BY BRIAN BEUTLER

& CROOKED MEDIA

Tuesday, March 12, 2019

—Felicity Huffman planning some fraud

CANNED IMPEACHES

Did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi close the door on impeachment? Her remarks, and related ones from her closest allies, strongly suggest so.

Pelosi stunned the political world Monday when she told the Washington Post, “unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because [impeachment] divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.”

Many observers have interpreted her comments to mean that if Democratic investigators and/or federal prosecutors compile an open-and-shut case that Trump should be impeached, then the House might vote to impeach him. But her criteria also include the condition that impeachment in the House must be “bipartisan,” and that means she’s given House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Fox News, and the rest of the right veto power over whether President Trump should be held accountable for anything.

She’s not alone in this: Other Democratic leaders agree.

• House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, who would oversee impeachment proceedings, said, “She laid down a number of conditions—it has got to be bipartisan, the evidence has to be overwhelming—which is what I’ve been saying.”
• Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said of her bipartisanship standard, “I think the speaker is absolutely right: In its absence, impeachment becomes a partisan exercise doomed for failure."

Why would Democratic leaders want to give Republicans this power? Because they believe making their new members from swing districts vote on impeachment will imperil their majority. “We’ve got 62 new members,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said, “not three.”

It makes sense for Democrats to be prudent about impeachment—if only so they don’t show up at an impeachment trial unprepared. But Republicans have made clear that there’s no level of criminality and corruption they won’t tolerate from Trump. By making them the ultimate deciders of Trump’s fate, Pelosi has given Trump the greenlight to commit impeachable offenses that damage the country, secure in the knowledge that Republicans will never have to vote on whether to let him get away with it. She should drop the condition that impeachment in the House must be bipartisan and should do it ASAP.

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SCHOOLHOUSE CROCK

Federal prosecutors have indicted dozens of rich people, including Full House’s Lori Loughlin, Felicity Huffman of Desperate Housewives, and several prominent businessmen, for bribing admissions officers, test proctors, and other people in the education system, as part of a nationwide fraud scheme designed to help their children gain admission to elite universities. The prosecutors did not charge any of the students, most of whom allegedly did not know that their parents were engaged in criminal fraud on their behalf. It’s unclear whether any students will be expelled or have their admissions revoked, but universities have begun firing employees who accepted bribes, and the quickly mounting backlash suggests the consequences may ultimately touch people directly involved.

The scandal is also likely to become an issue in national politics, because it underscores how the current system creates both legal and illegal paths for affluent students to gain unfair advantage over peers whose parents can’t afford to make large donations to schools (hi Jared Kushner) or participate in bribery schemes. And faced with calls to clamp down on unfair practices, Republicans will likely try to broaden the argument to attack affirmative action because they are terrible.

The FAA and U.S. airliners are under intensifying pressure to ground 737 Max airplanes until their safety can be certified, after an Ethiopian Airlines crash this weekend killed 157 passengers and crew, and a Lion Air 737 Max crashed in October killing 189.

The U.K. Parliament has overwhelmingly rejected Prime Minister Theresa May’s second Brexit deal. There are no plans afoot to delay Brexit or for a new referendum to cancel it, nobody wants to grapple with the corruption that drove the initial Leave campaign, and the deadline for the U.K. to leave the European Union is March 29. What a mess.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson didn’t just defend child rape and call women “cunty” and “primitive.” He also called Iraqis "semiliterate primitive monkeys" and told radio host Bubba the Love Sponge, “I like you...in a completely faggot way.” Though advertisers have fled, Fox News has done nothing, so the DNC should definitely reward the network by allowing it to host a Democratic presidential primary debate.

The Senate will vote Thursday on a resolution to terminate President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency along the southern border, and the White House is so desperate to stop it from passing that it dispatched Vice President Mike Pence to promise Republican senators that if they just let Trump get away with this one abuse of power, he will sign legislation stopping all future abuses of power.

Michael Avenatti no longer represents Stormy Daniels. Basta luego, she said.

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), who led the failed effort to boot Nancy Pelosi from House Democratic leadership, wants to abolish the filibuster and Electoral College. This Seth Moulton redemption tour is good.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell claims he has rounded up 51 votes to change the rules again and make it even easier still for him to confirm right-wing Trump nominees to lifetime federal judgeships, so that after Trump is gone and his Republican supporters disgraced, we will have to live under a judiciary stacked with people like Eric Murphy. He is a newly confirmed 39-year-old appeals-court judge who made a name for himself advancing voter-disenfranchisement efforts and can now spend the next several decades ruling on behalf of other restrictionists who try to make it harder for young and people of color to vote.

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Florida voting-rights advocates gathered in Tallahassee, the state’s capitol, to rally and meet with lawmakers who have been slow-walking the implementation of Amendment 4, the successful ballot initiative that re-enfranchised 1.4 million Floridians with felony records. The marchers, including thousands of former felons, hope to register 500,000 disenfranchised people right off the bat, and eventually reach 90 percent of the 1.4 million.

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