1. Tom Nichols: Trump-Ukraine impeachment made simple: Smear Biden and you'll get your military aid

As Congress moves into the public phase of its Ukraine investigation, the scandal has become more clear rather than more complex. Every witness confirms a straightforward storyline with remarkable consistency: President Donald Trump placed America’s national security at risk by abusing the power of his office for personal gain.

The good news so far for American democracy is that America’s public servants are protecting the rule of law and the national interest. The bad news is that their chief opponent is the Republican Party.

It is heartening to realize that so many government officials, all sworn servants of the Constitution, raised objections to Trump’s schemes. The president’s sycophants, proceeding from a warped theory of executive branch omnipotence, believe that these subordinates should have saluted smartly and moved out when the commander in chief made a decision.

Instead, those officials asked whether what they were being told to do was even legal. (Deputy Secretary of Defense Laura Cooper, for example, questioned whether the Office of Management and Budget had the authority to hold up the aid.) In a system of government by the rule of law, in which government employees take an oath to defend the Constitution rather than any one political leader, this is the correct response. The question of “what the president wants” should always be subordinate to the more important question of what the law allows. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/11/13/trump-impeachment-trade-ukraine-military-aid-for-biden-smear-column/2575150001/

2. Anna Palmer and Jake Sherman: We know how the impeachment show ends, but we’re still watching

The House’s impeachment of President Trump is kind of like watching the newest season of “Jack Ryan” on Amazon Prime Video. Sure, the twists and turns are exciting. You know the dude is going to get chased, shot at or stabbed — and do it all in exotic locales. Every episode makes you sweat as Jack gets into one pickle or another. In the end, though, you also know the showrunners probably won’t kill him off.

Impeachment is kind of similar. Yes, the hearings these next two weeks are momentous and historic. They will highlight just how unusual this White House is: The president’s personal lawyer was running around the globe trying to get a foreign country to investigate a political rival, and the U.S. government was dangling meetings and money as enticements. We’ll hear from longtime foreign servants, a military official and White House insiders, all of whom have the same view of this administration’s behavior: improper, immoral and wrong-headed.

But, at the end of the day, we all have a pretty good idea how this movie is going to end: a nearly party-line vote, with most every Democrat voting to impeach the president, and nearly all Republicans voting against it. But in the middle, the next nine days — you’ll get nonstop, white-knuckle action.” https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2019/11/13/we-know-how-the-impeachment-show-ends-but-were-still-watching-487658

3. Eric Lutz: Devin Nunes Uses Impeachment Hearing To Spew Conspiracy Theories

Faced with damning testimony from Bill Taylor and George Kent, Republicans on Wednesday engaged in increasingly complex intellectual gymnastics in an attempt to defend Donald Trump. As Taylor and Kent, both well-respected diplomats, provided sober, detailed accounts of how the president and Rudy Giuliani pressured Ukraine to announce politically-motivated investigations into Trump’s domestic foes, Devin Nunes and other Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee pushed debunked conspiracy theories, lashed out at the impeachment process, and treated the bombshell testimonies with a yawn.

Nunes was particularly incoherent in his explanation of Trump’s extortion effort, suggesting as he questioned Taylor—a lifelong public servant who on numerous occasions raised concerns that a cadre of officials, at Trump’s direction, were conditioning military aid on probes into Joe Biden and the 2016 election—that the president was justified in seeking the investigations because there were “numerous indications of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election to oppose his campaign and support Hillary Clinton.”

“Once you know that,” Nunes said as he finished questioning Taylor, “it's easy to understand the president's desire to get to the bottom of this corruption and discover exactly what happened in the 2016 election.”

Of course, the notion that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election—not Russia, as United States intelligence concluded—is unfounded, and forms the basis for the very conspiracy theories Trump attempted to get Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate. Tom Bossert, Trump’s former Director of Homeland Security, has called the crackpot narrative “completely debunked,” but he and other officials had been unable to shake the president’s convictions. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/11/devin-nunes-uses-impeachment-hearing-to-spew-conspiracy-theories

4. Eugene Robinson: Rank partisan solidarity is all Trump’s defenders have left

Tribalistic party identity is basically all the president’s defenders have left.

They complained that the House had not taken a formal vote to proceed with impeachment . . . but then the House held such a vote. They complained that the House impeachment investigators were taking depositions of witnesses in secret . . . but Republican committee members already had access to those hearings. They complained that transcripts of those interviews had not been released . . . but now they are being released, and one of the loudest complainers, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) says he will refuse to read them. They complained that there had been no public testimony that would allow the American people to judge for themselves . . . but a public phase of the House investigation is beginning this week, with the first witnesses scheduled to appear Wednesday.

The latest diversionary Republican complaint is that the whole process is somehow illegitimate unless the anonymous whistleblower who brought the Ukraine scandal to light is made to testify publicly.

The problem with this contention is that the whistleblower’s secondhand suspicions have long since been superseded by firsthand sources and documents, including the rough transcript of the phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that was released by the White House. Republicans are basically arguing that an alleged arsonist, caught with a gas can in one hand and matches in the other, cannot be fairly tried without testimony from the passerby who saw a building on fire and called 911. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/rank-partisan-solidarity-is-all-trumps-defenders-have-left/2019/11/11/be0a290c-04cb-11ea-ac12-3325d49eacaa_story.html

5. A Plea From 33 Writers: Words Matter. Stop Using ‘Quid Pro Quo.’

NY Times: A plea from 33 writers: Please use language that will clarify the issues at hand.

Please stop using the Latin phrase “quid pro quo” regarding the impeachment inquiry. Most people don’t understand what it means, and in any case it doesn’t refer only to a crime. Asking for a favor is not a criminal act; we frequently demand things from foreign countries before giving them aid, like asking them to improve their human rights record.That is not a crime; the crime is President Trump’s demand for something that will benefit him personally. But using this neutral phrase — which means simply “this for that” — as synonymous with criminality is confusing to the public. It makes the case more complicated, more open to question and more difficult to plead.

Please use words that refer only to criminal behavior here. Use “bribery” or “extortion” to describe Mr. Trump’s demand to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, making it very clear that this is a crime. The more we hear words that carry moral imputations, the more we understand the criminal nature of the act. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/08/opinion/letters/quid-pro-quo.html

6. Dana Milbank: It’s too late to save yourself now, Bill Barr

For Bill Barr, it’s too little, too late.

In my news colleagues’ latest scoop, The Post’s Matt Zapotosky, Josh Dawsey and Carol Leonnig report that the attorney general declined to fulfill President Trump’s request that he publicly exonerate Trump’s “perfect” call with Ukraine’s president — following several actions recently in which “the Justice Department has sought some distance from the White House.”

Right. Like a barnacle seeks distance from a whale.

The distancing maneuver is plainly an attempt by those sympathetic to Barr to make him look a bit less like the president’s mob lawyer — done anonymously so that Trump wouldn’t rage at Barr but instead blame the “degenerate” Post, as he did Thursday. But Barr has sealed his fate. As Trump’s impeachment looms, Barr has degraded the office Elliot Richardson once dignified. Barr has turned the Justice Department into a shield for presidential misconduct and a sword wielded against political opponents.

As part of the “distancing” campaign, Barr’s Justice Department would have us believe the attorney general never discussed with Trump the prospective Ukraine probe into the Bidens, didn’t talk to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani about Ukraine and didn’t know anything about the White House withholding aid to Ukraine.

Why would anybody doubt the sincerity of such claims?

Maybe Barr is getting queasy, with two of Giuliani’s Ukraine associates under indictment and Giuliani being turned down by four lawyers before finding representation. Maybe he’s unnerved by what he’s reading in the daily drop of impeachment depositions; on Thursday, another high-ranking State Department official testified about Giuliani’s campaign being “full of lies.” Maybe he even felt a pang of conscience.

It doesn’t matter. During his confirmation hearing in January, Barr vowed to “protect the independence and the reputation of the department.” Instead, he destroyed the former and squandered the latter. We may never know why he ruined his reputation to serve as Trump’s mob lawyer. But it’s far too late for rehabilitation. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/07/its-too-late-save-yourself-now-william-barr/

7. Eric Levitz: To many conservatives, Democrats (and/or popular democracy) are a greater threat to America than Vladimir Putin.

The victims of Trump’s shadow diplomacy were not Joe and Hunter Biden, but America’s security, democracy, and constitutional order: By withholding aid without fiscal justification, the administration unlawfully defied the will of Congress.

By unlawfully denying military assistance to a NATO-aligned ally under attack, Trump jeopardized America’s national security. And by using his official powers to generate legal and political problems for his domestic opposition, the president violated a norm that is essential to the preservation of free and fair elections in the United States.

In public, Republicans will declare these assertions untrue. But from the perspective of their party’s core activists and donors, they may be simply irrelevant. At a Trump rally in Ohio last July, two of the president’s supporters wore T-shirts that read, “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat.” The implication of this sentiment — that conservatives should have more contempt for the GOP’s domestic adversaries than for America’s geopolitical ones — was hard to miss. It was also rather easy to understand. Two decades after the Cold War’s end, in a moment of peak partisan polarization, why should an ideologically committed conservative fear Russia’s occupation of Ukraine more than a Democrat’s occupation of the Oval Office? Put differently, why should a person who believes abortion is genocide care more about constraining Putin’s influence over eastern Europe than the pro-choice movement’s influence over the judiciary? America is simply too secure on the world stage — and divided on the domestic one — for appeals to national solidarity in the face of a foreign menace to pack much punch. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/the-gops-case-against-impeachment-is-scarily-principled.html

8. Andrew Sullivan: This Is No Ordinary Impeachment

This is not just an impeachment. It’s the endgame for Trump’s relentless assault on the institutions, norms, and practices of America’s liberal democracy for the past three years. It’s also a deeper reckoning. It’s about whether the legitimacy of our entire system can last much longer without this man being removed from office.

We have become so used to these attacks on our constitutional order that we fail to be shocked by Trump’s insistence that a constitutional impeachment inquiry is a “coup.” By any measure, this is an extraordinary statement, and itself an impeachable offense as a form of “contempt for Congress.” We barely blink anymore when a president refuses to cooperate in any way, demands his underlings refuse to testify and break the law by flouting subpoenas, threatens to out the first whistle-blower’s identity (in violation of the law), or assaults and tries to intimidate witnesses, like Colonel Alexander Vindman. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/andrew-sullivan-this-is-no-ordinary-impeachment.html

9. Michael Gerson: Trump’s Ukraine defense: Blah, blah, blah

Sometimes a phrase can summarize an era. “We shall overcome.” “If it feels good, do it.” “It’s morning again in America.”

My candidate for the age of Trump was coined by White House counselor Kellyanne Conway. Asked about findings by the special counsel that she had violated the Hatch Act (which forbids government employees from campaigning in their official capacity), Conway answered, “Blah, blah, blah.”

This somehow captures the way that President Trump and his administration casually bat away the serious demands of law and conscience. Ethics compliance? Financial transparency? The emoluments clause? Prohibitions against obstructing justice? Election security? Whistleblower protections? Blah, blah, blah.

Press freedom? Racial reconciliation? The protection of minority religions? The humane treatment of refugees and migrant families? Blah.

Norms of basic honesty? Expectations of presidential character and dignity? The civilized rejection of verbal violence and dehumanization? The ancient proscription — found, I seem to remember, in Blackstone’s “Commentaries” — against having your sleazy political fixer pay hush money to a porn star? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-ethical-anarchy-makes-us-forget-what-honor-looks-like/2019/11/07/3db2fbd8-0199-11ea-8bab-0fc209e065a8_story.html

10. Dana Milbank: The United States is being run by a toddler

Most Americans don’t care what Lutsenko said to Giuliani about Yovanovitch. And we rarely take interest in Kiev if it isn’t preceded by “chicken.”

But if you take away the names and the Ukraine intrigue, what you’re left with from the thousands of pages of deposition transcripts released this week by impeachment investigators is a striking consensus — among Trump administration officials, Democrats and even, to some extent, Republicans — that the United States is currently being run by a toddler.

He has tantrums. He rips up paper. He disregards facts. He believes crazy conspiracies. He’s erratic and ill-informed. Those around him walk on eggshells, trying to prevent him from doing the geopolitical equivalent of sticking his finger in an electrical socket.

An anonymous administration official writes in a new book that Trump is “like a twelve-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding across the runway and the flights frantically diverting away from the airport.” Even loyalist Sen. Lindsey (R-S.C.) posits a dubious new defense of Trump’s Ukraine actions: “It was incoherent …They seem to be incapable of forming a quid pro quo.”

The depositions make clear Trump appointees and civil servants feel similarly. They describe “great confusion,” a “lack of clarity,” "the absence of “any coherent explanation” and a “vacuum.” The acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, “rarely responded to emails and almost never returned phone calls.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/08/united-states-is-being-run-by-toddler/

11. Kathleen Parker: Trump learns that fake charities are tons of fun until you get caught

Imagine President Trump’s surprise upon realizing that a charity bearing his name did not mean the money belonged to him.

So it has come to pass with a New York judge’s ruling Thursday that the president had misused money given to the Donald J. Trump Foundation and, as part of a settlement, will have to pay $2 million in damages. Not only did he use the money for himself, including the purchase of a 6-foot-tall portrait of None Other, but he also filled the board of directors with family members (the usual suspects: Ivanka, Donald Jr. and Eric) and at least one officer, Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, who didn’t know he was even on the board, according to court documents.

The man who popularized “fake news” apparently also invented a fake charity. They’re tons of fun until you get caught. But there was nothing fake about the money Trump spent that was intended for others. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-learns-that-fake-charities-are-tons-of-fun-until-you-get-caught/2019/11/08/667b89a6-0273-11ea-9518-1e76abc088b6_story.html

12. Abigail Tracy: “The Truth Looked Bad For Donald Trump”: The Roger Stone Trial Is Delivering Much Of What Mueller Didn’t

It was the Roger Stone trial, so the circus was definitely in town—journalists, Trump supporters, cranks, and conspiracy theorists of every flavor—but this circus had an incongruously somber air. Stone arrived Friday morning at the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse in Washington, D.C., dressed in a tailored gray suit and a blue-and-white-striped button-down, facing charges of lying to Congress, obstructing justice, and witness tampering.

The appearance of Steve Bannon in the 2 p.m. hour on Friday made it feel like the courtroom had beamed back to 2016. Between mentions of the infamous Access Hollywood tape, polls, and the odds in Clinton’s, Bannon testified that Stone was viewed by himself and others on the campaign as the conduit to WikiLeaks. “The campaign had no official access to WikiLeaks or to Julian Assange. But Roger would be considered if we needed an access point—an access point because he had implied or told me that he had a relationship with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange,” Bannon, who served as the CEO of the Trump campaign in the twilight of the presidential election and went on to work in the White House, said.

The thinking inside the campaign, Bannon explained, was that any emails that were damaging to Clinton were a boon to Trump—and that, underwater in the polls and in the aftermath of the tape’s release, the Trump campaign needed all the help it could get. “I do know how to win this but it ain’t pretty,” Stone wrote Bannon in one email. And in a stunning admission, Bannon said he believed he heard Stone was somehow “involved” in the release of the stolen emails.

Bannon was on the stand for roughly a half hour, but arguably, his testimony tied the Trump campaign to the release of the stolen emails in a way far more salient than the Mueller report or the special prosecutor ever could. Believing it had a back channel to WikiLeaks and Assange, the Trump campaign welcomed any dirty tricks Stone had up his sleeve. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/11/donald-trump-and-the-roger-stone-trial

13. Washington Post Editorial: Congress, stop ducking. Free the ‘dreamers.’

IN THE expansive realm of congressional dysfunction, there are few recent examples that surpass the failure to shield from deportation hundreds of thousands of unauthorized migrants, now in their 20s and 30s, who have grown up, studied and entered the job force after being brought to the United States as children. Here is a youthful cohort of more than 700,000 — as ambitious and promising as their native-born neighbors, classmates, co-workers and friends — whom large majorities of Americans want to protect. And still their fate remains hostage to Capitol Hill’s habitual gridlock.

As the Supreme Court hears legal arguments Tuesday on the Obama-era policy that provided a reprieve from removal and gave job permits to hundreds of thousands of young unauthorized immigrants, and on the Trump administration’s 2017 attempt to rescind that policy, it’s worth remembering some history. Specifically, that members of Congress of both parties have been trying, and failing, to codify those very protections for so-called dreamers since nearly the turn of the century.

Perversely, it is imaginable that Congress, and perhaps even Mr. Trump, could be jarred into acting on the dreamers’ behalf by a Supreme Court ruling that removed their protections and job security. Mass layoffs and waves of deportations, along with the financial distress those would trigger, could create the sort of crisis that focuses minds in Washington when all else fails. And the fiscal and economic impact of layoffs affecting hundreds of thousands of employees, and others still in college, would be consequential. A 2017 CATO Institute study found that deporting 750,000 young people protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program would sap the U.S. economy by $280 billion over a decade, and the federal tax coffers by an additional $60 billion.

But Congress could regain some respect by doing the right, the obviously right, thing before the court rules. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/congress-stop-ducking-free-the-dreamers/2019/11/11/9908e854-04cc-11ea-8292-c46ee8cb3dce_story.html