Thread by @STUinSD

Thread – Behind Enemy Lines with Rachel Maddow, Part I

1. Here was the scene a couple of weeks ago: it was Friday night after an amazing week: the House finally passed the USMCA trade agreement replacing NAFTA, the markets end a fourth consecutive week of breaking records, ….

1A. … the President’s job approval numbers keep going up and up, and DoJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz provided more details of FBI’s biases and FISA abuse during testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

2. And then there was the debate on the previous night between the Democrats’ Star Wars bar scene (a/k/a “top tier” Democrat presidential candidates). The debate was summed up perfectly here:

3. Oh, yeah, and the Democrats beclowned themselves with their partisan passage of two empty and “crime-less” articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump.

4. Given the Democrats’ breathless 90-second statements about the dire urgency to impeach President Trump, as they bleated one after the other during the “debate” before the impeachment vote (I suffered through them all!), ….

4A. … somehow Nancy Pelosi has suddenly determined that impeachment is apparently not so urgent anymore, as she has delayed sending the articles to the Senate.

5. With all of that as backdrop, I decided to go behind enemy lines to see how Rachel Maddow spun the week on her low-rated show Friday night on MSNBC. It was like visiting an alternative universe or the “Twilight Zone.”

6. Leading off her show, Maddow was still giddy about the Democrats’ impeachment vote on Wednesday. “It was only two days ago that Nancy Pelosi ‘impeached Donald Trump,’” and more in the same vein.

7. Then she shifted into her “four burning questions” about impeachment going forward. Let’s pick up her commentary introducing the first of her questions here:

8. Maddow (happily droning one): … There’s still the possibility that that means the President will be delivering his State of the Union address in the middle of his Senate impeachment trial.

8A. The uncertainty around the logistics of the Senate impeachment trial is one of the most interesting things going on in the news right now.

8B. … In the wake of the impeachment of President Trump this week, I have realized now that I have basically four main outstanding questions in terms of what happens next, and how this impeachment drama is all going to resolve.

8C. … The first one is about the impeachment trial and what the Senate is gonna be like. Now that the Senate is going to have to take up their part of the constitutional responsibility of impeachment, which is to hold a trial, ….

8C1. and the US senators will have to decide if this president should be removed from office.

8D. This question of “How will the Senate impeachment trial be run?” is very much an open question. Everybody I think does agree that the Senate in fact DOES have to hold a trial – it’s not optional – but beyond that, what that means … the fight on that is on.

8E. It looks like it may very well extend through the Holiday break.

9. Me: There won’t be much of a “fight.” The Democrats don’t get to set the rules in the Senate; the Republican majority does thanks to the “nuclear option” of only needed 51 votes to determine the process.

9A. But of course, that’s what the Democrats and their Democrat operatives in the media like Maddow are trying to do now – orchestrate support for Democrats controlling the process in the way that THEY wish it to unfold.

10. Maddow (continuing): There were bipartisan rules that were unanimously agreed to for the last Senate impeachment trial, which was President Bill Clinton’s impeachment in the 1990s, which allowed for witnesses and documents and a certain number of hours of debate.

10A. The vote to adopt those rules in the US Senate for the Clinton impeachment was 100-0 because the Democrats and the Republicans worked it out together.