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Impeachment has hit the Senate, federal coup enablers are under investigation, and Rudy Giuliani’s butt-dialing days are numbered now that he’s getting his ass sued off: We’ve entered Accountability Season, and shockingly, Republicans want no part of it.
- The House has transmitted its article of impeachment charging Donald Trump with incitement of insurrection to the Senate, though the actual trial won’t begin until the week of February 8. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the Senate president pro tempore, will preside over the trial instead of Chief Justice John Roberts, who has to wash his hair that day. (The Constitution only explicitly requires that the chief justice preside when the impeachee is the current president.)
- With the exception of Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), Senate Republicans have increasingly agreed to pretend that the January 6 attack on the Capitol was all a dream, falling into line behind the baseless argument that impeaching a president who’s no longer in office is unconstitutional. Why block an insurrection inciter from further radicalizing the Republican party and one day regaining power when we could simply cram it all down the memory hole? “Impeachment is the zenith of cancel culture,” tweeted Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) on Monday, less than three weeks after he sought to cancel millions of votes on the same day an insurrectionist mob tried to cancel former Vice President Mike Pence by murdering him. Not only are their arguments made up, plenty of Republicans demonstrably don’t believe them; here’s Matt Gaetz suggesting impeaching Barack Obama in 2019.
- Republicans might regret requesting an extra two weeks before disingenuously declaring Trump innocent, as whole new episodes of his attempted coup continue to spill out into the open. The Justice Department’s inspector general has announced an investigation into whether any current or former department officials tried to help overturn the election. That announcement came just days after the New York Times broke the bananapants Tale of Two Jeffreys: Trump had schemed to oust then-Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and replace him with Jeffrey Clark, a DOJ lawyer who had “spent a lot of time reading on the internet” (huge red flag) and wanted to use the department to force Georgia lawmakers to overturn the state’s election results.
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Other key players in Trump’s election-stealing efforts now face their own potential reckonings.
- Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) sent a letter to President Biden calling on him to fire the entire USPS Board of Governors over their “silence and complicity” in Trump and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s attempts to sabotage the Postal Service and subvert the election. That would also be Biden’s fastest route to getting rid of DeJoy himself; only the board of governors can hire and fire the postmaster general, and because Republicans blocked Barack Obama’s nominees and left the board completely vacant when he left office, all six current governors on the board (which still has three open seats) were nominated by Trump.
- Meanwhile, in Rudy Giuliani’s Legendary String of Wins, Dominion Voting Systems has slapped him with a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit over his role in promoting the voter-fraud lies that ultimately inspired an insurrection. Demonstrating his unmatched legal acumen, Giuliani deftly defused the whole suit by going on his radio show (where he lied about Dominion machines as recently as last week) and publicly acknowledging the election results for the first time on January 25, 2021, while also accidentally saying “fight” a bunch: “We’ll have a nice fight, a real fight, and by fight, I don’t mean, don’t mean any words of violence. I fight in the courtroom, you know? That’s what I always mean when I talk about fight.” Nailed it.
After paying weak lip-service to Trump’s culpability for fomenting violence directly after the Capitol riot, Republicans have slipped clumsily back into whiny dismissals of any justice for an attack on democracy as a feature of a made-up culture war. Allowing that narrative to be taken seriously is the surest way to wind up right back where we started.
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Nationally-elected Republicans aren’t the only ones still clinging to a twice-impeached Donald Trump and his conspiracy-addled base. Over the weekend, Arizona’s Republican Party passed resolutions censuring Cindy McCain and former Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) for endorsing Joe Biden over Trump, as well as Gov. Doug Ducey (R-AZ), who, along with both McCain and Flake, opposed Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results. What better way to respond to losing both Senate seats than to attack the members of your party who win elections? Also over the weekend, the Hawaii Republican Party tweeted a thread in defense of QAnon believers, before the ensuing backlash prompted a communications official to resign. On Monday, the Oregon GOP released a resolution condemning the “betrayal” of the ten GOP House members who voted to impeach Trump, and citing the Epoch Times to falsely claim, “there is growing evidence that the violence at the Capitol was a 'false flag' operation.” Back to brunch, folks, it’s all exceedingly normal out there!
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- The Supreme Court has dismissed the remaining emoluments cases against Donald Trump as moot, and vacated judgements against him in the lower courts, with no apology for the fact that an entire nation learned this word for nothing.
- Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is still filibustering the organizing resolution that will allow Democrats to take control of the Senate, and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) has officially joined Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) on the pro-filibuster/anti-governing bandwagon. If you live in Arizona or West Virginia, you know what to do: (202)-224-3121.
- Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) announced he won’t run for re-election, boosting Democrats’ hopes of holding onto the Senate in 2022, if they can wrench their gavels out of McConnell’s cold ghoulish hands by then.
- Former White House Lying Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced
her career was permanently destroyed when she asked to leave the Red Hen she’s running for governor of Arkansas.
- The Senate has confirmed Janet Yellen as Treasury secretary, making her the first woman to hold the post in U.S. history.
- Former coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx has bravely spoken up about the shitshow she went along with for months, revealing that Trump was receiving alternate sets of coronavirus data from someone other than her.
- Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has lifted stay-at-home orders across California, a creative choice for the coronavirus epicenter.
- Ohio state lawmaker Stephen Huffman, who questioned the hygiene of “the colored population” in June, has been appointed to lead the state Senate Health Committee, even after being fired from his day job as an emergency room physician.
- Thousands of Russian pro-democracy protesters braved -60 degree weather to demand Alexei Navalny’s release, and in Moscow, took the opportunity to demonstrate their superior snowball aim.
- Larry King died on Saturday, at 87. A moment of silence for Larry King, and a second moment of silence for Larry King’s one-of-a-kind Twitter method.
- The First Dogs have landed and are, reportedly, very good boys.
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German intelligence officials are concerned that the Capitol riots will further radicalize far-right extremists in Europe. Far-right extremists around the world have been connecting online for years, and even traveling to meet each other and train together in person. Many of them in Europe saw the violence on January 6 as both a symbolic victory for their shared, racist cause, and a strategic defeat they could learn from. German authorities immediately tightened security around the parliament building in Berlin in the wake of the attack, and while no concrete plans have been detected in Germany, officials there are concerned about both a strengthening of international far-right networks since January 6, and neo-Nazis’ current volatile state: “a dangerous mix of elation that the rioters made it as far as they did and frustration that it didn’t lead to a civil war or coup.”
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Joe Biden has signed an executive order repealing Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military.
Seattle has approved a mandatory pay boost for grocery workers for the duration of the pandemic.
Oregon lawmakers have introduced legislation that would enable people to vote while incarcerated.
Harriet Tubman is once again bound for the $20 bill.
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