* “The party has to stay neutral. I’m not telling anybody to run or not to run in 2024.”–RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. The upshot: She’s declining an opportunity to encourage Donald Trump to run for president in 2024.
* When Trump won the presidency, he didn’t carry his New York home precinct. In the November election, he did carry—with 62 percent of the vote–his new Florida home precinct that includes MAGA-Lago. In other words, the precinct that knew him best over the years, didn’t want a charlatan-grifter for president, but the MAGA-Lago crowd and assorted West Palm greed heads and sycophants have another take.
* “We have members of Congress who want to bring guns on the floor and have threatened violence on other other members of Congress.”–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in underscoring that anxiety about security remains high in Congress—especially “when the enemy is within the House of Representatives.”
* “A waste of time. (This impeachment) isn’t about accountability … It’s about demands for vengeance from the radical left.” Yeah, that was this iteration of Marco Rubio. trying to distance himself from Trump impeachment and not offend the former president’s vengeful base. The same protean senator who has called out Trump for being a “con artist,” mocked him for promoting a “tough guy charade” and thinking the “nuclear triad” was a “rock band from the 1980s.”
* New Greene Deal: Doesn’t it speak odious volumes that there hasn’t even been a Republican censure yet of QAnon-nut case, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene? Granted, having worn a “Trump Won” mask to her oath-taking wasn’t that off-putting to a lot of GOPsters. But a history of racist, anti-Semitic comments; dismissive, school mass-shooting denials and insults; 9/11 hoax theories; and suggested support for threats to Nancy Pelosi and other Dems on social media should be well beyond the Congressional pale. (Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy even appointed Greene to the House Education and Labor Committee.) What’s it say for a democracy when representing the vilest elements of a constituency necessarily means misrepresenting everybody else? That’s beyond basic pandering. BTW, there is talk among some GOPsters that Greene could become a political dilemma for the party. Not an appalling, societal disgrace, mind you, but another-day-at-the-office political“dilemma.”
* We know there’s Republican backlash out Westover those pols, such as Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, who can no longer pretend that Trump is anything other than an insurrection-stoking embarrassment. But there is also this: Nearly 5,000 Arizona voters dropped their GOP voter registration after the Capitol attack.
* Last Sunday marked the 156th anniversary of Congress passing the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery. Should we have foreseen the need for a “BLM” movement more than a century and a half later?
* The bottom line for Trump’s impeachment-defense team: Prominent attorneys with reputations to protect don’t want to be part of a word-parsing defense that, at its core, is an extension of farcical, false claims that Trump actually won re-election. So, maybe there’s still a chance we could see Pam Bondi.
* There have been four presidential impeachments in American history. Half of them are Trump’s.