This photo w/@BernieSanders was taken in an RV during the very 1st episode of the #theaxefiles on 9/28/15. Tomorrow, 346 eps later, we’ll be sharing a best of Dem candidates reel, featuring excerpts from past shows w/Sanders, @elizabethwarren, @KamalaHarris & @pete.buttigieg.
Fun reminisces from all, including Sanders’s recollections of his years a student organizer at @UChicago in the ‘60s, where it all began! #AxeFiles on @hearluminary!!
It's very late to change horses; a lot will happen in the next year that no one can predict & Biden's team says his resolve to run is firm.
He's defied CW before but this will send tremors of doubt thru the party--not "bed-wetting," but legitimate concern. nytimes.com/2023/11/05/us/…
The greatest concern is that his biggest liability is the one thing he can't change. Among all the unpredictables there is one thing that is sure: the age arrow only points in one direction.
The @POTUS is justly proud of his accomplishments. Trump is a dangerous, unhinged demagogue whose brazen disdain for the rules, norms, laws and institutions or democracy should be disqualifying. But the stakes of miscalculation here are too dramatic to ignore.
.@SenAlexander raises entirely valid concern about impact on divided nation of ousting @POTUS, which has never been done. But if you believe a brazenly unrepentant president did something “clearly inappropriate,” how do you stop him from doing it again? nytimes.com/2020/01/31/us/…
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If you believe the voters should decide, as Alexander argues, shouldn’t they have had the benefit of the witnesses and evidence the president and the senate denied them?
And while removal of the @POTUS would be convulsive to the Republic, isn’t the meek surrender of congressional oversight authority and normalization of subversive acts by an unbridled president corrosive to the republic?
“The president’s lawyers did not deny any of the core facts underlying Democrats’ charges, conceding what considerable evidence and testimony in the House has shown...”nytimes.com/2020/01/18/us/…
“that he withheld $391 million in aid and a White House meeting from Ukraine and asked the country’s president to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son, Hunter Biden.”
So what we will hear the president’s lawyers argue is his own assertion that he did nothing wrong when he quietly withheld military aid, voted by congress and signed by the @POTUS, while he pressured Ukraine to open an investigation into the Bidens.
One of the odd things about this debate is that so much of the argumentation rests on this notion of removing the president from office when everyone in the chamber knows the senate will NOT remove the president from office.
The argument that the House seeks to “overturn the results of an election” is good @GOP fodder for riling up the base with talk of bloodless coups. But the whole point of impeachment is to safeguard us against extraordinary abuses of power by ELECTED presidents!
Even knowing the senate is a Get Out of Impeachment Free card for the @POTUS, it’s essential for the House to signal through impeachment that what we KNOW @realDonaldTrump did was not “perfect,” it was perfectly WRONG; an egregious assault on the principles of our democracy.
“Yes, the man pointed a gun at you and demanded your wallet. But did he ever say, ‘This is a robbery?’ And if he didn’t say ‘this is a robbery’ how, sir, could it be a robbery?!?
“And you obviously didn’t FEEL threatened because you didn’t offer a word of protest when he had that gun pointed at you!”
“And he never actually TOOK your wallet, did he? In fact, sir, by the time the police arrived, he had removed the gun from the side of your head, isn’t that true? So, in fact. nothing actually happened, did it?”
The most disturbing thing about this whole Ukraine discussion is the alacrity with which the president’s supporters have adjusted their values to suit the moment, justifying a brazen, stealthy act of extortion of a critical ally.
Without the whistleblower complaint, Ukraine was poised to submit to Trump’s private demands to launch a politically-motivated probe against the Bidens & we may never have known about the underlying, improper pressure @realDonaldTrump placed on Zelensky to do so.
If these same set of facts were fitted to a Democratic president, is there anyone who doubts the @GOP would speak as one FOR impeachment?