I love hearing John Oliver make an argument. He's my second favorite news anchor-- after Chris Hayes. When I heard the video above, I was in another room and didn't realize it wasn't Oliver. It sounded brilliant and it made the news fun, the way he does. But it was actually a very serious-- deadly serious journalist Mehdi Hasan, speaking for The Intercept. Please watch it; Hasan takes apart one lame anti-impeachment argument after another apart.On Friday Jerry Nadler, Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, was a guest on WNYC. He made the case for Pelosi's go-slwo/run-out-the-clock approach: "Impeachment is a political act," he said, "and you cannot impeach a president if the American people will not support it. The American people right now do not support it because they do not know the story. They don’t know the facts. We have to get the facts out. We have to hold a series of hearings, we have to hold the investigations... Part of the function of Congress, just the same as the Watergate hearings 40 years ago, [is] to have a dialogue with the American people so people can make informed decisions and know what’s going on. It’s very important that [Mueller], to a television audience and to the American people, state it and answer questions about it, even if there is no new information."Nadler is dragging his feet. Over half the Democratic members of his committee have already called for impeachment, despite him and Pelosi and Hoyer:
• Ted Lieu (D-CA)• Jamie Raskin (D-MD)• Pramila Jayapal (D-WA)• Joe Neguse (D-CO)• David Cicciline (D-RI)• Veronica Escobar (D-TX)• Val Demings (D-FL)• Steve Cohen (D-TN)• May Gay Scanlon (D-PA)• Greg Stanton (D-AZ)• Madeleine Dean (D-PA)• Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX)• Cedric Richmond (D-LA)
So which Democrats on the Judiciary Committee are still protecting Trump from impeachment? Zoe Lofgren (D-CA)-- who fought like a rabid dog to steal the chair from Nadler-- Blue Dog Lou Correa (CA), and a gaggle of leadership-shills: Hakeem Jeffries (NY), Hank Johnson (GA), Ted Deutch (FL), Lucy McBath (GA), Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (FL), Karen Bass (CA) and Sylvia Garcia (TX).
