Dear Progressive Reader,
The big news this week was, of course, the House vote to approve two articles of impeachment against Donald Trump—a Congressional vote taken for only the third time in U.S. history (since Richard Nixon actually resigned before being impeached). Trump is not taking it lying down (or at least not “down”), but rather has been tweeting up a storm, in between public denouncements of the process in speeches and media scrums. In the meantime, he has his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani out building a case, as cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates this week.
But then, maybe Trump hasn’t been impeached at all? This argument is beginning to make the circuit inside and outside the White House ever since a statement by Harvard law professor Noah Feldman (who had testified at the Judiciary Committee in favor of impeachment earlier this month) was published on Thursday. Feldman claims that since Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has not yet delivered the articles to the Senate, impeachment has not yet occurred. “The argument is textually bizarre, historically inaccurate, structurally misguided and functionally misleading,” Feldman’s colleague Professor Laurence Tribe told The New York Times. In just one more “through the looking glass” moment of the past three years, we’ll just have to wait to see which set of “alternative facts” the Administration chooses to adopt. Or not.
This past Thursday evening, Democratic hopefuls again took to the stage to push their case for a change in 2020. As Ruth Conniff reports, the stage looked smaller and whiter than in other recent debates. “Instead of piling on the progressives, or the frontrunner (still Biden), as they have in other debates, the Dems went after each other—a sign that the race is still very much up in the air,” she writes. The next debate will take place on January 14 in Des Moines, Iowa, just about twenty days before that state’s caucuses kick-off the 2020 race. The DNC has raised the threshold to qualify for access to the stage, so we will see if the trend away from diversity exacerbates as well.
The previous week’s elections in Britain are leaving many in the United States concerned about the 2020 outcome in the U.S. as well. As Sarah Jaffee notes, “for U.S. activists watching, the lesson must be that rebuilding trust takes time, base-building, hard work.” “Progressive campaigns,” she explains, “must reach the working class everywhere it lives—in deindustrialized smaller towns as well as the biggest cities—and they must do more than make promises or show up at election time. They must prove they are around for the long haul.” As we at The Progressive approach our 111th birthday next month, we definitely understand how long that haul will be.
Finally, several articles of note on education appeared on our website this week. Jeff Bryant, lead fellow of our Public School Shakedown project, discusses a new report on fraud and abuse by taxpayer-funded charter schools. The report reveals that more than a quarter of the $500 million allocated went to schools that have closed or never even opened. Sarah Lahm describes the recent Public Education Forum in Pittsburgh, where seven of the Democratic presidential hopefuls were asked to take a stand on public education in front of 1000 teachers, students, and a live TV audience. Lahm also reports this week on Minnesota’s cuts to higher education. “State Republicans,” she points out, appear to “want new tax breaks, not a strong university system.” And Bill Van Esveld and Elin Martinez of Human Rights Watch decry that, in spite of international mandates, “for many of the world’s children, [access to any sort of] education proves elusive.”
Keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.
Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher
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