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      in US Politics

      Democrats defend decision not to call witnesses as tactic under scrutiny

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      Democrats defended their prosecution of Donald Trump’s impeachment trial on Sunday and hinted at the possibility of criminal charges, after failing to convince enough senators the former president was guilty of inciting the deadly Capitol attack.The 57-43 vote for a conviction, which fell short of the two-thirds majority required, was still the biggest bipartisan impeachment vote in US history and amounted to “a complete repudiation” of Trump’s conduct, lead House manager Jamie Raskin insisted. Seven Republicans crossed party lines to vote with every Democratic and independent senator after the five-day trial.But the tactics of Raskin and his team have come under scrutiny, with some Democrats asking if the decision not to seek witness testimony, after senators voted early on the trial’s final day to allow it, was a mistake.Specifically, evidence was not heard from the Washington congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler about a call between Trump and Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy during the 6 January riot showing that the president would not call off his supporters.“Well Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election theft than you are,” Beutler said Trump replied when the House minority leader pleaded for him to recall the mob who overran the Capitol in support of the president’s false claims of a stolen election.On Sunday, the Washington Post reported that the question of whether to call witnesses sparked lengthy debate among the House managers, who ultimately agreed to a deal to accept Beutler’s statement as a written record. The decision diverted the likelihood of the trial extending days, if not weeks as both sides deposed witnesses.“I know that people are feeling a lot of angst, and believe that maybe if we had this, the senators would have done what we wanted,” Stacey Plaskett, a congressional delegate from the Virgin Islands and impeachment team member, told CNN’s State of the Union.“We didn’t need more witnesses, we needed more senators with spines. We believe that we proved the case, we proved the elements of the article of impeachment. It’s clear that these individuals were hardened, that they did not want to let the [former] president be convicted, or disqualified.”Raskin concurred.“These Republicans voted to acquit in the face of this mountain of unrefuted evidence,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press. “There’s no reasoning with people who basically are acting like members of a religious cult.”Among the 43 senators to vote to acquit Trump was Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader who nonetheless followed his “not guilty” vote with a fiery and contradictory post-trial speech on the Senate floor, in which he condemned Trump for a “disgraceful dereliction of duty”.“There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” McConnell said. “No question about it.”“President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office as an ordinary citizen,” the Kentucky Republican added, raising the prospect of criminal charges for the 45th US president over the riot. “He didn’t get away with anything. Yet.”Neither Raskin nor Madeleine Dean, an impeachment manager who told ABC’s This Week McConnell was “speaking out of two sides of his mouth”, ruled out criminal prosecution for Trump, saying the decision would be up to others.Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland and a frequent Trump critic, went further.“There was yesterday’s vote, but there’s still a number of potential court cases that I think he’s still going to face, in criminal courts and the court of public opinion,” he told CNN. “This is not over and we’re going to decide over the next couple of years what the fate of Donald Trump and the Republican party is.”Prosecutors in Georgia are investigating calls by Trump and an ally, Lindsey Graham, in which state Republican officials were pressured to overturn Biden’s victory.Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator for Connecticut, said Trump’s acquittal proved he was still firmly in charge of the Republican party, and that trial witnesses would not have swayed any more senators.“They weren’t going to get any more Republican votes than they had and I think they made the right decision to move to closing arguments,” he told CNN. “I don’t know that they would have lost votes, I just am pretty confident they were at their high watermark yesterday morning. I know that [among the] Senate Republican caucus, I can’t figure out who their eighth or ninth vote was going to be.“Donald Trump’s going to be in charge of their party for the next four years. As they were deathly afraid of him for the last four years, they are going to continue to be afraid of him for the next four years.”Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana senator who was among the Republican dissidents, expanded on his reasoning for his vote after declaring on Saturday it was simply “because [Trump] is guilty”.“We can see the president for two months after the election promoting that the election was stolen,” he told ABC. “He scheduled the rally for 6 January, just when the transfer of power was to take place. And even after he knew there was violence taking place, he continued to basically sanction the mob being there. And not until later did he actually ask them to leave.”Cassidy said he was unconcerned by a backlash in Louisiana, where the state GOP has censured him and the chair of the Republican caucus warned him not to expect a warm welcome back.“I have the privilege of having the facts before me and being able to spend several days deeply going into those facts,” he said.“As these facts become more and more out there, and folks have a chance to look for themselves, more will move to where I was. People want to trust their leaders, they want people to be held accountable.” More

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      Keir Starmer can learn much from Joe Biden’s first weeks | Letters

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      I read Andy Beckett’s column (Think bigger: that’s the message for Starmer from Biden’s bold beginning, 11 February) with interest and a certain amount of agreement. Joe Biden has hit the White House floor running with his overturning of Donald Trump’s divisive issues and, indeed, confounding some of his critics. I feel, too, that Keir Starmer needs to take a leaf out of his presidential book, because it is not just enough to be “the grown up” in the chamber at prime minister’s questions. He needs to be radical and persuasive. I used to relish his forensic questioning but now find it slightly stale and predictable.He has real capabilities of forging the party into a fighting and vigorous entity, and not one to appeal to just one demographic. Biden is proving to be quite radical and forward thinking. Starmer needs behave in a similar manner before the public simply forgets all the government’s mistakes with the pandemic and just centres on the great success of the vaccine rollout. So please, Sir Keir, harness your inner passions and go for it, without weighing up all the pros and cons first. Judith A Daniels Great Yarmouth, Norfolk• Andy Beckett is right to encourage the new Labour leadership to “think bigger”. But the real lesson from the US is the way in which the existing political system handicaps parties of the centre-left.So Labour needs to work with other progressive parties to show how the necessary supply of public goods – health, housing, education, social care, social security, infrastructure – cannot be obtained without changes to the political system: ensuring that everyone who is entitled to vote can actually do so; introducing some form of proportional representation so that no one is deprived of a vote by where they live; placing limits on private political funding; and introducing much tighter control over the veracity of political claims and statements.This is the “bigger picture” that Labour needs to draw if there is to be any hope of another genuinely progressive government. Prof Roger BrownSouthampton• If we can learn anything from Joe Biden’s success, it is that a principled, centre-left man of integrity could be exactly what the population of the UK so badly needs. What we do not need is a populist masquerading as a committed politician, but who cannot unite the Labour party, let alone the country. Jeremy Corbyn was more inclined to alienate the core of the centre-left.Beckett rightly pairs Trump with Boris Johnson but, weirdly, chooses to call them charismatic! It may well be that Keir Starmer, whose integrity, intelligence and competence are indeed what Labour needs, will readily follow Biden’s values of “family, community and security”. What, after all, is the alternative? Boris Johnson? A man who has publicly praised Donald Trump and whose values would appear to fall short of those espoused by Biden and Starmer. Carolyn Kirton Aberdeen• I have to disagree with Andy Beckett when he credits the “surge” in leftwing politics in the US with Donald Trump’s defeat. While acknowledging the professional and pragmatic approach taken by the Democrats in their campaign both for the White House and Congress, it was clearly the damage wrought by Covid to the US economy, as well as the ensuing loss of life and its exposure of the inadequacies and downright incompetence of Trump and his ragbag administration, that gave Joe Biden and his party the ultimate victory. John Marriott Lincoln More

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      Convicted or not, Trump is history – it's Biden who's changing America | Robert Reich

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      While most of official Washington has been focused on the Senate impeachment trial, another part of Washington is preparing the most far-ranging changes in American social policy in a generation.Congress is moving ahead with Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which expands healthcare and unemployment benefits and contains one of the most ambitious efforts to reduce child poverty since the New Deal. Right behind it is Biden’s plan for infrastructure and jobs.The juxtaposition of Trump’s impeachment trial and Biden’s ambitious plans is no coincidence.Trump has left Republicans badly fractured and on the defensive. The party is imploding. Since the Capitol attack on 6 January, growing numbers of voters have deserted it. State and county committees are becoming wackier by the day. Big business no longer has a home in the crackpot GOP.This political void is allowing Biden and the Democrats, who control the White House and both houses of Congress, to respond boldly to the largest social and economic crisis since the Great Depression.Tens of millions are hurting. A record number of American children are impoverishedImportantly, they are now free to disregard conservative canards that have hobbled America’s ability to respond to public needs ever since Ronald Reagan convinced the nation big government was the problem.The first is the supposed omnipresent danger of inflation and the accompanying worry that public spending can easily overheat the economy.Rubbish. Inflation hasn’t reared its head in years, not even during the roaring job market of 2018 and 2019. “Overheating” may no longer even be a problem for globalized, high-tech economies whose goods and services are so easily replaceable.Biden’s ambitious plans are worth the small risk, in any event. If you hadn’t noticed, the American economy is becoming more unequal by the day. Bringing it to a boil may be the only way to lift the wages of the bottom half. The hope is that record low interest rates and vast public spending generate enough demand that employers will need to raise wages to find the workers they need.A few Democratic economists who should know better are sounding the false alarm about inflation, but Biden is wisely ignoring them. So should Democrats in Congress.Another conservative bromide is that a larger national debt crowds out private investment and slows growth. This view hamstrung the Clinton and Obama administrations as deficit hawks warned against public spending unaccompanied by tax increases to pay for it. (I still have some old injuries inflicted by those hawks.)Fortunately, Biden isn’t buying this, either.Four decades of chronic underemployment and stagnant wages have shown how important public spending is for sustained growth. Not incidentally, growth reduces the debt as a share of the overall economy. The real danger is the opposite: fiscal austerity shrinks economies and causes national debts to grow in proportion.The third canard is that generous safety nets discourage work.Democratic presidents from Franklin D Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson sought to alleviate poverty and economic insecurity with broad-based relief. But after Reagan tied public assistance to racism – deriding single-mother “welfare queens” – conservatives began demanding stringent work requirements so that only the “truly deserving” received help. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama acquiesced to this nonsense.Not Biden. His proposal would not only expand jobless benefits but also provide assistance to parents who are not working, thereby extending relief to 27 million children, including about half of all Black and Latino children. Republican senator Mitt Romney of Utah has put forward a similar plan.This is just common sense. Tens of millions are hurting. A record number of American children are impoverished, according to the most recent census data.The pandemic has also caused a large number of women to drop out of the labor force in order to care for children. With financial help, some will be able to pay for childcare and move back into paid work. After Canada enacted a national child allowance in 2006, employment rates for mothers increased. A decade later, when Canada increased its annual child allowance, its economy added jobs.It’s still unclear exactly what form Biden’s final plans will take as they work their way through Congress. He has razor-thin majorities in both chambers. In addition, most of his proposals are designed for the current emergency; they would need to be made permanent.But the stars are now better aligned for fundamental reform than they have been since Reagan.It’s no small irony that a half-century after Reagan persuaded Americans big government was the problem, Trump’s demise is finally liberating America from Reaganism – and letting the richest nation on earth give its people the social support they desperately need. More

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      in Elections

      Failure to convict Trump in impeachment trial will live as a 'vote of infamy', says Schumer – video

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      The Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, decried the decision to acquit Donald Trump of inciting a riot at the US Capitol on 6 January. House Democrats, who voted a month ago to charge Trump with ‘incitement of insurrection’, needed two thirds of the Senate, or 67 votes, to convict him. Only seven Republicans joined all 50 Democrats in voting to convict Trump.
      The Democrats argued in the short trial that Trump caused the violent attack by repeating for months the false claims that the election was stolen from him, and then telling his supporters gathered near the White House that morning to ‘fight like hell’ to overturn his defeat. Five people died when they then laid siege to the Capitol.
      Senate has officially voted to acquit Trump on 57-43 vote More

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      in US Politics

      Five Republicans join vote for witnesses in Trump Senate trial – video

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      Five Senate Republicans voted with the Democrats on Saturday, that the Senate should call witnesses in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump.
      Before the 55-45 vote, Trump’s impeachment lawyer Michael van der Veen warned senators that if Democrats wished to call a witness, he would ask for at least 100 witnesses and insist they give depositions in person in his office in Philadelphia – a threat that prompted laughter from the chamber.
      Impeachment: five Republicans join vote for witnesses in Trump Senate trial More

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      in Elections

      Trump impeachment trial day three: Democrats rest their case – video highlights

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      House impeachment managers concluded their case against Donald Trump on Thursday by saying that the deadly Capitol assault he stands accused of inciting was the culmination of a presidency beset by lies and violent rhetoric. They also said he would remain a threat to US democracy if not convicted and barred from holding future office
      Democrats rest case with warning that Trump remains a threat More

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      in US Politics

      The impeachment managers reflect a diverse US – unlike the senators they seek to persuade

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      One side holds up a mirror to America in 2021. The other, not so much.The nine Democratic prosecutors at Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial are made up of men and women young and old with multiple racial and religious identities.But each day in the Senate chamber they are trying to persuade a caucus of 50 Republicans still dominated by ageing white men.The contrast is not obvious on television but striking to reporters in the press gallery who gaze down at the sea of faces – clad in masks because of the coronavirus pandemic – visible above wooden desks on a tiered semicircular platform.The impeachment managers – all of whom are lawyers – from the House of Representatives are led by Jamie Raskin, who is of Jewish heritage, and include Joaquín Castro, who is Latino, Ted Lieu, who is Asian American, and Joe Neguse and Stacey Plaskett, who are African American.Neguse, whose parents came to the US as refugees from Eritrea four decades ago, is the first African American member of Congress in Colorado’s history and, at 36, the youngest ever impeachment manager.Plaskett is also making history as the first non-voting delegate to the House to be an impeachment manager. She represents the US Virgin Islands, a territory that does not have a vote in Congress, meaning that she was not permitted to vote for Trump’s impeachment on the House floor.“Virgin Islanders are always looking for space to be part of this America and try to make it better, even without a vote,” Plaskett told the Associated Press. “I’m going to make sure that their voice and the voice of people from territories representing 4 million Americans – Puerto Rico and other places – are actually heard.”The multiracial lineup of prosecutors is all the more resonant because they are detailing the actions of a mob that included white nationalist groups and flaunted regalia such as the flag of the Confederacy, which fought a civil war to preserve slavery.And the rioters’ objective was to overturn an election that Trump lost specifically by nullifying votes cast by people of colour, most of which went to his opponent, Joe Biden.Kurt Bardella, a senior adviser at the Lincoln Project, a group that campaigned for Trump’s defeat, said: “I don’t think it should be lost on anyone that the prosecution of Donald Trump and his white nationalist allies is being conducted by a very diverse group of Democrats encompassing gender, ethnicity and even religion.”On Wednesday it fell to Plaskett to remind senators that when Trump was asked to condemn the Proud Boys and white supremacists, he said: “Stand back and stand by.” The group adopted that phrase as their official slogan and even created merchandise with it that they wore at his campaign rallies.She also recounted how, on September 11, 2001, she was a member of staff at the Capitol and she might have been dead if the fourth hijacked jet that day had plunged into the Capitol, as it was believed to have been planned, instead of being taken down by heroic passengers and crashing into a field in Pennsylvania. She drew a line from that day to 6 January 2021.“When I think of that and I think of these insurgents, these images, incited by our own president of the United States, attacking this Capitol to stop the certification of a presidential election,” she said, enunciating each syllable, then pausing before adding, “our democracy, our republic.”In those days Plaskett was a Republican and later worked in the Department of Justice in the administration of George W Bush, converting to become a Democrat in 2008, and winning a place in Congress in 2014.She had studied in Washington DC, at Georgetown University as an undergraduate, then attended law school at American University, where Raskin was her law professor, which he noted in the Senate chamber on Wednesday was “a special point of pride” for him.At the trial, the juxtaposition of Plaskett – the only Black woman in the chamber now that Senator Kamala Harris has departed for the vice-presidency – delivering this evidence was inescapably potent.Bardella reflected: “When you’re talking about the Proud Boys being told to ‘stand back and stand by’, I think the articulation of that prosecution is made even more impactful and powerful when it’s being made by people of colour, by people who really represent symbolically the very thing that these people were protesting and trying to insurrect on January 6.“It’s the very notion of people of colour in roles of power and prominence that white nationalists rebelled against. At the heart of all of this is the systematic effort by the Republican party to disenfranchise voters of colour and to disqualify legal votes cast by people of colour in this country. That is at the epicentre of this entire conflict.”The impeachment managers have made a blistering start as they seek to demonstrate that Trump was “inciter-in-chief” of the deadly violence at the US Capitol. They have used the former president’s own rally speeches and tweets to show that he spent months pushing “the big lie” of a stolen election and urging his supporters to “fight like hell”.But it remains extremely unlikely that they will get the 17 Republican senators they need for a conviction. The trial is likely to be another case study in how far apart the two major parties have grown. Despite some notable gains among voters of colour last year, Republicans have only one Black senator: Tim Scott of South Carolina.LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, said: “The diversity on the Democratic side is reflective of America: more inclusive, more diversity of thought. My grandmother used to say, the GOP [Grand Old Party] has built their castle on sinking sand. Their entire existence has been centred around white male privilege and lack of accountability for white men of means.“So the visual on their side shows it is not reflective of America, only a particularly elite class in America. The second distinction is the argument. Trump’s defence team haven’t even met the standard of mediocrity, in my opinion. They have been absolutely awful. I do think that’s indicative that white men have literally never had to fully defend themselves.” More

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      in US Politics

      US sanctions have 'catastrophic impact' amid Covid, say progressive Democrats

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      Progressive Democrats in Congress are calling for an overhaul of US sanctions on other nations which they argue have “catastrophic humanitarian consequences” on the global effort to contain the coronavirus pandemic.
      In a letter to Joe Biden to be delivered on Thursday, 23 Democratic representatives and two senators, welcome a review of sanctions and their impact on the pandemic that the president launched soon after taking office.
      But the signatories also urge the new administration to take a broader look at sanctions as a foreign policy tool, which they say America had imposed as “a knee jerk reaction” for too long. The letter signals the issue is likely to be at the heart of the foreign policy debate within the party in the Biden era.
      The new administration has inherited a “maximum pressure” regime imposed by Donald Trump on Iran, as well as blanket sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba. It has already suspended a terrorist designation issued in the last days of Trump administration on the Houthis in Yemen, because of its impact on humanitarian aid deliveries.
      Thursday’s letter, authored by congresswoman Ilhan Omar, congressman Jesús García, and senator Elizabeth Warren, points to the unintended consequences of secondary sanctions imposed on third country governments and companies for dealing with targeted governments. Often, risk-averse financial institutions are deterred from facilitating any transactions, even in humanitarian goods formally allowed by the sanctions.
      “Existing protocols and licenses have proved woefully insufficient to meet the enormity of the challenges shared by people around the world in the face of the pandemic,” the Democrats say in the letter. “Even when licenses and humanitarian exemptions are available, moreover, there is a persistent problem of overcompliance, particularly from the financial sector. This has led to catastrophic humanitarian consequences in various parts of the world.”
      Under a national security directive issued by Biden on his first full day in office, the secretaries of state, commerce and the treasury, in consultation with the health and human services secretary and the administrator of the US Agency for International Development, are to review US and multilateral sanctions to assess whether they are obstructing global responses to the pandemic.
      Thursday’s letter represents a push for the review to encompass a radical rethink of sanctions, away from their use as a fix-all tool.
      “Far too often and for far too long, sanctions have been imposed as a knee-jerk reaction without a measured and considered assessment of their impacts. Sanctions are easy to put in place, but notoriously difficult to lift,” the signatories argue.
      “This is why we are asking for this release to be comprehensive, to see if these policies can be adjusted to make sure that they’re not specifically harming the people in these countries who are trying to survive…in a public health pandemic that is bringing about a financial crisis,” Omar told the Guardian.
      Chad Brown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the nature of the pandemic meant that international cooperation, even with rivals and adversaries, was all the more in the national interest.
      “If the pandemic is raging anywhere, the emergence of variants means that nowhere is truly safe,” Brown said. “That even includes the countries the United States may find challenging for geopolitical reasons.” More