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wbur President Trump waves as he boards Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base on Tuesday. (Andrew Harnik/AP)

This week, the legal cloud hanging over President Trump grew darker.

According to The Washington Post, special counsel Robert Mueller is now investigating Trumpfor possible obstruction of justice.

The growing scandal around Russian election hacking and the firing of the FBI director are prompting many progressives across the country to say its time to begin impeachment proceedings against the president now.

John Bonifaz, a constitutional lawyer who heads Free Speech for People, a small progressive group in Amherst, is part of the vanguard of a grassroots movement that has opposed Trump since his first day in office.

"We've launched ImpeachDonaldTrumpNow.org, which now has the support of 1.1 million Americans across the country," Bonifaz says.

Bonifaz says Trump is violating the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the Constitution for failing to fully divest from his private business interests before he took the oath of office. Similar concerns prompted nearly 200 Democratic members of Congress to file suit against the Trump administration this week. The White House dismisses the suit as politically motivated and unfounded, but Bonifaz says there are other reasons to impeach Trump.

"We have since expanded our grounds for this call to include obstruction of justice in light of the president's interference with an ongoing criminal investigation with the firing of FBI Director James Comey," Bonifaz says.

Along with the million-pluspeoplewho've signed Bonifaz's petition, about a dozen U.S. cities and towns have passed resolutions calling for impeachment, including Los Angeles and Chicago, as well as Amherst, Cambridge, Pelham and Leverett here in Massachusetts.

And after Comey's congressional testimony last week, two national grassroots organizations, Indivisible and MoveOn.org, which oppose Trump, also urged Congress to start impeachment proceedings.

"More people support impeaching Trump than approve of his job performance," says Anna Galland, MoveOn's executive director. According to a recentPolitico/Morning Consult poll, she's right though the poll also found the country deeply divided over this issue, with a slim pluralityopposing impeachment.

Still, Galland says it's time to act now.

"There have been sufficient evidence of what are called in the Constitution high crimes and misdemeanors, and we think it's time for all members of Congress both Democrats and Republicans to support moving forward with impeachment proceedings, Galland says.

But that's not happening. For the most part, Republicans in Congress remain in lockstep behind the president and don't support impeachment. And so far, just two Democrats U.S. Reps. Brad Sherman of California and Al Green of Texas say they do.

"We live in a country where no congressman, no senator and not even the president of the United States is above the law," Green said earlier this week. "And I've concluded that as a result articles of impeachment should be drawn."

"The only place impeachment comes before investigation is in the dictionary."

That position sparked sharp disagreement at this week's weekly meeting of House Democrats, according to The Hill, which reported that Massachusetts U.S. Rep.Michael Capuano denounced the push for impeachment as a selfish maneuver that could hurt Democrats.

Congressman Seth Moulton of Salem agrees.

"The danger is that it just looks political that we're not really trying to find out the facts or bring the right people to justice, but are just trying to pursue a political crusade against the president," according to Moulton, who says it is "frightening" that President Trump won't acknowledge what U.S. intelligence agencies have: that Russia interfered with the U.S. election and will try to do it again. Moulton wants a bipartisan commission to get to the bottom of what the Russians did and whether or not the Trump campaign was involved.

But he says impeachment could actually impede that effort.

"If you look back to the Watergate era, there were some people who suggested impeachment very early on," Moulton says."And that wasn't actually helpful to the investigation or to ultimately getting Nixon to resign."

Massachusetts U.S. Sen.Elizabeth Warren has been quiet on the issue of impeachment, while U.S. Sen. Ed Markey says it's too soon to consider it.

"The only place where impeachment comes before investigation is in the dictionary," Markey said outside his office in Boston last week. "But if that investigation establishes obstruction of justice, then of course that matter has to come before the United States Congress as a potential impeachment process."

That possibility grew a bit more likely this week, with news that special counsel Mueller is now probing whether President Trump obstructed justice.

In tweets early Thursday, Trump accused federal investigators of promoting a "phony" story about colluding with the Russians, and once again called it a "witch hunt."

Democrats are responding carefully. The growing scandal could help them retake the House next year, but if they jump aboard the impeachment bandwagon, they could alienate voters in conservative and politically moderate swing districts.

Bonifaz, of Amherst, who organized the online petition to impeach Trump, says too many members of Congress are putting party over country.

"They're engaged in a political calculation of what works best for 2018," according to Bonifaz, who says Democratic and Republican lawmakers should instead "stand up for our Constitution and Democracy."

This is hardly the first time progressives have pushed against mainstream Democrats. They hope that if their numbers grow, the mainstream will follow.

But one longtime Democratic activist says, "If Trump gets impeached, it wouldn't be because the left called for it, but because a nonpartisan law enforcement investigation made a case beyond a reasonable doubt against the president."

This segment aired on June 16, 2017.

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Many Progressives Say Impeach Trump Now. More Mainstream Democrats Say Not Yet - WBUR

CNSNews.com (blog)

Rev. Graham: Leftist Progressives 'Want to Destroy the President' CNSNews.com (blog) Commenting on the shooting of Congressman Steve Scalise (R-La.) and three other people by a left-wing Bernie Sanders-supporter on Wednesday, Reverend Franklin Graham said "leftist progressives" will not "let go of losing the election" and "they want to ...

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Rev. Graham: Leftist Progressives 'Want to Destroy the President' - CNSNews.com (blog)

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If I have to read one more article blaming liberal condescension toward the red states and the white working class for the election of Trump, Im moving to Paris, France. These pieces started coming out even before the election and are still pouring down on our heads. Just within the last few weeks, theNew Republichad Michael Tomasky deploringelite liberal suspicion of middle America for such red-state practices as churchgoing and gun owning andThe New York Timeshad Joan Williams accusingDemocrats of impugning the social honor of working-class whites by talking about them in demeaning and condescending ways, as exemplified by such phrases as flyover states, trailer trash, and plumbers butt. Plumbers butt? That was a new one for me. And thats not even counting the 92,346 feature stories about rural Trump voters and their heartwarming folkways. (I played by the rules, said retired rancher Tom Grady, 66, delving into the Daffodil Diners famous rhubarb pie. Why should I pay for some deadbeats trip to Europe?) Im still waiting for the deep dives into the hearts and minds of Clinton supporterswhat concerns motivated the 94 percent of black women voters who chose her? Is there nothing of interest there? For that matter, why dont we see explorations of the voters who made up the majority of Trumps base, people who are not miners or unemployed factory workers but regular Republicans, most quite well-fixed in life? (I would vote for Satan himself if he promised to cut my taxes, said Bill Thorberg, a 45-year-old dentist in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Im basically just selfish.) There are, after all, only around 75,000 coal miners in the entire country, and by now every one of them has been profiled in theTimes.

In her fascinating recent bookStrangers in Their Own Land, the brilliant sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild asks readers to climb the empathy wall and really try to understand the worldview of Trump votersas she did, spending over five years getting to know white Southern Louisianians, many of them Cajun, who have extreme free-market, anti-government Tea Party politics although they live in Cancer Alley, an area where the petrochemical industry, abetted by the Republican politicians they voted for, has destroyed nature, their communities and their health. Hochschild has a deep grasp of human complexity, and her subjects come across as lovely people, despite their politics. As she hoped, I came away with a better understanding of how kindly people could vote for cruel policies, and how people who dont think theyre racist actually are so.

But heres my question: Who is telling the Tea Partiers and Trump voters to empathize with the rest of us? Why is it all one way? Hochschilds subjects have plenty of demeaning preconceptions about liberals and blue-statersthat distant land of hippies, feminazis, and freeloaders of all kinds. Nor do they seem to have much interest in climbing the empathy wall, given that they voted for a racist misogynist who wants to throw 11 million people out of the country and ban people from our shores on the basis of religion (as he keeps admitting on Twitter, even as his administration argues in court that Islam has nothing to do with it). Furthermore, they are the ones who won, despite having almost 3 million fewer votes. Thanks to the founding fathers, red-staters have outsize power in both the Senate and the Electoral College, and with great power comes great responsibility. So shouldnt they be trying to figure out the strange polyglot population they now dominate from their strongholds in the South and Midwest? What about their stereotypes? How respectful or empathetic is the belief of millions of Trump voters, as established in polls and surveys, that women are more privileged than men, that increasing racial diversity in America is bad for the country, that the travel ban is necessary for national security? How realistic is the conviction, widespread among Trump supporters, that Hillary Clinton is a murderer, President Obama is a Kenyan communist and secret Muslim, and the plain-red cups that Starbucks uses at Christmastime are an insult to Christians? One of Hochschilds subjects complains that liberal commentators refer to people like him as a redneck. Ive listened to liberal commentators for decades and have never heard one use this word. But say it happened once or twice. Feminazi went straight from Rush Limbaughs mouth to general parlance. One of Hochschilds most charming subjects, a gospel singer and preachers wife, uses it like a normal word. Equating women who want their rights with the genocidal murder of millions? How is that not a vile insult?

Im sure I have stereotypical views of people who live in red statesincluding forgetting that, as Tomasky points out, all those places have significant numbers of (churchgoing, gun-owning) liberals. I try not to be prejudicedmost people are pretty nice when you dont push their buttonsbut I probably have my fair share of biases. But so what? What difference does it make if I think believing in the Rapture is nuts, and hunting for pleasure is cruel? So what if I prefer opera to Elvis? What does that have to do with anything important? Empathy and respect are not about kowtowing to someones cultural and social preferences. Theyre about supporting policies that make peoples lives better, whether they share your values, or your tastes, or not.

How much empathy did Louisiana Republicans show when they electedand reelectedBobby Jindal, who, backed by Republican legislators, cut taxes, slashed spending on education, health care, and social programs and gave massive tax breaks to the very petrochemical companies that poisoned Republican voters themselves? In Oklahoma, a growing number of schools are now open only four days a weekvoters, ultimately, made the choice to cut taxes instead of pay for a decent education for the states children. You can go down the most uncontroversial list of social goodshospitals, libraries, schools, clean air and water, treatment for mentally ill people and drug addictsand Republican voters label them Big Government and oppose them. And when the consequences get too big to ignore, as with climate change, they choose to believe whatever nonsense Fox News is promoting that week, as if at least 97 percent of the worlds climate scientists are just elitists who think they know so much. True, by the time the world burns to a crisp, todays voters will mostly be dead, but wheres the empathy for their own grandchildren?

Sorry, self-abasing liberal pundits: If you go by actual deeds, liberals and leftists are the ones with empathy. We want everyone to have health care, for example, even those Tea Partiers who in the debate over the Affordable Care Act loudly asserted that people who cant afford treatment should just die. We want everyone to be decently paid for their labor, no matter how low they wear their pantssomehow the party that claims to be the voice of working people has no problem with paying them so little theyre eligible for food stamps, which that same party wants to take away. We want college to be affordable for everyoneeven for the children of parents who didnt start saving for college when the pregnancy test came out positive. We want everyone to be free to worship as they pleaseincluding Muslimseven if we ourselves are nonbelievers.

What should matter in politics is what the government does. Everything else is just flattery, like George H.W. Bushs oft-cited love of pork rinds. Unfortunately, flattery gets you everywhere.

Katha Pollitt is a columnist for The Nation.

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The Tired Myth That Progressives Lack Empathy Is Hardly the Problem - AlterNet

REDLANDS >> Is health care a right?

Some of the citys conservative and progressive thinkers tackled that question at a forum Wednesday in an attempt to reach common ground.

I ask how can life be a democratic right without a system of universal health care that guarantees everyone access to medical care to sustain life regardless of economic status? said Jennifer Nelson, member of Redlands for Progressive Change.

The common ground is, of course, people need to be able to have access to medical care but that does not mean government should be providing it across the board on a free basis, responded Julie Biggs, president of the Redlands Republican Womens Club Federated.

The forum, held at the University of Redlands, was the first installment of the Common Ground Conversation Series, a collaborative effort between Redlands For Progressive Change and the Redlands Republican Womens Club Federated.

The forums are a way to get those from both sides of the political spectrum together to find agreement on issues and build relationships in the community, said Denise Davis, founder of Redlands For Progressive Change.

In order to truly move forward as a united, and emphasis on united, States of America, we believe its critical to have conversations with our neighbors, Davis said. We arent hiding behind a computer, a phone screen. Were not just watching these debates play out on television. We believe the real change happens when we sit in the same room together listening to one another.

Representing the progressive point of view were Nelson, professor and director of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Redlands and expert on the history of social justice movements for health care and human rights; Mark Pavelchak, director of institutional research at Cal State Los Angeles, former assistant professor of business administration at the University of Redlands and member of Redlands for Progressive Change; and Iqbal Pittalwalla, science writer, public relations practitioner, math and physics tutor who was born in India and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2003.

On the conservative side were Biggs, attorney, board member of the Lincoln Club and elected member of the San Bernardino County GOP Central Committee; Sean Flynn, professor of economics at Scripps College, board member of the Lincoln Club and Republican congressional candidate in 2016; and Dale Broome, physician, delegate for the California Republican Party and member of the Redlands Tea Party Patriots.

Each panelist was given time to address the question, Is health care a right? Afterward, panelists on the opposing view discussed points of common ground, which were written on a chalkboard.

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Following the panels discussion, members from the audience shared their opinions and points of agreement.

The group found agreement on a need to provide emergency care and coverage for catastrophic events, limiting governmental involvement in health care decisions, closing loopholes and fixing weaknesses in the Affordable Care Act.

The Constitution of the United States is designed to protect people and their rights from government, from the government taking over and making decisions for you that affect your personal life, Biggs said. When government decides to provide medical care for people, it makes the decision as to who will receive that and who wont receive that.

Pavelchak agreed with some of Biggs statements.

You mentioned government should not step in to make governmental health care decisions for people and that especially hits home with regard to womens reproductive rights, Pavelchak said. I think women should be allowed to make those choices without government saying no, you cant.

Davis asked the audience for their feedback on the forum, which was an experiment, to find out if theres an interest in the community for future forums, she said. Members of the audience voiced positive responses to the discussion.

The purpose of this is not for us to walk away agreeing 100 percent, Davis said. The purpose is to find some points of agreement and some points of common ground. I think weve been able to do that tonight, which is great.

Original post:
Redlands progressives, conservatives meet to find common ground on American healthcare - Redlands Daily Facts

The United States Constitution is the supreme law in America. Anyone not subject to its jurisdiction is, by definition, not a citizen (14th Amendment). Progressives have sought to change the original Constitution over more than a century. They were successful in changing the states' selection of senators to popular election.

They passed Prohibition. They added direct taxation of income. Justices of the Supreme Court have considered international and Shariah law in their decisions making their oaths a lie.

Progressives have passed treaties which created a "right" to medical care, and invented a "right" to same-sex marriage. Health care law is constitutional as a tax.

At the same time, they obligated the United States to transfer a lot of its wealth to the rest of the world with the Bretton Woods agreements and the Marshall Plan. We pay at least 20 percent of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations and many other entities.

The head of the World Bank is American; the head of the IMF is French; and the U.N. has 15 "equal" members on the Security Council and about 190 members total. Our national sovereignty is diminished by these global entities which create "rights."

Climate agreements require the United States to clean up its act which it has done with the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Environmental Protection Agency, etc. and pay for the cleanup of developing nations like China.

As a scientist I can agree that climate change summer, fall, winter and spring is real. It is caused mainly by the sun and the obliquity of the ecliptic. Humans exhale carbon dioxide, but the effect on the global climate is not significant when compared with water vapor caused by the sun and ash clouds from erupting volcanoes.

Math models do not consider unpredictable things like volcanic eruptions even though the effect can be globally significant (see Krakatau, August 1883). Faux scientists make an error when they extrapolate a day in laboratory conditions to a billion years.

Blaming Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on global warming was easily proven false in 2006 when few hurricanes and no major hurricanes occurred. For a decade no hurricanes made landfall on Florida coasts. Still Sandy was blamed on global warming. Some scientists are hardcore. If global warming is the cause, then shouldn't every year get worse? True science is observable and testable. Big Bang and Evolution ideas are conjecture, not science.

Chuck Tatum

North Augusta

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Letter: Progressives are changing Constitution - Aiken Standard