Unimpeachable, unindictable, uninvestigable, above-the-law

I’m glad to hear some people are waking up to what the nasty guy is like. It helps that he is making is blatantly obvious.

White House Counsel Pat Cipollone sent an eight page letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday, essentially declaring impeachment as “illegitimate.” Or as Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos describes it:

Donald Trump's rampant misconduct in office and lifetime of criminal transgressions have left him, his lawyers, and his administration no choice but to declare him the ultimate unimpeachable, unindictable, uninvestigable, above-the-law sovereign.
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As Elizabeth Wydra, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, told Waldman, a blanket refusal to provide any information to Congress has "no place in a properly working constitutional democracy.”

And that is exactly the point. Trump has simply proven to be too corrupt, too criminal, and too unscrupulous to persist as leader of any functioning democracy, and so his White House and GOP allies are trying to break the democracy.

I’m pleased to hear Democratic leadership saying that failure to turn over subpoenaed documents is evidence of criminal cover-up and an impeachable offense.

But one thing this might accomplish is protecting his cronies. Yeah, the nasty guy has already confessed to several crimes. But we’ve seen a glimpse into the involvement of the vice nasty guy and most of the cabinet as well. This clampdown on documents might mean insufficient evidence to take them all down too.

Though there are voices saying that if the Democrats had been paying attention all along there is already plenty of evidence in the public record to take down the nasty guy, the VNG, and everyone else.



Adam Serwer is a staff writer for The Atlantic. He tweeted a thread:

“Republicans would be absolutely livid if a Dem president was extorting foreign powers to harm his rivals” is a good point to make but it won’t sway Trumpists because they don’t believe there should be another president from a different party. That’s the point of the extortion.

Some would insist that’s not true, but there are no fair elections where a president abuses his authority to criminalize his rivals, or extort foreign powers to implicate them. They know this but don’t care, because they think the other party should not be allowed to hold power.

Any method Trump uses to keep himself in power, no matter how unconstitutional or criminal, is legitimate because Dems are illegitimate and cannot be allowed to hold power. This conviction is, ironically, the result of projecting on the prior admin what Trump is actually doing.

Because they have already convinced themselves Obama did everything Trump does or will do, it’s perfectly fine for Trump to do it. This is the rationalization they’re using to hide from themselves that they just no longer believe in the rules necessary for democracy to exist.

We’ve seen this here before, and it’s the panicked logic of a majority used to wielding and holding power in brutal and unethical ways, fearing what will happen if they have to share it with those they once wielded it against.

It is all supremacist thinking. Even so, two ideas are worth highlighting. First is the belief that they are supposed to hold power, therefore anyone else trying to hold power is illegitimate. Second, they know they’ve behaved cruelly and are afraid of someone being cruel to them.



Mig Greengard tweeted a thread about the nasty guy’s reliance on “acting” directors of various cabinets. I’ve noted before that this is a way around Senate confirmation. Greengard noticed another aspect:

As I was saying, 2 yrs ago. This has been going on across the executive branch. It's not just appointing sycophants and installing loyalists, it's also appointing nobody and empowering unaccountable personal representatives. Eg Giuliani.
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Again, the US system and US lawmakers were unprepared for a president who has no interest in being president, only in personal gain and aggrandizement. Why wouldn't a president want to appoint people? For most politicians, that's how they expand their domain. Not an autocrat.

For a while the nasty guy was claiming that his discussions with the president of Ukraine about digging up potential dirt on possible rival Joe Biden was not about politics, but instead was about corruption, that what Joe Biden and his son Hunter had done was corrupt.

That’s rich, tweeted Stuart Stevens:

His campaign manager is a felon. His deputy campaign manager is a felon. His NSA is a felon. His foreign policy advisor is a felon. His longtime personal lawyer is a felon. But the defense is he cares about corruption?

Ross Baker is a professor of political science at Rutgers University and is on the Board of Contributors for USA Today. His opinion piece appeared in the *Detroit Free Press* this past Sunday (alas, I can’t find it online). He is concerned that most the Democratic leadership responsible for the impeachment inquiry are 70 and older and many are showing signs of dementia, so may not be as hard or as thorough as they need to be to pull off an effective investigation. Baker names: Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 79, House Judiciary Committee chair Jerrold Nadler, 72, House Financial Service Committee chair Maxine Waters, 81, House Foreign Affairs Committee char Eliot Engle, 72, and House Appropriations Committee chair Nita Lowey, 82.

Baker also notes of the Democratic candidates for President the oldest are Bernie Sanders, 78 (whose poll numbers are dropping after a recent heart incident), Joe Biden, 76, and Elizabeth Warren, 70.

And the nasty guy is 73.