Article of Impeachment

Supporting Materials

Trump in Davos - Part 2 (today)

Put that in the evidence for impeachment article 2, obstruction of Congress.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Oh, the humanity!

Nancy Pelosi's souvenir pens have Trump backers clutching their pearls.

One by one, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi picked up pens lined up beside her and used them to sign a bit of her name on the impeachment articles against President Donald Trump. Then she handed each signing pen to the assembled chairmen and House managers who will prosecute the case in the Senate.

Signing pens are swag in Washington, often framed and hung in lobbies across the city as trophies of proximity to power. Trump has engaged in the tradition himself.

But White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham on Wednesday criticized Pelosi both for the pens and the speaker’s demeanor, which got some blowback on social media for being too cheery for such a grave development.

  WaPo

“You know what you hand out pens for? Accomplishments. Like, say, signing a historic trade deal with China,” Republican National Committee spokeswoman Elizabeth Harrington added, referencing Trump — who on the same day as Pelosi's impeachment signing entered a landmark trade agreement with Chinese Vice Premier Liu He in the East Room of the White House.

  Fox News

Is she saying impeaching Trump was not an accomplishment?

Ahem....

h/t Kevin Kruse

Special Delivery

I believe there's a word for this

Extortion.

Trump seems inordinately fond of extortion.

Add another article of impeachment.

I have a question:  Why does The Wall Street Journal have a period after its name?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

It's not over til the fat lady sings

If their intent is to have Trump stroke out, I don't mind.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

IMPEACHED - part 2

Impeachment, Donald Trump said, could turn a president into “a mess.”

A president impeached, he continued, “would be thinking about nothing but — it would be a horror show for him.”

In fact, to be impeached “would be an absolute embarrassment,” he concluded.

“It would go down on his record permanently,” Trump declared.

The future president offered this existential take on impeachment during a 2014 call-in to “Fox & Friends,” in reference to then-President Barack Obama.

[...]

The House vote also marked one of the rare moments in Trump’s life where he has faced concrete accountability for his actions.

[...]

Sure, 46 percent of people still oppose Trump’s impeachment — statistically similar to the 49 percent who support such action, according to a Washington Post-ABC poll released Tuesday. And of course, he may yet win reelection in 2020.

[...]

But for a man consumed with his legacy and legitimacy, the 230-to-197 vote on abuse of power and the 229-to-198 vote on obstruction of Congress are stains that undermine both.

It is impeachment, and it is for life. It’s historical and it’s constitutional. It’s not something Trump can squirm his way out of, or cut a hush-money check to make disappear.

  WaPo

Don't worry. He'll pass it off once he's acquitted in the Senate.

Trump can spin and obfuscate all he wants — he can dismiss it from the rally stage and decry it from his Twitter feed — but the scarlet “I” of impeachment will be, as Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) said, “permanent.”

Yep. The horror of having had him as a president at all will be somewhat mitigated by the fact that everything printed about him in history books will include the word "impeached".

On Wednesday night, Katy Tur, an MSNBC anchor who covered Trump’s campaign, tweeted out the myriad ways Trump has long evaded accountability — a riff she articulated again on her show the following day.

“This is the first time — if you don’t count 2018 and the election there — Donald Trump has suffered political consequences for his actions,” she said.

[...]

Even Trump, who has approached what he calls the “very ugly word” of impeachment by blaming just about everyone but himself, seems to understand the severity of his historical sentence. His tweets and pronouncements and public statements have the feel of someone trying to scream away the one thing that can’t be undone.

“I don’t feel like I’m being impeached because it’s a hoax, it’s a setup,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Thursday, responding to a question about what it feels like to be impeached. “It’s a horrible thing they did.”

[...]

At his two-hour rally in Battle Creek, Mich. on Wednesday night, which presented a surreal split screen with the vote unfolding in the Capitol 600 miles away, Trump cycled through outraged indignation to claims that he was barely even being impeached.

“There’s no crime! There’s no crime, right!” he argued. “They call it impeachment light.”

[...]

“It’s evident that he is suffering in whatever way he does, manifested by the hundreds of tweets and the anger and the two-hour diatribe,” [Tony Schwartz, who co-wrote Trump’s 1987 bestseller, “The Art of the Deal,”] said, referring to Wednesday night’s rally.

Schwartz likened the president to “a balloon with a small pinprick hole” that is constantly “leaking self-worth.”

“That’s his life work, blowing that balloon back,” Schwartz continued. “It is a grim survival mentality. Impeachment is simply the most extreme version of something he must blow back against.” Tuesday in the Oval Office [...] asked whether he bore any responsibility for his impending impeachment, the president replied, “Zero, to put it mildly.”

[...]

“You get impeached,” Trump said. “That may be a record that will last forever, but you know what they have done? They’ve cheapened the impeachment process.”

It will last forever, which is how long he'll whinge about it.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Trump's impeachment day rally

I'm finally tackling the record-setting 2-hour rally Trump held in Michigan to soothe himself while the House debated articles of impeachment.  As you might imagine, it was a doozy.

Pence boasts, as Trump has, "apprehensions on our southern border are down by 70%." They are only down that much from *the Trump-era peak in May*. They've been higher under Trump than they were in the late Obama era.

Of course, the amusing thing is that at times, they bragged that apprehensions were up, so you would know they were hard at work.

Pence calls the USMCA the "largest trade deal in American history." That's not even close to true. Aside from the fact that there was already an agreement with Mexico in Canada, those three countries *and nine others* were in the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Pence regularly just starts saying false claims Trump has made up. Trump himself hasn't even used this one in a while

Pence says Trump wanted to wait to see the "strong, unified Republican vote" in the House before coming out to speak at the rally.  

Pence has almost as much reason to fear the Ukraine investigations as Trump, because he's involved.

Trump begins by touting the greatness of both America and his 2016 election night. Returning to his usual December nonsense, he asks everyone if they've noticed that everyone is saying Merry Christmas "again."

Trump: "By the way, it doesn't really feel like we're being impeached."

"We" aren't.  YOU are. 

On the Impeachment podcast yesterday, Brian Lehrer commented about that statement, saying it's evidence of his guilt on the Zelensky call.  Trump defenders are saying on that call, Trump uses the term "us" (in "do us a favor") meaning it wasn't a favor for him personally.  Lehrer says his use of the royal "we" talking about impeachment means he was using the royal "us" in the call to Zelensky.  When I first heard this quote about "we're being impeached," my thought was that he doesn't want to own that it's him personally who's worthy of impeachment.  When he takes credit for something groups of people are doing, he uses "I" and "me".  But he doesn't want to take the credit for being impeachable.  He wants to share that distinction. I don't know.  Lehrer could be right.

To my point:

Trump says Michigan is having its best year of all time, but because of him, not because of "local" government, like the state's Democratic governor, who is doing a bad job.

Trump's team tried this two-step with Louisiana also, claiming that the state was having unprecedented economic success because of Trump but also that its economy was performing terribly because of the Democratic governor. 

Trump repeats maybe my favorite of all of his lies, claiming he was once named "Man of the Year" in Michigan. He adds, "By, I think -- somebody, whoever. I was the Man of the Year in Michigan." 

There is a protester. Trump tells the crowd that "you're about to hear the greatest speech you've ever heard," but the "fake news" will lead with the "massive riots." He then calls the protester "a slob...a real slob."

Trump is criticizing "the security company" and/or police for politely accosting anti-Trump protesters. "You've gotta get a little bit stronger than that, folks," he says. The president is continuing to rant about the handling of this one protester. He says she could only have made her "horrible gesture" because "the security man let her have so much time."

Trump says presidents, prime ministers and some dictators say "sir, we'd like to buy a nuclear submarine," but he says no, he turns them down.

Trump says F-35 pilots are better-looking than Tom Cruise, who is a good guy, with "equal" faces but better bodies.

He's constantly commenting on men's beauty.  Don't tell me he isn't really gay.  Which would be no problem, except he's a nasty, woman-hating gay.

Trump tells his multi-sir story about the guy whose wife thought he was a "loser" but now that his 401(k) is up 72% she calls him "darling" and is in love with him. He does not identify the man as an NYPD cop, as he usually does.

Trump says the economy would've crashed under Hillary Clinton. He then scoffs at people who say Obama deserves credit for this economy, arguing that "you were dying."

Trump claims that "20,000 people" had to leave the rally because they couldn't get in and it's too cold to watch on a screen. If anyone is out there reporting, please feel free to let me know if this is true. 

"I don't think we've ever had an empty seat," Trump says, though he has had empty seats at multiple rallies, such as October in Minneapolis, July in Greenville, October 2018 in Houston. 

Trump says "nobody ever leaves our speeches," they only get up to go to the bathroom. Even die-hard supporters regularly stream out of his speeches when they go late and long. 

"Choice. You finally got Choice. They've been trying to get it for almost 50 years," Trump says of the Veterans Choice program Obama signed into law in 2014. 

Trump invokes his son, saying that Elizabeth Warren had a big crowd in New York but Barron Trump could go into Central Park and get the same or "a bigger crowd" though he's 13. 

I think that's the first time he's ever mentioned Barron.

Trump says that when he sees any vacated seat, he wants it to be filled immediately because he doesn't want the media to misreport what is happening. He then starts talking about impeachment, then starts talking about 2016 election night again.

Trump makes his usual claim that Clinton had a mere 500 people at her last rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she had 4,200 people. 

Trump claims newspaper polls are even faker than the actual fake news in the newspapers, baselessly calling them "suppression polls." 

The Trump team said Trump would begin with a Christmas greeting and then talk about impeachment for 30 minutes. Trump has barely spoken of impeachment -- every time he's approached it, he has started rambling about something else. 

"Their debates are dying. Who wants to watch Boot Edge Edge. Boot Edge Edge. Boot Edge Edge...it's an unpronounceable name. That's why they call him Mayor Pete. Mayor Pete. Mayor Pete." Trump mocks Buttigieg's height after mocking his name, holding his hand up to his chest and saying, "I've had you up to here, Mayor Pete." 

Trump talks at length about Buttigieg's name, then moves on to Mexico's share of the auto industry, then goes back to impeachment. 

"I announced three months ago that I'm running. Right," says Trump, who officially launched his campaign six months ago and who registered to run immediately after his inauguration nearly three years ago. 

Trump says people think it was 17 Republican candidates in 2016 but it was really 18, people forget. It was 17 including Jim Gilmore, who he has previously identified as the 18th people forget about. 

It's like impeachment is an electrified fence for Trump tonight. He keeps touching it with like one scripted line, then retreating to something more comfortable. He's now on how successful he was with The Apprentice. 

Trump calls Comcast "Commiecast."

Trump says he never sees a lobby because the Secret Service takes him on private routes, through basements and up and down various flights of stairs and such. He says Hillary Clinton would not be able to do these walks, she would be too sleepy. A "lock her up" chant.

Trump on James Comey: "Did I do a great job when I fired his ass?" 

"Rush Limbaugh said it. Sean Hannity said it. Laura Ingraham said it. TUCKER said it. Ainsley said it. But a lot of people have said it: there's nobody in the world that could've handled that stuff that happened (with the Russia investigation)..." 

Trump tells his usual timeline-inverting tale about how Schiff tricked people with a phony account of the Ukraine call, but then Trump released the transcript and people felt better. Trump released the call document before Schiff spoke, not after. 

"THEY'RE the ones that should be impeached. Every one of them."

Trump begins to mock Schiff's looks, then says patently falsely, "with Me Too, I never even think about looks anymore, OK? I don't talk about looks of a male or female," then says he'll say, just one last time, that Schiff is "not exactly the best looking guy."

Ahem...Tom Cruise?  F-E5 pilots?  How long ago did he comment about their looks?  Also, this remark about Schiff is how he talks about women, only not in as nasty terms.

"He's a pathological liar," Trump says of Schiff.

"I'm the first person to ever get impeached and there's no crime. Like, I feel guilty." 

He should feel guilty.  There's lots of crime.

Trump says this doesn't feel like a dark impeachment era: "With Richard Nixon, I just see it as a very dark era, very dark...I don't know about you, but I'm having a good time. It's crazy."

LOL.  He's absolutely freaking out.  On Twitter, on TV, and now at a rally.

Trump demands that Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who supported impeachment, return his old campaign donations: "Give me back the damn money."

Did he say why he donated to her in the first place?

Appearing to surprise some of the crowd, Trump says that the late Democratic congressman John Dingell might be "looking up," like from hell, rather than "looking down" from heaven. He adds, "Maybe." Trump said this while bashing Dingell's wife, Rep. Debbie Dingell. He bitterly complains that he gave the late John Dingell "the A+," 10 out of 10, post-death treatment, but now Debbie Dingell is supporting his impeachment.

Nasty asshole. 

This is an unusually bitter speech even for a Trump rally speech.

Trump falsely claims Obama left him "142" judicial vacancies (it was 104, because of McConnell's open and successful obstruction strategy).  

After this speech-long barrage of lies and inaccuracies, Trump says he is very careful to be correct with his claims because "the stupid Washington Post" will give him a Pinocchio if he is a little bit off. 

Trump says for the second time tonight that he told Melania "you're so lucky I took you on this journey."

Hahaha.  I bet that's just what she thinks.

Trump makes an aggrieved face while doing his usual complaint about how he is more elite than the elite: "Oh really? I went to better schools. We won't talk about homes, even though your homes are nicer."

Trump boasts about low African-American unemployment, then spots an African-American in the crowd, then asks the man if Trump pays him. He explains, "I have a group of African-American guys, and gals by the way, that follow me around, and they think I pay them, and I don't." 

Trump claims that the Ukrainian prosecutor Biden pushed to get ousted was "looking at your son and your son's company." Hunter Biden was not under investigation, and the investigation into the company where Hunter sat on the board was dormant.

Trump says he wants, "in many ways," Biden to win the nomination. He then says he has the largest crowds in history. He says he is surprised that this venue is so small, but Battle Creek doesn't have many big venues, but he still wanted to be here.

Trump used to excitedly tout a finding from research firm Sentier that income gains during his tenure have totaled $5,000 per household. He then decided that it was actually $10,000. He just said it is "more than $10,000." 

Trump says that no great salesman boasts that he is a great salesman. It's the quiet types that are actually good, he says.

Now that's truly bizarre.

Trump is attacking Beto O'Rourke.

Does he think O'Rourke is still in the running?

Trump on his effort to rescind energy efficiency regulations for light bulbs: "Why do I always look so orange? You know why? Because of the new light. They're terrible."

Trump says that you used to press a dishwasher once and it was an "explosion" and five minutes later steam would come out. "Now you press it 12 times. Women tell me." 

So far this month, the president has claimed that modern efficient toilets require people to flush 10 or 15 times and modern efficient dishwashers require people to press buttons 12 times. 

Sinks. Showers. And what goes with a sink and a shower?" Crowd: "TOILETS!" The president: "Ten times. Right? Ten times." He adds, "Not me, of course, not me. But you."

I'm dying here.  After he first said that about toilets, there was a wave of jokes about him plugging up toilets because of his diet.  But, why doesn't he have to flush 10 times when everybody else does if the problem is the toilets?

Trump is now complaining of media coverage of his previous comments about people flushing toilets 15 times. This is the weirdest Trump rally in a long, long time.

And that is saying multitudes.

Trump tells his inaccurate story about Hillary Clinton supposedly saying the KORUS trade deal with South Korea would produce 250,000 new jobs. She didn't. Obama said generally increasing the US share of trade with Asia could mean 250,000 jobs. It wasn't about the Korea deal.  Trump wrongly describes Obama's "magic wand" comment about manufacturing, then says the US has gained "600,000" manufacturing jobs, though it is 497,000 through November.

Trump called for the impeachment of no-longer-president Barack Obama over his Obamacare "keep your doctor" comments ("I think we should impeach him for that. Let’s impeach him"), and suggested Obama should've been impeached for payments to Iran. 

Trump, touting his trade policies, is criticizing "globalists." He says, "The globalists are passé."

Trump falsely claims Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador used to refuse to take criminals back when the US wanted to deport them. Though there may have been scattered such cases, all three have always been considered cooperative, not "recalcitrant," by the US government. 

Trump says he used to be a donor to Chuck Schumer and also wants that money back: "He used to kiss my ass, Chuck Schumer. He'd do anything. He would have done anything for me." He says, "They act so pompous, they act so righteous."

I see a pattern here - the people he donated to aren't bowing to his demands.  He paid for service; he wants it.

At more than 1 hour 42 minutes, this is now Trump's longest rally speech ever. He is not far from his longest speech in office, the two-hour ramble at the CPAC summit.

"How badly was Flint? Who was -- who were the geniuses that did that to you?"  After decrying the Flint water calamity, Trump says, "I know your previous governor was a Republican, but I was not a big fan of his. I was not."

Paris. The Yellow Vests. French foreign aid. "Look at gas prices now." "The American embassy in Jerusalem." "We don't apologize." Trump on, I think but am not sure, the inspector general: "He's hit the golden pond."

I wonder how many people have left by now.

Trump falsely claims people had been trying to get a Right to Try medical law passed for "49 years." These laws are a libertarian-conservative creation of this decade; the first Right to Try state law was passed less than six years ago.

Trump is now musing about which of the people in the crowd is tough enough to arrest a MS-13 member.

Trump on San Francisco: "It rains, and it's filth, and it's needles, and it's drugs, and it's you know what, it's everything, and it goes right into those storm sewers...right out into the Pacific..." He's shown no evidence for his claims of needles ending up in the Pacific. Trump claims his government has given San Francisco a "tremendous dollar fine" over its supposed environmental violations. The EPA sent a notice of violation but did not impose a fine. Trump tells Speaker Nancy Pelosi to go back home and "take care of the homeless and take care of the filth."

Trump, talking trade, says that European countries "are as bad as China, just smaller...as bad as China, just smaller." 

Trump again talks about Obama. He says France and Germany like Obama better than him but they should because he's doing his job and being tough on them. 

"I could be loved in Germany," Trump says, saying "my father came from Germany." (His father was of German descent but was born in New York. His grandfather immigrated from what is now Germany.) 

Trump has concluded his longest rally speech ever, which was also one of most bitter and most rambling. Trump's impeachment night speech was 2 hours 1 minute, one minute shy of his longest speech ever.

Two hours of batshit crazy oral diarrhea.

From Aaron Rupar's coverage:

video clip

Jesus, Debbie.  Don't tell him that.  That's what he was after.

Maybe talk to Debbie Dingell.

His face is especially dark for this rally.  Do you suppose he thought more makeup wouldn't look orange?  Or is that just a new shade?

IMPEACHED

The two articles [of impeachment], which charge Trump with abusing power in his dealings with Ukraine and obstructing Congress in their investigation of those actions, passed almost exclusively along party lines.

[...]

Lawmakers voted 230 to 197 on the resolution accusing Trump of abusing his power, with all Republicans opposed and only two Democrats — Reps. Collin Peterson (Minn.) and Jefferson Van Drew (N.J.) — crossing the aisle in dissent. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii), a Democratic presidential candidate, voted “present.”

  The Hill

Tulsi Gabbard is a Democrat in name only.  And on the second article, one Democrat, Jared Golden of Maine, voted against it, while voting for the first article.

Jeff Van Drew will now switch parties, and the Republicans are welcome to him. Holding off on actually doing it until after the vote, when he'd already announced that he was going to switch, in order to give the historic record another Democratic no vote is just the kind of dishonesty and lack of integrity today's Republican party requires.

The real heros are the Democrats who hold seats in districts that voted for Trump in 2016, knowing their constituency might possibly kick them out of office if they voted for an impeachment trial, and did it anyway because, unlike Van Drew, they do have integrity: Tom O'Halleran (AZ), Lucy McBath (GA), Cheri Bustos (IL), Lauren Underwood (IL), Cindy Axne (IA), Abby Finkenauer (IA), DaveLoebsack (IA), Jared Golden (ME), Elissa Slotkin (MI), Haley Stevens (MI), Angie Craig (MN), Susie Lee (NV), Chris Pappas (NH), Josh Gottheimer (NJ), Andy Kim (NJ), Mikie Sherrill (NJ), Xochitl Torres Small (NM), Anthony Brindisi (NY), Antonio Delgado (NY), Sean Patrick Maloney (NY), Max Rose (NY), Kendra Horn (OK), Matt Cartwright (PA), Conor Lamb (PA), Joe Cunningham (SC), Ben McAdams (UT), Elaine Luria (VA), Abigail Spanbeger (VA), and Ron Kind (WI).

Some of those representatives are particularly heroic, because they barely beat incumbent Republicans in 2018: Abigal Spanberger, who won by only 2 percentage points; Elaine Luria won her Republican-held seat also by only 2 points; Ben McAdams, by less than a point; Joe Cunningham, the first Democrat in his district in more than 20 years, who won by a point; Kendra Horn, by one point, in a district that has been Republican for 40 years; Anthony Brindisi, by 2 points; Xochitl Torres Small, by one point; Mike Sherrill, by one point in a district that had been Republican since 1982; Andy Kim, by one point; Cindy Axne, by 2 points; and Lucy McBath, by 1.5 points.

One Democratic lawmaker described such votes as “seismic,” warning that there will be some blowback at the polls in 2020.

“Some of them are going to lose,” the lawmaker said.

[...]

With much at stake and the TV cameras rolling, lawmakers from both parties dug deep into their rhetorical closets to mark the historic debate, invoking the Founding Fathers, Jesus and the crucifixion, Pearl Harbor and Maya Angelou — among a long list of other cultural touchstones — to make their case.

[...]

The debate was largely civil; lawmakers from both sides — so far apart on the merits of the impeachment effort — seemed to agree on the historical significance of the moment.

But there were also some flare-ups, most notably when Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) promoted the conspiracy theory that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 election, in addition to Russia. All of America’s intelligence agencies have determined that Russia was the culprit, and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) wasted no time lambasting the claim.

“I'm concerned that any representative of the United States would spout Russian propaganda on House floor,” he said.

Gohmert marched back to the podium and sought to shout over the banging of the gavel in response to the accusation fired against him, but his yells were drowned out by demands that the House return to order.

[...]

Republicans gained more gusto as the day wore on, responding at times en masse with boos, groans or other knee-jerk reactions at the later statements from the Democrats.

  The Hill

They must have gotten a message from Trump that they weren't doing enough.

Wednesday’s votes send the two articles to the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has said he’ll hold an impeachment trial early next year.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would not commit on Wednesday to sending the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump to the Republican-held Senate, a surprise move that injects new uncertainty into Congress' timeline of the President's trial in the chamber.

"That would have been our intention, but we'll see what happens over there," Pelosi said at a post-impeachment vote news conference Wednesday night when asked about sending over the articles.

[...]

Some progressives have urged Democratic leaders to withhold the articles until Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, agrees to the parameters for the Senate trial that Democrats have called for, as well as agreeing to bring in firsthand witnesses like acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to testify.

While Pelosi's comments create a new level of confusion to the impeachment procedure and timeline, it's unclear what the specific advantages there would be to withholding to the articles of impeachment from a Senate trial.

Pelosi said Wednesday night that House Democrats will make the decision "as a group" on when to send the articles to the Senate.

[...]

There are procedural concerns behind not sending the articles to the Senate on Wednesday night immediately after the vote. Among them: Democrats can't send the articles Wednesday night because the Senate would have to take it up Thursday, blocking votes on two spending packages that must pass before week's end to avoid a government shutdown.

[...]

In the coming days, the House must also name impeachment managers for the Senate's trial, another step Pelosi was not ready to make Wednesday night.

"We cannot name managers until we see what the process is on the Senate side, and we hope that will be soon," Pelosi said. "So far we haven't seen anything that looks fair to us, so hopefully it will be fair."

  CNN

I suspect they'll go ahead and send them to the Senate.  Not sending them if McConnell refuses to cooperate - which is likely - would leave the Democrats open to charges that they weren't serious, that the whole thing was indeed a sham.  His Impeached Lardship has already started.

No, it's not the Senate's call.  The Senate can't demand them.

Also, it's "night", not "might".

They can't lose if there's no trial, and the Senate can't hold a trial if they aren't given the articles, and that's not the "Senate's call".

Stamping your feet won't change anything.

What precedent-breaking thing(s) he's talkinga about will by necessity have to be made up.

Indeed they are.  Vote Democratic in 2020.

UPDATE:

A delay.  But they will deliver them.  As far as I'm concerned, a delay until the 2020 presidential debates are held would be fine.

“The only thing that matters is the president of the United States was impeached today,” said Financial Services Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.). As for the Senate? “One step at a time,” she said.

“We defended the Constitution and we defended our democracy,” said Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.). “Right now, that’s the story,” he said.

  Politico

Actually, Jerry, it's not. Right now the story is the delay.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) said he's approached every member of House leadership about the idea and received responses ranging from interest to outright support. He said Pelosi, in particular, “indicated she was interested and considering it.”

“As long as we have the articles of impeachment under our control, we have an opportunity to prevent a travesty,” Blumenauer said.

No, the travesty has been upon us for three years.

Blumenauer argued that the House could use the delay to continue to build on its evidence for impeachment, and possibly to score additional legal victories that could unlock troves of new evidence and witness testimony that the Trump administration has withheld from Congress. Some of those court cases could be decided within weeks.

“You can continue to build the record, you can get information and you argue for fairness and don't surrender until it’s clear that that is in the best interest of the process,” Blumenauer said.

That's an....interesting....approach.

To be continued...

UPDATE:

More witness intimidation

I hope all the episodes of Trump trashing and intimidating witnesses go into the abuse of power testimony in the impeachment trial.  Because, as Lt Col Vindman said in his testimony, "This is America, and here, right counts."

Republicans foiled again

Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) recessed the impeachment articles markup after 11 p.m., saying that the committee would reconvene to cast the impeachment votes Friday at 10 a.m.

[...]

The outraged Republicans wasted no time blasting Nadler for what they saw as a procedural cheap-shot — one designed solely to allow Democrats more time before the TV cameras on Friday.

“You chose not to consult the ranking member,” Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) said, looking at Nadler stunned.

Collins, then stepping off the dais in a huff, described the chairman's move as a sign that trust between him and Nadler has broken down.

[...]

Collins then rushed outside the hearing room to a bank of TV cameras to air his frustrations further.

[...]

"We weren't sure if they had more amendments, they wouldn't tell us that," said Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.). "And what the chairman's spirit was: we want to make sure we do this in the light of day. We don't want to vote on such an important article, or articles, that matter to the American people [and] to this president, in the late of night."

The move came after Republicans introduced one amendment after another in an effort to protest the articles of impeachment, dragging out the hearing 14 hours as Democrats voted down their efforts to scrub the two articles of impeachment they are seeking to pass, which charge Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of justice.

A Democratic aide, when asked for the reasoning of the sudden move, said they felt Republicans were trying to run out the clock so that the vote would happen with the least eyes on them.

“We felt like they wanted us to pass this in the middle of the night, so we felt the American people deserved to see this historic vote. And it should be passed in the daylight and not in the middle of the night,” the aide said.

[...]

Thursday’s postponement is not expected to alter the outcome of the debate: Judiciary Democrats are set to pass the two articles on Friday, sending them to the full House, where votes are likely to take place next Wednesday.

[...]

“Hard to convey how upset everyone is,” said one Republican Judiciary aide, adding that “people had flights booked.”

  The Hill

And they only have themselves to blame.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

For dragging it out with no defense.  It's not the "witch hunt" that's tiresome.  It's you.

UPDATE:

A different explanation:

UPDATE:  The votes...

Articles of Impeachment debate

I don't have the stomach or the energy for it, but if you wish to watch, the Judiciary Committee is still debating this morning.

Clashes between lawmakers late Wednesday highlighted deep divisions on the panel, which is poised to pass the resolutions along strict party lines.

The full House is expected to vote on them next week, making Trump just the third president in U.S. history to be impeached.

  The Hill

Articles of impeachment decision rationale - addendum

Previous post.

Several freshmen moderate Democrats only got behind the impeachment inquiry after questions were raised over whether Trump sought to leverage the power of his office to push Ukraine to probe his political rivals. And in recent days, some of them -- including New York Reps. Max Rose and Anthony Brindisi -- indicated they would likely oppose an article focused on the Mueller findings.

Ultimately, Democrats chose to push forward on the two articles in a bid to keep their caucus mainly united, other than two Democrats -- Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey and Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota -- who previously voted against moving forward with the impeachment inquiry and are signaling they'll vote against the articles.

[...]

House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler sent a letter to House Democrats Tuesday afternoon that said the introduction of the impeachment articles "will not end the work of House committees to pursue ongoing investigations into Presidential misconduct, and those will proceed despite unprecedented obstruction."

"Some of these investigations relate to the Articles of Impeachment and may gather additional information for use in a Senate trial, adding to the already overwhelming case," he wrote.

[...]

Multiple Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee say that the conversation they had privately with Laurence Tribe, a Harvard University law professor, during a Saturday prep session helped convince them that narrowly crafted articles focused on Ukraine was the best path.

Similarly, in recent days, Pelosi has called Trump's handling of Ukraine "bribery" -- something specifically referenced outlining the constitutional powers of impeachment. But House Democrats looked into the issue and found that the precedent for charging a President with bribery vague and confusing, so they decided ultimately to leave that out.

  CNN

The articles of impeachment decision rationale

On Dec. 2, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi was on a trip to a climate change conference in Spain, she held a conference call with about a dozen of the most vulnerable Democrats who delivered her the House.

Their message to Pelosi: Keep impeachment focused only on the Ukraine scandal. The obvious but unsaid implication was she should exclude a standalone article of impeachment against President Donald Trump based on the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which described numerous instances of potential obstruction of justice by Trump.

  Politico

I hope she's not sorry.

Two days later, Pelosi called an emergency meeting in her second-floor Capitol office with her senior leadership team, where it quickly became clear her deputies were divided.

House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler of New York made the case for an obstruction of justice impeachment article based on the Mueller report. Backing him up were Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the second- and third-ranking House Democrats, according to multiple sources.

I would have gone with them.

Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff of California opposed the move, as did House lawyers overseeing legal cases against the Trump administration, according to Democratic insiders. And their resistance aligned with Pelosi’s long-held private belief that the caucus should take a narrower focus.

Okay, they're the lawyers. But I hope they're not sorry.

Discussion drafts on the articles began to circulate within Democratic leadership and the decision was finalized over this past weekend after Pelosi spoke repeatedly to all the key players. On Tuesday, Pelosi and key chairs made it official.

[...]

The show of unity emerged after an internal Democratic struggle over one of the core dilemmas facing the caucus all year — how to make use of Mueller’s complex investigation.

[...]

Mueller’s probe gets only a glancing reference in the articles of impeachment themselves. But Democrats — including Pelosi — have repeatedly leaned on the foundation Mueller built to help justify calls to remove Trump from office.

[...]

Democrats are still connecting Mueller to impeachment — at least paying lip service to his investigation, even if they've largely kept it out of the articles themselves. Democrats intend to expound on Mueller’s evidence in a lengthy report that will accompany the articles of impeachment when they’re voted out of the Judiciary Committee later this week.

Will that permit them to bring it up in the trial?

That report will spell out what Democrats allege is a “pattern” of impeachable conduct by Trump, beginning with his efforts to obstruct Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. It will then suggest Trump committed an impeachable abuse of power when he pressured Ukraine to investigate his Democratic rivals ahead of the 2020 campaign.

Perhaps the most decisive reason for not including obstruction of justice in the articles lies with this fact:

Democrats have been locked in lengthy and successful court battles to obtain Mueller’s secret grand jury evidence, as well as to force some of his top witnesses to testify. But it’s not clear when those cases will be resolved.

One issue facing lawmakers and aides was that the pending litigation may have provided the Senate with a pretense to ignore a Mueller-focused article of impeachment altogether. Senate Republicans, some feared, would simply cite the ongoing court cases and drop the article altogether.

That seems a little lame to me. So what is lost if that happens?

Democrats eager to maintain political momentum declined to go to court to enforce subpoenas connected to the Ukraine investigation. In fact, they withdrew a subpoena for a top witness — former White House national security aide Charles Kupperman — when it appeared poised to drag the House into a lengthy court battle.

[...]

Most important, the Ukraine scandal occurred entirely during Trump's term in office — unlike several of the events captured in Mueller's report — and presented a far simpler narrative to lay out for the public.

Now THAT sounds like at least a logical reason.

There's no confusion about the actions of "Candidate Trump" vs. "President Trump." As Democrats see it, Trump and senior administration officials defied the will of Congress by holding up military aid to Ukraine; they jeopardized an American ally and helped Russian President Vladimir Putin; and they attempted to leverage multiple agencies to execute the scheme to force Ukrainian officials to announce an investigation into Joe Biden, the president's domestic political rival.

It was a clear, concise case, as far as Democrats were concerned.

[...]

“The focus is obviously on making the strongest case that everyone can understand, and one that will highlight the challenges that this president presents to our Constitution,” said Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), a Judiciary Committee member. “And abuse of power and obstruction of Congress is so clear, so easy for everyone to understand."

That was something former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti has stressed all along: juries need simple, clearcut cases. I'd think that would be a little less concerning when the jury is the Senate, but maybe they're thinking about the para-jury, the public.

But there's still another possible problem - or at least something for Republicans to cry foul about and perhaps file a complaint or suit over:

That focus at times cut against the message the House was sending to federal courts about whether Mueller’s evidence would be included in impeachment proceedings.

While Pelosi allies have been signaling for months they wouldn’t wait for the courts to render decisions before deciding whether to move forward with impeachment, House lawyers had been telling a series of federal judges that they needed quick rulings in order to factor Mueller’s evidence into impeachment, particularly the testimony of former White House counsel Don McGahn, who provided some of Mueller’s most damning evidence.

The McGahn and grand jury cases are both scheduled to be argued Jan. 3 before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, but any rulings there would almost certainly be taken to the Supreme Court.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

All the people who refuse to testify are accomplices in the destruction of this country.

UPDATE: Further explanation.