Month: January 2021

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Chincoteague, Virginia scene. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

There are some significant changes for this week’s cycle. I have now overpainted the blue once again. Over that I have started the green highlights as well as the the water. You can now get a good idea where I am going with this piece.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

It was 10:30 in the morning on January 13, 2021, and former Rep. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania was appearing with CNN’s Erin Burnett and Anderson Cooper as they watched the U.S. House of Representatives impeach President Donald John Trump for a second time. Trump was charged with inciting an insurrection a week prior at the Capitol in a doomed effort to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the winners of the presidential election.

Republican Tom Cole, a jovial 10-term congressman from Oklahoma, had just spoken on the House floor: “Mr. Speaker, there’s still a way to unite the country. Let us look forward, not backward. Let us come together, not apart. Let us celebrate the peaceful transition of power to a new president rather than impeaching an old president.”

A little more than five years earlier, Dent, then a member of the centrist Republican Main Street Partnership and Tuesday Group, had been shaken by the sudden resignation of Speaker of the House John Boehner. He was even more disturbed when his preferred successor, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, dropped out of the running in that face of a conservative revolt. Dent then recommended that Cole or 2012 vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan succeed Boehner.

It was Ryan who got the job, but Ryan too proved too moderate for conservatives’ tastes and announced his retirement in April 2018. That was the last straw for Dent and, frustrated with the direction of his party, he quit mid-term in May 2018.

Now, a visibly upset Dent was telling CNN’s Burnett that no more than 10 to 20 of his former Republican colleagues would vote to impeach the president.

This is a time that I think that members need to stand up. Sometimes in order to save — you know, they need to — they shouldn’t be worrying about their jobs right now, they should be doing the right thing. They all know that…

…You know, I’m watching, right now, National Guardsmen, you know, sleeping in the Visitor Center of the U.S. Capitol right now.

The last time there were troops in the Capitol like this, stationed there, actually sleeping there, was right when Abraham Lincoln called the — the troops to defend the Capitol. I know that because the first unit to respond was the Allen Rifles from my hometown of Allentown, Pennsylvania. This is a very critical moment for these members. You know, this is — you know, they have to risk their jobs in order to save it. This is the time.

In the end, the number was ten. As for Cole, he had surprisingly voted not to certify the election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. He later explained that he’d considered changing his position after rioters stormed the Capitol, killing one and injuring 140 Capitol Police officers, and terrorizing congressmembers and their staffs. “It was a tough call. I went back and forth on whether or not I should do it. But the sentiment in my district was very strong,” Cole said.

Perhaps Cole’s cowardice was explained by the fact they he and his staff had been trapped inside his office during the insurrection and listened to the terrorists call out his name as they pounded on his door.

Many Democrats share Dent’s disappointment with Cole. “A couple of them have had questions, and I’ve patiently sat down and explained to them,” Cole said.

But there’s no adequate explanation. It doesn’t matter what the sentiment is or was in Cole’s Oklahoma district. The objection to the certification of the presidential election was based entirely on lies, and those lies led to a violent attack and an attempted coup.

That a consensus-minded institutionalist like Cole capitulated to these lies is an indicator of just how far the GOP has gone off the rails.

More evidence came on Thursday when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi gave a press conference and announced the she would seek supplemental funding to protect members of Congress not only from future riots but from each other: “The enemy is within the House of Representatives, a threat that members are concerned about, in addition to what is happening outside.”

Pelosi noted that some members of her caucus have recently purchased bulletproof vests because they’re concerned they may be shot by Republican colleagues. Of particular concern is Republican Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland’s Eastern Shore who nearly started a fistfight on the House floor on the night of the insurrection and subsequently set off the metal detectors while trying to illegally carry a gun into the House chamber.

Meanwhile, Kevin McCarthy, the guy centrist Charlie Dent once thought would be a good replacement for Boehner, joined Cole in his coup attempt and, far from supporting impeachment, spent Thursday visiting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and plotting an electoral strategy for the 2022 midterms. Here’s how historian Michael Beschloss characterized the situation.

Subservient pilgrimage to a twice-impeached ex-President, three weeks after an insurrection, and before start of the Senate impeachment trial.

— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) January 29, 2021

It’s hard to imagine relations on the Hill getting much worse. Cole describes the environment as “pretty raw” but says the country has seen more difficult times. Perhaps he has in mind the 1856 caning of Massachusetts abolitionist Charles Sumner on the Senate floor. If so, he has company in Republican Rep. Paul Gosar who responded when asked by the Arizona chapter of Oath Keepers if we’re headed toward a civil war by saying, “We’re in it. We just haven’t started shooting at each other yet.”

And, yet the tone is much different at the White House where the talk is still about unity and Press Secretary Jen Psaki goes to the podium each day to present a smiling, optimistic face to the world.

The contrast couldn’t be starker, and maybe President Biden is naïve to think he can steer the government back on course. It should be clear though, that he has to try.

As far as I understood it at the time, George W. Bush’s 2000 slogan of “compassionate conservatism” was meant to signify that he wasn’t the kind of Republican who wanted to eliminate the Department of Education or take similarly radical moves to shrink the federal government down the size where it could be drowned in a bathtub.  It wasn’t the kind of promise the Democrats could easily thwart. Likewise, Barack Obama’s “Hope and Change” theme was hard for the Republicans to combat, although they did their best after Obama’s productive first two years when they took back the House and stopped all legislative progress. But Joe Biden’s “Unity” mantra has some weaknesses.

Basically, anytime Biden does something a Republican doesn’t like, he will face the charge that he’s not pursuing unity–that he’s breaking a campaign promise. We already have the spectacle of the Washington Post dedicating three reporters to this topic. The headline (“Biden struggles to define his ‘unity’ promise for a divided nation”) indicates that we’re going to have an excruciating four years of meta-discussions about who’s to blame for the lack of unity, what unity actually means, and whether Biden kept his word or not. 

I’m not looking forward to this, nor am I interested in participating. What I hope is that Biden will lower the temperature of our political disputes and that, over time, this will have a variety of positive results. I really do believe that a nation under stress will act out. The Great Recession was incredibly stressful. The entire Trump presidency was stressful. The COVID-19 pandemic is stressful. We shouldn’t expect Americans to be the best versions of themselves in these circumstances, but we can slowly heal and get better if conditions improve. In the meantime, as long as Biden doesn’t exacerbate our stress levels, he’ll be a big improvement over Trump on that metric alone.

I think it’s easier to understand unity as a goal if you realize first that it’s relative–we’re never reaching some utopian endpoint where we all agree on the proper direction for the country. Second, we will grow closer together simply by having a president who isn’t intentionally pulling us apart.

This might never mean that Congress starts passing bipartisan legislation, but it could mean less political violence, fewer families ripped apart by political divisions, and less overall insanity. But these changes may be incremental and hard to detect for some time. They also have to contend with counter-forces that benefit from our divisions, whether it’s partisan media or social media influencers pushing outrage to grow their followers.

One thing I know is that every time a Republican complains that a Democratic policy priority is a broken “unity” promise, I want to punch that Republican in the face. So, yes, there are some intrinsic problems with this unity messaging that won’t go away.

 

I am really loving the speed and preparation with which the Biden administration is staffing up the government and rooting out Trump appointees. It’s almost breathtaking in its efficiency and focus. This is going to make it much easier to implement President Biden’s agenda, including the aggressive “whole-of-government” climate ambitions he rolled out on Wednesday.

Philip Bump of the Washington Post says, “Biden’s administration has quickly and unquestionably become the one most focused on climate change in U.S. history,” and this is unquestionably true as even the left flank of the Democratic Party acknowledges.

It’s almost as if we helped shape the platform 😉 https://t.co/zXn3VcAbYw

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 27, 2021

It’s true that Biden isn’t going to ban fracking. But that’s in part because he’s looking to smooth the transition to a clean energy economy rather than exacerbate the disruption and dislocation it will cause. As part of that, Biden established a Interagency Working Group on Coal and Power Plant Communities and Economic Revitalization which will not only look to clean up the environmental damage done in energy-producing communities, but turn their brownfields “into new hubs for the growth of our economy.”

The White House will also establish an interagency working group to help communities transition away from coal and other fossil fuels, the individuals said, headed by [White House National Climate Advisor Gina] McCarthy and National Economic Council Director Brian Deese.

Speaking to the U.S. Conference of Mayors this past weekend, McCarthy assured local officials from across the country that the administration would work to convince average Americans they will benefit from a transition to clean energy.

“People have been in pain long enough. We are not going to ask for sacrifice,” she said. “And if we fail to win the heart of middle America, we will lose.”

To get a sense of the potential here, it pays to look at the reaction from Gillette, Wyoming, Mayor Louise Carter-King. She governs a city that fancies itself the “Energy Capital of the Nation,” and they have a strong interest in the status quo. But Carter-King knows the dirty energy industry is on life support.

“I think we’ve found out it doesn’t really matter who is in the Oval Office,” she said in an interview, noting that while the Trump administration lightened regulations on coal and oil and gas companies, the energy industry that has helped this city thrive for decades still suffered job losses. “It’s just a free market, and that’s just all there is to it.”

She’s not thrilled to see the new emphasis on clean, renewable energy from the Biden administration, but she’s not taking an adversarial position.

While Wyoming remains one of the reddest states in the country — President Donald Trump won more than 70 percent of the vote in November — Carter-King said she welcomes Biden’s promises to help create new, solid jobs in places where the nation’s shift to cleaner forms of energy could mean lost jobs in the fossil fuel sector.

“We do want to work with the new administration on what we can do here. … Working together, we can get so much further than [having] some sort of standoff,” she said. “President Biden has promised to help communities like ours, so I’d like to hold him to that.”

The politics work for Biden, and they have to because his legislative agenda on climate has to go through Sen. Joe Manchin whose West Virginian constituents are as dependent on the old energy economy as the citizens of Wyoming. Manchin isn’t just a necessary vote in the 50-50 Senate, he’s the incoming chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. If Biden didn’t make it a priority to create replacement jobs, Manchin would insist. In fact, it’s Manchin’s recognition that the old economy cannot be saved that led him to team up with outgoing Energy Committee chairwoman Lisa Murkowski of Alaska to make sure the December coronavirus bill included “billions for solar, wind and battery storage.” Manchin knows that the people of his state will be left behind if he doesn’t use his powerful perch to get them new employment opportunities.

In this sense, Biden and Manchin’s interests mesh, and the same could be true for the mainly Republican senators who represent coal, oil and gas-producing states. More likely, they let partisan pressure prevent them from working constructively on climate legislation, but their constituents should benefit from Manchin’s efforts anyway.

It could be decades before Democrats are competitive in places like Gillette, Wyoming, but the changeover could come quicker than anyone thinks, precisely because Biden is taking their needs seriously and his policies will become their new lifeblood.

As for progressives, they’ll always find reasons to grumble and often without the slightest realism about what’s possible in Washington, DC. But they’re feeling positive about Biden’s appointments and his approach. We’ve rejoined the Paris Agreement, cancelled the XL Pipeline and paused all new oil and natural gas leases on public lands or offshore waters. There’s a new White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy and National Climate Task Force. Environmental justice will now be “part of the mission of every agency” and  federal agencies will “develop programs, policies, and activities to address the disproportionate health, environmental, economic, and climate impacts on disadvantaged communities.”

Maybe most importantly, Biden has reestablished the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and issued a presidential memorandum that “directs agencies to make evidence-based decisions guided by the best available science and data.”

All of this is in the service of Biden’s ambition to launch “a clean energy revolution that achieves a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035 and puts the United States on an irreversible path to a net-zero economy by 2050.”

So, nitpick if you must, but I think Biden’s habitual critics should be generous enough to admit they’re pleasantly surprised.

Hi everyone! We made it to another middle of the week more or less in one piece.

“I didn’t f*ck it up”:

At least a few of us are trying to unf*ck what got f*cked up. It takes time. Anyway, a decade-old video brought a bit of joy this evening.

And some things really are getting unf*cked.

The bar is open. The jukebox is available. Enjoy.

Cheers!

Believe me, I have my eyes keenly focused for any evidence that the Pentagon deliberately slow-walked sending support to the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection. And I see plenty of smoke. But, in fairness, I also see some blame from outside the Pentagon, mainly coming from leftover rage over how the military was deployed in June for President Trump’s bible-prop strut across Lafayette Park.

It seems no one really wanted to see the National Guard deployed in the district, and DC mayor Muriel Bowser didn’t ask for more than some assistance in controlling traffic and the metro stations. The House and Senate sergeants-at-arms were also reluctant to see armed military near the Capitol, although their motives are less clear.

Broadly speaking, the Pentagon was still stung from the criticism they’d received over the summer, and some thought racing the Guard to the Capitol might be interpreted as a coup attempt since the DC Guard answers to the president.

The Guard’s tardy arrival looks more like an overall mess than a carefully orchestrated effort to assist the insurrection. But there were still concerning developments, like orders that came down just prior to January 6 that stripped the DC Guard’s commander to act on his own initiative. This caused a delay in deployment of his reserve force of more than an hour.

The bottom line is that there were political considerations on all sides that argued against the military taking appropriate preventative actions based on the available intelligence. It’s also clear that if Trump had been alarmed when he saw his supporters physically assaulting the Capitol Police and ultimately breaching the building, he could have intervened and demanded that the Guard move in immediately. He did not do that.

 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell finally relented and dropped his demand that the Democrats foreswear eliminating the legislative filibuster before he will agree to allow the new 50-50 Senate to pass an organizing resolution. The impasse was preventing the formation of committees and impairing many Democrats from taking over as chairmen.

McConnell’s action was dramatic. Before now,  a party which had lost its majority had never sought to hold onto control of the committees by insisting on a 60-vote supermajority to re-organize the body. It was basically a coup attempt, and it never stood any chance of sticking. But McConnell got what he could out of his antics. Democratic senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona made strong oral commitments not to scrap the filibuster, which McConnell used as his pretext for backing down. Sinema and, especially, Manchin are two of the most vulnerable Democrats, and they’ve upped the political cost they’ll pay if they later reverse themselves and vote to end the legislative filibuster.

It’s not much of an achievement for McConnell. If he uses the filibuster to stymie highly popular bills that are vital to the Biden administration’s agenda, he’ll give Manchin, Sinema and other reluctant Democrats the excuse and cover they need to change their mind and scrap the rule. And a filibuster isn’t worth much if you can’t use it without losing it.

The next question is whether McConnell will be strategic and restrained in his blocking strategy or if he’ll just obstruct everything until frustrations reach a boiling point.

One point is worth emphasizing. The unanimous consent rule provides that a single senator can block a motion to proceed and force a 60-vote threshold cloture vote, so McConnell can’t prevent a Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee or Rand Paul from filibustering every motion Majority Leader Chuck Schumer introduces. It also means that at least 10 Republicans will have to vote with the Democrats on those motions in order for the Senate to do its business. McConnell hates when his caucus is divided, so he’s stuck in a difficult position. If he wants a unified caucus, he’ll have to block everything and punish aisle-crossers as he did during the Obama administration. But this will probably cause the Democrats to unify against the filibuster in response. If he wants to preserve the filibuster, then he’ll need to encourage his colleagues to vote with the Democrats on cloture motions most of the time. There are bad options, but he’s in a weak position.

As for the centrist Democrats, they also face a conundrum. In states like Montana and West Virginia where Trump easily won in 2020, Democratic senators do not want to be voting with the party over and over again on strictly party-line votes. They would vastly prefer the political cover that comes from bipartisan legislation. But if no Republicans will join them in voting for bills and everything gets blocked, then avoiding partisan votes also means avoiding getting anything done.

However, once the centrists realize that they cannot keep the filibuster without crippling the Biden administration, they’ll find that they’re in a position of maximum leverage. With the Democrats holding only a 50-50 majority (with vice-president Harris breaking ties), the party has to have their votes on nearly everything. If Manchin wants a provision added or dropped from a bill, his demand must be met. If people make too much of a fuss about it, he can just switch parties. He’d have a much smoother ride to reelection as a Republican anyway. Unfortunately, the Senate Democrats are also in a weak position with only bad options.

But, at least now, with McConnell backing down on his opposition to the organizing resolution, the committees can be formed and get to work.

 

 

Rep. Alcee Hastings, who has served in Congress since 1993, is the vice-chair of the Democrat-controlled House Rules Committee. He’s also a former District Court federal judge for the Southern District of Florida who was impeached and removed from the bench in 1989. A history of his ordeal is available on the U.S. Senate’s website and it’s instructive as the trial of Donald John Trump approaches.

The short version is that President Jimmy Carter appointed Hastings to the federal bench in 1979. Only two years later, in 1981, the South Florida jurist was arrested for accepting a bribe in return for giving lenient sentences to mobsters Frank and Thomas Romano on 21 counts of racketeering. But Hastings caught a lucky break. His alleged co-conspirator William Borders was convicted but refused to testify against Hastings and the Judge was acquitted.

However, a month after the acquittal, two U.S. District Court judges filed a formal complaint accusing Hastings of fabricating his defense. In 1986, three years later, the 11^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers South Florida, made a referral to Congress recommending that Hastings be impeached.

The impeachment process was complicated and controversial. In a 413-3 vote, the House impeached Hastings in 1988. The Senate then created a 12-member special committee to hear evidence in the case.  In all, they heard testimony from 55 witnesses. Hastings argued that the Special Committee was unconstitutional and that his case could only be tried in front of the whole Senate. However, the committee didn’t vote on guilt or innocence but rather issued a report to the full Senate. The actual trial lasted a single day and resulted in Hastings being convicted on 11 of 17 articles of impeachment in 1989.

At that point, the then Senate President Pro Tempore, Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, ordered Hastings removed from the bench. Fortunately for Hastings, the Senate did not vote on whether or not to ban him from ever holding another position of honor, trust or profit in the U.S. government, and three years later he won election to Congress, taking his seat in 1993.

In 1992, Hastings used his objection to the Special Committee to appeal his impeachment convinction before the District Court for the District of Columbia, and he initially won. But that ruling was superseded by the Supreme Court’s ruling in the 1993 Nixon v. United States case that the Senate’s impeachment procedures are not reviewable by the judiciary.  As for Borders, the convict who declined to testify against Hastings, he was pardoned by President Clinton on his last day in office.

I don’t mention all this to make a “both-sides” argument that Democrats are also capable of corruption or gaming the pardon process. Rather, the Hastings saga is useful for understanding some of the controversies swirling about Trump’s second impeachment.

First, the Nixon case establishes that the Senate has wide leeway to establish the rules for an impeachment trial since the judiciary has no oversight role. Also, note that it was Sen. Robert Byrd who presided over Hastings’ trial and ultimately removed him from the bench. The role fell to Byrd for two reasons. The Constitution provides that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court shall preside over the impeachment of a president, but only a president. Since Hastings was a judge, the job went to the president of the Senate, which at the time was Vice-President Dan Quayle. However, Quayle wasn’t interested in presiding, so he delegated responsibility to the officer authorized to act in his stead: the longest serving member of the majority, or Senate President Pro Tempore.

Since Donald Trump is no longer the president, this means that his trial will not be conducted by Chief Justice John Roberts but instead Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the president pro tempore, who was elected three months after President Nixon resigned his office in 1974.

 On Monday, the House delivered the articles of impeachment to the president. What comes next is governed by the Senate Rules of Procedure:

III. Upon such articles being presented to the Senate, the Senate shall, at 1 o’clock afternoon of the day (Sunday excepted) following such presentation, or sooner if ordered by the Senate, proceed to the consideration of such articles and shall continue in session from day to day (Sundays excepted) after the trial shall commence (unless otherwise ordered by the Senate) until final judgment shall be rendered, and so much longer as may, in its judgment, be needful.

By mutual agreement between Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the  trial will be delayed until February 8. The delay allows the Senate to work on a COVID-19 pandemic bill and the confirmation of Biden’s cabinet-level appointments, and it allows time for Trump’s lawyers to craft a defense.

As the Hastings impeachment makes clear, the Senate makes the trial rules. It could delegate the matter to a Special Committee which would issue a report to the full Senate. Conversely, they can have no witnesses at all and rely completely on the presentations of the House Managers and Trump’s defense team.

Without Chief Justice Roberts presiding, there’s no input from the judiciary, and scant prospect that the proceeding will be preemptively ruled unconstitutional on the grounds that an ex-president cannot be impeached.

As things stand, the House Rules of Procedure flatly states that impeachment of former officials is permissible, and Leahy won’t disagree:

The House and Senate have the power to impeach and try an accused official who has resigned…As a practical matter, however, the resignation of an official about to be impeached generally puts an end to impeachment proceedings because the primary objective–removal from office–has been accomplished. 

The final lesson from the Hastings impeachment is that if the Senate convicts and fails to forbid future officeholding, it may regret that decision. Whether Hastings has redeemed himself during his 28-year congressional career is open to interpretation. In 2014, the Treasury Department paid out a $222,000 sexual harassment settlement to a member of Hastings’ congressional staff. In 2020, a House Ethics Committee investigation into Hastings’ possibly inappropriate relationship with a staffer was dropped because the two got married.

The only way to guarantee Trump doesn’t make a political comeback is to bar him from holding future office. Inciting an insurrection warrants that verdict, whether the Congress delivers it or not.

Imagine if George W. Bush had run for election again in 2008 and prevented Barack Obama from being on the ballot. Imagine that intelligence operatives attacked Obama and practically blinded him, and then the Department of Justice falsely accused him of crimes and repeatedly imprisoned him. Then imagine that the courts backed Bush and rejected all Obama’s appeals. Finally, imagine that in 2012, Bush ordered Obama killed and assassins put a cholinesterase inhibitor in his coffee.

Finally, imagine that Obama was flown to Germany where medical teams nursed him back to life. That’s roughly the story of Alexei Navalny, except he was victimized by Vladimir Putin rather than George W. Bush. And Navalny hasn’t taken this all lying down. He and his wife recently flew back to Russia despite warnings that he would be arrested on arrival, which he was. Then, during his first full day in prison, his supporters released a video revealing details of a Versailles-scale presidential palace on the Black Sea. The United Kingdom’s Daily Mail says “In size and opulence it makes the homes of our Royal Family look positively diminutive and threadbare.” Navalny alleges the unfinished palace has already cost £1 billion which was supplied entirely by friends and cronies of Putin as a gift.

Many ordinary Russians are outraged by Navalny’s treatment and Putin’s corruption, and they took to the streets in more than 100 cities on Saturday. Inspired by Navalny’s balls of steel, they put their own lives and freedom on the line. Their clashes with police and security services led to over 3,000 arrests, including more than 1,200 in Moscow.

It’s frustrating to see this and note that in America the people just took the streets and assaulted the Capitol in support of dictatorship. This makes it a little harder to hold ourselves up as a healthier society and better example. But, hopefully, the Biden administration will quickly set things right and find a way to support Navalny and assure his safety.

Garrett Miller of Texas has substantial legal problems. He’s been charged with five federal counts related to his participation in the January 6 coup attempt at the Capitol. On the low end, he was trespassing. On the high end, he made death threats against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and the Capitol Police officer who shot and killed Ashli Babbitt during the insurrection. So far, his legal defense is that he was supporting President Donald Trump and just got a little over-exuberant.

Clint Broden, a lawyer for Miller, told CNN Saturday that his client “certainly regrets what he did.”

“He did it in support of former President (Donald) Trump, but regrets his actions. He has the support of his family, and a lot of the comments, as viewed in context, are really sort of misguided political hyperbole. Given the political divide these days, there is a lot of hyperbole,” Broden said.

The Feds threw the book at Jacob Anthony Chansley, the so-called “QAnon Shaman,” charging him with “knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority,” “violent entry, “disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds,” “civil disorder,” “obstruction of an official proceeding,” “disorderly conduct in a restricted building” and “demonstrating in the Capitol building.” His lawyer says he was supporting Trump and now has regrets:

“He regrets very, very much having not just been duped by the president but by being in a position where he allowed that duping to put him in a position to make decisions he should not have made,” Albert Watkins, a lawyer for Chansley, told Missouri’s NBC-affiliated television station KSDK…

…”Let’s roll the tape. Let’s roll the months of lies and misrepresentations and horrific innuendo and hyperbolic speech by our president designed to inflame, enrage, motivate,” Watkins told KSDK. “What’s really curious is the reality that our president, as a matter of public record, invited these individuals, as president, to walk down to the Capitol with him.”

The “Trump Defense” isn’t convincing in these cases because the perps went beyond anything the ex-president explicitly “authorized,” but it may work better in cases where people ambled into a wide-open Capitol, milled about for a bit without committing any violence. or vandalism, and then ambled out. There’s reportedly a debate in the Justice Department about whether it’s necessary or advisable to charge every single intruder since some of them fit this latter category and can truthfully argue that the president asked them to go the Capitol and even said he would join them.

What’s clear is that the most culpable party here is Trump, and I agree with George Conway that we may need three or four special prosectors to handle all his crimes. The idiots who followed his lead need to be held accountable, but there’s no way they should be punished while Trump gets a pass.