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Welcome to the official home and wonderful world of Pulitzer Prize Winning Political Cartoonist Michael P. Ramirez, daily editorial cartoonist for the Las Vegas Review Journal |
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Pelosi Announces Impeachment Managers
Zachary Evans. National Review•January 15, 2020 House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday named impeachment managers to make the House’s case in the upcoming Senate trial. The six managers will be Democratic Representatives Jerry Nadler and Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Zoe Lofgren of California, Val Demings of Florida, Sylvia Garcia of Texas, and Jason Crow of Colorado, according to a statement from Pelosi’s press office. All the managers are from safe Democratic districts except for Crow, who won election by two percentage points in a district outside of Denver. Absent from the list of managers was Michigan Representative Justin Amash, a former Republican and current Independent who Democrats had considered for the role to present the impeachment process in a less partisan light. Pelosi told reporters during a Wednesday press conference that the rebuke of President Trump would be “an impeachment that will last forever.” “The House has demonstrated its courage and patriotism,” Pelosi said in a press release. “Our Managers reflect those values, and will now honor their responsibility to defend democracy For The People with great seriousness, solemnity and moral strength.” Lofgren is the only Representative to have participated in the impeachment proceedings against Presidents Nixon, Clinton and Trump. In the 1974 as a law student she helped the House Judiciary Committee draft one of the charges against Nixon, while she sat on the committee when it voted to approve articles of impeachment against Clinton. Lofgren voted against the Clinton articles. In response to the announcement, President Trump on Wednesday wrote on Twitter that the Democrat-led impeachment process is a “con-job.” “President Trump has done nothing wrong,” read a statement from the White House. “He looks forward to having the due process rights in the Senate that Speaker Pelosi and House Democrats denied to him, and expects to be fully exonerated.” If the process moves on schedule, the articles of impeachment will be ceremonially brought into the Senate on Wednesday evening. Meanwhile, Senators Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) sent out a joint letter detailing procedural matters pertaining to the trial. read more
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Impeachment and the Fight Over the Deep State
COMMENTARY REAL CLEAR POLITICS By Charles Lipson - RCP Contributor January 15, 2020 Why is official Washington so determined to rid itself of Donald Trump? The usual answers focus on the country’s ideological divisions, now calcified in the parties, and Trump’s polarizing personality. Democrats of all stripes truly loathe him. All true, but those are only part of the answer. There is a deeper reason that helps explain both the origins of the impeachment articles and the larger movement to remove Trump. The key is that Trump not only ran against Washington’s entrenched power, he is actually delivering on that promise. Nothing is more dangerous to the Beltway’s power and profits, to its most powerful actors and the foot soldiers behind them. Those endangered interests are the essential backdrop to the House impeachment and Senate trial. Trump not only ran against the capital’s lobbyists, lawyers, and bureaucrats, he has avoided capture by them since taking office. Instead of making his peace with traditional Republican constituencies, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, he has shut them out. He pays little attention to familiar Republican think tanks. Instead of deferring to state party leaders, he stepped into the primaries, backed his own candidates (often underdogs), and showed it was fatal for Republicans to oppose him. Back in Washington, the Democrats shut out Trump, deciding from the outset to block as many of his Cabinet and judicial appointments as they could. The result is that Trump firmly controls his own party and is uniformly opposed by Democrats, who are otherwise fractured by ideology and age. For all his well-earned Pinocchios, Trump has governed exactly as he promised: as an outsider and disrupter. It is hardly surprising to find the losers fighting back hard. They realize Trump’s massive deregulation and his appointment of conservative judges is the most comprehensive effort to roll back the administrative state since it developed under Franklin Roosevelt, expanded under Harry Truman, and flourished under Lyndon Johnson and later. From Trump’s perspective, impeachment looks like another attempt by deep state actors and their allies in the Democratic Party and media to unseat a duly elected president. That’s how the White House and its allies view the initial counter-intelligence investigation of Trump’s campaign, its morphing into a criminal investigation, and the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, after leaks by ousted FBI Director James Comey. After two years of deep drilling into a purported “Trump-Russia conspiracy” came up dry, Trump and his supporters want to know how it all got started and why it continued so relentlessly on such thin evidence. They see the answer in a close partnership between bureaucratic functionaries, mainstream media, and high-level Democrats, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign and senior Obama officials such as John Brennan, James Comey, James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, and their colleagues at the National Security Council and Departments of Justice and State. Trump and his supporters see far worse than the “extreme sloppiness” Comey has acknowledged. They see crimes and deceit. U.S. Attorney John Durham seems to be finding the same thing. The targets of his criminal investigation are emblematic of entrenched Washington power and corruption. The future of that entrenched power -- the administrative state -- is the most profound battle in American politics today. Trump picked that fight himself, though he may not have fully comprehended its gravity or the manifold tools that could be used against him. As Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told Rachel Maddow, “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community -- they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” Schumer should have included the Department of Justice and FBI. It is the nexus of those institutions that launched the investigations of Trump, now culminating in both his impeachment trial and Durham’s investigation. read more
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