neera Tanden, the head of the Center for American Progress and Daou’s erstwhile ally in the fight to elect Hillary Clinton president in 2016. After she called his criticism of Obamacare from the left “enraging and the most...
The War-Crimes Presidency
Eight years ago, a friend sent me a photograph of Marines in Afghanistan proudly posing with a Nazi SS flag. As a former soldier, Iraq veteran, and historian who focuses on the German military during the Holocaust, I was shocked, and I reported the incident to the Marines’ inspector general. “Some symbols simply have pretty solid meanings,”...
Republicans Prepare to Give Hunter Biden the Benghazi Treatment
At the end of two weeks of impeachment hearings, President Donald Trump’s defenders find themselves at a crossroads. What the president stands accused of doing is, as The Atlantic’s David Frum notes, “simple and straightforward,” summarizable in “a few sentences of plain English.” The attempts of Republicans on the House Intelligence...
Bombshell: Impeachment Hearings DESTROY Gorpman and Bleemer
Whenever there’s a new development in the Ukraine scandal, I think of two names: Gorpman and Bleemer. Neither of them belong to real individuals. They instead come from an article published almost one year ago by Clickhole, a satirical website founded by The Onion, that mocked the most feverish coverage of the Russia investigation.”The...
Making Impeachment Matter
A national poll in September, one of the first taken after Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House of Representatives would initiate a formal impeachment inquiry regarding the president’s dealings with Ukraine, turned up a plurality of respondents already backing Trump’s impeachment. The spread of opinion was as follows: 42...
How Gordon Sondland Broke the Media’s Savior Complex
If Hollywood producers were to cast a foil to Donald Trump, they seemingly could not have done better than the witnesses who testified during the first three days of the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings. There was George Kent in his three-piece suit and colorful bowtie and Alexander Vindman in his full military...
Gordon Sondland Rips Out the Heart of Trump’s Defense
What did President Donald Trump know, and when did he know it? According to Gordon Sondland, he knew everything about the Ukraine scheme, and he knew it all along. The U.S. ambassador to the European Union confirmed the core allegations that ignited the impeachment inquiry: that Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani tried to coerce the...
