On Thursday, October 31st 2019, the US House of Representatives voted to advance with a formal impeachment proceeding, after a month of closed-door sessions garnered “flawed process” arguments from congressional Trump supporters. Halloween was perhaps the perfect date for an escalation of what Trump terms the “Witch Hunt” against him.
Two competitions of gargantuan proportions reached simultaneous apogees on October 22, 2019, as the World Series of Baseball kicked off in Houston, while in the nation’s capital the House Impeachment inquiry garnered the testimony of a key diplomat involved in the Ukraine “arms for dirt” scandal. While the outcome of both contests is still in doubt as of this writing, it’s beginning to look more and more like the underdogs may emerge the winners.
On October 16, 2019, Donald Trump “celebrated” a millennium of days in the Oval Office, which means the rest of us have suffered with this administration for a thousand earthly rotations. The miracle is that we’re still standing, if barely.
Trump commemorated the day with a meltdown in front of Congressional leaders, including the self-release of a photo showing him being chastised by Nancy Pelosi; the leaked release of an admonitory letter to Turkish President Erdogan that reads like a Third Grade composition; the self-bombing of hastily abandoned US bases in northern Syria to prevent their use by enemy forces; the House Impeachment Hearings testimony of a chief State Department adviser who had resigned the week before in protest over Trump’s Ukraine shenanigans; and a Jerry-Springer-style meeting at the White House between the bereaved parents of a British citizen killed in a driving accident and the US diplomat’s wife who killed him.
Is Donald Trump nuts? Or a genius? Or crazy like a fox? Or cracking under the pressures of the Oval Office?
At 5:04 PM EDT on Tuesday, 24 September 2019, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, fresh from a Democratic Caucus meeting, stood before the nation and announced that the US Congress was beginning formal impeachment investigations against Donald J. Trump. Critical mass had been building for this step in the caucus for a week, since the revelations of Trump’s outrageous breech of ethics, convention and quite possibly laws, in requesting aid from a foreign government in his 2020 US presidential reelection.
Perhaps more surprising, Mitch McConnell supported a unanimous nonbinding resolution in the Senate requiring the White House to release the full report logged by a national security whistleblower concerning Trump’s interactions with the Ukrainian president. Has the worm truly turned?
An emerging story casts further light on the Trump administration’s freewheeling, Mafia-style transactional interactions with foreign governments and its rampant stonewalling of congressional oversight. On August 12, 2019 a whistleblower from the U.S. intelligence community filed a complaint with the Inspector General that alleged some kind of wrongdoing at high levels of the U.S. government. The complaint was marked “urgent concern”, an unusual designation requiring immediate action, but the complaint hasn’t been made public, nor has it been shared with Congress, in direct contravention of the law.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is perhaps one of the most disliked, and most effective, politicians in the country. First elected in 1984 in a squeaker election which he won by less than one percent, McConnell has won reelection five times, and faces another race in 2020. He was tapped to replace outgoing Senate Minority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) in 2006, and became Majority Leader when Republicans took over the Senate in 2015.
The self-styled “Grim Reaper” of the Senate, Mitch McConnell is where legislation goes to die. Through a combination of stonewalling, pigheadedness, and obscure parliamentary tactics, McConnell has done his level best to frustrate Democratic administrations and agendas for decades.
