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Background Briefing: February 9, 2021
Will Witnesses Who Could Seal Trump’s Fate Testify?
We begin with the impeachment trial in the Senate that began today with House Managers showing a video compilation of the storming of the Capitol which made clear Trump’s explicit acts of insurrection as well his issuing of what amounted to a death sentence on his loyal Vice President who the rampaging mob wanted to hang. Kimberly Wehle, Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law and a former Assistant U.S. Attorney and author of How to Read the Constitution and Why and What You Need to Know About Voting a Why, joins us to discuss her article at Politico “Republicans Are Giving Rogue Presidents a Pass in Defining
Impeachment” and another at The xxxxxx, “Call Witnesses. There Was a Crime. There is a trial. There should be witness testimony.” With House Manager Jaimie Raskin pointing out “Trump knows nothing about the founders but the founders knew a lot about him”, we examine the possibility of Mike Pence testifying as well as senior White House officials who witnessed Trump enjoying watching the desecration of the Capitol as it happened while not wanting to call off the mob.
The GOP’s Authoritarian Moves to Recount the Election in Arizona
Then we look into how the GOP is becoming an authoritarian party that believes elections they win are OK but elections they lose are rigged, and explore the example of what is happening in Arizona as the Republican State Senate threatens to jail election officials in Democratic-leaning Maricopa County to force them to turn over ballots which the Republican Trump diehards can then recount to prove their delusion that Trump won the election. Jim Small, a veteran reporter covering state government who is the Editor of the Arizona Mirror where he has an article “Arresting opponents of the Big Lie is now the Republican way“, joins us.
Secession Movements Are on the Rise and Break Ups Could Happen Soon
Then finally we speak with Richard Kreitner, a contributing writer to The Nation whose latest book, just out, is Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union. He joins us to discuss how the GOP now dominated by QAnon followers and diehard Trumpsters who believe he won the
election, could well move from rejecting the legitimacy of the Biden presidency and the Democratically-controlled House and Senate and start secession movements to divide the country further into plantation America in the South and Jesusland in the the middle. Meanwhile will the Sodom and Gomorrah of blues states, New York and California on the coasts, keep subsidizing the rejectionist red states?Posts navigation
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