Kick Ass News
December 14, 2019
Image: Rudy Giuliani is Simon bar Sinister…It all makes so much sense.
The social media wins again!
Rudy Looniani
Category: Injustice Anywhere is a Threat to Justice Everywhere, MLK jr
Stories of injustice and justice
The Traitors Among Us
Rolling Stone
The Traitors Among Us
Donald Trump likes to call his opponents traitors — but if he’s looking for treasonous behavior, he should look within his own party
More than a few people in Donald Trump’s immediate orbit — and Trump himself — richly and actually deserve the title of traitor. Leon Neal/Getty Images
America once used the words “treason” and “traitors” only in cases of actual betrayal of our nation’s most vital secrets or interests. They were profound words, deep with meaning, grim in import, carrying with them the knowledge that the penalty for treason was death.
Be honest: The words “traitor” and “treason” don’t have the sting they once had; they’ve been devalued from mis- and over-use by this president. For Donald Trump, any opposition, either personal, ideological, or political is treason. Anyone who stands in his path betrays the Great Leader. Anyone who fails to take the knee is a traitor.
Like hearing an insult too many times drains it of its potency, Trump has diluted the power of that approbation. He has labeled loyal, dedicated Americans who served this country in the military and law enforcement as traitors, so much so that we could almost give in to the temptation to excuse it as “Trump being Trump” and let it slide like any of the other insults he vomits forth on the daily.
Which is a shame, because America is in the midst of a treason boom right now, and more than a few people in Trump’s immediate orbit — and Trump himself — richly and actually deserve the title of traitor, and the treason inherent in their acts and words is apparent.
Traitors from Benedict Arnold to Klaus Fuchs to Aldrich Ames to Robert Hanssen sold out this country for a host of reasons, all explicable and unforgivable. The intelligence community even has a handy acronym for the motivations of traitors, and one that applies readily to known cases. The acronym is MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise, and Ego. Pick a traitor and one of those reasons will underpin their betrayal.
Add a new one to the acronym. Call it, MICE-T, with the “T” naturally standing for Trump.
Their treason isn’t executed in the old ways of secret meetings, furtive brush passes, or encrypted messages. No, the traitors of today show us their cards on cable TV, laughing and giggling over their betrayal of the oath they swore, and the security of this country, all for the political service of Donald Trump.
As the impeachment hearings have worn on and as evidence of the complete moral collapse of the Republican Party has become more and more evident, it has become quite obvious there really are traitors among us. There are elected officials who have made the decision to protect a corrupt president by embracing conspiracy theories, refusing to acknowledge sworn testimony of career foreign-service officials, and piling on to Trump’s attack of democratic institutions.
The traitors deliberately ignore the reporting, counsel, and warnings of the intelligence community when it comes to Russia’s attacks and Vladimir Putin’s vast, continuing intelligence and propaganda warfare against the United States.
The traitors — be they United States senators like John Kennedy and Lindsey Graham or columnists from the Federalist, Breitbart, and a slurry of other formally conservative media outlets — repeat the Kremlin-approved propaganda messages and tropes of that warfare, word for word.
It’s not simply treason by making common cause with a murderous autocrat in Russia, or merrily wrecking the alliances around the world that kept America relatively secure for seven decades.
Their betrayal is also to our system of government, which as imperfect — and often downright fucked up — as it is, has been remarkably capable of surviving.
The traitors talk a good game, hands over their withered hearts, about supporting the Constitution, but they’re happy to ignore it when it suits their purposes.
The traitors believe the executive branch is superior to all others and unaccountable under the law. Traitors believe the “Fuck you, pay me” ethos of this president and this White House isn’t an open door to a pay-to-play political culture in Washington where everyone and everything in our government is for sale.
They defend the White House’s indefensible position of stonewalling, silencing witnesses, and refusing to testify before Congress.
Traitors keep racial arsonists like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon in their orbit and employment. They pretend these men are selling populism and nationalism when in fact it’s just the same weaponized racism that worked so well for them in 2016.
The traitors will sit in Congressional hearings on impeachment knowing the truth about Trump’s extortion racket and of the grubby, sleazy plan Trump sent Gordon Sondland, Rudy Giuliani, et al to carry out, and tell lie after lie, the bigger the better.
The traitors cheer when Trump rides roughshod over the military chain of command and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, freeing men who killed civilians, abused and violated the warrior ethos, and broke the very laws of war they swore to uphold. They’ve gone from respecting hard men carrying out tough missions to fetishizing the outliers, edge cases and the war criminals.
You can spot the traitors simply by watching their television shows, as they look you in the eye and tell you to your face they side with Russia. Tucker Carlson wasn’t winking and nodding to the camera; it was where he’s landed politically — a pro-Putin shill on a network that looks away from their pet president’s grotesque subservience to the Russian leader who helped elect him.
The traitors are ass-deep in oligarchs, eagerly selling access to the president, the secretary of state, the attorney general, and of course, the president’s venal pack of lucky-sperm-club spawn.
And if you can’t spot the treason yet, you will soon enough. That’s the thing about spies, traitors, and those who betray their country — they rarely stay hidden forever.
The traitors are the ones who, when this is all done and dusted, will sit in the dock at some new Nuremberg trial and claim their innocence of the worst charges and penalties not by claiming their actions were “just following orders” but that they were “just following Trump.”
Rick Wilson is a GOP political strategist and author of the forthcoming book “Running Against the Devil: The Plot to Save America From Trump — and Democrats From Themselves.”
More Than 500 Legal Scholars Say Trump Committed Impeachable Acts
HuffPost – Politics
More Than 500 Legal Scholars Say Trump Committed Impeachable Acts
By Sara Boboltz December 6, 2019
A group of more than 500 legal scholars has signed an open letter to Congress declaring that President Donald Trump “engaged in impeachable conduct” as the impeachment proceedings against him continue.
“We do not reach this conclusion lightly,” stated the letter, dated Friday.
Trump “betrayed his oath of office” by attempting to pressure Ukrainian leaders to help him “distort” the 2020 election “at the direct expense of national security interests as determined by Congress.”
“The Founders did not make impeachment available for disagreements over policy, even profound ones, nor for extreme distaste for the manner in which the President executes his office. Only ‘Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors’ warrant impeachment,” the scholars asserted.
The signees include professors and other experts from an array of academic institutions such as Columbia, Berkeley, Harvard, Yale, George Washington University and the University of Michigan, among many others. Their message was spearheaded by the Protect Democracy Project, a nonprofit created in 2017 with the goal of holding the White House “accountable to the laws and longstanding practices that have protected our democracy through both Democratic and Republican Administrations.”
Since the impeachment inquiry began in late September, House investigators have heard from a number of witnesses both in private and in public who have painted a fuller picture of Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.
According to sworn testimony from U.S. foreign policy officials, Trump threatened to withhold millions of dollars in military aid in exchange for investigations that would help his reelection campaign, and conditioned a White House meeting with Ukraine’s president on a public announcement of those investigations.
On Tuesday, a panel of four constitutional law experts took questions from the House Judiciary Committee over whether the president’s alleged offenses were serious enough to warrant articles of impeachment ― or a formal description of impeachable misconduct. Three of the four experts said Trump’s behavior was clearly impeachable, while a fourth dissenting in part because he believed more testimony was needed.
In their letter, the legal experts said Trump’s “conduct is precisely the type of threat to our democracy that the Founders feared when they included the remedy of impeachment in the Constitution.”
They also noted that “conduct need not be criminal to be impeachable.”
“Whether President Trump’s conduct is classified as bribery, as a high crime or misdemeanor, or as both, it is clearly impeachable under our Constitution,” the signees concurred.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday asked that articles of impeachment against Trump be prepared, saying the president’s actions have left “us no choice”
If the articles are passed in the Democratic-controlled House, the process moves to the Republican-controlled Senate, where it is not likely to result in Trump’s removal from office.
Crime and Punishment – Ukraine: Why hasn’t trump lost his base
Occupy Each Other
December 5, 2019
“Trump supporters appear largely unfazed by the mounting evidence that Trump is the least ethical president in modern American history. When asked last month whether they considered Trump corrupt, only 14 percent of Republicans said yes.”
“What the president’s supporters fear most isn’t the corruption of American law, but the corruption of America’s traditional identity.”
“[Republicans and Democrats have] ….competing notions of what corruption is.”
“Corruption, to the fascist politician,” he suggests, “is really about the corruption of purity rather than of the law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of the traditional order.”
“In the eyes of many Fox viewers…..the network isn’t ignoring corruption so much as highlighting the kind that really matters. When Trump instructed Cohen to pay off women with whom he’d had affairs, he may have been violating the law. But he was upholding traditional gender and class hierarchies. Since time immemorial, powerful men have been cheating on their wives and using their power to evade the consequences.”
“Throughout American history, few notions have been as sacrosanct as the belief that white women must be protected from nonwhite men.”
“Once you grasp that for Trump and many of his supporters, corruption means less the violation of law than the violation of established hierarchies, their behavior makes more sense.”
“Why were Trump’s supporters so convinced that Clinton was the more corrupt candidate even as reporters uncovered far more damning evidence about Trump’s foundation than they did about Clinton’s? Likely because Clinton’s candidacy threatened traditional gender roles.”
“For many Americans, female ambition—especially in service of a feminist agenda—in and of itself represents a form of corruption. “When female politicians were described as power-seeking,” noted the Yale researchers Victoria Brescoll and Tyler Okimoto in a 2010 study, “participants experienced feelings of moral outrage (i.e., contempt, anger, and/or disgust).”
“For many Republicans, Trump remains uncorrupt—indeed, anticorrupt—because what they fear most isn’t the corruption of American law; it’s the corruption of America’s traditional identity. And in the struggle against that form of corruption….Trump isn’t the problem. He’s the solution.”
From: Why Trump Supporters Believe He Is Not Corrupt
Peter Beinart August 22, 2018
The Atlantic
Why Trump Supporters Believe He Is Not Corrupt
On their face, the two stories have little in common. Fox is simply covering the Iowa murder because it distracts attention from a revelation that makes Trump look bad. But dig deeper and the two stories are connected: They represent competing notions of what corruption is.
Cohen’s admission highlights one of the enduring riddles of the Trump era. Trump’s supporters say they care about corruption. During the campaign, they cheered his vow to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C. When Morning Consult asked Americans in May 2016 to explain why they disliked Hillary Clinton, the second-most-common answer was that she was “corrupt.” And yet, Trump supporters appear largely unfazed by the mounting evidence that Trump is the least ethical president in modern American history. When asked last month whether they considered Trump corrupt, only 14 percent of Republicans said yes. Even Cohen’s allegation is unlikely to change that.
The Iowa murder, by contrast, signifies the inversion—the corruption—of that “traditional order.” Throughout American history, few notions have been as sacrosanct as the belief that white women must be protected from nonwhite men. By allegedly murdering Tibbetts, Rivera did not merely violate the law. He did something more subversive: He violated America’s traditional racial and sexual norms.
Once you grasp that for Trump and many of his supporters, corruption means less the violation of law than the violation of established hierarchies, their behavior makes more sense. Since 2014, Trump has employed the phrase rule of law nine times in tweets. Seven of them refer to illegal immigration.
Why were Trump’s supporters so convinced that Clinton was the more corrupt candidate even as reporters uncovered far more damning evidence about Trump’s foundation than they did about Clinton’s? Likely because Clinton’s candidacy threatened traditional gender roles. For many Americans, female ambition—especially in service of a feminist agenda—in and of itself represents a form of corruption. “When female politicians were described as power-seeking,” noted the Yale researchers Victoria Brescoll and Tyler Okimoto in a 2010 study, “participants experienced feelings of moral outrage (i.e., contempt, anger, and/or disgust).”
Cohen’s admission makes it harder for Republicans to claim that Trump didn’t violate the law. But it doesn’t really matter. For many Republicans, Trump remains uncorrupt—indeed, anticorrupt—because what they fear most isn’t the corruption of American law; it’s the corruption of America’s traditional identity. And in the struggle against that form of corruption—the kind embodied by Cristhian Rivera—Trump isn’t the problem. He’s the solution.
Peter Beinart is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York.
What also must be considered during the impeachment hearings: Trump is profoundly corrupt
The Washington Post – Plum Line
The Mueller report puts it beyond dispute: Trump is profoundly corrupt
By Paul Waldman, Opinion writer April 19, 2019
There are some things that were matters of dispute or insufficiently documented before, but are no longer in question. Let’s run through them:
Vladimir Putin very much wanted Trump to become president of the United States, and undertook a comprehensive campaign to make sure it happened. At this point, Trump might be the only person left in America who disagrees with this fact — or pretends to, anyway — but Mueller’s report makes it irrefutable.
Trump, his family and his campaign may not have set up a criminal conspiracy to cooperate with Russia, but they were eager to accept the help. This, too, was widely known, but Mueller provides exhaustive detail on just how enthusiastic Trump and those around him were about Russia’s interference in the election: There were not just extensive contacts with Russians they hoped would help them; they also gleefully welcomed Russia’s cybertheft from Democrats. As the Lawfare team puts it, the best that can be said of them is that “the Russians and the Trump campaign shared a common goal, and each side worked to achieve that goal with basic knowledge of the other side’s intention.”
The president’s attempts to obstruct justice were comprehensive and far-reaching. Mueller’s report documents in extensive detail the actions Trump took to subvert the investigation, including urging officials to pressure the FBI, trying to fire the special counsel and lying to the public. We can argue about the degree to which Trump could be held legally accountable or whether the intervention of his aides (or more often, their refusal to act) kept those actions from crossing the line into criminality. But there is no longer any question that Trump attempted to obstruct justice.
Everyone around the president, and the president himself, acted as though they had something to hide on Russia. Donald Trump Jr. lied about the infamous Trump Tower meeting. George Papadopoulos lied to the FBI about the outreach from Russia that began the investigation. Michael Flynn lied to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador. Michael Cohen lied to congress about the effort to secure Trump a multimillion-dollar deal to build a tower in Moscow. Paul Manafort lied about his relationship to the likely Russian intelligence asset to whom he passed polling data. Roger Stone allegedly lied about his contacts with WikiLeaks. President Trump lied seemingly every time Russia came up. If they were all innocent, they certainly weren’t acting like it.
Trump regularly instructs aides to lie to the public. Trump told Rod Rosenstein to claim that firing James Comey was his idea. Rosenstein refused, but Sean Spicer later told the lie to the press. Trump dictated a false statement to Hope Hicks for Trump Jr. to release about the infamous Trump Tower meeting. He instructed Donald McGahn to arrange for Mueller to be fired, then when the news got out, told McGahn to publicly deny it. He told Reince Priebus to tell K.T. McFarland to write a false email claiming that Trump never spoke to Flynn about Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador. If you’re having trouble following all this, that’s okay — the point is that Trump regularly ordered his aides to lie; sometimes they complied, and sometimes they didn’t.
There are also doubtless times when Trump aides lie on their own initiative, within a White House culture in which lying is just what everyone does. Sarah Sanders claimed that “countless” FBI agents contacted the White House to express support for the firing of Comey; she admitted to investigators that this was false (though she now claims it was a “slip of the tongue,” another obvious lie).
Nearly everything Trump called “fake news” turned out to be true. While news outlets might have made the occasional mistake (as they do on any story), over and over again important revelations were greeted by the president with the cry of “Fake news!”, only to be corroborated by the Mueller report. For instance, Trump claimed that reports that he had shooed other officials from the room so that he could speak to Comey about Flynn were fake; Mueller concludes that the known facts “support Comey’s description of the event.” Trump called reports that he ordered Mueller’s firing fake; these are extensively documented in the report.
Trump has no concern about whether his actions are illegal or unethical. While we have a lengthy record demonstrating Trump’s unethical and even lawbreaking ways —running scams that steal people’s life savings, abusing small business-people, committing tax fraud — the Mueller report documents how he brought that lack of moral compass to the Oval Office. It shows his boundless willingness to lie and have others lie for him, his complete disregard for any norm of integrity or propriety, and his belief that the entire U.S. government exists to serve his personal ends.
Stop Saying That Impeachment Is Political
The New Yorker
Stop Saying That Impeachment Is Political
By Adam Gopnik November 27, 2019
Donald Trump claims executive power, but he also claims an arbitrary power to act without any system of law or procedure to constrain him. Photograph by Al Drago / Bloomberg / Getty
One of the things often heard about impeachment is that it is essentially a political process. This seeming truth is said with a kind of sleepy sapience, as though only the naïve or the self-deluded would imagine anything otherwise. So, this vein of argument usually goes, if the Democrats fail at the politics of the impeachment of Donald Trump—if they don’t produce enough sexy sound bites, or if, despite the evidence, they can’t persuade Republicans of Trump’s guilt in trying to use the State Department as a shakedown office for his reelection campaign—then they will have failed utterly, and the blame will lie squarely with them.
Certainly, there’s a sense in which impeachment is a political process, in the same sense that any legal prosecution is partly political. Judges and juries are people with political opinions, and courtrooms are filled with people who share the sentiments and the prejudices of the moment. A prosecutor’s decision to undertake a case is always made with an eye to whether, given a typical jury and the evidence at hand, a conviction can be obtained. The evidence may be good but not good enough to convict. Or the evidence may be good enough but, given the public passions at the time and place of the trial, may not result in a conviction.
In this limited but universal sense, impeachment is political; it should be undertaken with an eye to the likely consequence of the jury’s decision. This is why Nancy Pelosi, a smart politician, was for so long dubious about the merits of launching an impeachment inquiry against Trump. There appeared to be no point in attempting to bring him to justice if justice would not be done.
But there’s another, more urgent sense in which impeachment exists as an alternative to politics. Recall that both modern-day impeachments in this country were launched against Presidents who had won overwhelming reëlection victories. Impeachment in this sense is anti-politics; it presumes that there exists a constitutional principle that overrules the politics of popularity. The point of an impeachment is not to do the popular or the poll-tested thing but to have the courage to do an unpopular thing, because what is at stake is a larger, even existential matter. When the Republicans impeached Bill Clinton—Senator Lindsey Graham, who was then a member of the House of Representatives, among them—they certainly at least acted as if they believed this to be true. (Though they, and he, are apparently not yet ready to admit that lying under oath in order to cover up an affair seems something less of a high crime than running a shakedown racket in a dependent foreign country.)
When the Founders were writing the Constitution, an impeachment that seems to have loomed large in their minds was that of Warren Hastings, the first British Governor General of India. In a trial that ran, intermittently, from 1788 to 1795, in the British Parliament, Hastings was charged with a series of high crimes and misdemeanors that included corruption and what we would now call war crimes. Edmund Burke, a Whig member of the House of Commons—who was once a hero of the American right, though not usually because he was passionate about the well-being of colonized people against their colonizers—led the fight against him.
It was an impeachment that was, as Burke knew by the time it came before the House of Lords, doomed; in the end, just six peers found Hastings guilty, and on only some of the charges. Nonetheless, Burke pursued it, because the principle involved seemed to him so clear. Hastings took for a major aspect of his defense what, essentially, Attorney General William Barr has imagined for Trump’s defense. In Hastings’s case, this meant that, as the magistrate in power, he had a right to act without impediment. Executive power, being his, was his to use. Hastings claimed that right by appointment, although Trump does so by election. But both men claim arbitrary power to act without any system of law or procedure to constrain them.
This, for Burke, was a mortal sin in government. No one could act by “whim” or desire outside a framework of fixed and transparent law. “Law and arbitrary power are in eternal enmity,” he told the Lords. “Name me a magistrate, and I will name property; name me power, and I will name protection. It is a contradiction in terms, it is blasphemy in religion, it is wickedness in politics, to say that any man can have arbitrary power. In every patent of office, the [idea of] duty is included.” All power is bound by duty; no magistrate—or President—can act badly and then just say that they do so by right. Impeachment is not a substitute for politics; it appeals to the principles of law and duty that make politics possible.
It is the unprecedented gravity of our moment, still perhaps insufficiently felt, that makes this confrontation essential, whatever the political consequences. Pelosi, too, now acknowledges this fact. As she told The New Yorker in September, about Trump, “He has given us no choice. Politics has nothing to do with impeachment, in my view.” The political consequences of impeachment are no longer the primary or even the secondary issue at stake; more important is the survival of the principle of the rule of law against the unashamed assertion of arbitrary power. Postponing a reckoning until the next election implies that what is at issue in Trump’s attempted extorting of the Ukrainian government are a series of policy choices, which voters may or may not endorse. According to this reasoning, if Watergate had happened during Nixon’s first term, and he had been reëlected anyway, attempted political burglary and obstruction of justice would have become acceptable practice. By invoking law against arbitrary power, the Democrats may not “win,” and who knows what the political outcome will be, but, as Pelosi says, there is no longer a choice. Law and arbitrary power remain in eternal enmity. You pick your side.
This is why we need a public option for the ACA or Medicare For All !
New York Times
University to Students on Medicaid: Buy Private Coverage, or Drop Out
Sarah Kliff, The New York Times November 25, 2019
Emily and Kullen Langston were enrolling in classes for the winter semester at Brigham Young University-Idaho when they hit an unexpected roadblock.
The school, like many others, requires all students to have health coverage. But this month, the university made an unusual announcement: It would no longer accept Medicaid.
Emily Langston, 20, enrolled in the free government insurance program last year after becoming pregnant with the couple’s daughter, who is now 4 months old. Kullen Langston, 22, was planning to sign up for Medicaid in January, when it is set to expand in the state.
To remain in school, they would have to buy private coverage. The cheapest option available is the university’s student health plan, which does not comply with the Affordable Care Act’s consumer protections and would require the Langstons to pay a $3,125 annual premium.
Emily Langston said her family, which relies on the income her husband earns as a call-center operator, cannot afford that. She had hoped to become a teacher, but now intends to drop out of school, and her husband is unsure whether he will attend.
“I’m disappointed that they’re showing prejudice against those of us who are poor right now,” Emily Langston said. “I’m disappointed that I’m not going to be able to finish school.”
The decision on the eastern Idaho campus has confused and angered students. The change is set to go into effect on Jan. 1, the same day Idaho will expand Medicaid coverage to about 70,000 low-income residents, including college students.
In an email last week to its 19,000 students in Idaho, the university appeared to tie its decision to the Medicaid expansion. It’s not clear how many students currently have Medicaid coverage, but the state projects that about 2,400 more people in Madison County, where the school is, would enroll with the expansion. The university warned that having too many students sign up for the public program “would be impractical for the local medical community,” an assertion a local hospital official rejects.
The policy change is likely to push more students into a health plan administered by Deseret Mutual Benefits Administration, which, like the university, is owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
That plan limits annual benefits and doesn’t cover birth control — provisions that would violate the Affordable Care Act, but for a little-noticed Obama-era exemption for universities that fund their own health plans.
“It seems like a loophole, and is pretty misleading to students,” said Erin Hemlin, who oversees health policy at Young Invincibles, a nonprofit that focuses on issues affecting college students and young adults. “It’s called a student health plan, so you would think it’s going to be comprehensive coverage, and it isn’t.”
The church has been vocal on aspects of the Affordable Care Act, including religious freedom and the health law’s birth control mandate, but it has remained quiet on Medicaid expansion. It has never taken a public position on the issue, a church spokesman confirmed. The university’s Idaho campus and the church both declined to comment on the policy change.
Before the Affordable Care Act, student health plans across the country varied significantly from one campus to another. Some offered robust health benefits, while others had maximum annual benefits as low as $5,000.
The Obama administration required that most university plans comply with the new law by covering a wide array of essential health benefits, including maternity care and prescription drugs, and eliminating annual benefit caps.
The rules, issued in 2013, included a carve-out for a small number of universities that “self-funded” their health plans, meaning they used student premiums to cover costs — and accepted responsibility for any large bills that might cost even more. At the time, about 30 universities had such plans.
Most were big institutions with large endowments, such as the University of California, Johns Hopkins and Princeton. Those three, and some others, chose nevertheless to make their self-funded student plans comply with the Affordable Care Act.
But Brigham Young University campuses in Utah, Idaho and Hawaii did not. The university publicly opposed the law’s requirement to cover contraceptives. And its plans limited the maximum annual benefit. At the time, a university spokesman told the campus newspaper in Utah, “There are numerous government-imposed requirements that we don’t believe are necessary to provide good health care to our students.”
The Idaho campus’ plan has a $4,750 deductible that must be met before it will cover maternity care for the spouse of a student. It does not cover certain major medical services, such as residential mental health care and care related to an organ transplant.
These restrictions, along with the premium costs, are central reasons Idaho students with Medicaid coverage object to buying the university’s student plan. “It feels like they’re forcing us into a noncompliant health plan when the one we have is already compliant with Obamacare,” said Amanda Emerson, a 26-year-old student. “They’re making it really difficult to do anything otherwise.”
Deseret Mutual Benefit, the plan administrator, says that limiting benefits helps keep premiums down. “The purpose is to try to provide a plan as inexpensively as possible to the students,” said Andy Almeida, the company’s chief operating officer.
The Idaho campus is the only Brigham Young site that will no longer accept Medicaid as a substitute for the student health plan, a decision that university officials would not explain. The school’s Utah and Hawaii campuses allow students with Medicaid to waive private coverage.
Utah voters agreed to a Medicaid expansion last year, and a partial version of the program took effect in February. The state does not provide data on how many of the 33,000 students at the Provo campus are enrolled in Medicaid. The Hawaii campus has just 2,500 students; the number on Medicaid is not disclosed.
Idaho had long resisted participating in the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid, which provides coverage to Americans who earn less than 133% of the federal poverty level ($16,612 for an individual, and $34,248 for a family of four).
The state Legislature twice voted down bills that would have added Idaho to the program, which currently covers 36 states and the District of Columbia. In 2018, local activists secured a ballot initiative on the issue. The proposal passed with a double-digit margin and after a state Supreme Court challenge, the program will start in January.
In announcing its new stance on Medicaid, Brigham Young University-Idaho cited a worry about overwhelming local health care providers. The local hospital, however, said it had no such concerns and had not raised the issue with the university.
“We have some great providers here, and we feel like we’re able to handle any growth that the university and the community would need,” said Doug McBride, executive director of business development at Madison Memorial Hospital, a county-owned facility.
Since the school announced the new policy this month, students have organized Facebook groups and circulated petitions opposing the change.
Emerson, one of the students with Medicaid, is planning to enroll in a private plan in addition to her public coverage. Her husband, also a student at the Idaho campus, plans to do the same. They said they had discussed their options with a local insurance broker and found that the student plan would be the cheapest, but hadn’t yet made a decision.
“We only have a few weeks until we have to be registered for new classes, so this kind of dropped a bomb on us,” Emerson said. “We only have one semester to go, so we’re willing to dip into our savings.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Gordon Sondland’s Impeachment Testimony for the Ages
The New Yorker
Gordon Sondland’s Impeachment Testimony for the Ages
The case for Trump’s impeachment is strengthening, but the political equation in Washington remains at a stalemate.
By Steve Coll November 24, 2019
On July 29, 1986, at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, Vice-President George H. W. Bush met with Amiram Nir, a counterterrorism adviser to the Israeli government. Nir briefed Bush in detail about the latest doings in a shadow foreign-policy scheme authorized by President Ronald Reagan. With Israel’s help, the United States had secretly sent arms to Iran, in the expectation that American hostages held by Iranian proxies in Lebanon would be released. Reagan had pledged never to negotiate with terrorists, yet Bush had endorsed the operation and, according to a retired Air Force general who was involved in it, was “very attentive, very interested” in Nir’s update. That November, news broke about what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal, which eventually led to the indictments of fourteen Administration officials. Early on, Bush spoke about his role in a manner that was “at best misleading and at worst a lie,” in the judgment of Jon Meacham, his authorized biographer. Secretary of State George Shultz remarked privately that Bush was getting drawn into a “web of lies. Blows his integrity. He’s finished, then.”
In the unravelling of White House malfeasance, there comes a time when the bonds of omertà dissolve and the reckonings of high-level conspirators begin. In the case of Donald Trump’s attempt to bully Ukraine into investigating Democrats for his political gain, that juncture seemed to arrive last week, with the testimony of Gordon Sondland, Trump’s Ambassador to the European Union. Sondland had earlier given a closed-door deposition to the House Intelligence Committee, which is conducting the impeachment inquiry into Trump. Last week, in public, he set out to clarify the “bigger picture” on Ukraine. He explained, “We followed the President’s orders” while carrying out a wide-ranging effort to strong-arm Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, into aiding Trump’s reëlection. Was there a quid pro quo? “The answer is yes,” Sondland declared. His remarks were replete with such lines for the ages. One in particular seemed certain to jolt Vice-President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: “Everyone was in the loop.”
Pence and Pompeo have sought to evade accountability in the Ukraine affair. Pompeo is reportedly considering a Senate run in Kansas next year; both men are seen as eventual contenders for a Republican Presidential nomination. Since September, as sundry rats on Trump’s foundering ship of state have scurried for dry ground, Pompeo and Pence have addressed the Ukraine matter tersely, protected in part by White House stonewalling of House subpoenas for documents and testimony. Sondland’s appearance has made their attempts at political finesse considerably more difficult.
Sondland is a Trump-lite figure who made a fortune in hotels and donated a million dollars to Trump’s inaugural committee before the President appointed him to the ambassadorship. In that role, he joined the Administration’s attempt, earlier this year, to persuade Zelensky to announce investigations into former Vice-President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, and also into supposed coöperation between the Democrats and Ukraine during the 2016 campaign. Hunter Biden served on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company, when his father was Vice-President; both Bidens deny any wrongdoing. Fiona Hill, who, until earlier this year, served as the Trump Administration’s top N.S.C. expert on Russia, forcefully testified on Thursday that claims of Ukrainian electoral interference are a “fictional narrative.”
To undermine the Democrats, Trump asked Sondland to work with his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and Sondland duly attended meetings with Zelensky, while coördinating with the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv and the White House. Throughout, his boss at the State Department, Pompeo, “knew what we were doing and why,” Sonderland testified. It was already clear that, as the campaign to pressure Ukraine intensified, Pompeo had failed to stand by the U.S. Ambassador there, Marie Yovanovitch, whom Trump fired in May. (Pompeo has said that she was not fired for “a nefarious purpose.”) Sondland provided new evidence—excerpts from four e-mails that he wrote to Pompeo and others between July and September—which showed that he kept Pompeo updated on the back-channel operation. Beginning in July, the Administration withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine. Several diplomats and N.S.C. officials have testified in the inquiry that the suspension was designed to coerce Zelensky; Sondland’s e-mail excerpts suggest that Pompeo may have been briefed on this part of the pressure campaign. (A State Department spokesperson said that it was “flat-out false” to suggest that Sondland had told Pompeo that Trump had linked the aid to investigations.)
Sondland also testified about Pence’s role—in particular, about a meeting that he and Pence had with Zelensky on September 1st, in Warsaw. At the time, Pence told reporters that the aid was being held up because of “great concerns” that he and Trump had about “issues of corruption,” but he offered no specifics. Pence had denied publicly that the delay had anything to do with Trump’s reëlection bid. Sondland’s testimony undercuts that assertion; he recalled that he “mentioned” to Pence in Warsaw that he “had concerns that the delay in aid had become tied to the issue of investigations” into Trump’s domestic opponents. Pence’s chief of staff has denied that this conversation took place.
Pence and Pompeo are hardly alone in having forged Faustian bargains with Donald Trump, or in having gambled that they will somehow survive his heedlessness and serial disloyalty. Clever and ambitious politicians do occasionally outlast complicity in Presidential scandals. In late 1986, George Shultz warned George H. W. Bush to stop misleading the public about Iran-Contra before he destroyed his chance to succeed Reagan as President. Bush bristled, but took the advice and lay low; he won the White House in 1988. These are darker times. The Republican Party, because of its capitulation to Trump, is headed for a moral and political accounting. The President’s racketeering scheme in Ukraine is likely to inflict lasting damage on the reputations of all those at high levels of his Administration who have participated or stood by mutely.
Witness by witness, the case for Trump’s impeachment is strengthening. Yet the political equation in Washington remains at a stalemate. If the Democratic-controlled House does impeach the President, the Republican-controlled Senate still looks set to acquit him. The Ukraine dossier—and all that it continues to reveal about Trump’s indifference to the Constitution—seems headed for the voters. A year from now, we’ll know their verdict. ♦
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Moscow Mitch the “Kill Bill”
MOSCOW MITCH
