What A Day: Pelosi no evil

BY BRIAN BEUTLER, PRIYANKA ARIBINDI

& CROOKED MEDIA

Monday, April 22, 2019

—Stephen Moore, the Trump Fed Board pick who hasn’t been forced to withdraw

NANCY DREW THE LINE

Democrats are torn over what steps they should take in response to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to have sided with members of her caucus who are reluctant to impeach President Trump. It’s sorta like debating the best way to defeat Godzilla when he’s moments away from stomping on your building.

Pelosi acknowledged and described the rift in a Monday letter to her caucus. “[O]ur views range from proceeding to investigate the findings of the Mueller report or proceeding directly to impeachment,” she wrote.

In other words, House Democrats disagree with each other about how to answer two critical questions:

Where should investigations stemming from the Mueller report begin?
Should they conduct those investigations explicitly under the umbrella of an impeachment proceeding?

On one end, some Democrats essentially want to re-investigate everything Mueller meticulously documented in his report before considering impeachment; on the other end, some Democrats believe that the report speaks for itself, and could form the basis for passing articles of impeachment without further investigation.

The most pro-impeachment Democrats are right that the Mueller report, which is the product of a multi-year investigation, establishes behavior—obstructing an investigation of an attack on a U.S. election—that doesn’t need to be re-investigated, is cut-and-dry impeachable, and even that at some point the House has the obligation to vote on articles of impeachment.

But the House also has the obligation to persuade the public that impeachment is a necessary step, and since most people will never read the Mueller report, it makes sense for Democrats to air out its contents in public hearings. That’s why House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler just issued a subpoena to former White House Counsel Don McGahn, who supplied Mueller with the bulk of the evidence that Trump obstructed justice.

Pelosi suggested in her letter that these hearings should not be convened as impeachment hearings. “It is also important to know that the facts regarding holding the President accountable can be gained outside of impeachment hearings,” she wrote.

This may sound like an unimportant distinction, but it’s actually critical. Declining to respond to the facts laid out in the report by acknowledging that they appear to be impeachable will convey a message that the conduct Mueller documented isn’t so bad, and will create a void that Trump and his loyalists will fill with false claims of vindication and efforts to exact revenge for the Russia investigation.

That’s a bad opening to create when Trump’s criminal lawyer Rudy Giuliani has argued it is fine for Republicans to solicit dirt on Democrats from Russian intelligence, and his attorney general, and allies in the Senate are eager to launch investigations of the investigators.

It will also eat up time Democrats don’t have. If Democrats spend months re-tracing Mueller’s steps, then by the time they reach a conclusion, it may be too close to the 2020 election to begin a credible impeachment process. It’s good that Democrats want to make McGahn and Mueller testify, but they should do so at an impeachment hearing.

Elizabeth Warren has unveiled a new plan to eliminate student debt for families that earn less than $100,000 a year, make public colleges tuition-free, end federal funding of predatory for-profit colleges, and give more funding to historically black colleges and universities, all of which she’d fund through her wealth tax proposal. She estimates that this plan would benefit 95 percent of the 45 million Americans carrying student debt and wipe it out for 75 percent of them.

Warren argues that this plan would not only eliminate some barriers to education access, but would also stimulate the economy by giving working class Americans more opportunities to own homes, start businesses, and improve credit scores. Counterpoint: what is even the point of college if massive multi-billion dollar financial companies can't profit from it?

Eight bombs killed at least 290 people and injured 450 more at Catholic and Protestant churches and high-end hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday. The government has blamed an Islamist terrorist organization for the attack, arrested 24 people in connection with the suicide bombings, and shut down social media to prevent the spread of misinformation.

President Trump and the Trump Organization have sued House oversight committee chairman Elijah Cummings in an effort to quash the subpoena the committee issued to the Trump Organization’s accounting firm, which is definitely not a sign that the accounting firm is sitting on tons of evidence of fraud.

The Trump administration will end a program that let five large countries buy oil from Iran without penalty despite the American sanctions.

Grifting pizza magnate and accused sexual predator Herman Cain has withdrawn from consideration for the Federal Reserve Board, or at least that’s what Trump says. The Senate was poised to reject Cain’s nomination, but Cain recently said he wouldn’t back down. Knowing America at this point, Cain’s about to become the frontrunner on Big Brother.

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) is running for president, in case you were worried that there weren’t enough candidates in the field, joining Rep. Tad Roosevelt (D-IL) who launched his own campaign on Sunday. If you’ve never heard of Roosevelt, he’s known for being a politician we made up just now, but you were fooled for a second because so many goddamn people are running.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear multiple cases, which will determine whether or not federal anti-discrimination laws also prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Federal law and the laws in most states don’t explicitly ban anti-gay or anti-trans discrimination, though Equal Employment Opportunity Commission holds that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits this kind of discrimination in the workplace.

Abigail Disney, a filmmaker and heir to the Disney fortune, publicly criticized Disney CEO Bob Iger’s enormous compensation and the company’s decision to use permanent tax cuts to buy back stocks and fund bonuses, rather than give permanent raises to working-class employees. Let’s have a toast to the class traitors. We need more people like her mucking stuff up at cocktail parties.

The Associated Press and the New York Times have asked the court to keep Harvey Weinstein’s trial open to media and the public, in defiance of prosecutors and defense attorneys who want to keep Friday’s hearing closed.