Amy Klobuchar Targets Republicans

Amy Klobuchar is still in the race for the Democratic nomination, even though you may not have heard her name for a while. The Minnesota senator is hoping that she can change things by reaching out to a niche of voters that have been almost ignored by her rivals: Republicans.

Since entering the race, Sen. Klobuchar has failed to catch fire with voters but has nevertheless managed to maintain enough support to be included in debates. As Democratic primary voters flirt with flavor-of-the-month candidates in an effort to find an alternative to Joe Biden, Klobuchar remains one of the few Democrats who could conceivably rally moderates and independents to defeat Donald Trump. Although hampered by her status as a relative unknown, she was rated among the most effective and the most popular members of the Senate as well as having a relatively moderate voting record.

Now Klobuchar hopes to parley her skills at winning rural Minnesota voters into a surge in New Hampshire where the mindset may be similar to that of her constituents back home. Politico reports that the Klobuchar campaign is campaigning in towns that are all but ignored by other candidates. In particular, Klobuchar is gunning for voters who supported Obama and then voted Trump in 2016.

“Those are really a lot of communities that tend to be bellwethers or communities that have an impact on New Hampshire outcomes,” said Scott Merrick, Klobuchar’s state director. “Whether they're Democrats and they'll vote for more moderate candidates or they're truly undeclared voters who mix it up.”

However, University of New Hampshire pollster Andy Smith said “Obama-Trump” voters made up only about three percent of the electorate, a number too small to affect the outcome of the election. Therefore, the Klobuchar campaign is also targeting traditionally Republican towns and districts. In a state where Trump’s net approval stands at -16 points, there may be crossover Republican voters who would support socially liberal, fiscally moderate Democrat. The big question for Klobuchar is how to get those Republicans to back her rather than Joe Biden.

The answer may be two-fold. If Biden proves to be damaged by his tangential relation to the Ukraine scandal, such as by an embarrassing testimony in Trump’s Senate trial, his stock may fall, leaving a path for another moderate Democrat. The second part of the equation relates to Klobuchar’s strong debate performance (for those who actually watched), which resulted in a late-December fundraising haul. If Biden falters, Amy Klobuchar could become the non-radical alternative.

At present, Klobuchar has a lot of work to do before she earns her first delegate. The Real Clear Politics national average shows her at 3.5 percent. She currently polls even worse in New Hampshire with two percent. Fifteen percent of the vote is required to earn delegates in Democratic primaries. As Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren decline, Klobuchar may be well-positioned to rise if she keeps delivering strong performances in the remaining debates.

Amy Klobuchar remains a long shot but don’t count her out. She’s an experienced campaigner and could benefit from Trump voters who like the president’s economic policies but are disenchanted with his behavior. With no serious challengers opposing Trump in the Republican primary, the opportunity cost of crossing over to vote for a moderate Democrat is very low for previous Trump voters.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Donald Trump’s Diminishing Returns

As the new year cranks up, bringing with it the election season, like many others I’ve been pondering the upcoming campaign and the next four years. At this point, it is impossible to predict how the election will go. Polling is very close and it is very possible that either side could win. However, if Donald Trump manages to eke out another victory, it seems likely that he will fall victim to the law of diminishing returns, a maxim which holds that, at some point, that the amount of benefit received will become less than the energy or effort invested.

This law seems likely to apply to Mr. Trump because no one is seriously predicting an electoral landslide for the incumbent. In fact, the focus seems to be on determining how much the president can lose the popular vote by and still manage an Electoral College squeaker. An analysis by David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report last year found that Trump could increase his popular vote loss margin to 5 million votes (compared with 2.9 million in 2016) and still win the White House IF he wins votes in the right places.

Imagine, however, what such a win might look like. Even though Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, his coattails were nonexistent as Republicans lost two seats in the Senate and six in the House. It is very possible that another popular vote loss/Electoral College victory could further erode the Republican position in Congress, even as the GOP maintains control of the White House.

In both election years, the Senate map favored Democrats. In 2016, Republicans defended 24 Senate seats while Democrats defended 10. This year, the margin will be almost identical with Republicans defending 23 seats compared with 12 for Democrats.

The difference is in the occupant of the White House and national attitudes about the president’s performance over the past four years. At this point, the Cook Political Report lists Republicans with twice as many vulnerable seats (tossup or lean) as Democrats. Races to watch for control of the Senate include Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Michigan, and North Carolina. At this point, although Democrats stand to gain seats, they would have to run the table to win control of the Senate.

In the House, the situation is somewhat reversed. Cook rates 18 Democratic districts as tossups compared with only three for Republicans. Democrats will be defending House gains made in the landslide election of 2018, which includes many swing districts, so some Republican pickups are not out of the question. The bad news for Republicans is that, since Democrats hold a 36-seat advantage, taking back the House seems out of reach even under the current best-case scenario.

The bottom line is that, if President Trump wins re-election, it is likely that he will spend the next four years with a Pelosi-led House and a Senate where Republicans either are a minority or hold a smaller majority.  That would effectively mean an end to advancing the Trump legislative agenda and the beginning of a four-year holding action.

President Trump’s best chance at getting his agenda through Congress was in his first two years. Republicans held narrow majorities in both the House and the Senate and the president was more popular than today. Ironically, Mr. Trump’s average approval rating was at its highest point just after his inauguration in January 2017 at more than 45 percent. Within days, after the new president started doing things, his approval plunged into the low-40s/high-30s where it has remained ever since.

It was within this short honeymoon period where President Trump had his best chance to accomplish his goals. He was only partially successful. Tax reform passed but a slew of other items, such as Obamacare reform and funding for the wall, did not. It looks unlikely that Republicans will have another shot at these issues within the Trump presidency. There will be no honeymoon if Donal Trump wins in 2020.

Instead, a second Trump Administration would remain a stalemate, similar to what we’ve seen for the past two years. The Democratic House will send more bills to the Republican Senate where they languish and die and vice versa. Unless Trump and the Democrats could reach compromise deals, something that has been rare so far, policy gains would be mostly limited to executive actions.

The prognosis looks similar if a Democrat wins the presidency. Barring a wave that builds over the next 10 months, a Democratic president would contend with a Republican Senate, which would act as a brake on his (or her) agenda. Despite Democratic talk of Medicare-for-all, raising the minimum wage, immigration reform, gun control, these and other pie-in-the-sky proposals would be DOA in Mitch McConnell’s Senate.

Even though we are a month early for Groundhog Day, the next four years looks a lot like the last two regardless of who wins the White House. Not everyone would be unhappy with that scenario, however. Voters seem to prefer divided government, especially when officeholders are out of the mainstream and pushing forward policies that only cater to the base. In a country as closely divided as ours, in which neither political party is very popular, the effect is going to be that the parties will only rarely be rewarded with control of both houses of Congress and the White House.

As a result, very little will get done in the coming years unless partisans on both sides can relearn the lost art of compromise and exchange their demagoguery for reaching across the aisle to build bipartisan majorities. After years of stalemate, maybe the election of 2020 will usher in officials who understand that neither party can accomplish much on its own.

Nah.

Originally published on The Resurgent

'Knives Out' Review

I walked into “Knives Out” expecting a fast-paced murder comedy based on watching the trailer for the movie. That is not what I got.

That isn’t to say that “Knives Out” isn’t worth your time. I and my teenage son both thoroughly enjoyed the film despite it not being what either of us expected.

The movie centers around the suicide of a murder mystery novelist, Harlan Thrombey, played by Christopher Plummer). As the police attempt to close the case, a private detective, Benoit Blanc, played by 007 alum Daniel Craig with a syrupy Southern accent, shows up after being hired by a mysterious client. Blanc probes the family relationships and turns up a number of possible motives that the star-studded family had for wanting Harlan dead.

Unexpectedly, the plot centers on Harlan’s nurse, Marta, who comes from a Hispanic immigrant family. Ana de Armas, who is a Cuban immigrant in real life, is a newcomer whose first big English-speaking role seems to have been in 2017’s “Blade Runner 2049.” Immigration policy figures into the plot as Marta’s mother is revealed to be an illegal immigrant. The knowledge that members of her family could be deported understandably affects Marta’s actions, even though she is herself what one of the other characters refers to as an “anchor baby.”

Immigration also figures into an uncomfortably awkward scene in which two branches of the family argue over immigration policy. Donald Trump is not mentioned by name, but the flower-child sister-in-law, played by Toni Collette, makes a Hitler reference and mentions children in cages. Harlan’s son-in-law, Richard, played by an unrecognizable Don Johnson, argues that even illegals with good hearts should have consequences for breaking the law. The situation becomes even more awkward when he asks Marta for her opinion on the issue and praises her family for immigrating “the right way.” The two branches of the family trade partisan barbs such as calling each other “Nazis” and “social justice warriors.”

Although the scene isn’t particularly pleasant, neither is it unfair. The arguments of both sides are true to form and could be taken from pretty much any internet discussion or comments thread on the subject. The discussion could probably have been taken word-for-word from any number of family discussions around the country over Thanksgiving and Christmas. The movie is evenhanded in its disdain for both political wings and the film is not a vehicle for attacks on Republicans or the president.

If there is a political message to the film, it is about the humanity of immigrants. The film doesn’t preach, but Marta and her family come across as sympathetic. To some, that will contrast with how they often see immigrants portrayed as murderers, drug-dealers, and criminals. Marta represents the silent majority of immigrants who are hardworking and law-abiding. While some immigration hardliners may not appreciate this compassionate portrayal of illegal immigration, it is relevant to the plot.

While the movie is not the slapstick comedy that I expected, it is darkly humorous. There were laugh-out-loud moments but the core of the movie is the investigation into Harlan’s death. If you want a more consistently funny murder-comedy, go watch “Clue,” the 1985 movie based on the popular board game starring Tim Curry and a plethora of ‘80s stars.

But that doesn’t mean you should skip “Knives Out.” While it isn’t laugh-a-minute, it is worth your time if you like the mystery genre. The movie is more like an episode of “Columbo” or “Murder She Wrote” than “Police Academy.”

There are no complaints about the craftsmanship of the movie. The acting is excellent on all levels and its fun to see the aging Johnson, Collette, and Jamie Lee Curtis, as well as Chris Evans playing the parts of spoiled rich brats. It is Craig and de Armas who steal the show, however.

“Knives Out” is a good movie. It is thought-provoking and keeps you guessing to the end. I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it but know going in that it is not a lighthearted romp. With numerous plot twists, it’s also a good movie to see in a theater rather than watching on Netflix or Hulu in a setting with distractions.

In the end, “Knives Out” is a classic example of the mystery genre with a sense of humor.

Originally published on The Resurgent

A Few Flying Stories

Recently, I’ve had a couple of people ask me about my main job as a pilot so I thought that I’d do something a little different today and tell a few flying stories. Flying is statistically very safe, especially in jets, but you’ll have some problems if you fly enough. At this point, I’ve been flying turbine airplanes professionally for 17 years so I’ve seen a few interesting things.

I got my start as a civilian flight instructor flying single-engine prop planes. Interestingly enough, I had very few mechanical problems with these piston-engine planes, but I do recall a trip where I developed an engine problem after taking off from Williamsburg, Virginia in a Cessna 172.

As we climbed out, the engine started running rough and I could tell that it wasn’t developing full power. Eventually, it got to the point where we were at full throttle and, even though we should have been climbing, we were barely maintaining altitude. I was concerned that the misbehaving engine would quit entirely so we turned toward Newport News, which was the nearest airport at that point.

The problem with that was that Newport News was on the on the other side of the James River at that point and we were heading into a stiff wind, which slowed our progress. I was second-guessing my decision and wondering what I would do if the engine quit while we were only a few thousand feet above the river when I saw it: A fleet of ships including what appeared to be several aircraft carriers moored in the middle of the river. For a split second, I thought, this might be my only chance to get a carrier landing. A light Cessna could probably have landed safely on the carrier deck with the strong headwind but fortunately, I didn’t have to find out. The engine kept running and we landed safely and on terra firma.

It turned out that the ships were the Ghost Fleet. Officially called the James River Reserve Fleet, the ships are mothballed in the middle of the river in case they are needed for a national emergency.

Several years later, I had a real engine failure. I was flying as a First Officer for Atlantic Coast Airlines. ACA was a regional airline that contracted to both United and Delta for short-haul flights. I had just completed training on the Dornier 328 Jet and had started line training, called “initial operating experience” or “IOE,” with a training captain. It may surprise some to learn that since airliners – even small ones – are so expensive to operate, that new pilots do their initial training in the simulator and usually fly the real airplane for the first time with a load of paying customers in the back.

I was on my second day of IOE in the DoJet, fresh out of the simulator, when we took off from Greensboro, N.C. One of the worst-case scenarios that pilots train for is an engine failure on takeoff, called a “V1 cut” in the simulator. The phrase refers to losing an engine at V1, a speed on the takeoff roll where it is too fast to abort the takeoff but too slow to immediately lift off. The pilot has to keep the airplane on the runway while it accelerates to Vr, the speed where the nose is rotated upward to fly the airplane off the ground. That day in Greensboro, we got a V1 cut for real.

At most companies, the pilots alternate legs, taking turns flying the airplane while the other works the radios, programs the FMS (flight management system computer), and does other cockpit chores. The training captain was flying that leg when, between V1 and Vr, we experienced an engine failure.

In the simulator, engine failures usually cut and dried. The engine just quits and you follow the checklist. My real-life V1 cut wasn’t that simple. Rather than simply quitting, the engine temperature spiked and exceeded its maximum limit. The captain pulled the power back on that engine and found that the engine temperature was acceptable as long as the throttle stayed at idle power. Modern airplanes are checklist driven and we had no checklist for such a situation. We declared an emergency and ran the checklists that we thought appropriate to set the airplane up for a landing back at Greensboro. Ultimately, we landed safely and were told that the hot section of our turbofan engine had come apart and left pieces on the runway.

I found out later that the engines in the DoJet were notoriously unreliable and short-lived, something that is uncommon for jet engines. ACA was replacing the Pratt & Whitney 306Bs at an alarming rate. Ironically, years later I flew a Citation Sovereign corporate jet with an updated version of the engine, the 306C. By that point, Pratt had apparently gotten the bugs out of it because I flew the Sovereign for more than 1,200 hours with no engine problems.

I flew the Dornier for about a year until I was furloughed (laid off) amid the airline bankruptcies of the mid-2000s. The company lost its contracts with its mainline partners and tried unsuccessfully to become a low-fare carrier as Independence Air. The company went out of business in 2006.

A third big emergency took place several years later when I was working for a fractional jet company called CitationAir. Fractionals are an aviation timeshare company in which people and businesses buy shares of corporate jets. Their share entitles them to a certain number of flight hours per year.

At the time, I was flying a Citation X, the fastest civil aircraft in the world. We had just taken off from Westhampton airport on Long Island (where I once saw then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as she boarded an air force Gulfstream jet) when we got an EICAS (engine indication and crew alerting system) message that we had a hydraulic failure on the plane’s “A” system.

The X has two separate hydraulic systems and, naturally, the one that we lost was the important one. The A system contained the “gear, steer, and whoa” items, the landing gear extension, the nosewheel steering, and the brakes.

Many people think being unable to extend the landing gear is one of the worst things that can happen in an airplane, but it’s really not a big deal. Jets are built with lots of redundancy and there are plenty of backup systems to lower the wheels. In many airplanes, alternate extension is as simple as removing the up-locks that hold the landing gear in their bays and letting gravity drop them into place. In our case, the X had a pneumatic bottle that used nitrogen to blow the landing gear down.

In our situation, the bigger problems were the inability to steer the airplane on the ground and loss of the main brakes with their anti-skid systems. We would have to keep the airplane straight on the runway without the primary nosewheel steering and use emergency brakes to stop. Without the anti-skid, blowing a tire was a possibility if we weren’t careful. To make matters worse, the checklist imposed a penalty of about 3.5 times the normal landing distance when we used emergency brakes. This meant that we would need a runway about 10,000 feet long.

Again, the other pilot happened to be the flying pilot on the leg so it was my job to run the checklist for the emergency. As I mentioned earlier, in an emergency, modern pilots don’t rely on memory except for a few specific, time-critical situations such as fires. In most cases, the procedure calls for looking up the emergency in a thick, emergency/abnormal checklist book. In this case, the hydraulic failure affected so many systems that the checklist was pretty extensive. It helped that we had practiced the situation in the simulator at FlightSafety International.

We decided to divert to Stewart/Newburgh, N.Y. An air force C-5 Galaxy transport squadron is based at Stewart so they had a long runway. They also had a Cessna Citation Service Center where we could get the airplane fixed easily. We notified our company dispatcher as to what was happening as well as explaining to our passenger that he would not be landing in Chicago, then set up the airplane for the landing.

As we landed, the other pilot braked us to a stop on the runway since, without nosewheel steering, we couldn’t turn off onto a taxiway. A pneumatic backup gave just enough control to keep us on the runway.  I vividly remember sitting on the runway surrounded by airport fire trucks as we waited for the Cessna employees to hook up a tug to tow us to the service center. When we got out of the airplane, the fuselage was covered with hydraulic fluid from a line in the nose wheel bay that had ruptured. The system pressure of 3,000 PSI had emptied the hydraulic fluid from the entire system within seconds.

The company diverted another airplane to Stewart to pick up our passenger and so that he could continue his flight with a minimal delay. Exceptional customer service and quick backups if there was a mechanical problem were part of what he was paying for.

These were three serious incidents from almost 30 years of flying, but life-threatening problems are usually few and far between. For the most part, the drive to the airport is scarier than anything that happens in the air. That was especially true while I was based in Houston!

My flying career hasn’t turned out the way that I intended. In the beginning, I planned to be an airline pilot just as most other people looking at aviation careers do. September 11, the airline bankruptcies, and the Great Recession changed my plans and nudged me towards a career in corporate flying. While it wasn’t on my radar (pun intended), flying business jets has been a fun and rewarding career that allows me a lot of time with my family and a lot of time for writing.

But how I got to this point is another story.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Believing In Christmas Is Logical

I have a confession to make. I doubt sometimes.

I was raised in a Baptist church. I was in one of the families that, if church was being held, we were there. I was saved at an early age and grew up believing without question. For many years, I never seriously considered the possibility that God was not real or that the Bible was not accurate.

A few years ago, that changed for a couple of reasons. First, I started a job and had a coworker who was an atheist. The nature of flying jobs is that you spend a lot of time with the other crewmembers and get to know them very well. On long trips, the two of us spent a lot of time talking, solving the world’s problems and discussing the nature of God and religion.

They say that it isn’t polite to discuss politics and religion, but that is because too many people can’t disagree agreeably. My atheist friend, who I’ll call Rob, and I were different. We both liked logic and reason and could have long discussions over difficult topics in a calm manner. Sometimes we would agree and sometimes we would agree to disagree.

Rob was unlike the stereotypical atheists. He was sympathetic to religion, once telling me that he wanted to believe but simply could not. Still, he saw the value of religion as a tool for instilling morality, which he thought made the world a better place. When our families had dinner together and my kids said the blessing, he bowed his head in a very unatheistic manner along with the rest of us.

In fact, Rob, despite his atheism, was one of the most moral and charitable people that I’ve ever known. He was generous to a fault and always ready to help others who were in need. As we walked around various cities on layovers, he would frequently give money to homeless people. I remember more than once watching him slip money into the pockets of people sleeping on the street. His charitable heart put me to shame.

Rob was an analytical guy. In his examination of spiritual matters, he ultimately came to the conclusion that the universe and mankind were the result of random chance. We discussed the astronomical odds against the earth forming just at the right spot in a solar system and orbiting just the right type of star to allow life to develop as well as the minuscule chance that evolution would blindly steer developing life into a higher intelligence. He acknowledged the slim probabilities but maintained that the one chance out of billions was the number that had come up.

The second factor in my questioning was my diagnosis with skin cancer. I wrote about my stage one melanoma after it was removed almost two years ago now. While my cancer experience was much less traumatic and invasive than many, it was the first time that I had faced a real health crisis that could have killed me. In the wake of the melanoma, I realized with my gut what I had known intellectually for years: that death could come at any time.   

With that realization and with my place in eternity on the line, I didn’t want to trust blindly in a religion that I’d never really tested. If we do due diligence before buying a house or car or committing to a new job, shouldn’t we research our religious beliefs? If God is real, what we believe about him and what we do about those beliefs is the most important decision of our lives.

Religion is really a two-fold question. The first question is whether God exists. The second, in a world with many different religions preaching wildly diverging beliefs, is which is the most correct and appropriate path to God.

Logically, there are three possible outcomes. The first possibility is that there is no God, in which case, the whole point is moot. The second possibility is that there is a God but you pick the wrong belief system, which could be disastrous for your soul. Finally, the third possibility is that there is a God and you choose wisely with the result being that you spend eternity in heaven. This is the optimal outcome, but it is especially important to avoid the second.  

There are many evidences for God including the improbability that random chance got us to where we are, but one of the most interesting to me is a scientific study in which British researchers found evidence that consciousness continues after death. The AWARE study found that 40 percent of patients with cardiac arrest were conscious while they were clinically dead and prior to resuscitation. Dr. Sam Parnia pointed out that the memories described by the patients were not merely hallucinations but “detailed recollections of visual awareness in this case were consistent with verified events.”

So, I did what countless people down through history have done before me. I questioned God and put him and the Bible to the test. I looked at other religions to see how they compared. I read about ancient history and the documentary evidence for the Bible. I read about the problems and inconsistencies in the Bible. I wrote about this spiritual journey in another article after I came to the conclusion that God is real and the Bible is as true as imperfect humans can make it.

“The Bible As History” by Werner Keller became one of my new favorite books. I was astonished at how much archaeology backed up Biblical accounts. Although direct archaeological support for the Flood and the Exodus are still scant at this point, there is an abundance of evidence for Israel’s kingdom period. Further, over the past few years, I’ve watched as reports of new discoveries roll in that lend more support to Biblical claims. Although the Flood and the Exodus are difficult to prove, they are also difficult to disprove.

Two other very good books, Lee Strobel’s “The Case For Christ” and Warner Wallace’s “Cold Case Christianity,” built a similar case for the validity of the New Testament. Both men began their investigations as skeptics and ultimately found that the evidence for the God of the Bible was so strong that they became believers.

In contrast, the skeptical claims against the Bible crumbled as I investigated them. Prophecies from Islam seemed vague and unfulfilled compared with those of the Bible. There seems to be no archaeological support at all for the Book of Mormon. Other religions teach that good works earn your way into heaven or that people sent to hell are given a second chance. The lack of exclusivity from these religions argues against them. If they are true and you don’t pick them, it’s no harm and no foul. Atheist claims often seem to rely on the position that they cannot understand God and therefore deny his existence or, as with Rob, hold that natural processes, however improbable, must be true.  

But Christianity is different. It claims to be an exclusive path to God. It also has both archaeological and documentary evidence to back up its claims. If Christianity is true and you don’t pick it, you’ve missed the boat.

The evidence for Christianity is not limited to scholarly works and logical reasoning, however. There have been many instances in my life where there has been evidence of the supernatural. I described in the discussion of my melanoma how a prophetic dream led me to the doctor after several dermatologists had ignored the cancer on my face. My wife and I also once experienced what seems to have been a physical manifestation of a spirit that left a mark on her body with no physical explanation.

I discussed all this with Rob, who said that he wished he could have similar experiences and then maybe he could believe too. In Rob’s case, the resistance to belief seemed to be rooted in a bad experience with the church from years earlier. This was a tragic example of how hypocrisy and bad behavior by God’s people can undermine the Gospel.

My experience with Rob is one reason that I’ve been so critical of the church’s support for Donald Trump. Rob’s belief was made even more difficult by what he saw as hypocrisy in supporting a man whose life and actions contradicted their beliefs and principles.

So why am I writing this on Christmas Eve? A common theme for generations has been that the original Christmas gifts were God’s gift of his son Jesus (“Yeshua” in his original language) to save mankind and the offer of forgiveness for our sins. It’s true that these gifts form the foundation of both Christmas and Christianity in general, but modern seekers are not limited to the Biblical narrative.

Another Christmas gift that God has given to 21^st-century seekers is the gift of accumulated science and scholarship that backs up the first century Gospels. We have at our disposal 2,000 years of research that can help us determine that God’s gift of Jesus and his offer of forgiveness are true and our only hope of salvation.

The tragedy is that all too often the actions of Christians alienate seekers like Rob. Emotional reactions to hypocrisy and bad behavior can trump the objective truth of the evidence. All believers should strive to not be the reason that people turn away from God and should pray for those like Rob who have been led astray.

Even with all I’ve experienced and read, sometimes faith doesn’t come easy. But questioning God is not sinful and can ultimately make your faith deeper. Sometimes belief is more of a choice than an emotional response.

Jesus told Thomas, “You believe because you have seen me. Blessed are those who believe without seeing me.” Today, we can’t physically see Jesus face-to-face, but we can see the evidence of his existence and his actions more than any other generation since that of Thomas and the other disciples. We just have to look at the evidence and decide how to react to it.

Merry Christmas.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Here’s Who Broke Ranks On The Impeachment Votes

The final impeachment vote tallies are in and the results are slightly different from what we reported immediately after the vote last night.

On Article I, alleging abuse of power, the official vote tally was 229-198. Three Democrats crossed the aisle to vote “no” while no Republicans broke ranks. The three Democrats were Jared Golden (Maine), Collin Peterson (Minn.) and Jeff Van Drew (N.J.). Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) voted present.

Roll Call notes that Peterson is from a strong pro-Trump district while Golden said that he believed that Trump abused power but did not obstruct Congress. Gabbard’s present vote was a protest against “fragmentation and polarity.” Van Drew is rumored to be switching parties to become a Republican.

Three congressmen did not vote on Article I. This included two Republicans, Duncan Hunter (Calif.), who recently announced his resignation after pleading guilty on corruption charges, and John Shimkus (Ill.), who was on a trip to Tanzania to visit his son in the Peace Corps. Duncan was warned to cast any more votes by the House Ethics Committee. The sole Democrat not to vote, Jose Serrano (N.Y.), was hospitalized with Parkinson’s disease. He is not seeking reelection.

The final tally for Article II, alleging obstruction, was identical to Article I.

We initially reported that one Republican voted in favor of the impeachment. However, Jake Sherman of Politico tweeted that Michael Cloud (R-Texas) changed his vote from “yea” to “nay.” Rep. Cloud told the Dallas Morning News that his “yes” vote was due to a clerical error.

Pelosi Threatens To Delay Sending Impeachment To The Senate

ollowing last night’s impeachment of President Donald Trump by the House of Representatives most observers expected House Democrats to name impeachment managers, i.e. prosecutors, and to refer the matter to the Senate for a trial. In 2019, however, that would be too simple. Today, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is hinting that the House may delay in sending the impeachment resolution to the Senate.

The pretext for the possible delay stems from statements made by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republicans over recent weeks that suggest that Senate Republicans are working with White House lawyers to dispose of the matter as quickly as possible. McConnell told Sean Hannity, “There’s no chance the president’s going to be removed from office” and now Democrats using that statement to claim that the fix is in.

“So far we haven’t seen anything that looks fair to us,” Pelosi told reporters after last night’s vote, per Politico. “That would’ve been our intention, but we’ll see what happens over there.”

Senior Democratic aides said that Democrats complete the steps for sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate before early January. Earlier this week, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had proposed that the Senate take up pre-trial matters on January 6 while requesting that the Senate allow impeachment managers to call witnesses.

McConnell rejected Schumer’s request, saying, “The House chose this road. It is their duty to investigate. It is their duty to meet the very high bar for undoing a national election. If they fail, they fail. It is not the Senate’s job to leap into the breach and search desperately for ways to get to ‘guilty.’ That would hardly be impartial justice.”

The witnesses that Democrats had asked to subpoena were also subpoenaed by the House. The Trump Administration ordered those witnesses, not to contest the congressional subpoenas but to ignore them.

Even though the House has already passed the articles of impeachment, refusing to refer the matter to the Senate gives Pelosi a measure of control over how the trial is run. It also gives the Speaker a chance to correct what many see as the mistake of ramming the impeachment through too quickly and without enough evidence.

Without their self-imposed deadline, Democrats could have asked courts to enforce the subpoenas and pursued other leads such as testimony from Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-born Republican fundraiser who worked with Rudy Giuliani. Parnas is currently under house arrest in New York on charges of ” funnel[ing] foreign money to candidates for federal and state office so that the defendants could buy potential influence with the candidates, campaigns, and the candidates’ governments,” per the indictment. Parnas is also facing bribery charges in Ukraine.

Delaying the impeachment referral to the Senate has been advocated by a number of Trump critics in recent days. Former Republican congressman David Jolly and Charlie Sykes discussed the plan in a Bulwark podcast earlier this week. Afterward, Sykes wrote a Bulwark article describing the strategy.

“The key here is that there is no requirement that the House immediately send the articles of impeachment to the Senate. This is Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s final card to play,” Sykes wrote. “So here is a modest proposal: the House should (1) vote to impeach on Wednesday, and (2) withhold sending any articles which pass to the Senate unless and until a majority of senators commit to holding an open and fair trial in accordance with the Constitution.”

An open and fair trial is a reasonable request. As my Resurgent colleague, Steve Berman, wrote this morning, voters deserve to know the truth about what happened in connection with the Ukrainian aid. Even if you are a Trump supporter who is totally fine with a quid pro quo for aid, you should have the facts about President Trump’s actions and character.

When the Trump Administration was offered the chance to present evidence and witnesses that could have exonerated the president during the House impeachment process, they refused. Maybe Mr. McConnell can convince the White House to help Congress find the truth.

Originally published on The Resurgent