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GOP Senator Hawley Aims To ‘Dismiss’ Impeachment Before Trial

Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley said on Thursday that he plans to get Donald Trump’s impeachment “dismissed,” the latest in a line of GOP stunts aimed at protecting Trump from facing a trial in the Senate on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Hawley claimed that since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is holding back the House-passed articles of impeachment until Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell agrees to a fair trial of Trump, that impeachment should be dismissed.

“Dems said impeachment was URGENT. Now they don’t want to have a trial, because they have no evidence. In real world, if prosecution doesn’t proceed with case, it gets dismissed. So on Monday, I will introduce measure to dismiss this bogus impeachment for lack of prosecution,” Hawley tweeted Thursday afternoon.AdvertisementLoading…

“This will expose Dems’ circus for what it is: a fake impeachment, abuse of the Constitution, based on no evidence,” Hawley continued. “If Dems won’t proceed with trial, bogus articles should be dismissed and @realDonaldTrump fully cleared.”

Hawley’s tweets are riddled with errors.

First, there is ample evidence that Trump put a hold on military aid to Ukraine in order to force Ukrainian leaders to announce investigations into his political rivals — a move Democrats say is an abuse of power.

On Thursday, Just Security reported that Trump himself ordered the military aid to be placed on hold, and that government officials worried such a move was illegal. The report cited several Trump administration officials’ un-redacted emails, redacted versions of which were previously released to the Center for Public Integrity.

Second, the impeachment was not “fake,” as the House did in fact vote to impeach Trump on two charges — a power the Constitution grants the lower chamber unequivocally.

Hawley, who claims to be “one of the nation’s leading constitutional lawyers,” has sidled up to Trump and the Republican base since taking office in 2019, even raising money off of Trump’s impeachment.

Details about how an impeachment trial will take place should start to come together after Congress returns to Capitol Hill next week following the holiday recess.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

The War Against Warming: Why We Must Fight

Even after Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland, a strong pacifist movement in Britain opposed a military buildup to confront Nazi Germany. It vilified Winston Churchill as a warmonger for pushing one.

“What is it that Britain and France are fighting for?” Churchill asked rhetorically in a March 1940 broadcast. “If we left off fighting you would soon find out.”

Five months later, bombs started dropping on London. Britain found itself alone and teetering on the edge of an invasion by Nazi Germany. And in these dark hours, when a militarily weak Britain suffered frightening losses on the battlefields, politicians who opposed preparing for war blamed Churchill for being a poor wartime leader.

Climate change is a very different kind of peril, but it, too, is menacing our planet with catastrophic consequences for both our natural environment and built civilization. The warnings have been coming fast and furiously for years as the powers in Washington lifted not a finger to deal with the danger. Worse, many denied it is real.

Now listen to Cathy Crain, mayor of Hamburg, Iowa, whose Missouri River town was inundated to the rooftops by apocalyptic flooding.

“I’m looking at global warming — I don’t need to see the graphs,” Crain said. “I’m living it and everybody else is living it.”

Americans are finding out why they must fight. They see the devastating fires, droughts, hurricanes and tornados. They watch towns and beautiful farmland in Iowa, Nebraska and Missouri disappear under the water.

And it’s just started. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says 25 states could see moderate to major flooding through May. Some will surpass the infamous floods of 1993 and 2011.

Case in point is Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley. When the subject came around to climate change, the Republican pointed fingers at the all-purpose “radical environmentalists” for killing jobs. Now he blames them for allegedly forcing the Army Corps of Engineers — which oversees flood control efforts — to favor wildlife over farmers.

The corps serves several constituencies, but as its deputy commanding general for civil and emergency operations said in a recent statement, “The Corps’s No. 1 priority in its operations is life safety.”

Thing is, for over a century, the corps has been building, building, building levees, spillways and other infrastructure to control the waters. This system is crumbling under the pressure of climate-induced flooding. You could build levees seemingly halfway to heaven with more borrowed money, but in many cases, they won’t meet the growing challenge.

And even when levees — built or sometimes removed — succeed in preventing floods in one place, they can create problems elsewhere. After all, the water has to go someplace. When a levee was demolished in 2011 to save Cairo, Illinois, from a rampaging Mississippi River, some 100,000 acres, mostly farmland, was flooded.

In his previous job as Missouri attorney general, Hawley joined a suit against Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, designed to contain global warming. President Trump applauded.

With leadership like this, the war against climate change hasn’t even reached the end of the beginning. Surrender and blaming others is not a winning strategy.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com.To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.