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This is an open letter to all of you privately disgusted Republicans.

Its prompted by the fact that in the last few days, two of your colleagues have come forward to share with us your angst.

One was actually an ex-colleague, former Republican Rep. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania. He told CNN that you continue to support Donald Trump because pressure from the base the almighty base forces you to. But theres no question, he added, having spoken to many of them privately, theyre absolutely disgusted and exhausted by the presidents behavior. Democratic Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York seconded that emotion. If you talk to my Republican colleagues off the record, theyre all very concerned, he said, also on CNN.

Its not that we havent heard similar sentiments before. On the contrary, they have surfaced repeatedly over the last four years. But ladies and gentlemen, your lament has reached the point and breached the point of sheer tiresomeness.

As the scope of Trumps abuse of power grows ever more obvious, as his contempt for the rule of law grows ever more plain, as leaders of your party offer ever-more-threadbare justifications and rationalizations for that which is neither justifiable nor rational, we receive word that you folks are privately disgusted?

As Rick Perry and others claim Trump as Gods chosen one, as a new Economist/YouGov poll finds that most Republicans rank him a better leader than Lincoln himself, as the party grows ever more indistinguishable from a cult, with Trump as he who must not be questioned, he whose wisdom is beyond mere mortal ken, we hear that off the record, you lot are very concerned?

One struggles for adjectives to convey how little that means, how insignificant is the comfort it offers.

Sixty years ago, Martin Luther King issued a warning: If you fail to act now, history will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

King was addressing white racial moderates, but it is remarkable and disheartening how well his warning fits you, who have prioritized your own political backsides above truth, above honor, above national interest. As the country lurches toward a precipice from which it will not recover, you count votes. In a time that demands every good man and woman raise their voices, you embrace the appalling silence instead.

War criminals are set free. And appalling silence.

A Russian attack unanswered. And appalling silence.

Children dying in our care. And appalling silence.

Except we are given to understand that in private, you grumble from time to time. And Lord, what are we supposed to do with that information? Are we expected to sympathize with your dilemma? Please.

We are posing for history here, ladies and gentlemen. One day we will be judged by what we said and did not say, the stands we took and did not take, in this moment of peril. And you, the party of Reagan and Eisenhower, T.R. and the apparently overrated Lincoln, are coming up well short. Where is your courage? Who broke your moral compass?

Enough with your private disgust and off-the-record concern. The times are calling. They demand you stand up like American women and American men stand up like John McCain would long ago have done and speak what you know to be true, what we all know to be true.

Or else, at the very least, please shut up completely. Let the rest of us mourn our country in peace.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for The Miami Herald. He can be contacted at:

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Leonard Pitts: Republicans who are that disgusted with Trump should go public with it - Press Herald

One lesson from this delightful period in American political history is that none of the stories they told you in schoolabout those Checks and Balances, or the Separation of Powers, or the idea we are a Nation of Lawswere real. To the extent that they ever fully applied to the United States of America in practice, the Trump Era has exposed them as malleable at best.

You see, the laws and the norms and the ethics rules are only real if people in positions of power enforce them. If they ignore them, or are too weak to exercise the powers granted to the offices they hold to stop others ignoring them, these magical forces of democracy cease to functionally exist. The president violates the Constitution's Emoluments Clause on a near-daily basis, but it doesn't seem to matter. He tried to seize funds not appropriated by Congress for his Big, Beautiful Wall, and reportedly offered pardons to people who break the law to get it built. Impeachment is a process expressly laid out in the Constitution, but the president's senior adviser just dismissed it as "unconstitutional." If you have no shame, and your opponents are too feckless to stop you, you can do anything.

That's particularly true because, as we've also learned, a significant section of the public is not particularly concerned with all these machinations of a democratic republic. It's slow, it's intricate, and to the extent people know about Checks and Balances, a growing share have stopped particularly caring about them. Perhaps, under the Obama administration, the Democratic base grew so tired of Mitch McConnell-led Republican obstructionism that they would have accepted dramatic expansions of executive power at the expense of Congress and the courts. We don't have the data for that, but we can say, thanks to an August poll by the Pew Research Center which resurfaced on my Twitter feed today, that support among Republicans for ceding powers from other institutions to the president is growing quite rapidly.

Pew Research Center

The percentage of Republicans who think it would be too risky to give presidents more power has sunk from 70 to 51 percent in a year. Since 2016, that number has fallen 31 points. The share of people polled who say presidents could operate more "effectively" if he did not have to worry about Congress or the courts is up 16 percent in a single year, to 43 percent. This poll is from this summer, before the impeachment inquiry began in earnest. Where are the numbers now? In a poll last week, 53 percent of Republicans said Trump is a better president than Abraham Lincoln.

It's hard to deny what's happening here: the support for concentrating federal power in one person is building. Some people don't seem too concerned about checks and balances. There is a partisan fluctuation at play: under Obama in 2016, the first year listed in this particular study, 66 percent of Democrats thought granting the president more power was too risky. 82 percent think so now. But among the president's base, right now, the hunger is growing for a slide towards dictatorshipsomething for which there's been anecdotal evidence for some time.

In February of 2017, Esquire sent a reporter to a Trump rally in Florida, and one die-hard MAGA-type in attendance explained, simply and with no little pride, that he would embrace a Trumpian dictatorship: "I don't care what he does," Bill Moro told Jeb Lund. "I'm behind him 100 percent. Put it this way: If he became a dictator, and they said, 'We want him in forever,' he's my man. He's in. I'll never vote against him ... I love his power ... It's the power that does something to me."

That last part speaks to a whole other side of this, one that seems inseparable from the growing embrace of Russian interference in American elections for Republican benefit. For the party's base, the shrinking white majority is Real America, and anything that maintains their grip on power is justifiable. Anything that keeps The Others out of power can be explained away.

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Presidents from both parties have continually expanded executive power for decades, and President Obama was a prime example. He increasingly turned to executive orders in response to Rep. McConnell's scorched-earth tactics in the Senate, which in many cases served to thwart the popular will for the benefit of the narrow donor constituency McConnell truly serves. As a former professor of constitutional law, Obama was perhaps best placed to grasp there would be ramifications to this. Many men throughout history have convinced themselves they are justified in running roughshod over the institutions of democracy because they are seeking to realize the popular will or establish justice. When you've got four or eight years to cement your life's legacy, it must be near impossible to sit idly by while your entire agenda is cynically sunk.

In Trump's case, it's unlikely he even thinks in those terms. He does what he needs to do to survive and grift a little more cash. His transgressions against democratic norms and the Constitution dwarf Obama's by many orders of magnitude. In the process, he has trampled so much of what we took for granted in our democracy that it will be hard to dig it all out of the mud and hose it off before someone else comes along to trample it all some more. One lesson of the Roman republic's fall is that politicians learn from what previous politicians did. They saw what they could get away with, and how they could do it smarter. What will the next guy have learned from what Donald Trump was able to get away with? And how primed will their supporters be by then for a new order of things, where The Leader makes policy and everyone else follows it?

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The President's Fans Think He'd 'Operate More Effectively' Without Congress or the Courts - Esquire

Ordinarily, when a television news program invites a member of Congress on to discuss public affairs, the host asks the questions and the lawmaker tries to answer them. On CNN last night, that dynamic was reversed a bit, as Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas) started asking questions, which host Chris Cuomo seemed eager to answer.

At issue was the Republican Partys ongoing support for a Russian-backed conspiracy theory that Ukraine was responsible for the attack on U.S. elections in 2016. In context, this exchange followed Cuomos explanation that GOP officials keep echoing a Kremlin disinformation message intended to undermine U.S. interests.

WEBER: Chris, was CrowdStrike involved in the DCCC hacking?

CUOMO: Yes.

WEBER: Is CrowdStrike in part owned by a Ukrainian?

CUOMO: No.

WEBER: Really?

CUOMO: Yes.

WEBER: Thats not the information that we have.

CUOMO: You have bad information.

Its a problem that Republicans are peddling crackpot conspiracy theories. Its a problem that Republicans are echoing a message concocted by the Kremlin to help Russia and hurt us.

But in a case like this, what I find especially amazing is that a GOP member of Congress, after having many months to familiarize himself with his own partys talking points, went on national television and made clear that he doesnt yet understand the basic details of his own crackpot conspiracy theory.

The truth is unambiguous and has been readily available for quite some time: CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch is a cyber and national security expert who was born in Russia and now is a U.S. citizen; he is not Ukrainian.

To the extent that reality still has meaning, it wouldnt matter of CrowdStrikes co-founder were Ukrainian. Hes not, of course, but it wouldnt matter if he were.

What matters is that Russia attacked the United States in order to help put Trump in power, and Trumps party, for reasons it hasnt fully explained, is eager to advance Moscows disinformation campaign about the attack.

And in Randy Webers case, it appears some Republicans havent yet brushed up on the most basic elements of their own nonsensical argument.

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Some Republicans struggle to understand their own conspiracy theory - MSNBC

After an Autumn of accusation and acrimony that included two damning weeks of testimony from a variety of witnesses, the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday afternoon released its report documenting the impeachment investigation into the activities of Donald Trump in Ukraine. The information contained within is intended as a baseline for the drafting of articles of impeachment against Trump, a duty that will fall upon Rep. Jerrold Nadler and the members of his House Judiciary Committee shortly.

The report coming in at 300 pages long, including 150 pages of meticulously-organized notes got directly to the point in its preface:

President Trump, personally and acting through agents within and outside of the U.S. government, solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, to benefit his reelection. The President engaged in this course of conduct for the benefit of his own presidential reelection, to harm the election prospects of a political rival, and to influence our nations upcoming presidential election to his advantage. In doing so, the President placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States, sought to undermine the integrity of the U.S. presidential election process, and endangered U.S. national security.

The report explains in ruthless detail the manner in which Trump and his various minions, including personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland, attempted to strong-arm Ukraine into doing Trumps electoral bidding. Compounding Trumps Ukraine transgressions, according to the report, have been his ceaseless attempts to obstruct the investigation, and indeed any form of oversight Congress has attempted to execute.

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The damage to our system of checks and balances, reads the report, and to the balance of power within our three branches of government, will be long-lasting and potentially irrevocable if the presidents ability to stonewall Congress goes unchecked. Any future president will feel empowered to resist an investigation into their own wrongdoing, malfeasance, or corruption, and the result will be a nation at far greater risk of all three.

Notably, the House Intelligence report does not recommend any specific articles of impeachment, though several are obliquely suggested. On Monday, The Washington Post reported that House Democrats are debating whether to add impeachment articles specifically related to Trumps obstruction of justice in the Mueller investigation or emoluments violations.

Also notable, the report does not use the word bribery, except to quote Trump and Giuliani accusations against the Bidens and the whistleblower. After weeks of deploying the Latin phrase quid pro quo to describe Trumps illegal actions in Ukraine, Democrats finally began saying bribery in connection with Trumps activities, likely because that word is specifically mentioned in the Constitution as an impeachable offense. The absence of such pointedly specific language in this report is disquieting if it signals a rhetorical retreat by Democrats, but such concerns will be forestalled if that language eventually appears in the articles of impeachment themselves.

The House Intelligence Committee report is a strong document, but it is difficult to imagine how it could be otherwise. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff did a masterful job of managing the public testimony of key witnesses like U.S. envoy to Ukraine William Taylor, Ukraine expert Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and National Security Council Eastern Europe specialist Fiona Hill, in the face of balderdash eruptions from the likes of Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan. The report is the issue of that endeavor, and stands as a pivot point for the next phase of impeachment proceedings.

The day before the release of the House Intelligence Committee report, Republicans attempted to blot out the sun with a multiple-megaton manure bomb they passed off as their own impeachment hearings report. This 110-page ball of sweaty drivel is the culmination of years of Breitbart-bubble GOP conspiracy-mongering.

Publicly available and irrefutable evidence shows how senior Ukrainian government officials sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election in opposition to President Trumps candidacy, reads the Republican rebuttal report, and that some in the Ukrainian embassy in Washington worked with a Democrat operative to achieve that goal.

Its the dramatic insertion of irrefutable that makes this art; the addled accusation that Ukraine attempted to thwart Trumps election in 2016 has been debunked more times than the Flat Earth theory. It is laughable on its face; more than anything else, Ukraine needs to keep its relationship with the U.S. thoroughly bipartisan if it wishes to survive a Russian aggression campaign that has already captured Crimea. If Ukraine sticks a toe into the fractious waters of U.S. election politics, like as not theyd lose the whole leg.

The GOPs blatherskite-riddled report is a triumph of noise over substance. It should be carved word for word on the tombstone of the Republican Party if and when that bat belfry of an organization finally collapses under the weight of its own well-heeled inadequacies.

The worst part? Republicans know their report is a raft of lies, specifically about Ukraine election interference The GOP-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee has said so in broad daylight but Trumps defenders will fountain its gibberish to all points on the compass regardless, because they are playing to an audience of one. As the Eagles foretold, they are all but prisoners here, of their own device.

The impeachment train has a few more stops to make before it reaches a trial in the Senate. The House Judiciary Committee, which currently endures a platoon of GOP nonsense-mongers like Reps. Doug Collins, Louie Gohmert, Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs and Jim Jordan, is set to become a deliberately disrupted shitshow of historic proportions.

When the smoke clears, the committees Democratic majority will present articles of impeachment for a vote. Like as not, those articles will be approved by the committee. After that, a full vote of the House on those articles will come. Almost certain to break along party lines, the Democratic House majority will carry the day, and Donald Trump will officially be impeached at which point, the show moves to the Senate domain of Mitch McConnell for a trial to decide whether Trump will be removed from office.

I am, of course, not sanguine about the final outcome. Impeachment is a political exercise, and Trump has Senate Republicans wrapped so tightly around his finger that his fingernail is turning blue. All that, however, is for a day yet to come. The case for impeachment has been made beyond question or doubt, and the House Intelligence Committee report is the sum and substance of the argument for Trumps ultimate removal. It is a document of historic merit.

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Republicans' Alternative Report Does Nothing to Refute Impeachment Report - Truthout

This years elections to determine who represents you in the New Jersey Legislature saw the lowest amount of spending in a decade for state legislative races, a new report shows.

And while Democrats shelled out three times as much cash, Republicans ended up gaining seats for the first time in 10 years.

Candidates and outside groups spent nearly $25 million on the races, the lowest price tag on a legislative election since 2009, according to preliminary numbers released Tuesday by the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission.

On the ballot were a special state Senate seat in South Jerseys 1st District and all 80 seats in the state Assembly.

Its a significant decrease from 2017s pricey legislative election the most expensive in the states history which saw a total of more than $67 million in spending, according to ELEC. That year featured all 120 legislative seats, including the entire Senate, in which the chambers president, Stephen Sweeney, fought to keep his seat. And it was a gubernatorial election year.

But this years races were more low-key, with the Assembly, the Legislatures lower house, topping the ticket.

Outside groups funneled in more than $5.8 million, down from $23 million in 2017 and about half of what was spent in 2015 at $10.9 million, ELEC reported.

Nearly half of that came from General Majority PAC, a political group tied to Democrats, which spent about $2.7 million, according to ELEC. Democratic power broker George Norcross has significant ties to its backers and the candidates it supports. It was also a top spender in 2017, 2015 and 2013, ELEC determined.

This years election was the most low-key legislative race in a decade, said Jeff Brindle, ELECs executive director. It followed one of the most controversial, expensive legislative races in history in 2017. Maybe campaign donors needed a break.

He noted that parties and independent groups may be saving their money for next years presidential election and campaigns to fill 12 state congressional seats.

Democrats spending blew other parties out of the water at more than $4 million. Republicans spent less than $1 million, and a mere $800,000 came from other party affiliations, according to ELEC.

Still, Democrats lost three legislative seats the Senate seat and both Assembly seats in the 1st District. But they will still hold sizable control both chambers come January, when the new lawmakers are sworn in.

Swing districts that can go to either party saw the most spending, and more than 60 percent of spending went to the top ten districts. More than $2 million was poured into each of the 1st, 21st and 8th legislative district races.

Nearly $3 million went into South Jerseys 1st district, which flipped its Senate seat from blue to red when Republican Mike Testa defeated Democratic incumbent Bob Andrzejczak. The election was to fill the seat vacated by Democrat Jeff Van Drew, who moved up to the U.S. House of Representatives last year.

North Jerseys 21st district had the second-largest amount at $2.7 million, where Assembly Minority Leader Jon Bramnick fended off Democratic and independent challengers. It was the most expensive Assembly-only election, according to ELEC.

And the 8th district held onto by incumbent Republican Ryan Peters and his new running mate, former Burlington County Sheriff Jean Stanfield saw $2.1 million in spending.

The races in the 8th and 21st districts ranked as the fifth and tenth most expensive Assembly-only elections respectively, in state history, based on numbers adjusted for inflation, ELEC reported.

NJ Advance Media staff writer Brent Johnson contributed to this report.

Sophie Nieto-Munoz may be reached at snietomunoz@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her at @snietomunoz. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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N.J. Dems spent 3 times more than Republicans on state elections. But they lost seats. - NJ.com