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You've got a recipe for a shop-Uportechnology and direct knowledge. Good bye, ladies and gentlemen, on Shop-Uportechnology.com/goodbye. This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I'm your host, Greg Sargent. Donald Trump just exploded in fury at Jamie Raskin, calling for him to be expelled from Congress.
Trump raged that if Democrats win the House, Raskin will lead the President's impeachment. In saying this, Trump is accidentally admitting that he cares very much about the prospect of another impeachment. In fact, he's meanwhile reportedly trying to get Republicans to respond to his past impeachments, indicating how much they eat away at him. All his hands dimmed 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? We're talking about all of it with Andy Craig, a senior editor at the unpopularist who often thinks creatively on this topic. Andy, good to have you on. Good to be with you, Greg.
So let's start with Trump's explosion at Congressman Jamie Raskin. It kind of came out of nowhere. He posted this, quote, "Jamey 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 Presidency's in history," close quote, "Trump then continues, "Expell the bomb.
Congress can never be great with people like this who suffer massively from Trump derangements
syndrome, casting their vote of hate." Andy, there's a lot more of that. What's your reaction? Well, it does show that it 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 the King Jeffries and from”
some Democrats to do another impeachment, I think that the pressure will be too much, because the outrageous are just too many and we'll 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. Exactly. And so, the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump and his allies are hatching
a plan to get GOP lawmakers to vote on a resolution that somehow voids Trump's impeachments whatever the hell they think they mean by that, Trump said this to the journal, quote, "It should be done because I did nothing wrong," close quote. So he's saying on the record that he thinks his impeachment should be exposed. 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.
One of the more normal aspects of this midterm is that they're always a referendum on
the president and this president is deeply underwater on his approval ratings. So just, you know, they're making their political calculus the last thing they want to do is be dredging up January 6th or on which he is still particularly unpopular or going down that route. Just generally having to be more associated with them, I mean, 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.
“So in a way, that's why I think that in the sense Trump's explosion of fury at Raskin”
actually reveals weakness and kind of hands Demms a weapon for the midterms, it's really a self-own. He's admitting that he doesn't want to democratic House because he will face accountability, so Democrats can say Trump is plainly afraid of a democratic House because it will hold
A accountable.
He's admitting it himself and Andy, I think Democrats should say that even some Republicans don't want to vote to protect Trump and I guarantee you independence who are already tilting overwhelmingly against Trump right now and hate corruption, really want to check on Trump and really want him to hold accountable. What do you think?
Right, well, that's the campaign strategy decision for Democrats to make in terms of what's
“going to maximize their chances in November, but on the merits, the fact is that there's”
shyness away from talk of impeachment isn't well justified, actually the polling numbers show it's not unpopular, it's not toxic, it's not something independence and swing voters repell from, we see a lot of sentiment understandably across the board that people want more elite accountability, the idea that, oh, 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. I agree a hundred percent, so let's talk about what a democratic house can actually do. Let's put aside impeachment for now, although I do think Dems should impeach Trump and many of his top officials.
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 oversawed 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 from?”
Absolutely, there's so many, you know, it's the endless litany of outrageous in the second
term has been so much more extreme in terms of being a target rich environment for things to go after, certainly I think one thing I'm particularly interested in is the boat strikes campaign, the frankly murder that's going on with that, and the commander of Southern command essentially resigned in protest over this. So I think there's real digging that needs to be done there with Hague Seth and what's been
going on in the military in terms of rationalizing how this is somehow legal, which it obviously isn't. Andy, let me just jump in and say about that, that you could subpoena, Pete Hague Seth, you could subpoena top defense officials, you could subpoena the ones who are resigning under protest, I think there's at least one of them, you could bring them into Congress
and question them all under oath, we're learning every day in dribs and drabs, new things
about this campaign of murder on the high seas basically, 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 impact, you might even just find summary executions being carried out just because Trump says blow it up, basically something is really kind of disgusting as that.
“So that really gets to the important nuts and bolts problem of subpoenas and enforcing them”
and making them work. This is something Josh Chafe, it's written about that I highly recommend people look into, so for years now and we saw this in the first term, congressional subpoenas have tried to be enforced through civil litigation, going to the courts and saying, asking a federal district judge, will you please make this person show up because Congress subpoenaed
them? And that's not how it should work, Congress does not depend 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. Congress really needs to lean into using other tools they have, including it's inherent
contempt power, where ultimately Congress can arrest somebody on its own say so and it's been done before, Congress can impose financial penalties, Congress can also attach funding fights to this where we won't, we won't fund literally Pete Heggsett's own office staff potentially, or the executive office of the president, the White House staff. 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 up.
.
I also have my name, and I'm the founder of Yaui, a member of the Council of Justice and the Hand-Gefertigation
of the United States. And you're essentially saying Congress has got to maximize its own tools to do that. That's especially true given that this would be up to this administration, up to Todd Blanche essentially, his Department of Justice to decide whether to enforce subpoenas, right? You have to have Congress kind of exercise something like an imperial power itself and
really maximize what it can do to force these subpoenas to be honored, right? Absolutely.
“Congress needs to remember that they are their own branch of government, they are, they”
are co-equal, as it's often put powers. And when Congress issues the subpoena to somebody, that doesn't depend on the president agreeing, it doesn't depend on a court agreeing, that is a binding order that has legal
force, and ultimately they need to go after people's bank accounts or evens in disargent
it arms out to all of them in potentially, along with the other procedural tools they have like potentially deep funding people who aren't complying with subpoenas. Well, that was the second thing you brought up, which is the act of defunding. I want to try to get at that a little bit more. You're talking about Congress essentially really using as a hammer, the ability to just
essentially zap an office, right? In other words, Congress could essentially say either to enforce a subpoena or for some other purpose it could essentially say we're not funding the White House personnel, we're not funding this agency, we're not funding that agency until you do A, B, and C, correct? Absolutely, this goes back to the deep fundamentals of our constitutional system in the English
Parliament, so 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, but if nothing else, these appropriations come up every year, they lapse, and Congress can attach conditions saying, you know, if the Secretary of Defense, and that's the title to use for him, is refusing to comply with the subpoena or the White House Chief of Staff or whatever, then we're just not going to pay their salary, we're going to defund
their staff, or there are other tools, you know, you can defund various programs, or you have to be willing to kind of take hostages, that's the same beanbag. 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 Democratic Congress essentially saying, we're not funding that U.S. attorneys office anymore, right? Isn't that an absolutely valid tool? Absolutely.
“I mean, that's what it's there for, you know, that we're not going to have King Charles”
the first ruling without parliament and funding is own prosecution of critics in that kind
of thing. And these are appropriate, there are some appropriations where their fights you'll have to have about trying to claw it back because they're standing appropriations. They automatic revenue, that kind of thing, but most things, including exactly that, like the U.S. attorneys office that's going after somebody or anything like that, the whole DOJ,
those are on the annual appropriations. So they will expire if Congress doesn't get its act together and pass something. So I want to try to hone in on your big point in meshed in all that, which is basically that this sort of act would, if in a sustained way, carried out, be away of restoring integrity to our constitutional system.
It's worth pointing out that Trump's abuses are heavily, heavily dependent on Congress utterly checking out of the business of oversight and lawmaking and everything, really. 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. And so if we did what you're talking about, you'd really be restoring balance to the
System in a fundamental way.
It wouldn't be that Congress is overreaching.
“It would be Congress is bringing balance back to the system.”
Can you talk about that? Yes, this is the core, Madisonian checks and balances. These are the power's Congress is supposed to have. And like so many things, this problem predates Trump. The imperial presidency has been gaining power and Congress is 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. And so we've created a presidency that is this kind of turnkey tyranny, where they can outrun what even the courts can keep up with, but on a fundamental level, the big picture
political accountability for a lawless executive branch can only come from Congress.
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 neither, but they probably will win one or both.
“So what happens if they do something approaching your vision of this?”
Do we really just see kind of this fundamental shift in how the government is essentially functioning? What would it look like in a kind of, I don't know, day to day, week to week, way? What would we be seeing? What would the American people be seeing? 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, you know, the South was unrepresented. So what you can do is simple majorities can sometimes be more modest. But even then, what they essentially did is Congress took over reigning the government. It passed laws instructing the cabinet secretaries what to do.
It passed laws against Johnson firing them, which is what got him engaged and within one vote of getting removed from office. So you can have a system that, you know, we're not going to have a parliamentary system. It's not going to look like the United Kingdom where the executive emerges into the legislature. We do have an independently elected president.
There are certain constitutional powers that the president has. But Congress is the pre-eminent branch. Congress is the voice of the people. The president is not the sovereign Tribune of the American people. The elected representatives are the ones who have those powers.
And so yeah, they can pass laws and use their various tools to pretty directly reduce in some ways, at least the presidency to a much more constrained role where there are legal guardrails on what the executive branch agencies, the cabinet departments, the secretaries, the heads of these agencies are obligated to go out to do and to craft that in ways that it's enforceable both through the courts and by Congress following up with oversight.
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. But just to close out here, when Donald Trump explodes in fury because he might be held accountable
by a Democratic Congress, it makes me wonder, why don't Democrats right now go out there and talk the way you're talking? Maybe not exactly saying that this will be an imperial Congress, but saying something along the lines of, this is an absolutely out-of-control chief executive and that is having enormously damaging effect in this country and the whole world.
And if you put us in charge of Congress, we will rebalance. We will hold this guy accountable, we'll put guardrails on him, we'll restore balance and sanity to this system that they should get their heads to this place and talk that way. Right? Yes.
And one thing it matters is not just, I mean, you know, you can have the kind of political strategy arguments about how many votes will this get and what is the polls pointing.
“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. And you know, when you're talking about impeachment in particular, even if you cannot get to a majority in the Senate to convict, it's a kind of censure with teeth. Do you want to be out there hammering these issues, exposing the wrong doing, creating the
historical record and showing that you're doing what you can, 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 of impeachment.”
I could not agree more, Andy Craig.
I really hope Democrats are listening to you on this.
“Anyway, folks, if you enjoyed this check out Andy's work over at the unpopularist, he thinks”
about the stuff very creatively, very frequently, Andy.
Thanks so much for coming on.
Thanks, Rick. Good chat.
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