Crooked Media - What A Day: Fail to the brief

House Democrats and disgraced former president Donald Trump’s legal team have submitted the arguments they plan to make at his upcoming impeachment trial, and if nearly half the Senate didn’t stand ready to acquit Trump even if his lawyers did nothing but walk in and barf on the floor, he’d be in quite a pickle.
 

• In their first brief to the Senate, House impeachment managers demonstrate that Trump was “singularly responsible” for the violence at the Capitol on January 6, and laid out their case that he committed high crimes and misdemeanors by using the power of his office to advance his personal interests at the country’s expense: “If provoking an insurrectionary riot against a Joint Session of Congress after losing an election is not an impeachable offense, it is hard to imagine what would be.” (Sending emails from a private server, obviously.) The managers thoroughly refuted Trump allies’ recently invented argument that the Senate can’t try and convict former officials because of invisible constitutional reasons, and preemptively slapped down a First Amendment defense: The right to free speech doesn’t allow a president to “provoke lawless action if he loses at the polls.”
   
• Trump’s defense attorneys Bruce Castor Jr. and David Schoen—whom Trump hired on Sunday after his previous lawyers quit because he pressured them to lie about voter fraud on the Senate floor, and/or refused to pay them, lol—opened their response brief by addressing it to “Members of the Unites [sic] States Senate,” so you know it’s pure legal gold from there, baby. Trump’s lawyers called the upcoming trial unconstitutional and asserted that his lies about the election fell under protected speech, then amazingly argued that sure, Trump may have produced zero evidence for his mob-inciting claims that the election was stolen, but the burden of proof is actually on everyone else to prove him wrong: “Insufficient evidence exists upon which a reasonable jurist could conclude that the 45th President’s statements were accurate or not, and he therefore denies they were false.” Can you prove that this email wasn’t written by several cats walking across a keyboard? Then you must treat it as a serious possibility.
   
• The Senate trial will begin next week, but Democrats haven’t yet decided whether to call witnesses. On Monday night, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) leveled the bizarre threat that if Democrats call a single witness, by golly, Republicans will...get to the bottom of what happened on January 6? “If you open up that can of worms, we’ll want the FBI to come in and tell us about how people preplanned this attack and what happened with the security footprint of the Capitol. You open up Pandora’s box if you call one witness.” Graham seems to be arguing that if the insurrection was planned in advance, Trump couldn’t have spontaneously incited it with a single speech on the day—something no one has asserted. Anyway, Graham screaming “no witnesses” like a scared child seems like a solid tick for the pro-witness column.

Witnesses might make for a longer trial, but they would, at the very least, serve the crucial function of not letting Senate Republicans sweep a deadly insurrection in their workplace under the rug.
 

• Without them, that duty falls to members of Congress who are willing to relive their own trauma on Instagram Live to keep the conversation focused. In a heartbreaking livestream on Monday night, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) shared details of her terrifying experience hiding in her office during the attack, where she believed she would die. While recounting that trauma, she also disclosed that she’s a survivor of sexual assault, and said that GOP senators trying to distract attention from the terror they incited were “using the same tactics of every other abuser who just tells you to move on.”
   
• The same could be said of Republican efforts to pretend that the violence-endorsing, school-shooting-denying, QAnon cultist among their ranks isn’t a problem. Thanks to sustained pressure from Democrats, that wall of silence is starting to crack: Without naming Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Monday that “loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican Party and our country.” We can only assume that Mitch will leap at the chance to convict the loony lie and conspiracy-theory purveyor who’s on trial in his chamber next week. 
   

No matter how embarrassing Trump’s legal arguments, Democrats can’t force GOP senators to uphold their constitutional responsibility, and a conviction is very likely out of reach. What they can do is make the plain facts of what happened impossible to ignore, and then use the 14th Amendment to bar Trump from holding office in the future anyway.

Former DHS official Ken Cuccinelli cut a last-minute deal with the pro-Trump ICE union with the aim of tying Joe Biden’s hands on immigration, according to a new whistleblower complaint. As the Trump administration spent its final days trying to sabotage immigration reform by any means possible, Cuccinelli signed a contract that functionally gives the ICE union the authority to delay any changes to immigration policies or practices that ICE has any hand in. Under federal law, agency heads have 30 days to cancel labor contracts once they’re signed, but Cuccinelli’s deal could allow the ICE union to appeal to the Federal Labor Relations Authority. Once that 30-day window closes on February 19, the agreements would be locked into the ICE union contract for the next eight years. A wild last-day abuse of power, from an official who was serving in his role illegally.

• Democrats have taken the first step to pass President Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package through reconciliation: “We are not going to dilute, dither, or delay,” said Senate Alliteration Leader Chuck Schumer. Crucially, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has confirmed he’s along for the ride—but will be a pain in the ass on the $15 minimum wage hike.
   
• Brian Sicknick, the Capitol Police officer who was killed by the mob on January 6, will lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda on Tuesday night.
   
• The Senate has confirmed Alejandro Mayorkas as the first Latino and immigrant to serve as Homeland Security secretary, and Transportation Secretary Mayor Pete has become the first Senate-confirmed openly-LGBTQ Cabinet secretary.
   
• Two FBI agents were fatally shot and three others were injured while serving a warrant in a child porn case in Sunrise, FL, marking the first time since 2008 that an FBI agent has been shot and killed in the field. 
   
• Jeff Bezos announced that he will step down from his role as Amazon’s CEO later this year, to be replaced by Andy Jassy. A pure coincidence that Bezos takes a step back on the same day Amazon unveils plans for a building shaped like a glass pile of excrement? Yeah, probably, but let’s get a fun rumor started anyway.
   
• The anti-vaxxers who temporarily shut down the Dodger Stadium vaccination site in Los Angeles organized the “protest” on Facebook.
   
• Ginni Thomas, Justice Clarence Thomas’s rabidly pro-Trump wife, has apologized to her husband’s former law clerks—not for spreading false claims about the election or endorsing the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally, but for causing distress on their private listserv.
   
• A Moscow court has sentenced opposition leader Alexei Navaly to two and a half years in prison, sparking protests across the country.
   
• In far better Russian news, the hastily approved Sputnik V vaccine seems to be safe and effective.
   
• We've already been through a lot this year, and it's important to stop and take in moments of beauty when they present themselves. Here is the MyPillow guy breaking a Newsmax host's will to live in under two minutes. 

The coronavirus vaccine rollout has become the latest driver of racial inequity in the American pandemic response. Since the pandemic hit, Black, Latino, and Native Americans have faced both higher rates of coronavirus hospitalizations and deaths, and greater difficulties accessing health care. Early data from the 23 states that have reported ethnic and racial vaccination data shows the same trend: White residents are being vaccinated at much higher rates than Black residents, regardless of a state’s racial makeup. In Mississippi, 15 percent of vaccine doses have been administered to Black people, who make up 38 percent of the state’s coronavirus cases and 42 percent of deaths. In a Washington Post op-ed, physicians Oni and Uché Blackstock outlined four steps the Biden administration could take: Explicitly prioritize Black Americans for the vaccine, bring it to trusted points of access like community centers, roll out a major public-health campaign to provide vaccine education, and mandate that states collect racial and demographic data on vaccinations to help target public-health efforts. 

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President Biden has signed an executive order creating a task force to reunite families who were separated at the border.

The Biden administration will begin direct shipments of vaccine doses to pharmacies next week, with a focus on optimizing vaccine access in minority communities.

Elizabeth Warren will join the Senate Finance Committee, and announced that introducing a wealth tax bill will be her first order of business. 

A single dose of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine prevented 100 percent of hospitalizations in a new study, and the vaccine was shown to be 82 percent effective with a three-month gap between the two shots.