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Democrats are “abandoning more than a century’s worth of precedent and tradition in impeachment proceedings and denying President Trump basic fairness and due process accorded every American.”

When Republicans barged into the secure room where the inquiry was being conducted Wednesday to decry the process, they not only violated House rules but delayed a deposition from Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Laura Cooper by over five hours.

Rep. Mark Meadows, an ally of the President and leader of the Freedom Caucus that met with Trump before Wednesday’s slow-motion basement raid that Trump loved, told TIME. “If you focus on communication and not process you’re focusing on the wrong thing.”

“Witnesses are now coming forward to testify under oath and providing devastating testimony about the corruption of this President and I think this was part of the effort to stop the process,

Once all of the information is publicized, the GOP will be forced to come up with a new line of defense

Graham evaded the question and pivoted back to the argument that Democrats are selectively leaking from the depositions to undermine Trump’s poll numbers.

Part of the reason Republicans may continue to struggle is not only because of the facts that could emerge, but because of a lack of strategy at the White House.

McConnell and his leadership team are preaching unity in the face of Democrats’ incoming fire

Nine incumbent Republican Senators declined to become a co-sponsor of Graham’s measure

It’s not that those nine support impeaching and removing Trump, or alone are sufficient to band with Democrats. Instead, they represent a sense in the Senate that they should know if the President is abusing his power, regardless of his political affiliation. The pursuit of that fact, in the end, may be what keeps the process on track.

the Trump administration is considering leaving some U.S. troops in Syria — after saying an end must come to “endless wars” in the Middle East.

it would be the second time he has reversed course on pulling all U.S. troops out of the region in less than a year,” per NBC News.

“Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be putting out a plan that talks specifically about the cost of Medicare for All, and how we can pay for it,” Warren said, per NBC’s Benjamin Pu.

“This much I promise to you, I will not sign a bill into law that does not reduce the cost of health care for middle class families.”

“It was not a party of privilege or white supremacy. Those dubious honors belonged to the Democratic Party,” he said, which remained predominantly in the Southern states until the 1960s civil rights movement, when a major political realignment occurred.

Six weeks before his death, Lincoln addressed a crowd outside the Capitol, prepared to begin his second term in office. The country was emerging from the worst crisis in American history — a war that had killed hundreds of thousands and divided the North and South.He concluded the address, saying: “With malice toward none, with charity for all.”

In that polarized moment, Holzer said, Lincoln didn’t blame fake news and enemies of the people. He emphasized humility, talked openly about his flaws and used a brilliance of language not to punish and humiliate but to inspire.

Parnas told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Wednesday that the aim of the Ukraine effort was "all about 2020" and not about working in the interest of the United States. The revelation directly contradicts previous White House claims that overtures made by Trump and his allies to Ukraine were about rooting out corruption and not furthering his 2020 prospects.

Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who has made a big production of advocating for witnesses at the Senate trial, wasn't that interested in the new information provided by Parnas.Speaking to CNN's Phil Mattingly, she threw cold water on the new Parnas evidence."I wonder why the House did not put that into the record and it's only now being revealed," she said.After it was pointed out the documents were only just turned over to the House, she said, "Well doesn't that suggest that the House did an incomplete job then?"

The Senate has drafted a document on decorum guidelines for the impeachment trial, including rules senators — who will be serving as jurors — must follow.

Not impressed by this impeachment or this President is former Rep. Chris Cannon, who is no longer in office and therefore a little more free to speak his mind. He was one of the Republican House managers during the Clinton impeachment.

Democrats would have to sweep both races to draw the chamber to a tie and effectively take control when Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, who would cast tiebreaking votes when needed, is sworn in with Mr. Biden on Jan. 20.

Trump instructed his supporters to march to the Capitol — “and I’ll be there with you” — to “demand that Congress do the right thing” and not count the electoral votes of swing states he lost. “You’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong,” he admonished them, with CYA instructions to make themselves heard “peacefully and patriotically.”

While at least 140 House Republicans are expected to join their Republican colleagues in the Senate in voting against counting the electoral votes in Congress

Last week, Sen. Josh Hawley became the first senator to announce plans to object to the results -- a significant move since both a House member and senator are required to mount an objection when Congress counts the electoral votes.

For every state that Hawley objects to, the House and Senate much each debate separately for two hours and hold a vote.

while Hawley and Trump are speaking regularly, given their close relationship, Hawley has also heard from members of Trump's campaign team.

None of the challenges will change the fact that Biden will be the next president of the United States, and multiple courts have thrown out challenges to the election

But after the Capitol breach on Wednesday that left at least five people dead, Mr. Pence’s decision was expected.

Republican incumbents are straining for survival from New England to the Deep South, in the heartland and the West and even Alaska.

With the chamber now split, 53-47, three or four seats will determine Senate control, depending on which party wins the White House.

What started as a lopsided election cycle with Republicans defending 23 seats, compared with 12 for Democrats, quickly became a more stark referendum on the president as Democrats reached deeper into Trump country and put the GOP on defense.

Suddenly some of the nation’s better-known senators — Lindsey Graham in South Carolina, Susan Collins in Maine — faced strong reelection threats.

Only two Democratic seats are being seriously contested, while at least 10 GOP-held seats are at risk.

Felkel added: “You’d be hard pressed to admit we don’t have a Trump problem.”

The political landscape is quickly changing from six years ago when most of these senators last faced voters. It’s a reminder of how sharp the national mood has shifted in the Trump era.

Younger voters and more minorities are pushing some states toward Democrats, including in Colorado, where the parties have essentially stopped spending money for or against GOP Sen. Cory Gardner because it seems he is heading toward defeat by Democrat John Hickenlooper, a former governor.

GOP senators must balance an appeal to Trump’s most ardent supporters with outreach to voters largely in suburbs who are drifting away from the president and his tone .

Arizona could see two Democratic senators for the first time since last century if former astronaut Mark Kelly maintains his advantage over GOP Sen. Martha McSally for the seat held by the late Republican John McCain.

In Georgia, Trump calls David Perdue his favorite senator among the many who have jockeyed to join his golf outings and receive his private phone calls. But the first-term senator faces a surge of new voters in the state and Democrat Jon Ossoff is playing hardball.

Ossoff called Pedue a “crook” over the senator’s stock trades during the pandemic. Perdue shot back that the Ossoff would do anything to mislead Georgians about Democrats’ “radical and socialist” agenda.

Democrats have tapped into what some are calling a “green wave” — a new era of fundraising —

Competitive races are underway in Republican strongholds of Texas, Kansas and Alaska where little known Al Gross broke state records, Democrats said, in part with viral ads introducing voters to the military-veteran-turned-doctor who once fought off a grizzly bear.

The COVID crisis has shadowed the Senate races as Democrats linked Trump’s handling of the pandemic to the GOP’s repeated attempts to undo the Obama-era Affordable Care Act, particularly its insurance protections for those with preexisting medical conditions.

“In more places in the country than not, the president is not getting good marks” on that, Flaherty said, and it’s damaging Senate GOP candidates, “especially those in lockstep with the president.”

And the same algorithm that picks your next dance video could, in the future, pick a political video. (There is already more than a whiff of political content on the app.)

Trump has achieved his objective: preventing Chinese engineers, perhaps under the influence of the state, from manipulating the code in ways that could censor, or manipulate, what American users see.

Attorney General William P. Barr has already called for greater scrutiny — and perhaps abolition — of any such app that does not allow the United States a legal “back door.”

defeats the original intent of the internet. And that was to create a global communications network, unrestrained by national borders.

But the thin agenda also underscored how thoroughly congressional Republicans have transformed themselves in the age of Mr. Trump even from the recent days when, under Speaker Paul D. Ryan, they prided themselves on being the intellectual engine of their party.

Four years into his presidency, the party has followed his lead and shied away from stances on the nation’s biggest, most intractable problems, like how to fix a broken health care system or address the ballooning national debt, that were once considered Republican orthodoxy.

Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming — the party’s highest-ranking woman, who has made a point of separating herself from some of Mr. Trump’s policies and is widely considered to be jockeying for a top leadership position beyond his presidency — spent most of her time blaming Democrats for forest fires raging across the West and the fires set by mobs in America’s cities.

“Every day you see the damage of years of Democrat policies,” Ms. Cheney said. She had little to say about Republican alternatives.

“A lot of this document can be summarized by saying, ‘Let’s delete the last seven months in our country,’ because Republicans were certainly, at least from an economic perspective, feeling bullish about their chances this year,”

The fact that Republicans in the House felt a need to produce their own platform at all, in a presidential election year when the top of the ticket typically sets the agenda, underscores the party’s unique predicament under Mr. Trump, a leader who has never been guided by much of a policy vision.

“Trump is talking about fake news, rigged elections, players kneeling, ‘Sleepy Joe,’ Antifa invasions and whether dead soldiers are losers,” said Brendan Buck, a former top aide to Mr. Ryan. “Whatever policy he’s ostensibly for, he’s not running on an agenda. And for House members in marginal districts, you need more than the stream of consciousness that he’s offering every day.”

I wasn’t convinced. It might be evidence of racism, or it could be that when people kill others of their same race, they are more likely to know them. These could be crimes of passion and therefore less likely to draw the death penalty. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 2001 and 2005, nearly 78 percent of blacks were murdered by other blacks, and nearly 70 percent of whites were killed by other whites. According to BJS data tracking victims and offenders, blacks were responsible for nearly 22 percent of violent offenses in 2018, though they represented only 12 percent of the population.

I think of the testimony of black men that they are routinely pulled over and hassled for “driving while black.” Is that their imagination? Are they exaggerating? Is former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele not to be credited when he reports how frequently he’s been pulled over?

Can we dismiss Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who recalls a meeting at which one man after another recounted his experiences of being stopped by police, only to reveal that it was a conference of black physicists? What about Senator Tim Scott? He was stopped seven times in one year driving in his own neighborhood. He was detained by a security guard on Capitol Hill though he was wearing his member’s pin. When he gestured to it, the officer said “The pin I know – you I don’t.”

A study looked at 95 million traffic stops by 56 different police agencies between 2011 and 2018. They found that blacks were far more likely than whites to be pulled over – but the disparity declined at night, when it’s harder to detect the race of the driver.

A 2019 Los Angeles Times report found that 24 percent of black drivers were searched, compared with 16 percent of Latinos, and 5 percent of whites, yet contraband was more commonly found among whites.

A study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in February, 2020 looked at responses to 2 million 911 calls in two cities. It found that white officers were five times as likely to use force, including deadly force, in minority neighborhoods as African American officers.

I’ve come to believe that mistreatment of African Americans is not a myth and is not even uncommon. I’m glad that so many white and other Americans, by marching with their black fellow citizens, and by what they tell pollsters, are signaling their dismay at these outcomes. People’s minds can change. Mine did.

The second trial of Mr. Trump opened in the crime scene itself, the same chamber occupied on Jan. 6 by the mob that forced senators to evacuate in the middle of counting the Electoral College votes ratifying President Biden’s victory.

In appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” Mr. Cassidy said of the former president, “I think his force wanes,” and contended that more Republicans would come around in time to sharing his view of Mr. Trump’s guilt for the attack on the Capitol.

Many Republican voters still see Mr. Trump as the leader of the party; some senators see Mr. McConnell as the de facto leader, given his standing in the Senate and his ties to party donors.

Mr. Graham, for his part, suggested that it was Mr. McConnell, not Mr. Trump, who could face an uncertain future if Republican candidates suffer in 2022, noting Mr. McConnell’s speech criticizing the former president.

McConnell rebuked Trump for his actions after the insurrection as well.

But McConnell said that the process of impeachment and conviction is a "limited tool" and that he believes Trump is not "constitutionally eligible for conviction."

"The Constitution gives us a particular role. This body is not invited to act as the nation's overarching moral tribunal," he said.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer acknowledged the group in separate remarks after the vote, saying, "I salute those Republican patriots who did the right thing. It wasn't easy. We know that."

The New York Democrat called Trump's actions on Jan. 6 a "textbook example" of an impeachable offense.

“I think the policy was shameful,” Judge Garland said. “I can’t imagine anything worse than separating parents from their children. And we will provide all of the cooperation that we possibly can.”

Progressives have pushed local governments to “defund” their police departments after killings and assaults on Black people by officers. Judge Garland said that, like President Biden, he does not “support defunding the police.”

From 2008 to 2012, she served as ambassador to Liberia, before moving on to become the director general of the Foreign Service for about a year.

“If you look at what I have done prior to that,” she said, “there is no question that I am not at all naïve about what the Chinese are doing and I have called them out on a regular basis,” which included her sharp criticism of China at other points in the hearing.

an optimistic speech she had given in October 2019 on Africa’s relationship with both China and the United States.

The speech conspicuously lacked criticism of China’s human-rights record or pattern of predatory-lending practices in developing countries desperate for investment.

Despite the warm response Ms. Thomas-Greenfield’s nomination received from diplomats and former State Department officials, Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill showed some concern.

Aside from China, Ms. Thomas-Greenfield will have to more broadly strengthen America’s presence at the United Nations, which was scaled back as the Trump administration pursued an “America First” style of diplomacy that devalued multilateral institutions.

Wilson was raised in Augusta, Georgia during the Civil War, the son of Joseph Ruggles Wilson, leading light of the Presbyterian Church of the Confederacy who made his name through the publication of his popular sermon arguing for the Biblical sanction of slavery.

Wilson’s father enrolled him at another Presbyterian, Southern-friendly college in Princeton, New Jersey which, unlike Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, or Brown, refused to admit African-Americans. Two thirds of Princeton’s students came from the former Confederacy, but Wilson was confronted with non-Southerners for the first time, an experience that bolstered his reactionary politics and Southern identity. He took up the secessionist side in debates with classmates, and nearly came to blows with some Northern students during the contested 1876 election.

He condemned Reconstruction — the effort to enforce the civil and political emancipation of African-Americans in the occupied South — and said allowing Blacks to vote was a “carnival of public crime.”

The mass slaughter of Black people by white terrorists in Hamburg, Vicksburg, Colfax, New Orleans and other cities went unmentioned, as did attacks occurring in dozens of South Carolina towns right under Wilson’s nose the whole time he was coming of age.

“A History of the American People,” a poorly written and shoddily researched five-volume, illustrated tome published in 1902.

It furthered the white supremacist arguments in “Division and Reunion,” calling freed slaves “dupes” and the KKK a group formed “for the mere pleasure of association [and] private amusement” whose members accidentally discovered they could create “comic fear” in the Blacks they descended on. Immigrants were a problem because they were no longer “of the sturdy stocks of the North of Europe” but contained “multitudes of men of the lowest classes from the South of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland” and Chinese people, “with their yellow skin and strange, debasing habits of life,” who seemed “hardly fellow men at all, but evil spirits” and who provoked understandable mass killings by white mobs.

Wilson won the 1912 election with less than 42 percent of the vote, becoming the first Deep Southerner to hold the presidency.

It’s said that the South lost the war, but won the peace, but it was Wilson’s presidency that sealed the victory. Wilson presided over the segregation of the federal government, with Black civil servants directed to use only certain bathrooms and to eat their lunches there too so as to not sully the cafeterias

The president famously ejected Black civil rights leader William Monroe Trotter from the Oval Office for having temerity to tell him that his delegation came to him not as “wards” but as “full-fledged American citizens” demanding equality of citizenship.

Threatened with bankruptcy, Dixon turned to his old friend to intervene. Wilson screened the film in the White House for his Cabinet, and the following day Supreme Court Justice Edward Douglass White — whose statues in Louisiana and the U.S. Capitol are also subject of current protests — agreed to show it to the other justices and congressional leaders because he himself had been in the Klan and loved the film’s message. These tacit endorsements from the highest levels of power turned the tide and the film went on to be a massive financial success and was until very recently celebrated as a great work of art.

his plans for the world order presided over by the League of Nations paralleled his vision of the United States. He promoted the principles of democracy and national self-determination, but only for European nations and Anglo-Saxon settler countries like the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Czechs, Romanians, and Serbs deserved their own national states, African, Arab, Indian, and Pacific Island peoples did not

Japan, an allied power in the war, introduced a measure to include the principle of racial equality in the League’s mandate. Wilson opposed it because it would have compelled the U.S. to ensure equal treatment to Japanese, Haitian, or Liberian citizens in hotels, restaurants, and transport across the Jim Crow South. The measure passed anyway, 11-5, but Wilson, who chaired the proceedings, unilaterally and arbitrarily declared the measure had failed because it was not unanimous

Throughout Lincoln’s rise in 1860, the South watched in horror as this unlikely candidate grew in stature. He gave no serious speeches after his nomination, but he did not need to, as the Buchanan administration began to collapse under the weight of its incompetence and greed. It was not simply that a rising number of Americans were tired of propping up slavery, as the Democratic Party had been doing for decades.

Lincoln rejected that pay-to-play culture. He lived abstemiously and spoke modestly, rarely using the first person. He opposed the expansion of slavery and disapproved of plans to seize Cuba and Northern Mexico to groom pro-Southern states. He was sympathetic to immigrants and to the idea that America should stand for a set of principles, as a kind of beacon in an amoral world. He admired the Declaration of Independence, with its promise of equal rights for all.

For all of these reasons, Lincoln posed a lethal threat to the status quo.

That all would change if Lincoln were elected, as Southern leaders understood. Accordingly, they devoted their considerable resources to gaming the system, through a campaign of false personal attacks, physical intimidation and ballot manipulation

It still took some doing to launch the Lincoln administration, and the president-elect had to survive a serious assassination conspiracy on his way to Washington.

As the campaign wore on, the South realized that other means of persuasion were required. In Baltimore and Washington, mobs broke up Republican offices, shot off guns and desecrated images of Lincoln. His name was not even permitted on the ballot in 10 Southern states — a fact that was held against him, as if he were a “sectional” candidate. In border states, as well, voters were intimidated: In the state of his birth, Kentucky, Lincoln received only 1,364 votes.

But violence was no laughing matter, and Lincoln’s life was in danger from the moment he was nominated. A Virginia congressman, Roger Pryor, was quoted in The New York Herald as saying that “if Lincoln is elected we will go to Washington and assassinate him before his inauguration.”

Many were beginning to understand that the South’s ideas about democracy were as peculiar as its institutions. South Carolina still did not allow its citizens to vote for president, and in 1864 Jefferson Davis confirmed in an interview in this newspaper, “We seceded to rid ourselves of the rule of the majority.”

On Nov. 6, Lincoln was duly elected. But his percentage of the popular vote was very small (39.8 percent)

That led to a new kind of challenge, to build legitimacy, as Washington seethed over the result and pro-slavery thugs promised to prevent Lincoln’s arrival. Some threatened to turn the Capitol into “a heap of ashes.” In Southern cities, gun-toting militias quickly formed, some parading under the Gadsden Flag and its motto, “Don’t Tread on Me.”

Racial innuendo was a constant in these ugly attacks. Readers were breathlessly informed that Lincoln and his running mate, Hannibal Hamlin, were secretly mulatto, and The New York Herald promised that if Lincoln won, “hundreds of thousands” of slaves would invade the North, to consummate “African amalgamation with the fair daughters of the Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Teutonic races.”

Lincoln will remain our greatest president, for his own reasons — the bold actions and the calming words. But he also sits atop our pantheon because this champion of democracy came along at the exact moment when it was most endangered and reminded Americans that a higher standard was possible.

The Supreme Court on Friday rejected a desperate 11th-hour effort by Trump allies to change the outcome of the election, the latest in a string of stinging legal defeats.

From protests outside the voting sites to livestreamed broadcasts of the activities inside the rooms, electors, state officials and party leaders are bracing for an extraordinary onslaught of attention.

Even as the electors prepared to vote on Monday, Mr. Trump on Sunday railed on Twitter against the “MOST CORRUPT ELECTION IN U.S. HISTORY” and suggested that swing states could not certify “without committing a severely punishable crime” — further raising concerns about electors’ personal security.

Even some Republicans who are more willing to acknowledge electoral reality seem unable to completely give up hope.

A broader effort to persuade Republican-controlled state legislatures to swap out Democratic electors for a slate loyal to Mr. Trump has also failed.

For Democrats, the Electoral College vote will be the final affirmation of defeat for a president they believe has undermined the foundation of the country’s political system.

Enshrined in the Constitution, electors are called into action weeks after an election is over.

As a result, more than half of the states plan to livestream their events, to provide transparency and pre-empt some of the conspiratorial thinking that many state officials anticipate will follow their events.

After the electors cast their ballots, the votes are counted and the electors sign certificates showing the results.

Still, none of that, he said, overshadowed how “exhilarating and humbling” it is to be one of the 16 Democratic electors, the first in Georgia in nearly three decades, the last time a Democrat won the state.

A Wisconsin elector, State Representative Shelia Stubbs of Madison, said she cried with joy after being named an elector this year.