Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
All this hands Democrats a weapon. They should say, Mr. President, if we win the House, we absolutely will hold you accountable. And that raises a question: what can a Democratic House really do to hold Trump accountable anyway? What should it look like?
Andy Craig: Good to be with you, Greg.
“Jamie Raskin, a Loser in Life, who worked endlessly during my First Term to impeach me, will guaranteed be trying to do it again despite one of the most successful Presidencies in history.”
“EXPEL THE BUM. Congress can never be great with people like this who suffer massively from Trump Derangement Syndrome, casting their vote of HATE!”
Craig: Well, it does show that it’s certainly one of his fixations, that he is thinking already about what will happen in the next Congress. And he’s not wrong that it’s very likely he will face another impeachment trial. I think, honestly, even though we’ve seen some reluctance from Hakeem Jeffries and from some Democrats to do another impeachment, I think the pressure will be too much, because the outrages are just too many and will continue to pile on. And this is one of the tools Congress has, and it does have an effect even if you don’t get to 67 votes in the Senate.
But here’s the real kicker. Several GOP lawmakers tell the Journal that such a thing would have a tough time passing. Which means some Republicans in the House don’t want to vote to expunge Trump’s impeachments.
They want to be on the attack blasting Democrats for whatever they’re going to do. They don’t want to be defending Trump right now, given where the polls are at.
And, Andy, I think Democrats should say that. Even some Republicans don’t want to vote to protect Trump. And I guarantee you, independents who are already tilting overwhelmingly against Trump right now and hate corruption really want a check on Trump and really want him held accountable. What do you think?
We see a lot of sentiment, understandably, across the board, that people want more elite accountability. The idea that he should get off the hook—whether it’s Trump or whether it’s anybody else, people caught up in the Epstein files—there’s a mood in the air of that kind of thing, where Trump is not immune from this kind of backlash against the sense of elite impunity.
If you look at oversight and investigations, a quick list would mean much more digging into the Epstein files, serious investigations into how Attorney General Todd Blanche is deciding to prosecute Trump’s critics and how Blanche oversaw the bogus settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS—which granted Trump IRS immunity—serious investigations into the Trump family’s crypto scams and their dealings abroad. That’s just a start. What do you want to see happen on the investigations front?
So I think there’s real digging that needs to be done there with Hegseth and what’s been going on in the military in terms of rationalizing how this is somehow legal, which it obviously isn’t.
And it looks to me like if you were to be able to just dig even a little bit, you’d find an extraordinary lack of any kind of real rationale at the core of this. In fact, you might even just find summary executions being carried out just because Trump says blow it up. Basically something as really kind of disgusting as that.
And that’s not how it should work. Congress is not dependent on the other branches, nor on the other mechanism, which is referral to the Department of Justice for prosecution, which is obviously a dead end also.
There are all kinds of tools that they need to use. But the problem with the litigation is it just drags on for years and years. And even if Congress ultimately wins, it never gets done before there’s been a new presidential election and a new administration comes in.
So you have to have Congress exercise something like an imperial power itself and really maximize what it can do to force these subpoenas to be honored, right?
And ultimately, they need to go after people’s bank accounts or even send the sergeant at arms out to haul in, potentially. Along with the other procedural tools they have, like potentially defunding people who aren’t complying with subpoenas.
Craig: Absolutely. This goes back to the deep fundamentals of our constitutional system in the English parliaments of the Middle Ages and stuff. The power of the purse is the ultimate power. And that’s why it’s vested in the legislature. So there are different ways you can structure it and kind of procedurally how you tackle it.
Sargent: A hundred percent. And so let me ask you this. Let’s say the corrupt prosecutions of Trump’s critics really went even further. They’re already absolutely lawless and terrible. But let’s say it kept going. You could theoretically see a Democratic Congress essentially saying, we’re not funding that U.S. Attorney’s office anymore. Isn’t that an actually valid tool?
But most things, including exactly that—the U.S. Attorney’s office that’s going after somebody, or anything like that, the whole DOJ—those are on the annual appropriations. And so they will expire if Congress doesn’t get its act together and pass something.
Republicans have neutered themselves, neutered the Congress, and that is part of the reason we’ve got this unchecked lawless presidency kind of running rampage everywhere.
Craig: Yes. This is the core Madisonian checks and balances. These are the powers Congress is supposed to have. And like so many things, this problem predates Trump. The imperial presidency has been gaining power and Congress has been becoming more dysfunctional and more passive and not being as assertive as it should be going back decades. But as with so many other things we see, this is Trump coming in and turning it up to 11.
Sargent: OK, so let’s just imagine that Democrats win one or both chambers of Congress. It’s most likely that they’ll win the House and not the Senate, but it is possible that they’ll win both—or I guess it’s possible that they’ll win neither, but they probably will win one or both.
Craig: Well, there are historical precedents, and the biggest one would be what happened when Andrew Johnson was president after Lincoln during Reconstruction. And Congress was able to act more aggressively because they had Republican supermajorities—the South was unrepresented.
So you can have a system that—we’re not going to have a parliamentary system—it’s not going to look like the United Kingdom where the executive merges into the legislature. We do have an independently elected president. There are certain constitutional powers that the president has.
Sargent: It would really be something else if Democrats would actually go through with that. And of course, for a whole bunch of reasons, they might not, or they might adopt something in between. That’s a topic for another pod.
Craig: Yes. And one thing that matters is not just—you can have the political strategy arguments about how many votes will this get and what do the polls say. And I think there’s pretty solid evidence that this is a winning message. But also what it does is it amounts to a kind of pre-commitment. And it shows that if and when they win, that this is the public mandate they have.
Or are you going to just kind of roll over with a defeatist, Well, he’s not going to get removed from office anyway, so what’s the point? I think that’s entirely the wrong attitude, and it’s learning the wrong lessons from what happened in the last two impeachments.
Craig: Thanks.
Hence then, the article about transcript trump erupts at jamie raskin and hands dems midterm weapon was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Transcript: Trump Erupts at Jamie Raskin—and Hands Dems Midterm Weapon )
Also on site :