The Atlantic Politics Daily: This Article Is About Articles of Impeachment
For what, exactly, should the president be impeached? Democrats who support impeachment are still trying to work that out. Plus, a history of Roger Stone
It’s Friday, November 15. In today’s newsletter: Roger Stone, articles of impeachment, more on the Green New Deal, and questioning age limits for presidential candidates.
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This article is about articles of impeachment
On Friday, it was Marie Yovanovitch’s turn to face congressional investigators. The former ambassador to Ukraine testified to a “smear campaign” orchestrated by Trump allies that led to her sudden dismissal from the job in May.
But more problematic for the president wasn’t something that the veteran diplomat said. Rather, it was a fiery tweet from the president coinciding with her testimony, my colleague Russell Berman writes:
Witness intimidation is a crime, and it is not a stretch to infer that the Democrats could turn the president’s tweet into one of their articles of impeachment.
Just about all Democrats in Congress want to impeach Trump. But why should he be impeached? They’re still trying to figure that out.
Some lawmakers want to home in on the Ukraine scandal, but others have wanted to throw the kitchen sink at the president, indicting him on everything from family separation, financial self-dealings, and the Russia investigation, my colleague Elaine Godfrey reported. The bevy of hearings scheduled for next week might lead to new revelations that could change their calculus.
Through their debate over the articles, Democrats might have to decide what’s more important: pursuing a matter that they believe has the most obvious political utility—or making a more comprehensive statement about how an American president is allowed to act.
Read Elaine’s full piece here.
Some of the president’s opponents might be hoping that maybe, just maybe, one of the eight witnesses coming next week will be their white knight who can bring down the president. In other words, some on the left may be transferring the hope that they’d placed in Robert Mueller—whose testimony over the summer was a resounding dud on that front.
But as Quinta Jurecic argues, it can be a big mistake to turn career diplomats into heroes. Here’s her argument for why.
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Roger Stone, a longtime Trump confidant and self-described “dirty trickster,” was convicted today on seven counts of lying to Congress and attempting to obstruct a House investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
We detail his history of political mischief here.
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In the year after the dramatic entrance of the Green New Deal into American political discourse, the underlying arguments for reorienting America’s carbon economy are already winning, Robinson Meyer writes.
[A]s a more surprising admirer says: It assumes that “our environment and our economy are completely and totally connected.” That idea—which also underpins, to some degree, the Paris Agreement—is too potent to perish. And if it is winning, it is because it is true.
+ Rob has been following the shifting center for how the 2020 Democrats want to combat climate change, including adopting variations of the Green New Deal. Read that analysis here.
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70, 73, 76, and 78. (Do you know what these numbers refer to?)
James Hamblin explores the history of the idea of being “fit” for office, and interrogates a cognitive test that could be used to evaluate that fitness.
Better tests do exist. Simply and transparently administered, they could help the public know what is really going on with the cognitive status of people who seek to hold the nuclear codes.
The Atlantic has a new look. Read our editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s conversation with our creative director, Peter Mendelsund, about the new design.
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Today’s edition of our daily newsletter of political ideas and arguments was written by Saahil Desai and Christian Paz, and edited by Shan Wang.
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