The Washington Post‘s Jennifer Rubin thinks the common-sense approach of the former Ohio governor may be the GOP’s best hope. Here is a taste of her recent column:
Former Ohio governor John Kasich — a pro-life, fiscal-hawk Republican — will speak at the Democratic National Convention and has said he will vote for former vice president Joe Biden. In contrast to the equivocating Republican governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan (who has not ruled out voting for President Trump), Kasich makes as compelling a case as any politician that it is not enough to simply voice displeasure with Trump. We have to vote him out.
Kasich appeared with CNN’s Don Lemon on Monday to call for an end to the Trump era. “We can’t continue to go down this path. . . . I mean, people are now speaking to each other if they disagree with them with through clenched teeth. There’s almost hatred going on,” he explained. “This has to stop because the great things that happened in our country — whatever they are, women suffrage, civil rights — they happen when we come together, not when we’re divided.”
Kasich thinks Biden is the kind of unifier we need. More precisely, the former Ohio governor argues that, if one thinks Trump is a threat to the republic, it is not enough to stay home or write in a third party. “I’ve had enough of this. I’ve had enough of the division and everything else, and not getting anything done,” Kasich said. “So, to just sit it out again and say well I’m not going to be for Trump and not lend my support to somebody, I — it doesn’t make sense for me this time around.” You can either accept Trump as the new normal, or you can recognize he is a dangerous detour into unhinged populism and unfit for the job.
As we noted yesterday, Trump may accept the GOP nomination for president at Gettysburg battlefield. Manisha Sinha, a historian who is no stranger to followers of The Way of Improvement Leads Home blog and podcast, shares her thoughts at CNN.
Here is a taste:
Yet, Trump aspires to Lincoln-like greatness, clumsily suggesting to the pliant Republican governor of South Dakota that he would like his likeness on Mount Rushmore, which he used for his highly partisan and forgettable Fourth of July speech this year. That this is a desecration of sacred ground of the Lakota people, who protested his rally, predictably does not cross his mind.
Trump’s potential choice of Gettysburg for his acceptance speech is even more offensive given his fondness for Confederate leaders and generals like Robert E. Lee. He has defended the Confederate battle flag and “beautiful” Confederate statues and has included neo-Confederates and White supremacists among “very fine people.” So much so that a few political commentators have called him the last Confederate president.
Gettysburg, site of one of the biggest Confederate debacles of the war, is a standing monument to the defeat of a despicable cause. If Lincoln consecrated Gettysburg with one of the most famous speeches in American history, Trump would just as surely desecrate it by his proposed Republican convention address.
Princeton historian Matt Karp talks with Jacobin magazine’s Megan Day and Micah Uetricht about his recent Catalyst essay, “The Mass Politics of Anti-Slavery.” This is a wide-ranging discussion about abolitionism, Karl Marx, Abraham Lincoln, the Republican Party of the 1850s, and contemporary politics.
Here is a taste:
MU: Let me ask the classic question that is debated by Civil War–era historians: Who freed the slaves?
MK: I will answer this, but I have to preface it with a lame disclaimer, because in some ways I think that question actually was framed by people who want to produce a simplistic answer. In fact, Jim McPherson, God bless him, wrote an essay called “Who Freed the Slaves?” and the last sentence of that article is “Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.” You have to give the man credit. He asks historical questions. He doesn’t complicate; he doesn’t do a dialectic. He answers the fucking question.
Whereas I’ve got my hands waving, I’m all over the place. But I think I would say the antislavery movement freed the slaves. That would include antislavery politicians; antislavery voters; the Union Army, which became an armed wing of that movement; and, of course, the slaves themselves, who both took part in the Union Army and destabilized the system of slavery on the ground during the war.
I think a lot of the other answers are actually pretty ahistorical. I think “Abraham Lincoln” isn’t a historical answer. You see people trying to find a line of transmission, like “Lincoln wrote this document, and that empowered the army to do this.” They’re trying to solve it like it’s an engineering problem. Same thing for people who say the slaves freed themselves. While it’s true that thousands of slaves did free themselves, if you’re actually trying to give a historical answer to this question and not an engineering answer, you have to think about the forces that brought a situation about in which slaves could free themselves in the first place.
That’s why I would say that the answer is this antislavery movement — not the abolitionists narrowly, but the broad movement against bondage in America. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about “the abolition democracy” in the North, which ultimately formed a political alliance with slaves in the South. I think that’s the coalition that freed the slaves.
MU: What’s useful about your article is the way that it focuses on each of those pieces of the antislavery movement, which includes the slaves themselves but understands that what the slaves were able to do was often stoked by the organizing of the Republican Party. So there’s a complex interplay between all of these components of the antislavery movement.
MK: Not to be too polemical, but to say that the slaves freed themselves entirely is to say that all of the other enslaved people that did not free themselves at other points in history, and in other countries, etcetera,to free themselves every day that they were enslaved. Which is insane, because this is an overwhelming system of power and oppression that made the individual will to free oneself almost irrelevant. In terms of challenging the system of slavery, obviously that resistance was a necessary ingredient, but not sufficient. You needed, as you need now, a larger political movement to challenge something that powerful.
We all knew that George Will would never vote for Donald Trump, but today he announced that he will be pulling the lever in November for Democrat Joe Biden. According Raw Story, Will announced his decision during an event today at the Aspen Institute.
It will be the first time in his life that Will has voted for a Democrat.
Court evangelical Tony Perkins joins several other evangelical Trump supporters to talk about the 2020 election:
A few quick comments:
15:58ff: Perkins says that Christians “have a responsibility” to vote along “biblical guidelines” and “biblical truth.” He adds: “if you notice lately, truth is under attack.” As I said yesterday, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I hear Trump supporters try to defend truth. When will they speak truth to Trump? If Perkins wants to talk about biblical principles he should read about Jesus before Pilate in John 18 or Nathan’s words to King David in 1 Samuel 12. How dare Perkins sit there and say that “it is the truth that will make men free.”
Shortly after Perkins finishes speaking, the host shows a video comparing the GOP and Democratic platforms. The GOP platform, Perkins believes, is biblical. The Democratic platform, he believes, in unbiblical. “It’s like oil and water,” Perkins says. This is what we call the political captivity of the church.
And then comes the fear-mongering. Perkins implies that if evangelicals do not vote for Trump, the Democrats will come for their families, their religious liberty, and their “ability to worship God.” Listen carefully to this section. It begins around the 17:40 mark. I wonder what the earliest Christians would think if they heard Perkins say that unless America re-elects a corrupt emperor they would not be able to worship God. I wonder what the early Christian martyrs, those great heroes of the faith, would say if they heard Perkins tell the audience that “your ability to share the Gospel in word or in deed” rests on a Trump victory. As Bonhoeffer says in The Cost of the Discipleship, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
20:00ff: The audience does not start applauding until conservative pastor-politician E.W. Jackson tells them that Black Lives Matter is a “Marxist ploy to get people to buy into some sort of socialist, communist world view….” See what’s going on here. An African-American evangelical politician gives an audience full of white people the freedom to cheer against an anti-racist organization.
27:00ff: William Federer, probably known best in certain white evangelical circles for publishing a book of quotations from the founding fathers, implies that the CIA, Department of Justice, and FBI are planning a “coup” against Trump.
36:00ff: Tony Perkins says that if one believes human beings are created in the image of God, it will “direct all of your other policy.” He adds that the violence in the streets after George Floyd’s death was fomented by people who did not believe that women and men are created in the image of God. Was their unnecessary violence in the streets? Of course. But most of what happened in the streets after Floyd was killed had everything to do with the kind of human dignity Perkins is talking about here. How could he miss this?
41:35ff: Perkins notes the high levels of abortions among African-American women and blames the problem on Planned Parenthood. He fails to see that there is a direct connection between systemic racism, poverty, and abortion in Black communities. Of course, if one does not believe in systemic racism, then it is easy to blame Planned Parenthood and continue to ignore the structural issues of inequality and racism in our society.
1:30:00ff: Federer starts talking about the Second Great Awakening and how it led to abolitionism. This is partly true, but Frederick Douglass offers another perspective on this. When his master got saved during the Second Great Awakening, Douglass said that he became more brutal in his beatings. Why? Because he was now following the teachings of the Bible as understood by the Southern preachers who led him to God. Don’t fall for Federer’s selective history. It is a selective understanding of the past used in service of Trumpism. The 17th, 18th, and 19th South was loaded with white evangelicals who owned slaves and embraced white supremacy.
1:32:00: Perkins makes a connection between the Democratic Party and the French Revolution. He sounds like Os Guinness here.
There is a lot of other things I could comment on, but I think I will stop there.
And in other court evangelical news:
The Falkirk Center at Liberty University is tweeting a quote from Jerry Falwell Sr.
As Christians, we must re-engage in politics, or we will be controlled by those who are. The radical left wants to destroy western civilization and America’s foundations, which were born from the Judeo-Christian ethic and tradition. We cannot sit idly by and let them prevail. pic.twitter.com/Hhol2P0BmM
The idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country. If there is any place in the world we need Christianity, it’s in Washington. And that’s why preachers long since need to get over that intimidation forced upon us by liberals, that if we mention anything about politics, we are degrading our ministry. —Jerry Falwell Jr.
I will counter with a quote from C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters. Screwtape (Satan) is giving advice to his young minion Wormwood:
Let him begin by treating the Patriotism…as part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the state at which the religion becomes merely a part of the “cause,” in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce…Once [he’s] made the world an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing.
Samuel Rodriguez is holding a 4th of July prayer meeting at his church. The meeting is built upon his “prophetic decree” that America is “one nation, under guide, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” I wonder if he would have received the same prophetic decree prior to 1954, the year the words “under God” were added to the pledge.
James Robison tweets about the founders as if slavery did not exist.
Our nation’s founders acknowledged & exalted a benevolent and righteous God and affirmed the worth and dignity of humanity, unlike the brand of liberty exalted by some today which rejects the values on which this nation was built. The absolute truth is: ideas have consequences.
If you want to get a sense of the current state of the Republican Party, watch this debate in the House Judiciary Committee over the Democrats’ Justice in Policing bill:
The Black Lives Matter movement may have gripped the nation since George Floyd died under a police officer’s knee. But the GOP hijacked the committee debate over the Democrats’ Justice in Policing bill Wednesday to revisit complaints about the treatment of former national security adviser Michael Flynn who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in the probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Before there was even a basis for this embarrassing hoax, you had Jim Comey telling the FBI to go and entrap General Flynn,”complained Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).
The director of the FBI,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), told “the agents, ‘No, no, no don’t drop the case, we’re going after Michael Flynn.’”
Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) wanted “the FBI held accountable for the gross misconduct that it engaged in with investigating the Trump campaign.”
And this:
Democrats tried to steer the debate from that straw man to the topic at hand. “Can anyone on the Republican side say unequivocally, black lives matter?” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) asked.
“Unequivocally, all lives matter,” Gaetz replied. Gaetz, who later called Swalwell’s “theatrics” not “super productive,” added: “It would be as if I were willing to yield to any Democrat willing to say that blue lives matter.”
So what was “super productive”?
Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) spoke of “unborn children that are born alive from a botched abortion.”
Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) wanted it to be known that “antifa is without a doubt a domestic terrorist group.”
Gaetz described protesters’ “autonomous zone” in Seattle as “racially segregated,” with “all kinds of violent acts,” a “lack of sleep, screaming, gunshot, terror,” and a demand issued for “everyone who is white to give someone who is black $10.”
Yes, you read that correctly. Here is The New York Times:
When Republicans read the platform their party is using for the 2020 campaign, they may be surprised to see that it is full of condemnations of the sitting president.
“The survival of the internet as we know it is at risk,” the platform reads. “Its gravest peril originates in the White House, the current occupant of which has launched a campaign, both at home and internationally, to subjugate it to agents of government.”
The warning about speech online is one of more than three dozen unflattering references to either the “current president,” “current chief executive,” “current administration,” people “currently in control” of policy, or the “current occupant” of the White House that appear in the Republican platform. Adopted at the party’s 2016 convention, it has been carried over through 2024 after the executive committee of the Republican National Committee on Wednesday chose not to adopt a new platform for 2020.
This is what happens when someone sends a cover letter and forgets to change the name of the institution to which they are applying. Faculty also do this sometimes when they write letters of recommendation.
JF: What led you to write The Second American Revolution?
GD: A gnawing pit in my stomach and a sense of unfinished business and a golden opportunity. The gnawing pit was from a feeling that I hadn’t done what I genuinely intended to in my American Historical Review essay “The Mexicanization of American Politics: The United States’ Transnational Path from Civil War to Stabilization.” I began that research with an interest in the interaction between domestic/national politics and international events, in the way that events in other nations shaped the discourse around what was possible or probable, and I wanted to use this to show U.S. politics as less bounded than our received terms convey, to explore the mutual construction of what gets classed as national and trans-national history, and to capture the ebb and flow of ideas through particular domestic political contexts. In the process of following the inflow of ideas about Mexican crises to U.S. politics in the 1850s-1870s, however, I never got to the truly interactive nature of those connections, and so in some ways reproduced a domestic framework, in which the United States was influenced by cultural ideas about other nations. This made me uncomfortable, as I knew there was a great deal to the Mexican side of the story that I hadn’t explored, and it also gave me a sense of unfinished business: how could I go further in exploring the mid-19th century as a broad crisis in republican theory, in which calculations of how (and whether) republics survived were shaped by ideas and political actors moving from one nation to another. There was much more to be said about the relationship between the United States mid-century crises and those in other countries.
The opportunity came in the Brose Lectures which gave me a format and an excuse to explore ideas that were historiographically important but might not fit easily into a book. And as I began reading and thinking more deeply, I became more impressed with the ways that the literature was already working to incorporate a multi-sided view of the U.S.-Mexican influence (especially in work by Erika Pani and Pat Kelly and others) and also with a thread I had worried over earlier but not followed: the centrality of Cuba. By following Cuban revolutionary exiles, I was able to find a way to follow circuits into and out of different countries’ domestic politics and to explore the connection between the revolutionary remaking of U.S. political structures and a global revolutionary wave that rose and then fell in the mid-19th century.
JF: In two sentences, what is the argument of The Second American Revolution?
GD: The Civil War was not merely civil–meaning national–and not merely a war, but instead an international conflict of ideas as well as armies. Its implications transformed the U.S. Constitution and reshaped a world order, as political and economic systems grounded in slavery and empire clashed with the democratic process of republican forms of government.
JF: Why do we need to read The Second American Revolution?
GD: The book examines the breadth of U.S. politics at a moment when we need to recover our sense of the bold and of the possible. Much of the book is dedicated to exploring those international currents I mentioned, and those have important (I believe) historiographical ramifications for U.S. history and potentially some interest for historians of Cuba and the Caribbean and 19th century Spain.) But the book also turns inward to examine the norm-breaking boldness of U.S. Republicans in the 1860s as they created new states, forced constitutional amendments through, marginalized the Supreme Court, and in other ways significantly altered the political system. Then, I argue, they covered their tracks in order to make their achievements seem moderate, and we have helped them do so by scolding them for their moderation. But in fact no political candidate offers solutions anywhere near as bold as “moderate” 1860s Republicans; no one matches John Bingham in threatening to dissolve the Supreme Court entirely if it doesn’t recognize the role it must play. Instead we have fallen into calling for respect for norms that are—as in the 1840s and 1850s—no longer respected. When faced with those norm violations, we tend to call for the referees. But there are no referees, other than the electorate. And to the electorate we make claims about broader failings but can’t offer plausible solutions; we tell them the political system is broken but don’t fix it. I think we need to recover our boldness and abandon our sense of futility. Rethinking the constitutional transgressions of the Civil War is one way we can expand our own political thinking to make it at least approach the boldness of allegedly moderate 1860s Republicans, and thus discover ways out of problems like the contemporary Supreme Court, the Senate, and other sticky but intractable problems of U.S. politics.
JF: When and why did you decide to become an American historian?
GD: As a child I was raised between Kauai and my extended family’s home of central Kentucky and my extended family’s eventual new home in Middle Tennessee, and I was from a young age fascinated by the differences between those places, by the way that race and politics and memory worked so differently in Kauai than in Kentucky, and by the shadow that events (the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy or the Civil War) continued to gnaw upon the present. I worked as a journalist and as a high school teacher, so I didn’t always know that I would be an academic historian, but I always believed that the study of the past was venerable, difficult, and essential.
JF: What is your next project?
GD: I am working on completing my friend Tony Kaye’s manuscript on Nat Turner, a project he was working on when he died. After that I have many projects I am contemplating and am enjoying the time to reflect on what I most want to do and most feel challenged by.
As we enter the 2020 election season I have been trying to do more writing for local and regional outlets here in Pennsylvania. This morning I have an op-ed on the impeachment trial at LNP/Lancaster On-Line (formerly Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era). Here is a taste:
Other Republican senators, including Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and Pennsylvania’s own Pat Toomey, argued that Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president was “inappropriate,” but did not rise to the level of impeachment.
This last group of senators justified their acquittal votes in two ways.
First, some of them argued that the Founding Fathers would have opposed a partisan impeachment. (No House Republicans supported impeachment.)
This is not true.
In Federalist Paper No. 65, Alexander Hamilton, one of the most prolific defenders of the Constitution during the ratification debates of 1787-1788, predicted that impeachments would always be political. As a result, the Senate should always proceed with caution, prudence and wisdom.
Moreover, the framers of the Constitution would never have referred to an impeachment trial as “bipartisan,” since at the time of its writing there were no political parties in the United States.
The second way that this cohort of Republican senators justified their acquittal vote was by claiming that “the people” should decide whether Trump should be removed from office and this should be done when they cast their ballots during the November presidential election.
The Founding Fathers would not have recognized such an argument.
Democrats in the Senate believe that Trump should be removed from office. They will vote along these lines tomorrow. But they only have 47 votes. This is well below the 67 votes needed to remove the president from office. In all likelihood, the Senate will acquit Trump.
But several GOP Senators have noted that Donald Trump acted inappropriately when he asked the Ukrainian president to investigate Joe Biden. Marco Rubio even suggested that when Trump withheld American aid to Ukraine until he got an investigation into his political opponent the president was committing an impeachable offense.
While some Senators will defend the president at all costs, it seems that others–Lamar Alexander, Rubio, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Mitt Romney–may want to send a message of rebuke to the president for his corrupt behavior. A censure might be an appropriate way to do this.
I don’t think Joe Manchin will get many Democrats to support a presidential censure. Most Democrats want Trump out of office. Censure will look like a compromise. But what if the Republicans pushed for censure? If they really think that Trump committed unethical or impeachable offenses, perhaps they would want to remind the president that his call to Ukraine was not “perfect.” By calling for a censure of Trump, Manchin appears to be calling their bluff.
If the Senate did pass a censure resolution against Trump it would not be the first time this has happened in American history. As historian Mark Cheathem reminds us, the Senate censured Andrew Jackson in 1834. Here is a taste of his post at his blog Jacksonian America:
In 1834, the Senate passed a censure resolution against President Andrew Jackson. The decision to rebuke Jackson stemmed from his actions during the Bank War. Suspicious of the 2nd Bank of the U.S., Old Hickory had waged a battle against the financial institution since his first term. In 1832, he vetoed a congressional bill that would have granted the Bank a new contract four years earlier than expected. The following year, in an attempt to permanently weaken the Bank, Jackson ordered Secretary of the Treasury William J. Duane to remove the government’s deposits. When he refused, the president fired Duane. Jackson replaced him with Roger B. Taney, who implemented the removal policy. Bank president Nicholas Biddle responded by instigating a recession. “This worthy President thinks that because he has scalped Indians and imprisoned Judges, he is to have his way with the Bank,” Biddle said. “He is mistaken.”
Jackson’s opponents, led by Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, also took action. When Jackson refused to give the Senate a document on the removal of government deposits that he had submitted to his cabinet, Clay introduced censure resolutions against both Jackson and Taney. “We are in the midst of a revolution, hitherto bloodless, but rapidly tending toward a total change of the pure republican character of the government, and to the concentration of all power in the hands of one man,” Clay said in a speech on the Senate floor. He compared Jackson to a tyrant and warned his fellow senators that if they did not stand up to him, then the nation would collapse. “We shall die—ignobly die! base, mean and abject slaves— the scorn and contempt of mankind—unpitied, unwept, unmourned!” he concluded dramatically. In a decidedly partisan vote, in March 1834, the Senate passed censure resolutions against both Jackson and Taney. Senators also rejected Taney’s recess appointment as Treasury secretary.
In 1991, when Václav Havel received the Sonning Prize for contributions to European civilization, he spoke about those “who are starting to lose their battle with the temptations of power.” It is an insidious thing, Havel warned, to become captive to the perks of power. Politicians, he said, soon learn how easy it is to justify staying in power even as they give up bits of their soul in the process. It is easier than they think, he said, to get “morally tainted.”
“Politics is an area of human endeavor that places greater stress on moral sensitivity,” Havel concluded, “on the ability to reflect critically on oneself, on genuine responsibility, on taste and tact, on the capacity to empathize with others, on a sense of moderation, on humility. It is a job for modest people, for people who cannot be deceived.”
To see men and women who in other spheres of their lives are admirable, who got into politics because they believed it was a noble profession and had a positive vision for the Republican Party, beaten down and broken by Trump is a poignant thing. Their weakness and servility, their vassalage to such a fundamentally corrupt man, is dispiriting to those of us who not only lament the injury Trump is inflicting on the nation as a whole but who still care about the Republican Party and worry that conservatism is in the process of being subsumed into angry, ethnic populism.
What Republicans who have rallied behind Trump don’t fully grasp yet is the toxic effect he’s had on the younger generation, and on college-educated, suburban, and nonwhite voters. (Trump is wildly popular among blue-collar and rural voters, who are shrinking as a percentage of the voting population.) The damage done by Trump won’t be limited in its reach. He has imperiled the future of the party he leads. And those who think the GOP will simply snap back to the best of what it was pre-Trump—who think the worst elements of Trumpism will vanish once he leaves the White House—are kidding themselves.
Those who fell in line behind Trump have empowered him (and his many acolytes and media propagandists) to redefine much of conservatism and the principles that once informed the Republican Party. I don’t think that is what they intended, but that is what they have helped achieve.
With it looking increasingly likely that Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell won’t be able to prevent a vote in favor of calling witnesses in the impeachment trial of President Trump, the GOP finds itself in a tight spot.
Everyone agrees that there’s something close to a zero chance that 20 — and only a tiny chance that any — Republicans will join with 47 Democrats to vote in favor of convicting and removing the president from office, no matter what Trump’s former National Security Adviser John Bolton says under oath. (Conviction and removal would require an affirmative vote of 67 senators.) Yet allowing Bolton to testify about what’s apparently in his forthcoming book — namely, that in August 2019 the president understood himself to be withholding badly needed aid to Ukraine in order to get its president to announce he was opening an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden — would force Republicans to clearly reveal where they stand on the most important issue dividing the party.
Linker argues that Bolton’s testimony will reveal three kinds of Republicans:
Yesterday Joe Biden said that he would consider a Republican as his running mate if he were to win the Democratic nomination in 2020. Let’s have some fun with this. Who would make a good GOP running-mate for Biden?
John Kasich: Anti-Trumper who might help Biden win Ohio
Jeff Flake: Anti-Trumper who might help Biden win Arizona.
Mitt Romney: Trump won Utah in 2016 by more than 18 points. I don’t think putting Romney on the ticket will help Biden win Utah in 2020. But Romney is a national Republican and a moderate who instituted Obamacare in Massachusetts before it was called Obamacare.
Jeb Bush: This would be a strong anti-Trump ticket and might help Biden in Florida.
Condoleezza Rice: She is only 65 years old and an anti-Trump moderate.
I believe Donald Trump should be impeached and removed from office.
Here are the facts:
Donald Trump told the Ukrainian president that he would give him economic aid and/or a meeting in the White House if he investigated the Biden family’s relationship to a Ukrainian energy company. The goal was to prove that former Vice-President Joe Biden, who may be Trump’s chief rival in the 2020 presidential election, is involved in corruption related to his son Hunter’s position on the board of this energy company.
Donald Trump called for China to investigate the Bidens as well. Again, Biden is the front-runner in the Democratic primary race. Trump openly suggested that he wanted a foreign country to investigate his political opponent.
Donald Trump claims he wanted the Bidens investigated because he is a corruption fighter. So let me get this straight. Trump, of all people, claims to be using the power of his office to clean-up corruption in the world. Let’s remember that this is the guy who scammed hundreds of people through “Trump University” and took money from his non-profit to advance his political aspirations and pay his business debts. (And these are only two examples of his corrupt business dealings. We could write a whole book about how his business is benefiting from his presidency). Some of his associates are in jail. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin, the corrupt leader of Russia and the guy who tried to undermine the 2016 election (according to every American intelligence agency) has had more than sixteen exchanges with Trump.
Yesterday Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani confirmed that Trump removed Maria Yovanovitch, a true corruption fighter in the Ukraine, from her ambassador post so he (Giuliani) could be free to investigate the Bidens.
While the impeachment trial was going on, Rudy Giuliani was in Ukraine trying to dig up more dirt on the Bidens. Again, Joe Biden is Trump’s political rival and a likely opponent in the 2020 election. (This, I would argue, is actually worse than the June 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel).
Again, I think what Trump did was an impeachable offense. The GOP members of the House and Senate disagree. But regardless of whether they are right or wrong about impeachment, how can they not publicly condemn Trump’s behavior in this Ukrainian mess? Where is the moral backbone of the GOP? How can people like Jim Jordan, Devin Nunes, Doug Collins, Jim Sensenbrenner, Steve Chabot, Louis Gohmert, John Ratcliffe, Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs, Debbie Lesko, Elise Stefanik, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, John Thune, Lamar Alexander, Marcia Blackburn, John Cornyn, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron Johnson, James Lankford, Rand Paul. Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, Marco Rubio, Rick Scott, Tim Scott, Pat Toomey, and the rest sit back and not condemn this president? History has its eyes on you!
Conservative public intellectual Peter Wehner reflects on today’s impeachment hearings. Here is a taste of his piece at The Atlantic:
We are facing a profound political crisis. What the Republican Party is saying and signaling isn’t simply that rationality and truth are subordinate to partisanship; it is that they have to be obliterated for the sake of partisanship and the survival of the Trump presidency. As best I can tell, based on some fairly intense interactions with Trump supporters, there is no limiting principle—almost nothing he can do—that will forfeit their support. Members of Congress clearly believe Trump is all that stands between them and the loss of power, while many Trump voters believe the president is all that stands between them and national ruin. In either case, it has led them into the shadowlands.
For those of us who are still conservative and have devoted a large part of our lives to the Republican Party, it is quite painful to watch all of this unfold. Perhaps too many of us were blind to things we should have seen, or perhaps the GOP is significantly different now that it was in the past, when it was led by estimable (if imperfect) individuals like Ronald Reagan. Whatever the case, we are where we are—in a very precarious and worrisome place.
You can be critical of the Democratic Party and believe, as I do, that it is becoming increasingly radicalized while also believing this: The Republican Party under Donald Trump is a party built largely on lies, and it is now maintained by politicians and supporters who are willing to “live within the lie,” to quote the great Czech dissident (and later president) Vaclav Havel. Many congressional Republicans privately admit this but, with very rare exceptions—Utah Senator Mitt Romney is the most conspicuous example—refuse to publicly acknowledge it.
“For what purpose?” they respond point-blank when asked why they don’t speak out with moral urgency against the president’s moral transgressions, his cruelty, his daily assault on reality, and his ongoing destruction of our civic and political culture. Trump is more powerful and more popular than they are, they will say, and they will be targeted by him and his supporters and perhaps even voted out of office.
The answer to them is that it is better to live within the truth than to live within a lie; that honor is better than dishonor; and that aiding and abetting a corrupt president implicates the aiders and abettors in the corruption.
In a Q&A following the speech, McKnight did not hesitate to call out multiple facets of modern-day Christianity. He began by commenting on the contradiction of party politics with the evangelical faith.
“I think it is undeniable that the church in the United States is declining in its numbers, but it is clearly declining in its significance in our culture,” McKnight said. “I think it was a massive mistake in the 1970s and 80s when James Kennedy, James Dobson and Jerry Falwell decided to align that group of evangelical fundamentalists with the Republican party.”
Continuing in this line of thought, McKnight went on to state a thought surmised by many evangelical thinkers of our time.
“I can think of no good thing that has happened to evangelicalism as a result of its alliance to the Republican party. All I can think of are negative things,” McKnight said. “I’m not taking a political position. I would call myself a classic conservative. I’m not a Republican, I’m a Christian. I believe that we have made undeniable damage to the church’s witness because we align ourselves so much with political parties.”
Gregory Downs
Yesterday Joe Biden said that he 
