Crooked Media - What A Day: Coop de grace

The second impeachment trial of disgraced former president Donald Trump will begin on Tuesday under heightened security, and while Senate Republicans have virtually promised to acquit him, Democrats still have the opportunity to make that vote as unappetizing and unpopular as possible.
 

• In a new nonsense-packed brief filed on Monday, Trump’s lawyers called the article of impeachment “unconstitutional for a variety of reasons,” accused House Democrats of trying to “silence a political opponent and a minority party,” and argued that Trump didn’t incite a violent mob to attack Congress, but “simply called on those gathered to peacefully and patriotically use their voices.” Did Trump tell his supporters to “fight like hell” right before they forced their way into the Capitol and murdered a cop? Sure, but they had “their own reasons” for doing that, totally unrelated to Trump’s non-literal speech, please don’t look at the teetering stack of criminal cases and social media posts in which insurrectionists say, “my reason was Trump, whom I took literally.”
   
• House impeachment managers have filed a new pleading refuting Trump’s First Amendment defense, and highlighting his recorded threats against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn Georgia’s election results, or else. That January 2 phone call, the managers argued, exposed Trump’s desperation to stay in power at all costs, which we saw manifest again with deadly consequences on January 6: “The House did not impeach President Trump because he expressed an unpopular political opinion. It impeached him because he willfully incited violent insurrection against the government.” 
   
• Trump’s argument that the trial is unconstitutional because he’s no longer in office—which Republicans would love to focus on, instead of Trump’s actual high crimes and misdemeanors—took a pie to the face on Sunday, when a top conservative constitutional lawyer published an op-ed calling it garbage. Charles Cooper, who represented former national security adviser John Bolton during Trump’s first impeachment, wrote that the 45 GOP senators who voted to dismiss Trump’s trial as unconstitutional had read the Constitution wrong: “It defies logic to suggest that the Senate is prohibited from trying and convicting former officeholders.” Meanwhile, a law professor whose work on late impeachment Trump’s lawyers cited throughout their brief said that they had badly misrepresented his conclusions. Never a great sign when your footnotes start tweeting.

Each side’s legal arguments, such as they are, have come into sharper focus, but the scope of the trial itself remains to be seen.
 

• Senate leaders have hammered out the rules for the trial, which will begin with a four-hour debate on the trial’s constitutionality on Tuesday. Each side will then have up to 16 hours for presentation, followed by four hours for questions from senators. If House managers request the inclusion of witnesses and documents, that would then be ripe for debate and an up-or-down vote. As of Monday, Democratic leaders were reportedly intent on getting the trial over with as quickly as possible, and, thus, reluctant to let the impeachment managers call witnesses. Besides, as some Senate Democrats have argued, Trump’s election denials and the whole insurrection played out in public—who needs witnesses?
   
• Well...the country, maybe. Republicans have been very forthcoming about the fact that they’d much prefer to speed this trial along with no witnesses, as part of their larger project to stuff the events of January 6 down the national memory hole. GOP senators like Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) already feel comfortable enough to suggest on television that the insurrection was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s fault, actually. What’s to be gained by letting them move on without confronting sworn testimony from Brad Raffensperger, say, or folks who know what Trump was actually up to during the Capitol attack? Democrats understandably want to focus on Joe Biden’s agenda, but as they insisted during the first impeachment process, the Senate can walk and chew gum at the same time. 
   

There’s no clear upside to calling the trial a lost cause and playing it at 1.5x speed: A new ABC News/Ipsos poll finds that a large majority of Americans support the Senate convicting Trump and barring him from holding future office. If Republicans are determined to vote against the popular notion of holding Trump accountable, Democrats can at least make them do so under an avalanche of damning evidence, in full public view.

On this week's Lovett or Leave It stream, the Rant Wheel is back!  Jon Lovett is joined by Langston Kerman, Ira Madison III, Erin Ryan, and Travis Helwig to let off some steam about everything from Super Bowl Ads to Chromatica Oreos. Watch & subscribe →  youtube.com/crookedmedia

Louisiana’s GOP Attorney General Jeff Landry has sued a journalist for filing a public records request, in an inspiring commitment to government opacity. Andrea Gallo, a reporter at the Advocate and the Times-Picayune, filed a FOIA request on December 14 for copies of sexual-harassment complaints against Pat Magee, the head of the criminal division at the Louisiana attorney general’s office. Landry’s office initially said that the records couldn’t be released yet because of an “ongoing investigation.” On January 22, after the investigation into Magee was completed, Landry’s office said the files were on their way—then later reversed itself, and filed a lawsuit against Gallo, arguing that the information she had demanded would “compromise the rights of our employees and could lead to litigation over the violation of those rights.” The lawsuit asks a judge to seal the documents, and requests that the defendant pay any legal fees. That’s an unheard-of response to a FOIA request, and an intimidation measure that could deter regular citizens from demanding answers from people in power. 

• New research suggests that the U.K. coronavirus variant is spreading rapidly across the U.S., and could become the country’s dominant strain by late March. The good news is, the vaccines we have seem to be effective against that variant. 
   
• Rep. Ron Wright (R-TX) has died after being hospitalized with coronavirus, becoming the first sitting member of Congress to die of COVID-19.
   
• Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), chair of the House Oversight Committee, has called on Parler to fork over documents on who finances the company, and on its proposal to give then-President Donald Trump an ownership stake in exchange for his exclusive posting.
   
• Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's office has launched an investigation into Trump's efforts to overturn the state's election results, including The Phone Call. 
   
• The Justice Department's inspector general urged Congress to grant his office the authority to compel testimony from former department employees, after former Attorney General Jeff Sessions refused to answer questions about the Trump administration’s family-separation policy.
   
• Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) announced he won’t run for reelection in 2022. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), who led the House GOP's effort to object to the certification of the 2020 election results, suggested he’s interested in taking those talents to Shelby’s vacant seat. 
   
• South Africa has put its rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine on hold after a study found it to be less effective against mild and moderate cases of South Africa’s new coronavirus variant.
   
• The Biden administration’s new guidelines for ICE could cut way down on arrests and deportations, to the great frustration of ICE officials. 
   
• Now to take a big sip of tap water and read the latest cybersecurity news: Hackers gained access to a computer system controlling a water-treatment facility in Florida and started messing with chemical levels in the water supply. A supervisor saw it happening and reversed the changes before anyone was hurt.
   
• Some QAnon cultists believe that Trump will be sworn in as president on March 4, so Trump’s DC hotel has hiked up its rates around that date. The grift that keeps on giving.
   
• Speaking of QAnon grifts, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) paid off the bulk of nearly $20,000 in state tax liens, right around the same time she claimed $20,000 in mileage reimbursements. From the ashes of Kelly Loeffler's Senate defeat, a new queen of lucrative coincidences arises. 

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has released a report on Democrats’ proposal to raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2025, finding that it would lift an estimated 900,000 Americans out of poverty, raise income for 17 million people, and provide $333 billion in cumulative pay to affected workers over 10 years. The CBO also estimated that the measure would reduce employment by 1.4 million jobs relative to current law, and increase the federal deficits by $54 billion over the same period. Those latter forecasts will surely generate scaremongering talking points for Republicans who would never have supported a wage hike anyway, but it’s potentially good news for Democrats if they attempt to pass it through budget reconciliation. Under the Senate’s reconciliation rules, a bill needs to have a direct and substantial impact on federal spending, revenue, or the debt. The CBO has now said “yep, substantial impact here,” hopefully clearing the way for Senate Democrats to raise the minimum wage with their narrow majority. House Democrats have already committed to including the wage hike in their pandemic relief package, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is still leading the charge to do the same in the Senate.

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Pfizer said that it expects to cut its vaccine production time nearly in half, from 110 days to an average of 60 days. 

Former Obama staffers Antoinette Rangel and Alexa Kissinger have co-founded the Latinx44 Scholarship Program, a nonprofit to support Latino students in public-service internships. 

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) has introduced a new bipartisan bill aimed at ensuring that every family can afford diapers.

Austin, TX, will purchase a second hotel to turn into permanent supportive housing for people experiencing homelessness, using funds redirected from the city's police budget.