September 24, 2019

We Now Have Our Impeachment Inquiry

Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly via ZUMA

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Well, Nancy Pelosi has given us our formal impeachment inquiry. And the Senate has voted unanimously to ask the Director of National Intelligence to hand over the whistleblower complaint. The official response from Donald Trump is “PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!” The official response from the Trumpbot crowd is that Hunter Biden is the real scandal. The official response from the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger crowd is that we’d all be taking this a lot more seriously if Democrats hadn’t been so mean to Trump all along.

On a side note, this should make it easier for Congress to subpoena Trump’s tax returns, shouldn’t it? The Treasury Department has been arguing that Congress doesn’t really have any legislative purpose behind the request, but an impeachment inquiry is unquestionably a legislative purpose. It’s hard to see how they can hold out much longer, or how a court could rule in their favor.

I suppose one of the big questions going forward is how to frame the eventual impeachment charges. Should the House issue multiple articles of impeachment (Comey firing, Stormy Daniels, Ukraine, etc.) and hold extensive hearings on them? Or should they focus tightly on Ukraine and try to get through this fairly quickly? I’m tentatively in favor of the latter. Not only is time short, but Ukrainegate is a nice, bright line. Republicans have already made it clear that they’ll fight all the other stuff, and it’s not clear the public would have a problem with that. But Ukraine? This is so plainly corrupt and impeachable that it’s hard to see how anyone can defend it. The best you can do, I suppose, is to say it’s bad but doesn’t rise to the level of impeachable. And that’s pretty weak tea.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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