Deeply Cynical “Peace Plan” Is a Gift for Israel

For decades America’s presidents

have pursued the grail of a peace plan between Israel and the Palestinians, an achievement that would add luster to their names, not to mention a sure fire Nobel Peace Prize. All of them failed. Donald Trump, who thought he should have won that prize last year — “I saved a country…I saved a big war, I’ve saved a couple of them” he said, without further explanation — has found the answer: simply impose a plan on the Palestinians, they to have no say. It’s “the deal of the century”, he proclaimed.

For Trump in this election year, the move is to bolster support of evangelicals, who believe God’s eternal promise gave Jerusalem — and the rest of Palestine — to the Jewish people, and what kick-starts the apocalypse is Israel’s takeover of the Holy Land. Israel is delighted with this support, even though the evangelicals’ end times call for the conversion or extermination of the Jewish people.

The plan is a gift to Bibi Netanyahu, who needed to please right-wing Israelis just before a third election in a country that has not been able to form an enduring coalition. There in the White House to announce the diktat was an American president who had just been impeached for abuse of power, then acquitted in a sham trial, and the Israeli prime minister who had just been indicted for fraud, bribery, and breach of power.

The Deal

Israel would take some 30% of the West Bank, which “my vision provides to be part of the state of Israel” newly Zionist Trump tells us. It would annex the Jordan Valley on the other side of the West Bank as well as declaring all settlements in the West Bank — a large percentage on stolen land — part of Israel. What’s left to the Palestinians is a pocket of land
Settlement in the West Bank

pockmarked with Jewish settlements and surrounded by Israel. The annexations would begin immediately. Most of the world considers the settlements’ usurpation of Palestinian lands illegal.

There would be land swaps. Nearby settlements would be connected to Israel proper in return for disconnected chunks of land given to the Palestinians. Where? In the Negev desert along the Egyptian border.

Trump already scored big with evangelicals by moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, a city that the “deal” gives entirely to Israel, with the Palestinian capital moved to a slum area on the
Russia Applauds: America has set “a precedent for major powers dictating terms to weaker ones” which Russia might find useful to refer to when it takes certain actions, said the publication Republic. The Palestinians wouldn’t “control their skies, waters or communication frequencies” in a “limited sovereignty” much like what “Moscow had once wanted to give to the former Soviet republics”.

other side of the barrier away from Jerusalem. Trump, “in a triumph of real estate branding”, as the New York Times put it, dubbed it to be “East Jerusalem”.

The Palestinians’ unyielding demand of the right of return to their home in Israel for refugees driven out by the 1948 War to internment camps in Lebanon would of course be nixed. For that matter, almost none are left who once lived in Israel; they were of two and three generations ago.

It’s a deal that simply recognizes the facts on the ground, said the Israeli newspaper Yisrael Hayom. That rewards Israel for over a half century of oppression and occupation that produced the facts on the ground. Might makes right.

The Palestinians would not even be offered their own state, just a limited sovereignty subject to their agreeing to oppressive security measures. They would be bought off with a $50 billion economic plan that Kushner or his people claim would create a million jobs over 10 years. The money would come from other Arab states, not the U.S. A tunnel would be dug to connect Gaza with the West Bank. Hamas, the ruling party in Gaza, would have to be dismembered before that could happen.

The U.S. itself gets no guarantees in Israel’s “deal of the century”. The annexations are front-loaded with no possibility of reversing them. Any imitation state for Palestinians is just a promise, with Israel likely to erect perpetual hurdles.

Rather than it be the work of a neutral architect or commission of experts on the region, the plan was developed by two Jews, Trump’ son-in-law Jared Kushner and David Friedman, the American ambassador to Israel, an outspoken advocate of settlement expansion. Kushner calls it “a big opportunity for the Palestinians” who should “stop posturing”. His attitude is that by non-cooperation they will only harm themselves “like they’ve screwed up every other opportunity that they’ve ever had in their existence”.

The cynically named “peace plan” upends the long-held hopes of western nations for a two-state solution with pre-1967 War boundaries as the foundation for any equitable agreement. This keeps with the principle that states do not keep lands won in war, a precept that dates from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Despite many of its people’s largely of European roots, Israel’s Zionist roots do not recognize that principle.

As Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut says, the proclamation is a “total abandonment of decades of U.S. Middle East policy”. Policy which never worked, Trump allies could point out, but this plan adopts only Israel’s desires and obliterates Palestinian rights. And it adds to the world’s view of a United States steeped in hypocrisy, issuing lofty principles of a people’s right of self-determination while in practice endorsing the opposite.

Did Roger Stone Deserve 7-to-9?

With the sentencing of former Trump adviser Roger Stone imminent, the president tweeted his displeasure at the sentencing recommendation of seven-to-nine years, Attorney General William Barr immediately reduced the guidelines, Trump congratulated Barr for doing so, four prosecutors quit the case in protest,

one quitting the department altogether, and Barr unleashed a stunning rebuke of the president’s “public statements and tweets”, saying they “make it impossible for me to do my job”.

That leaves out a lot, stated in brief because you probably already know the story. It headlined every television news program and newspaper for days. But our take here is to do what the breathless reporting hasn’t done: delve into the question of whether the proposed sentence is fair or unjust. To answer that, we turned to the indictment itself. The takeaway is mostly that the disputants don’t seem to know what the charges against Stone say. We’ll get to that.

Barr claimed that he was already working to mitigate the sentence, had spoken to one of the prosecutors, when Trump burst forth with his opening salvo:

The proseutors went ahead anyway, ignoring Barr, and issueing a 26-page sentencing memorandum calling for seven-to-nine years in prison for Stone. That caused Barr to step in the next day to call for a reduction and earning Trump’s appreciation:

This takes us from seven-to-nine years to “a case that…perhaps should not have even been brought” accompanied by a libel of Robert Mueller who did no such thing. Barr used an interview with ABC News to vent his frustration that…

Public statements and tweets made about the department, about people in the department, our men and women here, about cases pending in the department, and about judges before whom we have cases, make it impossible for me to do my job… with a constant background commentary that undercuts me.”

He was under considerable pressure from within the Justice Department, both prosecutorial staff in Washington and in the field. It wasn’t just the uproar over the four defectors. Barr may have read a piece in The New York Times from the day before his interview in which reporters had canvassed a sampling of more than a dozen of the 93 U.S. attorneys across the land. All spoke off the record for fear of reprisal but said they had already been wary of working on any case that “might catch Mr. Trump’s attention”, and the Stone case made clear what worried them, that Barr would undercut their work to suit the president.

So did Barr suddenly find himself on the road to Damascus when he chose to upbraid Trump? Only if you are of the Susan Collins school that thinks Trump and his cohort learn lessons. The famously vindictive Donald Trump “wasn’t bothered” by Barr’s scolding, according to Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham. That sounded like Barr got pre-clearance from the White House to profess to department personnel that…

“I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody…whether it’s Congress, newspaper editorial boards, or the president.

To the president Barr was saying, if we can presume to channel him,

“Stop making it impossible for me to do my job of making everything happen the way you want it. Best to let me do that quietly to escape notice, because, Mr. President, you are drawing attention to what I’m doing and, by the way, there are sentencings and decisions whether to indict yet to come.”

But just as the general consensus grew that Barr had been given a hall pass to try to salvage some of his integrity, Main Justice, as the department’s DC headquarters is called, announced it is closing its two-year case against former FBI acting-chief Andrew McCabe. Hadn’t it just been reported that Barr is personally taking charge of legal matters of personal interest to Trump? Hadn’t Jessie Liu, who had presided over the McCabe investigation, been abruptly removed last month from her job as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia? She was slated for a top slot as an undersecretary at the Treasury Department, and even that posting was now rescinded. Moreover, Barr has been assigning cases such as the forthcoming sentencing of Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn — he had lied to the Mueller inquiry about conversations he had with Russians — to what has been called a review board of outside prosecutors, possibly to soften or reverse cases of interest to Trump, undercutting the in-house prosecutors. This is guaranteed to invoke their furor, corrupting Justice with one set of laws for Trump and another set for the rest of us.

Closing the McCabe case cuts in the opposite direction. It is bound to invoke the ire of the president who wants revenge for the FBI having launched the Russia investigation which became the Mueller inquiry. Trump is also infuriated that Barr has not developed charges against McCabe’s predecessor, James Comey, whom Trump fired and wants to see in prison for crimes against Trump.

McCabe had been charged for repeatedly lying about authorizing a subordinate to give information to a newspaper reporter about the FBI investigating the Clinton Foundation. For this Trump called him “a sick guy”and “what he was trying to do was terrible, and he was caught!” McCabe denied that he intentionally misled anyone. Fired and disgracefully denied his entire pension moments before he would become eligible, he has sued the department. Or, coming the week before Stone’s sentencing, is Barr signaling to Stone’s judge Amy Berman Jackson that going tough on Stone compared to dropping charges against McCabe would be unfairly tilting the scale of justice?

Meanwhile, after Barr’s purged his aigue, Trump predictably no longer “wasn’t bothered”, tweeting:

How much did Trump interfere? He had been tweeting and speaking non-stop. He had already said about stepping into criminal cases,

“I’d be able to do it if I wanted to. I have the absolute right to do it. I stay out of things to a degree that people wouldn’t believe but I didn’t speak to him. I thought the recommendation was ridiculous. I thought the whole prosecution was ridiculous.”

He tweeted:

“They treated Roger Stone very badly, they treated everybody very badly, and if you look at the Mueller investigation, it was a scam because it was illegally set up.”

Illegally set up? Trump constantly throws his opponents onto the defense, fact-checking and straightening out his lunacy. Mueller was appointed special counsel by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein because Trump had fired Comey. Trump seemed to be referring to the Christopher Steele FISA warrant which had nothing to do with Mueller.

It’s a disgrace, and frankly, they ought to apologize to a lot of the people whose lives they have ruined… I want to thank the Justice Department for seeing this horrible thing, and I didn’t speak to ’em, by the way, just so you understand.”

The Cheering Section

So did right-wing media think it horrible? Trump listens to Tucker Carlson. He called off retaliation against Iran for downing our drone on advice from Tucker. What did Carlson have to say:

“Back in November former Trump adviser Roger Stone was convicted of several charges related to the now officially discredited Russia investigation. Prosecutors claimed that Stone lied about communicating with the former stand-up comedian called Randy Credico, a man whose role in the story was so minor that it’s already been lost to history. For this offense, prosecutors say, Stone…must spend up to nine years in prison.

This is what Fox viewers take away, thinking it to be truth, most knowing nothing further. This single statement is a short course in the Fox specialty of disinformation.

 First, the Mueller probe is now “discredited”? No mention who decided that “officially”. Carlson has seemingly shrunk the investigation to have only been to prove “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Russians. In fact, the appointment order was to “investigate the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election” [emphasis added]. The question of “coordination” (“collusion” not being a legal term) was sub-item (b)(i) in a list that ran from (a) to (d). Besides, that Mueller’s team found no “coordination” worthy of prosecution does not discredit an investigation even if that had been its purpose. The mission is equally to determine whether there has been wrongdoing or none.

 Second, because Credico’s role in history was minor, that erases any crime is what Carlson suggests.

  Third, Carlson wants viewers to believe that Stone’s entire indictment was no more than lying “about communicating with the former stand-up comedian”. An example of how Fox engineers the story to match Trump who had said the day before,

“[Justice] saw the horribleness of a nine-year sentence for doing nothing…Nine years for doing something that nobody can even define what he did”.

Stone did nothing. Nobody can even define what he did. That brings us to the indictment which defines what Stone did.

Lying to Congress

The indictment spells out just short of two dozen instances — e-mails, public statements — in which Stone is involved with finding out in the summer of 2016 when there will be drops of e-mails stolen by Russians from the Clinton campaign. (You can read it here )

Stone instructs intermediaries, referred to as “Person 1” and “Person 2”, to…

“Get to [the head of Organization 1] [a]t Ecuadorian Embassy in London and get the pending [Organization 1] emails . . . they deal with Foundation, allegedly”.

The Clinton Foundation, that is, and Organization 1 is, of course, Julian Assange’s Wikileaks.

Person 1 states “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.”

Person 1 advises, “Time to let more than [the Clinton Campaign chairman] to be exposed as in bed w enemy if they are not ready to drop HRC. That appears to be the game hackers are now about.”

This speaks of Inside knowledge of what the Russians were after.

“Would not hurt to start suggesting HRC old, memory bad, has stroke — neither he nor she well.”

At a public event that August, Stone said more than once that “I actually have communicated with [the head of Organization 1]”. In an interview four days later, he was “in communication with [the head of Organization 1]” but was “not at liberty to discuss what I have.” Another interview four days after that, “I have had some back-channel communication with [Organization 1]”.

He sent a request that Assange dig up whatever e-mail he could find against Hillary Clinton between “August 10 to August 30—particularly on August 20, 2011” with precautions in other mail saying “now pretend u don’t know me”, “Please leave my name out of it”, “I can’t talk about it”.

Shortly after Organization 1’s release of e-mail stolen from the Clinton Campaign chairman, an associate of a high-ranking Trump campaign official sent a text message to Stone that read “well done”.

What’s to Lie About?

Collusive, certainly, but apparently not the law’s “coordination”. There’s a good deal more than we’ve excerpted, but collusive is not the point. Nothing in the indictment charges Stone and intermediaries for seeking possible dirt about Ms Clinton.

In early 2017, the FBI, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) and the House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee (HPSCI) all announced investigations into Russian election interference and and possible links and coordination between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government. Stone came before those committees and constantly lied. Asked to submit a long list of whatever types of documents he might have, including e-mails, he said he had nothing. He challenged the legitimacy of the hearings for being based on the “yet unproven allegation that the Russian state is responsible for the hacking of the DNC and [the Clinton Campaign chairman] and the transfer of that information to [Organization 1].” Remember the communications with Persons 1 and 2 just cited? Stone testifies the opposite:

Another Q and A:

Another:

Stone was asked, “Did you ask [the intermediary] to communicate anything else to [the head of Organization 1]?” Stone falsely responded, “I did not.”

Stone was asked, “Did you ask [the intermediary] to do anything on your own behalf?” Again Stone falsely answered, “I did not.”

The indictment lists five counts of lying to Congress and one count of obstruction of Congress by the lies that threw them off from finding the truth of the Russian Wikileaks hacking.

Witness Tampering

Stone told Randy Credico that he had identified him as Person 2 to HPSCI — and asked him to falsely confirm what Stone had testified. An e-mail exchange between them ensued in which Credico repeatedly told Stone his testimony was false and urged him to correct it before the committees.

In November 2017, Credico received a request to voluntarily testify. Stone told him to “Stonewall it Plead the fifth. Anything to save the plan . . . Richard Nixon” and later said to do a “Frank Pentangeli”, who in “The Godfather: Part II” claims in testifying before a congressional committee that he does not know information that he does in fact know. At various times Stone texted Person 2, “…and if you turned over anything to the FBI you’re a fool”, “If you testify you’re a fool”, “I guarantee you you are the one who gets indicted for perjury if you’re stupid enough to testify”, “I’m not talking to the FBI and if your smart you won’t either”.

Credico invoked the 5th Amendment. Stone e-mailed him this:

What was it our president said?, “…nothing…Nine years for doing something that nobody can even define what he did”. For Carlson, “This is a pure political hit……The president must pardon Roger Stone or commute his sentence before he goes to jail”. As he assuredly will, possibly so swiftly that Stone doesn’t spend a day in jail.

Seven-to-nine years is unduly harsh, but a pardon or no sentence says we have no laws. Lie to Congress. Make them figure out the truth. Threaten witnesses. Make people fearful to come forward. No laws, so no consequences. Which is where we’re headed

Republicans had a chance to get rid of this outlaw president, but they blew it.

Social Security: A Year Closer to Crisis and Still No Fix

“Nobody in politics wants to deal with Social Security a second before they have to”, quipped Alan Simpson, the towering former Republican senator from Wyoming. That again held true in 2019 even though the money coming in from payroll taxes is no longer sufficient to pay benefits. Starting in 2018 the administration had to begin recalling the surplus tax collections it has loaned to

the federal government over the years, but that so-called trust fund will run out in 2034. From that point forward the SSA won’t have enough and will have to cut benefits to all retirees by by 21%.

The country was faced with this same threat in 1983, but Congress raised the payroll tax and the eligibility age, sending revenues into surplus enough to keep the system healthy for over three decades. Congress shows no sign of taking action this time. Fourteen years will go by quickly. Where will that leave you?

Let’s first take the measure of the crushing demands the Social Security program faces in coming years. As it is, in fiscal 2019 it paid $1.1 trillion in benefits to 69 million recipients, assisted 43 million visitors at its offices, and fielded 75 million calls to its toll-free line. The population bulge of those born between 1946 and 1964 — the Baby Boomers — define its future. They have been turning 65 at a rate of 8,000 to 10,000 every day and they are living longer with life expectancy steadily increasing. In 1970, the median American age was 28.1 years. In the half century since, the median age by 2016 became 37.9 years. By 2035, the number of Americans 65 and older will exceed those under age 18 for the first time in our history, and by 2060 this cohort will nearly double in size.

Benefits to retirees are paid from the payroll taxes collected from those at work today, but there are fewer workers supporting more retirees. The boomer population isn’t the only reason; women are bearing children later in their lives or foregoing motherhood — the “baby bust” it’s been called. In 1950, the payroll taxes of 16 workers supported each senior. The lower birthrate together with increased longevity has led to a mere 3 workers supporting each retiree today, and the swelling of the senior population group by the postwar baby boom will reduce that number to 2 per retiree. Without major change, this is clearly unsustainable in Social Security’ s future.

And yet we cannot allow that 21% cut to happen else millions will be reduced to poverty. Pretty uniformly across all age groups, 78% of Democrats and 68% of Republicans oppose any cuts in benefits. Employers have largely done away with pensions, and the current crop of retirees have only $152,000 in savings on average — far too little for a likely 20 year retirement — with 45% having no savings at all. For about 1 retiree in 3, the Social Security payment (today averaging $1,413 a month, about $17,000 a year) accounts for 90% of their income. For 3 in 5 it is half their income. A 2017 study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported that 9% of all retirees lived in poverty but that would have been 39% had there been no Social Security. (Those percentages are 19% and 52% for African-Americans and 17% and 46% for Hispanics, respectively.)

A Gallup poll found that 74% of Americans hope to work past 65, but how many businesses are eager to hire people in their late years? (There are many reasons they should, but that is its own subject).

What’s to be done?

It should be clear that we cannot work for 40 to 45 years paying an eighth of our income into the system and then expect to receive a substantial payout for another 25 years. Any rescue of Social Security needs to be a thorough overhaul.

Short of raising taxes on today’s wage owners to unconscionable levels, which the Social Security trustees said in 2018 would have to be an “immediate and permanent” payroll deduction of 15.18% to solve the 2034 problem, trimming of benefits to well-off seniors must be on the table. How can it be justified to further favor those at the older end of the age spectrum who spend their days at leisure by further taxing the younger generations who spend their days at work? For the Social Security system to be self-sufficient, need must figure in. Benefits must be reduced relative to beneficiaries’ increases in income, and at some income level early along that increasing scale, benefits must decline to zero for the cost savings to make a difference in the 2034 equation. The young and middle-aged cannot go on being taxed to give money to those who do not need it.

Social Security income isn’t free and clear. It is already taxed, will be the argument against this proposition, with the tax increasing according to other income. But no more than 85% of the benefits are taxed, and the computation just increases one’s tax. The benefits themselves are not curtailed.

Americans believe their payroll deductions are their own money loaned to the government and owed to them on retirement, so they rebel at any suggestion of holdbacks. But the law is otherwise, or so has said the Supreme Court. Those deductions are labeled a payroll “tax”, take note, and the court ruled early on in 1937’s Helvering v. Davis that…

“The proceeds of both the employee and employer taxes are to be paid into the Treasury like any other internal revenue generally, and are not earmarked in any way”

and in 1960’s Fleming v. Nestor…

“To engraft upon the Social Security system a concept of ‘accrued property rights’ would deprive it of the flexibility and boldness in adjustment to ever changing conditions which it demands”.

That bold flexibility is now needed.

This is especially appropriate when we admit that, given increased longevity, seniors reaching ages somewhere in their 70s in the usual case, will receive — despite adjusting for inflation their contributions through life and crediting a modest rate of interest all along — considerably more in Social Security benefits than than they ever paid into the system. As they live on, the old folks become parasites.

Raise the Cap

For 2020, an individual’s first $137,700 of income will be subject to the 12.4% FICA or Social Security tax, with half paid by the employer and half by the employee. That’s up from $132,900 in 2019. This is a regressive tax, applied as it is to the very first dollar of a minimum wage employee and not at all to income beyond $137,700. Mindful that it is a tax with no “earmarking” or “property rights”, it could be argued that there should be no cap, that all income should be subject to FICA’s reach. That would never get through Congress, of course, where they would be voting to tax themselves and the contributors to their re-election, but it’s worth making the point to encourage receptivity to other unpalatable but equitable solutions.

Raise the age of eligibility

That’s already been done, but not enough. In the 1983 fixes, the age was raised from 65 to 67, but starting only several years after so no one in Congress would be voted from office, and then ratcheting up so slowly that only a 10th of a year of age was added for each calendar year, such that 67 won’t be reached until 2027. Two percentage points across 44 years.

Given the long retirements afforded by longer lives, the age for Social Security eligibility must be raised further: 70 is often proposed. But there’s a problem. Those who worked physical jobs all their lives — sanitation workers doing heavy lifting, roofers nailing shingles, commercial fishermen hauling traps and nets — are unable to go on working to that age to support themselves. They need Social Security relief sooner. They are joined by those in the bottom income rungs who need Social Security assistance the most and who, for one or another reason — those physical jobs did physical damage, they weren’t able to afford proper healthcare, and so forth — have not seen their life expectancy rise as much as the more affluent with their physically undemanding jobs and money enough to pay for better healthcare. For men now at age 50 and at the top of the wealth and income scale, life expectancy is 88 years. Men now at age 50 at the bottom of the income ladder can only expect to live to 76 years. Data for women shows a similar spread.

That says that with full benefit eligibility now at 66, those at the bottom will receive only 10 years of Social Security benefits whereas those at the top (who don’t even need the added income) will receive benefits for 22 years. It should be clear that the current schema is dramatically unfair.

By postponing eligibility and trimming benefits, both in proportion to wealth and income of those who are better off, we could restore some fairness. But eligibility cannot be postponed to age 70 for those at the other end of the income scale. And for those physically unable to work late in life, the Social Security calculus might factor in a new metric — how Americans have made their living. Employers submitting payroll deductions to the SSA would tag them with a 3-level rating characterizing the employee’s job — physically demanding to moderate (such as on one’s feet all day) to undemanding. Alongside one’s income history would be this point score, with those who spent most of their working years in physical work scoring highest and thus earning earlier benefit eligibility, with those who scored lower for having done less or no physical work earning later eligibility.

There have been a number of other proposals to fairly include those left out. Women are likely to have spent uncompensated years as caregivers, whether to infants or older family members. Most other industrialized countries credit some years of caregiving when calculating retirement benefits, says a Boston College survey — entirely missing in this country. A bill introduced by Chris Murphy, Democratic senator from Connecticut would award up to five years of figurative wages to Social Security scorekeeping to those who provide at least 80 hours a month to “parents, spouse, domestic partner, sibling, child, aunt or uncle”.

It gets complicated, but it must. Social Security and Medicare now account for 42% of the annual budget excluding interest on the national debt and is on course to become 50% by 2029. Social Security needs to be more finely calibrated to fit the needs of changing demographics and evolving American life.

The Social Security Act.

It’s the handiwork of Representative John Larson, another Connecticut Democrat and chair of the Ways and Means Committee, and is supported by 90% of Democrats in the House. It would raise benefits 2% across the board; rework the annual cost-of-living adjustment to factor in the different expenses older people experience, high medical costs especially; and boost the minimum benefit to lift more people from poverty.

To pay for it, the payroll tax would rise by 0.1% every year for 24 years, lifting the tax from today’s 12.4% (split between employee and employer) to 14.8%, and the tax would be applied not just to the first $137,700 of earnings (2020’s cap) but would kick in again for income exceeding $400,000, creating a doughnut hole of no tax for the $262,300 in between, much like Obamacare’s prescription drug coverage.

Compare that with the problems this article has proposed to solve. There is no contemplation of split eligibility ages to meet the needs of different groups of people; the diminishing pool of younger workers are to pay considerably more to the mushrooming older contingent; nothing is done to trim benefits of older people whether needed or not and despite their increased longevity taking out far more than they ever put in. It’s understandable that 42% of ages 18 to 29 assume they won’t get any benefits.

Of course neither Larson’s bill nor any other could get through a Republican Senate with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocking all access. And one of Trump’s campaign promises was, “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican”. So another year will go by with nothing done.

So Many Reasons Not to Impeach

The president’s defense in the Senate trial hoisted a flurry of reasons that impeachment was unwarranted. We put together the following list with our own observations. You can probably think of a couple we overlooked:

Why impeach when the election is so near? has been the most pervasive argument. Let the voters decide whether President Trump should remain in office. Democrats remind us that the moment he heard Robert Mueller’s anemic performance before Congress, Trump declared, “I can do whatever I want as president of the United States”, and then did precisely that with his phone call to Ukraine the very next day. His Democrat pursuers were persuaded that, allowed to get away unscathed with his Ukraine shakedown, he will do something even more brazen. And it is not just the months until the election that Republicans ask us patiently to wait. Even if defeated, Mr. Trump is still in office for three further months, potentially doing harm with a vengeance — doubly so if defeated — until January 2021.

Precedents for the future were also a concern on both sides. In this case, wouldn’t wait for the next election say to future presidents that they can do whatever they want in the year and a half before that election because that’s considered an impeachment-free zone?

Ukraine didn’t know the funds were on hold , so how would President Zelenskyy think the quo of military aid depended on the quid of pledging to investigate the Bidens and alleged Ukraine involvement in the 2016 American elections? The defense team made a good case for that, showing multiple video segments of hearing testimony in which one after another witness said they only knew of the aid freeze when Politico broke the story, and that was a month later on August 28th. In a trial, those admissions are evidentiary, whereas the Democrats’ position is more conjectural. In the call, Zelenskyy is understandably obsequious, scrambling to please and flatter the president, anxious to receive the aid. He may not be aware of a specific quid pro quo, but is he wondering what has become of the $391 million? So he makes the point that “we are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States” as if to say to the transactional president, you’ll get the money right back! (The defense makes the point that the aid package doesn’t include Javelins, but that’s clearly not what Zelenskyy thinks. That, we saw, is his #1 ask).

And here’s another by-the-way. Ukraine did know of the aid far earlier, which the Republican defense chose to hide.

And not so incidentally, the Democrats ask, if Trump had no quid pro quo in mind, why did he put a hold on the aid? And would he have ever released it (without Zelenskyy going before a microphone ) had he not been caught out?

The money was held because of corruption in Ukraine. If the Republicans are making their case on something not said — no one said “quid pro quo” — so can the Democrats toss aside the claim that the funds freeze was because of corruption in Ukraine. There was no mention whatsoever of corruption in the July 25th phone call even though corruption was on the prepared list of talking points. The entire “favor” was that Zelenskyy look into the strange 2016 conspiracy theory, the Bidens, and “the company that you mentioned” (Col. Vindman’s notes say “Burisma” was spoken but he couldn’t get the White House minders to put it in the transcript). When his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, returned to Ukraine, Trump asked him to prepare a report on his “findings” about Biden, with no mention of corruption in general. The money, for it to be held up, was cleared for release, so where was the concern about corruption? The Defense Department had certified in May, before Mr. Trump put a hold on the funds, and then again in July, that Ukraine had met American-set anti-corruption benchmarks for receiving the money.

And yet the defense in the trial are trying to make the case that the aid was held up bcause the president was acting out of general concern about corruption in that country.

There was no crime. The president did nothing wrong. Impeachment doesn’t require that a statutory crime be committed.

The Democrats’ Articles of Impeachment elevated Trump’s misdeeds to “abuse of power” and thus, it could be argued, they made the strategic mistake of handing the defense a plum. They could say he was not charged with anything specifically in the Constitution. The Founders had trouble creating a list of impeachable offenses, as we learned from commentators suddenly immersed in their writings. The Constitution’s authors decided they should not be too specific. So they left it vague at “high crimes and misdemeanors”. While “high” at the time meant high office, not maximal crime such as murder, there was not yet the U.S. code setting forth what constituted a crime, so they left it to us to judge.

But the defense argues, with Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz on the podium, that the offense must connect with the specifics listed in the Constitution, however scattershot and lacking in definition, as a way of invalidating the impeachment ruling.

But the Founders did stipulate “bribery”. What were the Democrats thinking that they did not make that central to their case? In Trump’s instance (the burden of proof still to be hefted), it was extortion, the twin of bribery. Bribery is “I’ll pay you to do what I ask even though improper”; extortion is “You’ll get the money due you only if you do what I ask even in improper”. Would the Founders have said that the one is a crime but the other is perfectly OK? So while Trump certainly abused his power, the Democrats left themselves with something more nebulous to prove.

Not so incidentally, Trump did commit crimes, but the Democrats unaccountably left them out of the Articles of Impeachment. As the Senate trial began, the Government Accounting Office said the withholding of funds was illegal, which was obvious without their imprimatur. Without congressional approval, it’s a violation of the Impoundment Control Act. And there is also 52 U.S. Code §?30121 which prohibits

“a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value, or to make an express or implied promise to make a contribution or donation, in connection with a Federal, State, or local election.

What could be clearer, yet there was no mention of these actual laws. Laws no longer matter?

No harm, no foul is shorthand for Republicans arguing that even if someone can prove a quid pro quo, nothing came of it. Ukraine got the $391 million and Zelenskyy didn’t have to investigate.

The Democrats made farce of that with their own shorthand; nothing came of it because “he got caught”. Trump’s plot was exposed. The Republican want you to think that if the bank robber returns the money, there’s no crime.

On September 9th, the inspector general of the intelligence agencies notified the House Intelligence Committee of the whistleblower’s “urgent concern” complaint. Three House committees immediately launched investigations. Two days later on September 12th, Trump releases the funds. Zelenskyy cancels a CNN interview at which he was to announce the investigations, and neither did they go forward in fact.

It is legitimate to argue that, absent these events, Trump might not have released the funds at all. He was already close to the September 30th end of the U.S. fiscal year, at which point the funding would evaporate by law. It would have to be re-allocated by Congress in the new fiscal year.

It should be remembered that, after a National Security Council (NSC) meeting on August 16th, in which all advocated release of the money except President Trump, who rejected the recommendation, an aide reported that the “president doesn’t want to provide any assistance at all”.

There was no quid pro quo. No one could prove that the president actually linked the non-payment of aid to the insistence “that President Zelenskyy go to a microphone and say he is opening investigations of Biden and 2016 election interference, and that President Zelenskyy should want to do this himself”, which is what Tim Morrison, who helms the NSC’s Eurasia desk, heard Trump say to Ambassador Gordon Sondland.

But we can scrap “there was no quid pro quo”, because a manuscript of John Bolton’s forthcoming book circulating in Washington has affirmed the link. In August, President Trump told Bolton, then his national security adviser, that he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into the Bidens.

The president was denied due process in the House proceedings, which made impeachment an illegitimate sham. Three House committees had conducted joint closed-door hearings in the basement of the Capitol to which the president’s lawyers were denied access, Republicans could not call witnesses, and some Republicans seemed to think only Democrats could attend. In fact, there were some forty-five Republicans on the committees and not only did they attend, but they were given equal time for questioning.

The more important point is that this first round of hearings, referred to as “depositions”, were the equivalent of a grand jury proceeding in which the Democrats were building a case, as well as seeing if they had a case. Unlike for the Nixon and Clinton impeachments, no one had done it for them. The Nixon case was built by special prosecutors, first Archibad Cox, who was fired by Nixon in the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre”, and succeeded by Leon Jaworski. Clinton had the latter-day Javert, Ken Starr, pursuing him for four years all the way from an Arkansas land deal to an assignation with Ms. Lewinsky in the White House. In contrast, they had to do it themselves and the White House had no business inserting itself and its lawyers while the House committees built their case. Republicans complaints about “process” were disingenuous.

In the open hearings, Trump forbade any and all administration personnel from testifying and blocked access to documents, and then complained there were no Republican witnesses. In the Senate trial, Mitch McConnell is, at this writing, muscling all Republicans not to break ranks and vote to allow neither witnesses nor documents so as to vote for acquittal and speedily shut down. The due process complaint is a red herring.

The call was about burden sharing. This argument seemed an act of desperation, so easily is it ridiculed. The first 20% of the call was taken up with mutual flattery. Talk about European countries not supporting Ukraine enough – sharing the burden – occupied only 14% of the call, and Zelenskyy is anxious to change the subject, thanking Trump for “your great support in the area of defense” and immediately switching to the Javelin anti-tank weapons he is so anxious to have. Trump responds by asking for his “favor, though” and from there forward the subject is the Bidens, Crowdstrike, the 2016 election interference question, asking Zelenskyy to welcome Giuliani’s and Barr’s calls.

Even if there had been great emphasis on the burden-sharing topic, what point bringing it up with Zelenskyy, who says he had talked to “Angela” and Macron telling them they “are not doing quite as much as they need to be doing”. So shouldn’t President Trump have been calling them?

“Abuse of power” is not in the Constitution, and that should void the Democrats’ first article of impeachment. The Democrats became originalists and countered by quoting the Founders at every opportunity, citing, for example, Alexander Hamilton at the Constitutional Convention saying that impeachment was the remedy for “the abuse or violation of some public trust”. The sketchy list of specific wrongs in the Constitution mean that judgment should be the ultimate determinant.

To claim that abuse of power is an improper criterion is to say that anything goes. A president can, like Trump has said, do anything he or she wants. Attorney General Bill Barr’s “unitary executive” theory of the presidency comes close to that, maintaining that a president has complete freedom to conduct policy abroad and issue edicts at home, including “complete authority to start or stop a law enforcement proceeding”. It is an argument for an elective monarchy; it mistakes Trump for a king.

There was no obstruction of Congress , the second article of impeachment is wrong.. The president is within his rights (just ask Bill Barr) to bar testimony by administration personnel and refuse to turn over documents because the president should be free to have confidential discussions with his advisers.

But in Trump’s case, the president attempted to block all administration officials from any cooperation whatever and released not a single document to the House committees. This went far further than a claim of executive privilege, which the defense team at the trial is now claiming. But that requires exposure of meetings or papers to evaluate which conversation or text passages should be considered privileged and kept from public view. Trump’s complete ban argues that Congress has no rights as the second branch of government; it’s the elective monarchy again.

OK, he did it but it doesn’t rise to the level of an impeachable offense . The president illegally (see above) withheld congressionally mandated military aid to Ukraine who are fighting against U.S. adversary Russia at cost of lives in order to force that country’s president to investigate Trump’s election opponent in the hopes of finding something to use against him. Michael Gerhardt, a professor at the University of North Carolina and one of the four making up the panel in the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing said,

“If what we’re talking about is not impeachment, then nothing is impeachment. This is precisely the misconduct the framers created the Constitution, including impeachment, to protect against”.

Ad nauseam, Republicans have said the Democrats want to “overturn the 2016 election” and subvert the will of millions who voted for him. Under that principle, a president could never be removed. Elections rule out the impeachment provisions of the Constitution, that says. The nation should suffer the perils of the worst of presidents and patiently wait years for their terms to end.

Moreover, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was very much against impeachment. She wanted Trump gone, to be sure, but held back the radical left newcomers in the House fearing that impeachment would inspire the same sympathy for Trump as occurred with Clinton’s impeachment. But then came the whistleblower. What he did with Ukraine was a breach too far. She had to relent and let impeachment happen.

The Perfect Phone Call That Everyone Knew Was Wrong

“Can you believe that I will be impeached today by the Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats? AND I DID NOTHING WRONG!”. Donald Trump believes that because, hadn’t he decreed that “I can do anything I want as president of the United States” just the day before he made his “perfect” July 25th phone call? He was incapable of wrong.

It was striking just how universal was the opposite reaction when one after another witness in the impeachment hearings said they knew that what they were hearing — withholding of aid to Ukraine on condition that a foreign government investigate a rival candidate — was wrong. We got a rare glimpse of our civil servants whom Republicans are wont to call “unelected bureaucrats” and the “deep state”. That they across the government — the State Department, the Pentagon, the White House — so conscientiously recognized wrongdoing deserves attention as a subject on its own. It made for a strong statement against the president.

It started with a magazine article

In June, Mick Mulvaney got first wind that the president was going off course when he e-mailed from Air Force One, heading for Japan, “I’m just trying to tie up some loose ends, did we ever find out about the money for Ukraine and whether we can hold it back?” Aide Robert Blair replied that it could be done but “Expect Congress to become unhinged”.

President Trump had evidently seen an article in the Washington Examiner that said the Pentagon was readying another tranche of aid to Ukraine for military assistance that would bring the total since 2014 to $1.5 billion. Mr. Trump directed Mulvaney to place a hold on the aid. On May 23rd in the Oval Office, Trump had said , “They are all corrupt, they are all terrible people,” according to Kurt Volker, the administration’s Special Envoy to Ukraine. “They tried to take me down.” Mr. Trump was apparently referring to Ukraine’s uncovering the “black ledger” that showed $12.7 million in secret payments to Paul Manafort that forced him to quit the 2016 campaign.

By July 10th the hold on the funds had not yet happened when something of an all-hands meeting took place in John Bolton’s West Wing office. Joining him — he was then National Security Adviser to Trump — were Volker, Gordon Sondland, Fiona Hill, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, and two Ukrainians guests, Andriy Yermak, a top aide to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Alexander Danyliuk, Bolton’s counterpart in Kyiv. Sondland is our ambassador to the European Union, Ms. Hill was the National Security Council’s (NSC) former senior director for Russia and Europe. Vindman is the top Ukraine expert at the NSC.

Mr. Sondland blurted out that Mick Mulvaney, the president’s acting chief of staff, had guaranteed that Zelensky would be invited to the White House provided Ukraine announced it would conduct “investigations”, which by then, as testified by Ms. Hill, were recognized by most in attendance as the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, the Bidens and the 2016 election.

Hearing that caused Mr. Bolton to stiffen, witnesses said, and abruptly call a halt to the meeting. A renowned “hawk”, Bolton is a controversial figure, but he is thoroughly knowledgeable of how America should conduct its affairs abroad, and what he just heard was a wrong turn. He pulled Ms. Hill aside and told her to report what had transpired to John Eisenberg, the NSC’s chief legal adviser. “Tell Eisenberg that I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up,” he said, according to Ms. Hill’s testimony.

Eight days later on July 18, a group of top officials meeting on Ukraine policy learned from the budget office that the president had ordered a freeze on delivery of the $391 million military assistance package. “I and the others on the call sat in astonishment,” William Taylor, the top United States diplomat in Ukraine, testified to House investigators. “In an instant, I realized that one of the key pillars of our strong support for Ukraine was threatened.” The alarm was widespread. That same day, aides on the House Foreign Affairs Committee were tipped off by four calls from administration sources warning them about the hold and urging them to look into it.

Taylor, 5th in a class of 800 at West Point, did not learn until September 9th that the funds had been withheld on condition of a political favor. When he heard the substance of the July 25th call, he e-mailed Sondland and Volker, “I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance to help with a political campaign”. Even though acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, he had been left in the dark to discover this on his own. “There appeared to be two channels of U.S. policy-making and implementation, one regular and one highly irregular”. The irregular channel bypassing the State Department were Sondland, Volker, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, the self-identified “three amigos”, and they were ordered by Trump to take instruction from his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

Volker said he “opposed the hold on U.S. security assistance as soon as I learned about it on July 18”. But he, too, despite his ambassador rank, was not aware that when Burisma was spoken of as the investigation target, it was code for the Bidens. “In retrospect, I should have seen that connection differently, and had I done so, I would have raised my own objection,” he said.

Mark Sandy also learned on July 18th that the Ukraine funding was to be held up, but he couldn’t find out why. A graduate of Oxford and the Naval War College, a 21-year Navy reservist and veteran of a tour of duty in Afghanistan, he was in charge of moving congressionally allocated monies to their intended destinations. He repeatedly pressed Michael Duffey at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), about why Mr. Trump had imposed the hold but Duffey “simply said we need to let the hold take place — and I’m paraphrasing here — and then revisit this issue with the president.” Sandy devised what he termed “a footnote” that would hold up the movement of money, but he signaled his chain of command there could be legal issues and urged them to consult the OMB’s lawyers. Mr. Sandy said in testimony that he had never stalled a spending order in his 12 years at the agency.

Then, on July 30th, Duffey, a political appointee, took over control of the aid himself, something no one in the OMB remembers ever happening before.

“I JUST GOT IMPEACHED FOR MAKING A PERFECT PHONE CALL!”

It’s an odd word to describe a conversation, but the president repeated ceaselessly that the July 25th call with Zelenskyy was “perfect”. He meant there was nothing wrong with it, so said the media, but it seemed to us that what he really meant was that he had managed to get through the call without specifically mentioning the incriminating “quid pro quo”. But the implicit transaction was clear to everyone else who heard the call.

Vindman had prepared the talking points for the call. A Purple Heart veteran of the Iraq War brought to the U.S. at the age of three by parents fleeing the Ukraine of the Soviet Union (that made him “un-American” for Donald Trump Jr.”, by the way), Vindman listened in on the call as an official note-taker. He was startled to hear the president go off script. In testimony he said,

“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was probably an element of shock, that maybe, in certain regards, my worst fear of how our Ukraine policy could play out was playing out, and how this was likely to have significant implications for U.S. national security”.

Out of a “sense of duty”, Vindman headed for lawyer Eisenberg’s office to read him his notes and question the propriety of the demand for investigations. “I did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen”, he would say. Eisenberg and another lawyer at the council quickly decided to move the transcript of the phone call into the White House’s most classified computer system. A few days later, a top White House lawyer directed Vindman “not to talk to anybody else”. Vindman and two lawyers saw something wrong enough to be kept secret.

Eisenberg would find himself fielding complaints from at least four national-security officers alleging that the President was leveraging Ukraine policy in potentially illegal ways.

Jennifer Williams also listened in on the call. The longtime State Department employee with expertise in Europe and Russia was “detailed” to the White House on Vice President Mike Pence’s national security staff. She was not accustomed to a president discussing domestic political issues with foreign leaders, according to three people familiar with her remarks at the time. Williams had found the call “unusual and inappropriate” and “more political in nature”.

As for Trump’s claim that there was no quid pro quo, that the aid was not tied to Ukraine agreeing to investigations, just 90 minutes after the July 25th call, Duffey at the OMB e-mailed the Department of Defense, “Please hold off on any additional DoD obligations of these funds, pending direction from that process”. Obligation refers to the process of a government agency designating how funds will be spent. Duffey evidently recognized something untoward about the president’s edict; he e-mailed further, “Given the sensitive nature of the request, I appreciate your keeping that information closely held to those who need to know to execute the direction.”

Ms. Williams recounted a September meeting between Pence and Zelenskyy in which the Ukrainian president explained how failing to provide the money was the wrong move, only helping Russia. “Any signal or sign that U.S. support was wavering would be construed by Russia as potentially an opportunity for them to strengthen their own hand in Ukraine,” Williams said, relaying what Mr. Zelenskyy told the vice president.

With the September 30th end of the fiscal year fast approaching, and the time needed to process the dispersal of funds diminishing, a bipartisan group of senators registered with Mulvaney “our deep concern that the Administration is considering not obligating the Ukraine Security Initiative funds for 2019”.

When Timothy Morrison, a NSCl aide, heard about a September 7th conversation between Trump and Sondland, it gave him a “sinking feeling”. Trump had said “I want no quid pro quo”

from Ukraine — this was well after the whistleblower complaint, meaning the president was intent on denying any such coercion — but he then went on to “insist” that Mr. Zelenskyy publicly announce an investigation into the Bidens and the fictional Ukraine interference in the 2016 election. (Republicans and their media would recite the first part non-stop and leave out the second part). Morrison found it disturbing enough that he, too, had NSC’s chief lawyer Eisenberg review it. This was bad foreign policy, Morrison said. He feared Trump’s demands could potentially squander a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to cement good relations with Ukraine’s new anti-corruption government.

Laura Cooper, a top Defense Department official in charge of Russia and Ukraine, testified that she and Pentagon officials had warned the White House over the summer that continuing to deny Ukraine security assistance could cause the administration to run afoul of the law. As indeed it did. In January, just as the impeachment trial was beginning, the General Accounting Office said that Trump and his cohort had broken the Impoundment Control Act’s law that bars the president from deciding unilaterally not to spend money appropriated by Congress.

Ms. Cooper said that throughout the summer, as Pentagon officials kept sounding the alarm about the legal perils of waiting to provide the aid, the White House, through the budget office, repeatedly “was trying to see if we could push, you know, keep planning to obligate, but keep pushing the obligations until later in the year and still complete them,” Cooper testified.

Late in August, a united front of Bolton, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo thought withholding security assistance so wrong that they confronted the president face-to-face in the Oval Office. One by one each made his case why Trump should free up the money. The whistleblower complaint was by then known to Trump, so he knew he’d best make corruption the reason for the freeze. “Ukraine is a corrupt country,” the president said. “We are pissing away our money.” He would not budge.

Politico was the first to report that military aid to Ukraine had been held up. Its August 28th story surprised and angered Congress. Three House committees would shortly announce they would investigate whether Mr. Trump had withheld the aid to pressure Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son. Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, heard from Sondland that the aid would be unblocked only if the Ukrainians gave Mr. Trump the investigations he wanted. Johnson arranged a call to the president. When he asked Mr. Trump directly if the aid was contingent on getting investigations, Trump replied in a shower of expletives that there was no such demand and he would never do such a thing.

By mid-August, Pentagon lawyers were growing increasingly concerned about how to lawfully implement a lengthy hold. With time running out, in an e-mail to the Pentagon on September 10th, Michael Duffey tried to absolve the White House of any responsibility for not delivering the funds to Ukraine in time, that it was up to the Defense Department to do more to ensure that the aid be released to Ukraine by the September 30th deadline. Elaine McCusker, the Pentagon’s acting comptroller, shot back, “You can’t be serious,” she wrote. “I am speechless.”

With the pressure of exposure coming from all sides, Trump lifted the hold the next day, September 11th.