Jamie Raskin, the House Democrat leading the impeachment of Donald Trump, remembered his son Tommy on Sunday and said: “I’m not going to lose my son at the end of 2020 and lose my country and my republic in 2021. It’s not going to happen.”
Tommy Raskin, a Harvard law student who struggled with depression, died on New Year’s Eve. He was 25.
His father, a constitutional law professor and representative from Maryland, was this week named as lead impeachment manager for Trump’s second Senate trial. The president was impeached for the second time for inciting the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January, in which five people died, to further his baseless claim that the election was stolen.
Trump’s trial could start immediately after Joe Biden takes power on Wednesday. Raskin discussed the impeachment on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. He was also asked about his son.
“Tommy was a remarkable person,” he said. “He had overwhelming love for humanity and for our country, in his heart, and really for all the people of the world. We lost him on the very last day of that God awful year, 2020, and he left us a note, which said ‘Please forgive me, my illness won today, look after each other, the animals and the global poor for me, all my love Tommy.’
Republican congresswoman Nancy Mace, who worked for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, says the president put her life, as well as those of her children, at risk in the run-up to violence at the Capitol this month.
“We feared for our lives, many of us that day, and our staff. And, as you know, my children were supposed to be up there,” she told NBC’s Meet The Press. “And if they had been, there like they were supposed to be, I would have been devastated. And so, we do need to find a way to hold the president accountable.”
WATCH: Freshman Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) calls GOP objections to the electoral college "enormously disappointing."@RepNancyMace: "I literally had to walk through a crime scene where that young woman was shot and killed to get into the chamber to vote" to certify the election. pic.twitter.com/1UXDA9QVsm
Mace was asked about many of her Republican colleagues in the House continuing to push back on the results of the presidential election, even after a pro-Trump mob invaded the Capitol.
“I will tell you for me, as a new member, it was enormously disappointing. I literally had to walk through a crime scene where that young woman was shot and killed to get into the chamber to vote that night to certify what was supposed to be a ceremonial vote to certify the Electoral College,” she said. “And yet, my colleagues continued to object, and they knew this was a failing motion.”
I keep hearing that Joe Biden will govern from the “center”. He has no choice, they say, because he will have razor-thin majorities in Congress and the Republican party has moved to the right.
Rubbish. I’ve served several Democratic presidents who have needed Republican votes. But the Republicans now in Congress are nothing like those I’ve dealt with. Most of today’s GOP live in a parallel universe. There’s no “center” between the reality-based world and theirs.
Last Wednesday, fully 93% of House Republicans voted against impeaching Trump for inciting insurrection, even after his attempted coup threatened their very lives.
The week before, immediately following the raid on the Capitol, two-thirds of House Republicans and eight Republican senators refused to certify election results on the basis of Trump’s lies about widespread fraud – lies rejected by 60 federal judges as well as Trump’s own departments of justice and homeland security.
Prior to the raid, several Republican members of Congress repeated those lies on television and Twitter and at “Stop the Steal” events – encouraging Trump followers to “fight for America” and start “kicking ass”.
This is the culmination of the growing insanity of the GOP over the last four years. Trump has remade the Republican party into a white supremacist cult living within a counter-factual wonderland of lies and conspiracies.
Donald Trump supporters will gather at capitols in all 50 states today, spurred on by the president’s baseless claims that the election was stolen from him. Arkansas’s Republican governor Asa Hutchinson told Fox News Sunday that he believes Trump bears responsibility for the violence at the US Capitol this month, and which some fear could be repeated today.
“[Trump] asked all the people to come to Washington for the rally and then he used very aggressive language in the rally itself and he misled people as to what happened during the election, that it was stolen and that our checks and balances are not working,” Hutchinson said.
Hutchinson said that he has been monitoring the protests at the Arkansas capitol today but did not believe intelligence suggested he will need to call in the national guard.
“We’re using civilian law enforcement, we’ll have response teams there, we’ll have beefed-up presence at the capitol for Tuesday,” he said. “We don’t have any specific intelligence that there’s going to be violence associated with those rallies but we want to be extra cautious. Every state has to look at their own intelligence matrix and make those kind of judgments.”
HR McMaster, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, has told CNN that another run for office by the president would be “terribly divisive”.
He said that he did not support any particular candidate but did not necessarily oppose the move to impeach Trump for a second time over the recent violence at the US Capitol. He told CNN that “nobody is above the law.”
New York Times releases bombshell pardon-lobbying report
Martin Pengelly
An associate of Rudy Giuliani told a former CIA officer a presidential pardon was “going to cost $2m”, the New York Times reported on Sunday in the latest bombshell to break across the last, chaotic days of Donald Trump’s presidency.
The report detailed widespread and in some cases lucrative lobbying involving people seeking a pardon as Trump’s time in office winds down. The 45th president, impeached twice, will leave power on Wednesday with the inauguration of Joe Biden.
The former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who was jailed in 2012 for leaking the identity of an operative involved in torture, told the Times he laughed at the remark from the associate of Giuliani, the former New York mayor who as Trump’s personal attorney is reportedly a possible pardon recipient himself.
“Two million bucks – are you out of your mind?” Kiriakou reportedly said. “Even if I had two million bucks, I wouldn’t spend it to recover a $700,000 pension.”
An associate of Kiriakou reported the conversation to the FBI, the Times said.
Washington DC’s Democratic mayor, Muriel Bowser, has appeared on CNN’s Meet The Press this morning. After the invasion of the US Capitol earlier this month, there will be a huge security presence around DC for Joe Biden’s inauguration. Host Chuck Todd said the capital looks like an “armed camp” and asked how long it will continue to do so.
“[The bigger question is] ... how serious is our country going to take domestic white extremism?” said Bowser. “And I think what we saw here last week is that we didn’t take it seriously enough. We never believed that so-called patriots would attempt to overthrow their government and kill police officers, but that’s exactly what happened.
“So I do think we have to take another posture in our city that is more domestic terrorist-focused and external to our country and enact accordingly. Now, we don’t want to see fences, we definitely don’t want to see armed troops on our streets, but we do have to take a different posture.”
She also agreed with Todd that there is more security around the Capitol than at any moment since 9/11.
“I think this will be an inauguration unlike any other. I think it was already destined to be given Covid concerns and some of the limited seating and public access,” she said. “But having our fellow Americans storm the Capitol, in an attempt to overthrow the government, certainly warrants heightened security.”
A CNN poll puts Donald Trump’s approval rating at a new low as the end of his presidency nears, with his numbers dropping among Republicans as well as Democrats.
In the poll, which was released on Sunday, 34% of those surveyed said they approved of Trump’s presidency. The previous low was 35% and before the election in November Trump’s approval rating stood at 42%.
Despite Trump’s part in the violence at the US Capitol earlier this month, 80% of Republicans said they approved of his presidency. However, that was down from 94% in October. Two percent of Democrats approved of Trump in the latest poll.
Most of those surveyed (54%) said Trump should be removed from office following the events at the Capitol. Ninety percent of Democrats agreed Trump should be forced out, and 10% of Republicans.
Joe Biden will sign a series of executive orders in his first days in office, attempting to roll back damage done at home and abroad by Donald Trump, whom the Democrat will replace as president on Wednesday.
Biden, 78, has already outlined plans to send an immigration bill and a Covid stimulus and relief package to a newly Democratic-controlled Congress. On Friday he said he would shake up the delivery of vaccines against Covid-19, mired in chaos under Trump.
According to a memo from chief of staff Ron Klain released on Saturday, Biden plans to return the US to the Paris climate accords and the Iran nuclear deal, overturn Trump’s travel ban against some Muslim-majority countries, restrict evictions and foreclosures under the pandemic and institute a mask mandate on federal property.
President Biden will enjoy Democratic control of both houses of Congress, if by a slender margin in the House and by Kamala Harris’s casting vote as vice-president in a 50-50 Senate. But Senate business, including confirmation for Biden’s cabinet nominees, will soon be dominated by Trump’s impeachment trial.
On Sunday, Klain told CNN’s State of the Union: “It’s important for the Senate to do its constitutional duty, but also to do its constitutional duty to move forward on these appointments, on the urgent action the country needs.
“During the last time President Trump was tried the Senate was able to hold confirmation hearings for nominees during the morning [and] was able to conduct other business. I hope that the Senate leaders on a bipartisan basis find a way to move forward on all their responsibilities. This impeachment trial is one of them but getting people into the government and getting action on coronavirus is another one of those responsibilities.”
Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of US politics at the end of what has been a busy week. As Donald Trump enters his final days in power, the US is braced for potential unrest with the president’s supporters expected to gather for protests in Washington DC and all 50 state capitols.
Here’s where we are so far:
Can Joe Biden and Kamala Harris repair a broken America? The US is riven with stark inequalities, rising white supremacist terror and large numbers who believe the election was stolen. The new administration faces a truly daunting challenge
Trumpists on top? President exits having cleaved the Republican party in two
