At the heart of upheaval over George Floyd’s killing is police accountability.

Maybe we should skip all the primaries, caucuses, polls and campaign fund-raising.

We’ve had three or four seemingly contradictory court rulings this week that make it impossible to understand where the powers of the presidency and Congress legally are set – and an outright plea from the Washington D.C. Court of Appeals majority to settle it themselves and to please leave judges out of the question.

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The disturbing, divisive undercurrents of the impeachment continue to ripple through our political, investigative and legal systems.

The disturbing, divisive undercurrents of the impeachment continue to ripple through our political, investigative and legal systems.

Even as the Republican Senate majority was acquitting Donald Trump of impeachment charges, one could sense the country bracing for the impending retaliating boomerang.

It has been a cringe-worthy process that almost certainly has deepened deep divisions in the country, and that has showcased a Republican Senate majority willing to follow party loyalty right out the window, throwing out a truckload of traditional American values. Do we believe in fairness, in truth, in fact?

It has been a process that put forth zany legal arguments seemingly spun of whole cloth to protect Donald Trump, even at the expense of radical reinterpretation of the Constitution’s division of governmental responsibilities and the simple understanding that doing bad is something to be excised and punished. Do we really accept that a president, particularly Trump, who has made self-aggrandizement a feature of his presidency, can do anything toward reelection because he thinks it is “in the public interest,” as outlined by presidential defender Alan Dershowitz?

It has been a process that often bordered more on personal rudeness and chest-bumping between the feuding lawyers than on any understandable search for what happened between Trump and Ukraine. It became a trial turning its back on witnesses, even as we are hearing from leaks to journalists about the John Bolton’s new book or more tapes and emails from Rudy Giuliani’s henchmen acting on behalf of Trump, and on stopping obstruction of Congress.

Team Trump's Arguments

Finally, after days of presentation, followed by two days of Senate questions, we reached the bottom line in the arguments of Team Trump’s lawyers:

• There are no limits on Trump’s powers, he does not need to meet requests, demands, even subpoenas from Congress. At the same time, there apparently is no reason to settle any of these refusals to acknowledge Congress in the courts, where Team Trump is arguing that the appropriate response to access complaints incongruously is impeachment.
• There is nothing impeachable about anything that a president does in pursuit of re-election because seeking reelection might be “in the public interest” and including seeking “information” from foreign countries, because “information” has no value.
• And, apparently, there is nothing wrong with running a rogue campaign to trade military aid for dirt on Joe Biden, as a prime political opponent. Per Team Trump, there was no quid pro quo, unless there was, in which case, it was perfectly reasonable either because Trump cared so deeply about corruption in Ukraine over years or because it was in the public interest rather than his own.
• The House managers relied on law, for the most part; by contrast, Team Trump’s arguments were largely political. Along the way, Democratic prosecutors made enough mistakes to leave themselves vulnerable to counter-arguments, however illogical.

Listening to the proceedings was often difficult. The twisted logic of the president’s team was outdone only by its disdain for anything I would associate with truth-finding. As I have said all along, I can understand a debate over whether these acts rise to the level of impeachment; but treating American voters like chumps who are blind and deaf to the outpouring of information about Trump's wrong-doing is simply dismissive.

The Deliverables

It is difficult to pick out the worst of what we have heard, and where it leaves us.

• We have been moving steadily since November 2016, toward a presidency that undercuts democracy, hastened by Democratic advances in 2018 elections that have prompted Trump into making more and more policy through executive order, the refusal to cooperate with Congress over general government oversight as well as impeachment, and now, in big gulps of power-swallowing toward an autocratic, authoritarian government.
• The evidence that was collected, mostly from the mouths of Trump appointees in diplomatic and national security service, showed that we are willing to host a government replete with Cabinet members and departmental overseers who are willing to bend budget, justice, environment, education and energy safeguards upside-down to make Trump look good. Despite the 200 Senate questions, there are piles of head-scratchers out there that were never asked: Why was Giuliani ever dispatched to Ukraine rather than the State Department, if this was in the public interest? What are we to make of the unasked questions about the roles of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Atty. Gen. William P. Barr, former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, the White House lawyers who stuck the Ukraine phone tapes in a White House secure, classified safe?
• As soon as the Senate votes against impeachment, we can expect Trump to come out in full boast, having learned nothing of anything close to humility. Instead, we can predict a full volley of vindictive behaviors personally aimed at anyone with the audacity of questioning the new American monarch.

L’etat, c'est Trump. 

The new year for White House anti-immigration efforts has run into an early obstacle. A federal appeals court temporarily blocked a Trump administration policy that would deny legal status to immigrants who use any public benefits.

Days after the assassination of Qassim Suleimani and a would-be Iranian retribution, Donald Trump took to the White House lectern and ducked saying whether we were going to war or standing down.

End of year proves a good platform for looking back to sum up administration achievements or missteps over the year, as well as how certain we are about the directions in which our nation is moving.

It seems that all of Washington is already treating the impeachment process as a done deal, but the House isn’t voting until today on formal adoption.

Donald Trump now says he wants a public trial, an impeachment trial—so long as he has loaded dice among majority Republican senators.

The impeachment case outlining Donald Trump’s bad behavior in launching a campaign for personal political gain just took a huge, if not a devastating, slam-dunk leap forward.

As the House moved closer last week to impeaching Donald Trump, the almost more disturbing note was that Trump is working to buy Senate support with campaign cash.

According to news reports, the Trump Organization is considering selling its prime location Washington hotel. The statement from son Eric Trump was that the company was getting lots of inquiries offering a great deal for the hotel, so why not take a look.

The announcement that U.S. commandos targeted and killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, founder and leader of ISIS, was welcome news, of course. Removal of the terrorist leader, plus retrieval of documents and plans, calls for congratulations.

The United States has reached a “very substantial phase one deal” with China in the high-stakes trade negotiations between the two economic superpowers, Donald Trump says.

Here’s the thing about these election debates that continue on Tuesday: They are not working. That is, however effective at eliminating the worst fund-raisers, they do not serve as a good screen for the range of skills that we think make for a good president or good governing.

To me, it feels ice-tinglingly creepy that the U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu in Washington wants to bring criminal charges against former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe.

The fund-raising appeals are coming fast and furious, now, particularly toward the end of each month as Democratic Party candidates and organizers use a mix of guilt, pride and begging to press for just another $5 or $50 or $500.

Just in case you wanted to believe that the Trump administration isn’t on a campaign to trample rights for Americans, here comes the Labor Department to shove a grapefruit in your face.

Both political parties have been making much ado in the weeks since the Democratic debates about candidates holding up their hands affirmatively to say that migrants entering the country even illegally should be able to get health treatment.

Donald Trump is returning from Asia, where he insulted allies and befriended the nation’s biggest strongman foes from Russia, China and North Korea in time to turn our Fourth of July celebrations on Thursday into a self-aggrandizing party about, well, Donald Trump.

As Donald Trump continues to find only wonderful things to say about himself, his words­—and actions—continue to belie an administration of lies and ineffectiveness, and bravado over solution. But all you need do is listen to the daily voices from the White House to feel as if you’ve entered a Twilight Zone episode.

The knockout punch that the New York State Legislature just landed fighting landlords over spiraling rents ought to be attracting wider attention.

Here we go.

Ratcheting up anti-immigrant fervor, our federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has proposed a new rule seeking to stop undocumented immigrants from receiving federal housing assistance.

Apparently, the White House has photographs of fully assembled Iranian missiles on boats, along with overheard generic conversations threatening possible attacks on Navy ships and commercial shipping or American troops in Iraq by Arab militias with Iran ties, according to The New York Times.