Republicans HIDING!, Is Donald Trump Too Incapacitated to Be President?

Republicans clearly see the FALLOUT from this failed pResident, the crime and corruption surrounding, their participation and knowledge, their attempts to sabotage and cover-up. 

The rest of the World clearly sees even if Americans are too blind. 

The US is marching toward IMPEACHMENT, a sad and divisive process. 


Sad for my country! Sad for what Republicans have done to their Party and the Nation.  

Is Donald Trump Too Incapacitated to Be President?

Not in this America.

By Dahlia Lithwick

The most practical problem with the 25th Amendment option is that it won’t happen.

Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photos by Ron Sachs-Pool/Getty Images and Thinkstock.

Ever since Donald Trump landed in the Oval Office, millions of us have been obsessing on how to get him out. For many, the question has been not justif, but how and how soon. Will impeachment happen? Could Trump simply admit defeat and stand down? Or could proving his mental incompetence to be president force his hand?

The last option has gained traction in the past few days, perhaps because it is increasingly obvious to anyone following the news that Congress has no stomach for impeachment, and also that the president is demonstrably not up to the job. Trump’s missteps have more frequently revealed themselves to be blunders of incompetence rather than blunders of malice (though they can often be both). It’s become standard for reports coming from the inside of the White House to acknowledge, slyly at first but now overtly, that Trump is in constant need of managing. He believes false reports and refuses to read truthful ones. He lashes out at anyone who hasn’t lied for him adequately. There are now entire reports devoted to his rage, his anger, his madness and his inability to accept responsibility.

Thus, my mailbox is brimming with petitions and inquiries from the 25thAmendment Hopefuls; the folks who believe Trump’s recent behaviors might trigger Article 4 of the 25th Amendment, which provides that:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

An increasingly vocal pool of 25th Amendment aspirants have begun to contend it is in fact possible that the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet could simply notify Congress that the president is unable to “discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Even before the calamities of this past week, the idea gained traction following Evan Osnos’ expansive reporting in the New Yorker from early May on the possibility of the 25th Amendment as a vehicle for Trump’s removal. As Osnos explained, after the Kennedy assassination, the worry arose that a president could be incapacitated but not dead, and the Constitution afforded no remedy:

[T]he Twenty-fifth Amendment was added to the Constitution in February 1967. Under Section 4, a President can be removed if he is judged to be ‘unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.’ The assessment can be made either by the Vice-President and a majority of the Cabinet secretaries or by a congressionally appointed body, such as a panel of medical experts. If the President objects—a theoretical crisis that scholars call “contested removal”—Congress has three weeks to debate and decide the issue. A two-thirds majority in each chamber is required to remove the President. There is no appeal.

As Osnos goes on to detail, however, part of the reason the 25th Amendment has never been used to remove a sitting president is that the inquiry requires assessments of presidential incapacity and mental illness that mental health experts generally want no part of, and politicians are reluctant to engage in. Almost to a one, the constitutional experts I contacted about all this confirmed that removal under Article 4 of the 25th Amendment happens only in political thrillers because back here in the real world, there will never be the political will to do it.*

The most practical problem with the 25th Amendment option is that it won’t happen. The selfsame Cabinet and vice president tasked with assessing the president are still enabling him. That’s how you get lines like the closer of this New York Times’ piece assessing the president’s alleged blurting of classified intelligence reports to Russian officials: Three administration officials privately reported “that they could not publicly articulate their most compelling—and honest—defense of the president: that Mr. Trump, a hasty and indifferent reader of printed briefing materials, simply did not possess the interest or knowledge of the granular details of intelligence gathering to leak specific sources and methods of intelligence gathering that would do harm to United States allies.”

Put more simply, these officials know the president didn’t leak anything of deep and granular significance with respect to sources and methods because he doesn’t read or comprehend well enough to understand them. It’s the kind of detail that is worth its own story.

For the 25th Amendment aspirants, it’s also proof of the validity of their cause—after all, even the people on Trump’s side see his incompetence. Unfortunately, they also still work for him. They’re not going to fire him: They know he’s simply a useful stooge (though his level of usefulness depends on the time of day, they’re realizing).

Donald Trump isn’t the disease that plagues modern America, he’s the symptom.

That’s the problem with tilting at the 25thAmendment windmill—the people who would need to trigger it won’t. Invoking it would not only require the moral backbone they clearly lack, it would also implicate the same people who benefit from Trump’s deficiencies. As Jennifer Rubin notes in the Washington Post, Donald Trump’s possible future mental health diagnosis is not the issue. His current mental state is, and the people who might do something about it spend every day defending it.

Moreover, so many of the Cabinet officials who might rightly affirm that Trump is unable to discharge his duties are similarly unable to discharge their own. Trump’s chief infirmity—the vanity, wealth, and self-regard that was mistakenly confused with effective leadership—is actually shared by the vast majority of his Cabinet, most of whom—in the manner of any individual Kardashian—seem to prize money and power more than they prize governance or democracy. For instance, it’s abundantly clear that neither Betsy DeVos nor Ben Carson are fit to execute their own Cabinet positions. Are they also to be summarily removed? Jeff Sessions has gone along with the worst of Trump’s plans, drafting the legal justification for the stalled-out Muslim ban. If we can see clearly enough to judge Trump unfit, surely Sessions is as well.

We already know that the people with the power to stop Trump—the Republicans in the House and Senate who declare themselves “troubled” and “concerned” by his actions—are so hell-bent on destroying the regulatory state, harming the weak, imposing Christianity on nonbelievers, and giving tax breaks to the wealthy that Trump’s fitness raises no alarms. Unfortunately, that isn’t a DSM-IV level diagnosable pathology. It’s what we call conservatism in America.

So it is essentially guaranteed that the 25th Amendment will not be invoked. And here’s the kicker: It shouldn’t be. Disturbing and shattering as it is that the president cannot read and understand classified security briefings, it does not make him mentally ill. It makes him exactly what many Americans voted for: an incurious self-obsessed man with a middling mind who happened to reach great heights thanks to a perfect storm of privilege, cheating and fame. He isn’t necessarily unfit or unwell, he is the same Donald Trump who won the Oval Office on the unspoken proposition that anyone could do it.

But what of the genuine claims by genuine mental health experts that the president suffers from narcissistic personality disorder or dementia or some other diagnosable form of mental illness? Advocates of this theory point to his short attention span, his incapacity for empathy, his narcissism, and solipsism as evidence. Some mental health professionals agree—a group of psychologists at Yale recently meet to assess their obligation in warning of the president’s diminished mental capacity. But more and more I balk at my own deployment of the word “crazy” to describe him or his daily actions. It does violence to those who are genuinely mentally ill.

The most useful rebuttal of the idea that Trump’s problem is that he is ill comes from the leading expert on narcissistic personality disorder, the affliction most employed to categorize Trump’s deficiencies. In response to the chorus of suggestions, Allen Frances clarified in February in the New York Times why the president does not suffer from NPD. It’s pretty simple. “Trump causes severe distress, rather than experiencing it,” he wrote.

Assessments of Trump’s mental state since Frances’ record-straightening have thus struck upon the more provable cause of the president’s lack of ability: Trump is not mentally ill, per se, but he does seem to suffer from a curiously underdeveloped brain. The extreme privilege he has been afforded throughout his life have made it possible for him to function despite these deficiencies, but now, in the Oval Office, they’ve become impossible to mask. Earlier this week, in “When the World Is Led by a Child,” David Brooks argued that “at base, Trump is an infantalist.”

His fellow New York Times columnist Ross Douthat went further, agreeing the next day that this child brain is sufficient to trigger a constitutional remedy. In penning “The 25th Amendment Solution to Remove Trump,” Douthat carefully avoided calling Trump mentally ill, but instead stated that he is “seemingly deficient” in all the traits one needs to successfully execute the presidency. “Some he perhaps never had, others have presumably atrophied with age,” he suggested.

What Douthat is acknowledging isn’t the kind of sudden onset mental incapacity or illness the drafters of the 25th Amendment feared. He is instead describing buyer’s remorse, for which there is, sadly, no constitutional or legal fix. This is a political problem, and given that we live in a democracy, it is for politics and not armchair diagnoses to remedy. That is why Jimmy Carter’s attempt to require a medical panel in any 25th Amendment determinations fell apart. It’s for Republican leadership to diagnose and treat Trump’s competency problems, not psychologists.

Finally there is this: Invoking the 25th Amendment undermines and devalues the seriousness of the genuine mental health crisis that the nation is currently facing. This solution presupposes that by deeming Trump mentally unfit to be president, the virus that allowed the GOP to put us into this situation would be isolated, contained and eliminated. It elides the fact that the virus itself has not only chosen to put him into office, but that now—faced with near-hourly evidence of incompetence—the virus continues to defend his presence there. It elides the fact that those who loved Trump are actually rejoicing in seeing him ritually perform all of the values on which he ran—his outsiderness, his contempt for compassion, institutions and expertise, his abhorrence of political correctness, and political solutions. It ignores that Trump’s self-satisfied Electoral College achievement actually reflected the triumph of that which a good part of America holds dear: the hollow fame, money, and power he embodies.

Putting Trump’s qualities that render him unfit for office into a category of pathology or medicalized diagnosis is not the way to solve the problem. Let’s stop calling it a disability and call it what it is: What we are now. That American exceptionalism came to be represented by fact-free-apology-free table-toppling melodrama instead of sane and sober governance means that Donald Trump isn’t the disease that plagues modern America, he’s the symptom. Arguing that ritual acting out of these qualities makes him too mentally infirm to execute the office of the president only allows him to become the ultimate victim of his own toxic reality show. It would also allow the people who might theoretically gather together to oust him to absolve themselves for their complicity in colluding with and covering for him. Removing Trump from office on a mental health pretext will not fix America—it will merely allow the people who put him there to receive accolades for having finally done the right thing.

Instead of waiting around for the Impeachment Fairy to leave a new president under our pillows or for her cousin, the Incapacity Gnome, to remove a man who is precisely as sick as America needed him to be, the millions of people who find Trump terrifyingly unfit and unwell need to work on political solutions: on gerrymandered districts, voter suppression, infighting, cynicism, and messaging. That isn’t the stuff of the 25th Amendment but it is very much the project of constitutional democracy. For Democrats to sit around and hope that Trump’s own Cabinet or large majorities in Congress might decide that today’s presidential incompetence will be the straw that breaks that camel’s back? That’s magical thinking, reality-show thinking. And as much as this current presidency has made the office resemble one, quick fixes won’t get us anywhere. Donald Trump wasn’t too incapacitated to win the presidency. That is the problem we need to fix.

*Update, May 17, 2017, 7:35 p.m. EDT: This sentence was updated to clarify the language of removing the president under the 25th Amendment. 

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/05/no_the_25th_amendment_is_not_the_solution.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_fb_top

HAPPENING NOW: Republicans Staging the Most Cowardly Political Stunt in American History

By Paula Kennedy

Republicans in Washington D.C. are hanging their heads in shame tonight following President Donald Trump’s latest scandal.

In a shocking display of cowardice, every single Republican lawmaker reached by Fox News declined to go on air for an interview on Tuesday evening. Fox News is famous for going easy on GOP politicians, so it is extremely telling that Republicans are now even refusing to do interviews with the station.

“We’ve tried tonight to get Republicans to come out and talk to us, and there are not Republicans willing to go on camera tonight as of yet, and we’ll see if that changes” Fox News host Bret Baier said during his TV broadcast on Tuesday evening.

Fox News host Bret Baier shared Tuesday there weren’t “any Republicans willing to go on camera” in the wake of a New York Times story that reported President Trump had asked former FBI Director James Comey to end an investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

… Regular panelist Charles Krauthammer found it “stunning” Republicans wouldn’t defend the president.

“What I think is really stunning is that nobody, not even from the White House, has come out under their own name in defense of the president here,” Krauthammer said.

“We don’t see any Republicans on camera,” he continued. “And that is totally understandable. They’ve just watched over the last ten days, people who went out on a limb on the Comey firing, and said it was the result of the memo from the deputy Attorney General, and had they’re limb sawed off by Donald Trump himself without a flinch.”

“So who is going to step out now and defend the president in these denials?” Krauthammer asked.

The panel portion of “Special Report” usually runs during the final 25 minutes of the program, but was featured for the full hour to discuss the breaking news around the Comey memo.

The apparent cause for the Republicans’ hiding is the bombshell report about Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey. Nobody from the part is brave enough to go on national television and answer questions about their embarrassing president.

If the Republicans are too afraid to answer questions, maybe they should do everyone a favor and just resign!

http://liberalspeak.com/2852/happening-now-republicans-staging-cowardly-political-stunt-american-political-history/

6 terrifying things Republicans did this week everyone missed

POSTED BY: TOM CAHILL MAY 12, 2017

While we were obsessed with the firing of James Comey, Republicans across the country did several horrifying things that went largely underreported.

While it may or may not have been Trump’s intention to keep us distracted from significant stories that will impact millions of Americans that didn’t get the attention they deserved, we’ve included a few of those stories below.

1. Wisconsin Republicans bring back child labor

For all intents and purposes, children between the ages of 16 and 17 are now members of the workforce in Wisconsin, after the Republican-dominated legislature passed a business-backed bill loosening regulations on employing teenagers. The bill passed the state assembly, and most recently the state senate, on a party line vote of 20 for and 12 against.

The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign reported that if Gov. Scott Walker signs the bill as expected, children as young as 16 years old will no longer need a parent or guardian to sign off on their employment, leaving businesses free to openly recruit high school students to work for them.

2. Trump-supporting media conglomerate to own news stations watched by 70 percent of American homes

Earlier this week, Sinclair Broadcast Group (SBG) bought Tribune Media for $4 billion. SBG already owns a significant market share of local TV news stations, but the Tribune acquisition means that they would own enough stations to have direct control of channels watched by 7 out of every 10 Americans. Their open support for President Trump means that pro-Trump messaging will likely inserted into newscasts piped into nearly every American household on a nightly basis.

In New York Magazine’s article on the acquisition, reporter Eric Levitz detailed how Jared Kushner — husband of First Daughter Ivanka Trump — promised Sinclair “exclusive” access to Donald Trump in the final three months of the campaign, when the billionaire real estate mogul was making his rounds across the most pivotal swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, in exchange for “fair” coverage. Sinclair landed 11 exclusive interviews with Trump, and interviewed his rival, Hillary Clinton, exactly zero times. SBG executives also ran anti-Clinton content and told local producers that they were mandated to broadcast it:

A “must-run” email from Washington managers to stations on Sept. 13 read this way: “DESCRIPTION: Why did Hillary Clinton struggle with disclosing her medical diagnosis? She has been repeatedly faced with previous questions of trust. Can a president lead with so many questions of transparency and trust?…There were no equivalent “must-run” stories examining Trump’s refusal to release his medical or tax records or about questions surrounding his charitable foundation.

While current FCC rules stipulate that no media company can own more than 39 percent of the television market share, FCC chairman Ajit Pai has stated he’s open to changing those rules. The FCC has not yet signed off on the acquisition as of this writing.

3. Trump puts vote suppressor Kris Kobach on “election integrity” commission

One executive order Trump signed this week that got little fanfare was one that authorized the creation of a bipartisan commission to examine current voting laws in all 50 states, and make recommendations as needed under the guise of election integrity.

However innocuous the commission may sound on its face, Trump’s decision to appoint Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to the commission virtually guarantees that any new recommendations from the commission will be even stricter voter ID laws that are overly burdensome to traditionally Democratic-leaning constituencies, like students, the elderly, and people of color. Kobach, who is the vice chair of the commission, has been successfully sued four times for suppressing legitimate votes.

Despite Kobach crusading nonstop against the specter of “voter fraud,” his own office only found nine individual cases of potential voter fraud out of 1.8 million voters in Kansas. That’s a rate of 0.0005, or five ten-thousandths of one percent, for those of you keeping track.

4. North Carolina has 99 percent of disaster relief denied

While it remains unclear if President Trump didn’t want to approve the funding needed for North Carolina to recover from a recent hurricane because the state has a Democratic governor, or just simply because he felt like it, the state is only receiving $6 million in disaster relief funds despite Governor Roy Cooper requesting $929 million. Cooper said the funding was necessary to “help communities and families fix homes, repair businesses and recover from the historic flooding.”

According to the Washington Post, Hurricane Matthew devastated a large portion of the state, with 50 of 100 counties in a state of emergency, and an estimated $2.8 billion in damage, on top of an additional $2 billion in damage to the state’s economy. Gov. Cooper has invited President Trump to take a tour of the state with him, but as of this writing, Trump has not yet responded.

5. Oklahoma Republican suggests handing over non-English speaking-children to ICE

Because Republicans are completely opposed to raising taxes, and because Oklahoma has a $900 million budget deficit as a result of not enough tax revenue, one Oklahoma Republican state representative Mike Ritze on Friday raised a particularly horrific proposal — turning over 82,000 vulnerable children to federal authorities.

“Identify them and then turn them over to ICE to see if they truly are citizens,” Ritze suggested. “Do we really have to educate noncitizens?”

Ritze’s proposal to round up non-English speakers as a means of saving money for state education would likely not pass judicial muster, since, as the Washington Post pointed out, a 1982 Supreme Court decision (Plyler v. Doe) ruled that states did not have the authority to deny public education to the children of undocumented immigrants.

6. Texas state senate licenses “baby jails” as child care facilities

In Texas, a bill written by for-profit, private prison corporation GEO Group looks like it may become law if Republicans have their way. Earlier this week, SB 1018 passed the Texas state senate on a party line vote, which would allow immigrant family detention centers, which are colloquially referred to as “baby jails,” as child care facilities officially recognized by the state of Texas. It would most likely ensure a steady stream of revenue for Texas’ two immigrant detention centers for children, which can collectively house more than 3,200 people.

Tom Cahill is a senior editor for the Resistance Report based in the Pacific Northwest. He specializes in coverage of political, economic, and environmental news. You can contact him via email attom.v.cahill@gmail.com, or follow him on Facebook by clicking here.

http://resistancereport.com/politics/6-terrifying-things-republicansdid-we-missed/