by Tom Sullivan
At 10 a.m. EST (7 PST) this morning the House Judiciary Committee begins its first impeachment hearing. The session bears a title: The Impeachment Inquiry into President Donald J. Trump: Constitutional Grounds for Presidential Impeachment. (The link goes to the live-stream site.)
Democrats will be serious and sober. Lacking any real defense, Republicans will put on a circus.
Democrats hope to convince us all why the man in the video clip below, Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States, should be removed from office.
It’s a wonder Trump did not project those words out his eyes in beams of light onto a nearby wall.
MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Tuesday night invited psychiatrist Lance Dodes, a former assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, to assess Trump’s mental/emotional state in light of those comments.
Yes, it’s projection, says Dodes. Trump “tells other people that they are what he is.” Dodes believes (as this blogging amateur has said before) that Trump is emotionally and developmentally stunted.
Dodes calls Trump’s level of development “primitive.” Trump is a sociopath who runs a “very simple program” and is “limited by the capacity of a person with early emotional development.”
Asked about the developmental path that produced someone like Trump, Dodes responded, “It’s very early. Almost all people don’t have this problem … The early capacity to have empathy for other people, to identify them as being worthwhile and caring about them, happens in all human beings at a very early point. He doesn’t have that.”
It’s not all Trump doesn’t have.
Former Deputy Director of Intelligence Susan Gordon told an audience Trump is the first in her experience with “no foundation or framework to understand the limits of intelligence,” its purpose, or how the intelligence community discusses it.
Trump’s lens for viewing the world is economic rather than military or political, Gordon said. Officials had to retool briefings to present them framed for a person “who is interested in making trades and deals.”
Trump was interactive, though, Gordon said, and had two typical responses:
“One, ‘I don’t think that’s true,'” Gordon told the Women’s Foreign Policy Group.
“The one is ‘I’m not sure I believe that,'” Gordon continued, “and the other is the second order and third order effects. ‘Why is that true? Why are we there? Why is this what you believe? Why do we do that?’ Those sorts of things.”
Basically, coming he views policy solely from an economic perspective: What’s in it for me?
USA Today adds:
Gordon, who was in line for the top intelligence job following the departure of Dan Coats, resigned in August after learning that the president sought to bypass her elevation.
While the House ponders whether Trump is fit to remain in office, Trump, the man who swore that with him occupying the Oval Office, the world would no longer laugh at us (meaning at him), is attending the NATO summit in London.
Will aides be able to keep Mr. Insecurity from seeing this?
Stand by for more projection.
Cross-posted from Hullabaloo.
Strangely Trump believed that he could work his will on the natural order of things and there wouldn’t be any consequences.
Republicans thought that they could create a new reality out of Trumps chaos by using federal judges and the Supreme Court.
“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,” because nature seeks balance.
Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution speaks about “judicial Power.”
It says that we will have “one Supreme Court,” but it says nothing about the number of justices sitting on that court.
Section 1 goes on to say that “inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish,” are permitted.
The Judiciary Act of 1789 put a finer point on the operation of the various courts and put 1 chief justice and 5 associate justices on the Supreme Court for a total of six.
In the end all of the hard work packing the federal courts that Moscow Mitch has tried to accomplish may come to nothing if Congress decides to rearrange the courts.