The DOD Inspector General’s report on now-Rep. Ronny Jackson found he drank and abused ambien on the job as WH Physician and disparaged, belittled, and humiliated his subordinates, as first reported by CNN. assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2049…
The DOD IG decided not to interview then-current White House Military Unit staff who worked with Jackson for this report because the Trump White House Counsel’s office insisted on being present for every interview.
“When a drunk man comes to your room and they say, ‘I need you,’ your mind goes to the worst...”
In another incident, Jackson berated a subordinate in front of his kids and his spouse at a White House party.
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Let’s talk about the history of the Senate. The minority veto embodied by the filibuster rule was Senator Calhoun’s dream. Its permanent enshrinement in the rules was Senator Russell’s accomplishment. The reconciliation kludge that sustains it was Senator Byrd’s innovation.
John C. Calhoun, Richard Russell, and Robert Byrd aren’t just the authors of the current senate stalemate. They’re, respectively, the foremost defender of slavery and secession, the leading opponent of civil rights, and the Democratic party’s last official with links to the Klan.
Actually, let’s say last elected Senator to be safe.
Something I expect we’ll be seeing at the surface of the news more and more is what I think of as the more ordinary scandal material of the pandemic—a bad policy choice got covered up, an opportunity was squandered, officials were corrupted, people got rich off human misery, etc.
And I think it’s important to remember why that remained to some degree submerged for so long.
For more than a year, US national leadership, state Republican officials, and their media adjuncts were in the grips of surreal delusional thinking about the pandemic. They said it wasn’t real, wasn’t deadly, was imminently disappearing, was a communist plot, was the flu.
The Democrats could have appointed a committee to take testimony under Rule 11 and run through whomever managers wanted to call plus Jason Miller’s 301 witnesses or whatever over the next eight months without using a day of floor time for it.
Failing that, they could have used the time while depositions were being taken to advance their agenda on they floor. They could have passed rules limiting the trial to half of any given day and the conducted regular business in the other half. They control the Senate.
1) The senate has standing rules to allow it to do legislative work while taking testimony; the tension between them is largely a canard.
2) It’s vitally important to preserve testimony and very hard to call these witnesses in other forums.
3) It will be easier for Republicans to defend acquittal votes politically without hearing sworn testimony or seeing damning subpoenaed documents. They’ll have a ready excuse if it comes out later.
4) The moment the acquittal takes place the whole political dynamic will shift.
“Investigators have determined that initial reports suggesting Sicknick was struck with a fire extinguisher aren't true, CNN previously reported.” cnn.com/2021/02/10/pol…
Those initial reports were, of course, also attributed to multiple anonymous law enforcement officials. nytimes.com/2021/01/07/adm…
It’s something a Capitol Police briefing on the events of Jan 6th would do a lot to clarify, because a reporter could ask a briefer on the record what the cause of death was, or whether there was a medical examiner’s report, how they decided to release the body for burial, etc