1. David Remnick: Trump’s Impeachment and “Impeachment Lite”

There was a time, not so long ago, when Lindsey Graham recognized, and said publicly, that Trump was “unfit for office”—and when Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, Susan Collins, Cory Gardner, and so many other Republicans in Congress recognized Trump for the moral vacuum that he is. Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff, once called Trump “a terrible human being.” Rick Perry, his Secretary of Energy, saw him as a “barking carnival act” and deemed his candidacy “a cancer on conservatism.” Ted Cruz called him a “pathological liar” and “utterly immoral.” They used to care. But things have changed.

At the same time, nearly every loyalist who leaves the Trump White House—James Mattis, Gary Cohn, H. R. McMaster, John Kelly, Rex Tillerson, et al.—comes clean, on or off the record, about despising Trump. They describe in detail the President’s countless acts of duplicity and incompetence. Only fearful, humiliated ex-Trumpers in need of campaign support, such as Jeff Sessions, who is again running for the Senate in Alabama, abase themselves and speak of his virtue. Nikki Haley, who seems intent on being Trump’s successor (or perhaps Mike Pence’s replacement on the ticket), refers to Trump as “great to work with” and “truthful”; in 2016, she said that he was “everything a governor doesn’t want in a President.”

In other words, when it comes to Trump, everyone knows. As the Republican caucus members fell into line on Wednesday, they revealed themselves. No one defended Trump on the merits, on the facts—not with any conviction or coherence. Who came to praise his character or values? No one. Instead, there were only counter-accusations, smoke-bomb diversions about procedure, ill will, and even talk of the President’s martyrdom. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/trumps-impeachment-and-impeachment-lite

2. Mark Galli in Christianity Today: Trump Should Be Removed from Office

To the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record, we might say this: Remember who you are and whom you serve. Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior. Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency. If we don’t reverse course now, will anyone take anything we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come? Can we say with a straight face that abortion is a great evil that cannot be tolerated and, with the same straight face, say that the bent and broken character of our nation’s leader doesn’t really matter in the end?

We have reserved judgment on Mr. Trump for years now. Some have criticized us for our reserve. But when it comes to condemning the behavior of another, patient charity must come first. So we have done our best to give evangelical Trump supporters their due, to try to understand their point of view, to see the prudential nature of so many political decisions they have made regarding Mr. Trump. To use an old cliché, it’s time to call a spade a spade, to say that no matter how many hands we win in this political poker game, we are playing with a stacked deck of gross immorality and ethical incompetence. And just when we think it’s time to push all our chips to the center of the table, that’s when the whole game will come crashing down. It will crash down on the reputation of evangelical religion and on the world’s understanding of the gospel. And it will come crashing down on a nation of men and women whose welfare is also our concern. https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/december-web-only/trump-should-be-removed-from-office.html

3.  Susan B. Glasser: The House’s Sad, Predictable, Partisan, and Historic Impeachment of Donald Trump

Trump’s impeachment was mostly just another crazy, divisive moment in his crazy, divisive Presidency—an inevitable day, a predictable day, a partisan day, a long day, and, in the end, a historic day. There was rage, real and feigned. There were speeches, dozens and dozens of them. When I arrived on Capitol Hill in the morning, it was a bright, sunny day, and before going into the Capitol I watched as a protester toting a “Criminal in Chief” sign chased after the Republican Matt Gaetz, one of Trump’s loudest television surrogates, begging to talk to him. “I’m not even trolling you!” she said breathlessly. But, of course, nobody really wanted to talk to anybody. Gaetz did not stop to talk to the protester, at least not that I saw. Inside the Capitol, the members did not really talk to one another, either, despite the hours of debate. The vote was set; the outcome was known; the country was divided.

Minutes after Pelosi banged down the gavel on his impeachment, the President was onstage in Michigan, musing out loud about the late, legendary Michigan representative John Dingell looking up from hell as his wife, Debbie Dingell, voted with the Democrats to impeach. Trump will never say that he is sorry, and his supporters will never demand it of him. On the House floor, Barry Loudermilk, a little-known Trump devotee from Georgia, actually claimed that Trump was being treated worse than Jesus had been by the Roman prefect who ordered his execution. This was laughable, but in some ways the Republicans were almost all Barry Loudermilks on Wednesday, endorsing an array of fanciful excuses for the President that were just as implausible, if not so comically ahistorical. It was McCarthyism, a day that would live in infamy, like Pearl Harbor, they said. Trump never demanded that Ukraine investigate his political rival Joe Biden. Trump is a noble anti-corruption crusader.

The fight now heads to the Senate, where the Republican majority is expected to offer another all but unanimous G.O.P. vote to acquit Trump, following a trial that has little prospect of featuring a single witness. Pelosi, in fact, hinted, on Wednesday night, that she is not ready to send over the articles of impeachment just yet; “we’ll see,” she said, whether Republicans in the other chamber are really ready to have a fair trial. But, whenever a Senate trial happens, it’s certain that Trump will claim complete and total vindication from it, and that Democrats will blame Senate Republicans for failing to hold him to account. With the result in so little suspense, Washington has been consumed in recent days by the politics of this presumed outcome, reading the latest batch of polls as if they were runes from the future that can reveal how this all plays out in the 2020 election. But that is, as yet, unknowable. For now, what the polls show is exactly what Wednesday’s impeachment debate showed: the stubborn, unyielding reality of a country divided, of an America whose views are fixed about Trump and about everything else. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-houses-sad-predictable-partisan-and-historic-impeachment-of-donald-trump\

4. Philip Bump: To avoid removal, Trump needs senators representing only 7 percent of the country to support him

“Consider, for example, that it requires 67 votes in the Senate to oust Trump from office. That means that only 34 votes are needed to preserve his position. Even if he were deeply unpopular, if Trump maintained support from senators in 17 states, he could keep his job. Meaning, in the most extreme scenario, that he could be impeached but not removed from office if senators from the 17 least-populous states — representing only about 7 percent of the population — decided to stand by him.”

Again assuming a party-line vote, white Americans would be about as likely to be represented by a pro- as anti-impeachment senator. Black Americans, though, thanks to the density of the black population in Southern states, would be much more likely to be represented by a anti-impeachment senator. Overall, 6 in 10 nonwhite Americans in our poll supported impeachment.

In the Senate, things don’t line up as neatly. Again assuming a party-line vote, white Americans would be about as likely to be represented by a pro- as anti-impeachment senator. Black Americans, though, thanks to the density of the black population in Southern states, would be much more likely to be represented by a anti-impeachment senator. Overall, 6 in 10 nonwhite Americans in our poll supported impeachment. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/19/avoid-removal-trump-only-needs-senators-representing-percent-country-support-him/

5. George Conway: Republican senators run the risk of being shamed by Trump himself

In his unhinged letter Tuesday, President Trump accused House Speaker Nancy of having “cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!” A few days earlier, he accused Democrats of “trivializing impeachment.” 

If anything has cheapened or trivialized the process by which Trump was impeached, it was House Republicans’ refusal to treat the proceedings with the seriousness the Constitution demands. Unable to defend the president’s conduct on the merits, GOP members of the House resorted to deception, distortion and deflection: pretending that Trump didn’t ask President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to investigate Trump’s political rival; claiming that Ukraine interfered with the 2016 election; and throwing up all manner of silly assertions of procedural unfairness. 

Trump’s written tirade to Pelosi shows that, even as he is being impeached, he still has no idea why — and thus no idea what his presidential duties require. He hasn’t learned his lesson, and never will.

And that is the ultimate point Republican senators who care about their legacies should consider: They run the risk of being refuted and shamed on the pages of history not just by the evidence — but by Trump himself. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-conway-republican-senators-run-the-risk-of-being-shamed-by-trump-himself/2019/12/18/1fb19698-21de-11ea-a153-dce4b94e4249_story.html

6. Peter Baker: A President Impeached, and a Nation Convulsed

For the most unpredictable of presidents, it was the most predictable of outcomes. Is anyone really surprised that President Trump was impeached? His defiant disregard for red lines arguably made him an impeachment waiting to happen.

From the day he took office, Mr. Trump made clear that he would not abide by the conventions of the system he inherited. So perhaps it was inevitable that at some point he would go too far for the opposition party, leading to a historic day of debate on the House floor where he was alternately depicted as a constitutional villain or victim.

The proximate charge as Democrats impeached him for high crimes and misdemeanors on party-line votes Wednesday night was the president’s campaign to pressure Ukraine to help him against his domestic political rivals while withholding security aid. But long before Ukraine consumed the capital, Mr. Trump had sought to bend the instruments of government to his own purposes even if it meant pushing boundaries that had been sacrosanct for a generation.

Over nearly three years in office, he has become the most polarizing figure in a country stewing in toxic politics. He has punished enemies and, many argue, undermined democratic institutions. Disregarding advice that restrained other presidents, Mr. Trump kept his real estate business despite the Constitution’s emoluments clause, paid hush money to an alleged paramour and sought to impede investigations that threatened him.

His constant stream of falsehoods, including about his dealings with Ukraine, undermined his credibility both at home and abroad, even as his supporters saw him as a challenger to a corrupt status quo subjected to partisan persecution.

Mr. Trump, in his divisiveness, is the manifestation of a nation fracturing into warring camps and trying to define what America is about all over again, just as it did during Reconstruction, during the era of Vietnam and Watergate and during the rise of a new form of angry partisanship at the dawn of the information age.

“In each of these impeachments, they are not taking place during periods of quietude,” said Jay Winik, a prominent historian and author of “The Great Upheaval” and other books on pivot points in United States. “In a sense, what we’re seeing is a cap coming off a simmering volcano. We see it with each of these presidents — we see it with Johnson, we see it with Nixon, we see it with Clinton and we see it now with Trump. These impeachments are emblematic of periods of profound transition.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/18/us/politics/president-impeachment-history.html

7. Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman: Fear and Loyalty: How Donald Trump Took Over the Republican Party

Just under four years after he began his takeover of a party to which he had little connection, Mr. Trump enters 2020 burdened with the ignominy of being the first sitting president to seek re-election after being impeached.

But he does so wearing a political coat of armor built on total loyalty from G.O.P. activists and their representatives in Congress. If he does not enjoy the broad admiration Republicans afforded Ronald Reagan, he is more feared by his party’s lawmakers than any occupant of the Oval Office since at least Lyndon Johnson.

His iron grip was never firmer than over the last two months, during the House inquiry that concluded Wednesday with Mr. Trump’s impeachment on charges of abuse of power and obstructing Congress. No House Republican supported either article, or even authorized the investigation in September, and in hearing after hearing into the president’s dealings with Ukraine, they defended him as a victim of partisan fervor. One Republican even said that Jesus had received fairer treatment before his crucifixion than Mr. Trump did during his impeachment.

Perhaps more revealing, some G.O.P. lawmakers who initially said Mr. Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine was inappropriate later dropped their criticism. People close to Mr. Trump attributed the shift both to his public defense of the call as “perfect’’ and to private discussions he and his allies had with concerned lawmakers.

This fealty hardly guarantees Mr. Trump re-election: He has never garnered a 50 percent approval rating as president and over half of voters tell pollsters they will oppose him no matter who the Democrats nominate.

But the shoulder-to-shoulder unity stands in contrast to Democrats at the moment, with their contentious moderate-versus-liberal primary that was on full display in Thursday night’s debate. And it is all the more striking given Mr. Trump’s deviations from longstanding party orthodoxy on issues like foreign policy and tariffs.

Interviews with current and former Republican lawmakers as well as party strategists, many of whom requested anonymity so as not to publicly cross the president, suggest that many elected officials are effectively faced with two choices. They can vote with their feet by retiring — and a remarkable 40 percent of Republican members of Congress have done so or have been defeated at the ballot box since Mr. Trump took office.

Or they can mute their criticism of him. All the incentives that shape political behavior — with voters, donors and the news media — compel Republicans to bow to Mr. Trump if they want to survive. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/21/us/politics/trump-impeachment-republicans.html

8. Michael Linden: After two years, Trump's tax cuts have failed Americans

This month marks the two-year anniversary of President Trump's major legislative accomplishment: his rewrite of the tax code. As we head into the election year, you can bet that taxes and the economy will be topics of debate. President Trump will, no doubt, want voters to give him credit for his tax law, which he promised would lead to more investment, more jobs, higher wages and faster growth.

But none of those promises have been fulfilled. From a purely economic standpoint, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 has been an enormous flop.

Let's start with jobs. Has the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act created millions of new jobs, as was promised? In a word, no. In the four years prior to the passage of the GOP tax law, the economy added an average of 213,000 jobs each month, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the nearly two years since the law passed, average job creation has actually declined by an average of 11,000 per month.

The White House promised that the tax cuts would result in an annual wage increase of $4,000 per household. Again, not even close. In the two years since the law passed, wage growth, after accounting for inflation, rose only slightly, from 1% to just under 1.4% per year for nonsupervisory workers, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. That difference — even if it were fully attributable to the tax cuts — amounts to less than $400 for a full-time worker. So much for your $4,000 raise.

We have been told, over and over again, that tax cuts for the rich are good for the overall economy. However, there's not much solace to be found in gross domestic product either. In the four years before the law passed, real GDP grew by an annual average rate of about 2.4%, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the nearly two years since, the GDP growth rate has inched only slightly higher to an annual average of 2.5%. https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/20/perspectives/trump-tax-cuts/index.html

9. Jonathan Chait: Trump Believed Ukraine Conspiracy Because ‘Putin Told Me’

Trump’s impeachment has focused primarily on his demand for an investigation of his political rival. But Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine began as an effort to vindicate the conspiracy theory that Putin had apparently persuaded Trump to believe. Trump asked Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to locate the server the Russians claimed Ukrainians had smuggled away and hid.

More important, Trump allegedly directed the activities of Lev Parnas, a partner of Giuliani. Parnas was paid a million dollars by a notorious Russian oligarch with close ties to Putin. On behalf of Parnas’s company, a Republican donor paid Giuliani, who represented Trump for “free.” And Giuliani, astonishingly, is still at it. After returning from another trip to Ukraine, where he met with a series of notorious Russian-allied figures, Giuliani has made his case on conservative network OANN and met with Trump, who in turn vouched for him and his work.

Proving criminal conspiracies in court is hard — especially when some of the suspects reside in a hostile foreign country, and even more so when the investigation’s principal subject has the power to pardon witnesses who withhold cooperation. The Mueller investigation failed to establish a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Russia, but Trump is working to spread Russian-originated propaganda and he handed this work off to figures who were paid by Putin allies. Whether you describe this relationship as a conspiracy or simply an alliance, it is very much ongoing. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/trump-putin-told-me-ukraine-conspiracy-russia-impeachment.html

10. Joyce White Vance: Trump May Be Acquitted in a Senate Impeachment Trial. That's Not the Same as Being Exonerated

As they discuss the trial with the judge, the prosecution learns the usual rules won’t apply. It won’t be able to put on any evidence at trial to support the allegations against the defendant. None of the witnesses it interviewed will be permitted to testify. None of the withheld information will be available. And although newly discovered evidence suggests that the defendant may have asked some of his friends to help him carry out the robbery, it won’t be admitted, and witnesses that the prosecution has requested to testify about that won’t be permitted to testify.

Also, some of the jurors have already committed to vote for the defendant. They will still be permitted to participate and vote in the trial.

Of course, this could never happen in our criminal justice system. But apparently, it can in the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald John Trump. That’s because under the Constitution, the Senate (or at least the party that holds a majority in it) gets to make decisions about more than just the facts. https://time.com/5754646/impeachment-senate-trial/