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Over and over again during his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, President Donald Trump and his team complained about technicalities. When courts ruled against them on procedural grounds, they suggested (often wrongly) that the rulings meant the substance of their arguments remained intact — because the courts hadn’t actually dealt with them.
“There’s no way to say it other than they dodged,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said after the Supreme Court dismissed a case in December. “They dodged, they hid behind procedure, and they refused to use their authority to enforce the Constitution.”
On Saturday, Trump was acquitted at his second impeachment trial largely — if not completely — on a technicality: the argument that the trial itself was unconstitutional. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/02/14/trump-got-off-technicality/

The United States is grappling with a jaw-dropping surge in the number of novel coronavirus infections. More than 288,000 Americans have been killed by a virus that public health officials now say can be spread through airborne transmission.

The virus spreads most commonly through close contact, scientists say. But under certain conditions, people farther than six feet apart can become infected by exposure to tiny droplets and particles exhaled by an infected person, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in October. Those droplets and particles can linger in the air for minutes to hours.

To visually illustrate the risk of airborne transmission in real time, The Washington Post used an infrared camera made by the company FLIR Systems that is capable of detecting exhaled breath. Numerous experts — epidemiologists, virologists and engineers — supported the notion of using exhalation as a conservative proxy to show potential transmission risk in various settings. https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/12/11/coronavirus-airborne-video-infrared-spread/

An unpunished coup attempt becomes a training exercise and a greenlight for their return to power. In 1923 Hitler was lightly punished for an attempted coup and was in power ten years later. We should learn from that historical experience of fascism. January 6 was an attempt to retain a fascist leader in power. When we talk about an acquittal leaving the door open to fascism, we aren’t worried that fascism might just wander back in. It’s bloodthirsty – they are already climbing through the windows and scaling the walls. Conviction is the least that we can do.

This week, the world will be watching to see if the rule of law will remain in the most powerful country in the globe; that is what is at stake in whether Trump is convicted and held to account. And while right now, it does not seem that conviction is likely, this can change.

The 2020 election was a showdown over the form of rule in this country. A second Trump term would have allowed a leap and rapid consolidation of fascism in the most powerful country in the world – real possibilities of an escalation of the ethnic cleansing at the border, unleashed white supremacist terror, anti-science lunacy killing hundreds of thousands more from Covid. For months before the election – and for years when it comes down to it – Trump claimed that any election he lost would be illegitimate; spread lies about immigrants voting illegally; and in plain sight attempted to sabotage the election, from blackmailing the president of Ukraine to voter intimidation to disrupting the U.S. postal service.

After Trump lost the election, he refused to concede even as lawsuit after lawsuit challenging the results were thrown out. His backers attempted to cancel millions of ballots from the largely Black, urban voters of swing states. His rabid followers vowed to keep coming back to DC to “fight for Trump,” culminating in the storming of the Capitol on January 6. That they did not succeed in overturning the election does not change what it was – a violent coup attempt by fascists, in and out of government, fighting to stay in power so they could rule over everyone they hate with their white supremacist, misogynist, xenophobic terror. https://refusefascism.org/2021/02/09/we-must-make-it-politically-untenable-to-vote-against-conviction/

The first three days of the impeachment trial have reminded us just how low the Republican Party has fallen. What should be open and shut — an airtight case of inciting an insurrection — has become yet another exercise in disingenuous denial. Most Republican senators have plainly decided to acquit the ex-president no matter what. No matter how dangerous and frivolous it would be to create a “January exception” for impeachable conduct, and despite overwhelming the evidence that he stoked the MAGA mob, they will let him walk.
This is a party that is immune to facts and bereft of decency. It has proved that it cannot function within the ground rules of our system — that candidates concede when they lose, that they respect a free press, that they stick to facts and embrace majority rule. Such a party cannot exist in our democracy.
The Republicans who rally around a pathological demagogue are not a “fringe” in the party. The 10 House and six Senate Republicans who have expressed the view that impeachment is not only constitutional but essential are the fringe. That is a mere 12 percent of Senate Republicans and less than 5 percent of House Republicans. Those people are the outliers.
We are not talking about a trivial difference over policy — or even a major one. It is a fundamental division over whether the party should become a right-wing populist cult willing to subvert democracy to keep power. That is too much for some to swallow, thank goodness. The two sides cannot coexist. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/12/stop-trying-save-gop-its-hopeless/

James Allen Mels, 56, is expected to make an initial appearance at 1 p.m. in federal court in Detroit, the first step in being transferred to face charges in Washington, D.C.

The criminal case against Mels charging him with knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, and violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds was not publicly available Thursday morning.

Mels is the third person from Michigan charged with a federal crime in connection with the Capitol riot.

Last month, Calumet resident Karl Dresch, 40, was charged with knowingly entering or remaining in restricted grounds without lawful authority as well as impeding or disrupting official functions, a one-year misdemeanor carrying up to $100,000 in fines. The other charge is violent entry and disorderly conduct on the U.S. Capitol grounds, a six-month misdemeanor carrying an up to $5,000 fine.

Wixom resident Michael Foy, meanwhile, was accused of striking a law enforcement officer at least 10 times with a hockey stick before “rallying” others to climb through broken windows into the Capitol. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2021/02/11/feds-arrest-third-michigan-resident-capitol-riot-probe/6720584002/

One step at a time, Trumpism fooled many of its most enthusiastic adherents. Recall that some of the original intellectual supporters of Trump—people like Steve Bannon, Michael Anton, and the advocates of “national conservatism,” an ideology invented, post hoc, to rationalize the president’s behavior—advertised their movement as a recognizable form of populism: an anti–Wall Street, anti-foreign-wars, anti-immigration alternative to the small-government libertarianism of the establishment Republican Party. Their “Drain the swamp” slogan implied that Trump would clean up the rotten world of lobbyists and campaign finance that distorts American politics, that he would make public debate more honest and legislation more fair. Had this actually been Trump’s ruling philosophy, it might well have posed difficulties for the Republican Party leadership in 2016, given that most of them had quite different values. But it would not necessarily have damaged the Constitution, and it would not necessarily have posed fundamental moral challenges to people in public life.

In practice, Trump has governed according to a set of principles very different from those articulated by his original intellectual supporters. Although some of his speeches have continued to use that populist language, he has built a Cabinet and an administration that serve neither the public nor his voters but rather his own psychological needs and the interests of his own friends on Wall Street and in business and, of course, his own family. His tax cuts disproportionately benefited the wealthy, not the working class. His shallow economic boom, engineered to ensure his reelection, was made possible by a vast budget deficit, on a scale Republicans once claimed to abhor, an enormous burden for future generations. He worked to dismantle the existing health-care system without offering anything better, as he’d promised to do, so that the number of uninsured people rose. All the while he fanned and encouraged xenophobia and racism, both because he found them politically useful and because they are part of his personal worldview.

More important, he has governed in defiance—and in ignorance—of the American Constitution, notably declaring, well into his third year in office, that he had “total” authority over the states. His administration is not merely corrupt, it is also hostile to checks, balances, and the rule of law. He has built a proto-authoritarian personality cult, firing or sidelining officials who have contradicted him with facts and evidence—with tragic consequences for public health and the economy. He threatened to fire a top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official, Nancy Messonnier, in late February, after her too-blunt warnings about the coronavirus; Rick Bright, a top Health and Human Services official, says he was demoted after refusing to direct money to promote the unproven drug hydroxychloroquine. Trump has attacked America’s military, calling his generals “a bunch of dopes and babies,” and America’s intelligence services and law-enforcement officers, whom he has denigrated as the “deep state” and whose advice he has ignored. He has appointed weak and inexperienced “acting” officials to run America’s most important security institutions. He has systematically wrecked America’s alliances.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/trumps-collaborators/612250/

As former President Donald Trump faces a Senate impeachment trial on charges of inciting attacks on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, unanswered questions about the full extent of his ties to a nearby rally the same day highlight the need for more campaign finance transparency.

Newly identified payments in recent Federal Election Commission filings show people involved in organizing the protests on Jan. 6 received even larger sums from Trump’s 2020 campaign than previously known.

OpenSecrets unearthed more than $3.5 million in direct payments from Trump’s 2020 campaign, along with its joint fundraising committees, to people and firms involved in the Washington, D.C. demonstration before a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol.

Recent FEC filings show at least three individuals listed on permit records for the Washington, D.C. demonstration were on the Trump campaign’s payroll through Nov. 30, 2020 https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2021/02/jan-6-protests-trump-operation-paid-3p5mil/

Winston Churchill famously said, “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” All Americans, but especially my fellow Republicans, should remember this wisdom during the Senate’s trial of former president Donald Trump.

I say this as a lifelong Republican who voted to impeach Trump last month. Virtually all my colleagues on the right side of the aisle took the opposite path. Most felt it was a waste of time — political theater that distracted from bigger issues. The overwhelming majority of Senate Republicans appear to feel the same way about conviction.

But this isn’t a waste of time. It’s a matter of accountability. If the GOP doesn’t take a stand, the chaos of the past few months, and the past four years, could quickly return. The future of our party and our country depends on confronting what happened — so it doesn’t happen again.

The immediate cause for Trump’s impeachment was Jan. 6. But the president’s rally and resulting riot on Capitol Hill didn’t come out of nowhere. They were the result of four-plus years of anger, outrage and outright lies. Perhaps the most dangerous lie — or at least the most recent — was that the election was stolen. Of course it wasn’t, but a huge number of Republican leaders encouraged the belief that it was. Every time that lie was repeated, the riots of Jan. 6 became more likely.

Even now, many Republicans refuse to admit what happened. They continue to feed anger and resentment among the people. On Jan. 6, that fury led to the murder of a Capitol Police officer and the deaths of four other Americans. If that rage is still building, where does it go from here?

Impeachment offers a chance to say enough is enough. It ought to force every American, regardless of party affiliation, to remember not only what happened on Jan. 6, but also the path that led there. After all, the situation could get much, much worse — with more violence and more division that cannot be overcome. The further down this road we go, the closer we come to the end of America as we know it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/08/adam-kinzinger-trump-impeachment-senate-republicans/

The impeachment trial offers a chance to show how Donald Trump tried to undermine the election’s legitimacy for months—not just on the day of the Capitol attack.

If Donald Trump was repeatedly lying to steal an election he knew he had lost, that would be impeachable. But even if he was “merely” massively deluded in believing that the election was stolen, and pressed numerous state and federal officials to act on the basis of his delusion, that would still make him extraordinarily dangerous in any future public office. And since the trial’s second major purpose is to determine whether, if convicted, disqualification is appropriate, a focus on the longer arc of his sustained false narrative—regardless of whether he intentionally deceived the country or believed everything he said—is particularly apt. Some might ask whether sustained delusion, and taking actions based on it, is a “high crime and misdemeanor” within the meaning of the impeachment clause. But federal officials have been impeached for being drunk when performing public duties. A delusion of this scale, on such a consequential issue, is far more dangerous to the republic than even that.

Finally, as a political matter, getting Republican senators to agree that Trump directly incited the January 6 attack will be a heavier lift than getting them to endorse the view that he grossly abused his office by refusing to acknowledge the election result. To be sure, many believe that Trump had the right to pursue legal challenges up to a point. But many also believe, as does Senator Mitch McConnell, that once the states had certified their totals, and certainly after the Electoral College had voted, Trump’s continued effort to undermine the election was indefensible. Remember that while Trump was pressuring Pence to undermine the election results, more than 80 percent of Republican senators were rejecting objections to the states’ votes. They might not vote to convict Trump, for various reasons, but focusing much of the trial on his actions before January 6 would give Republican senators an opportunity to condemn those actions, whether or not they are prepared to endorse the conclusion that he directly incited the Capitol riot.

The horrifying events of January 6 will live forever in American history. Donald Trump’s role in them will rightly be part of his trial. But the unprecedented attack on the Capitol was the culmination of a much larger campaign to subvert the legitimacy of the election. Whether that campaign is best understood as “The Big Lie” or “The Big Delusion,” it is what must be most forcefully condemned, for the health of American government and American democracy going forward. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/january-6-impeachment-context/617967

The nation’s mail service is slower and more erratic than it’s been in generations, via the confluence of an abrupt reorganization and pandemic-era anomalies that has fueled demands for reform and fundamentally different ideas on how to achieve it.

On one side is Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who, with the backing of the U.S. Postal Service’s governing board, is expected as soon as next week to outline a new vision for the agency, one that includes more service cuts, higher and region-specific pricing, and lower delivery expectations.

But congressional Democrats are pressing President Biden to install new board members, creating a majority bloc that could oust DeJoy, a Trump loyalist whose aggressive cost-cutting over the summer has been singled out for much of the performance decline. The fight over the agency’s future is expected to be fraught and protracted, leaving Americans with unreliable mail delivery for the foreseeable future. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2021/business/usps-performance-whats-next-biden/