Impeachment is a constitutional tool designed for times of extraordinary abnormality — say, for instance, when a president presides over an obscenely lawless administration. It's a way of bringing politics back to normal.
Time is short and the risks of failure are high, but Democrats have no choice except to proceed. The anonymous whistle-blower's complaint that the House Intelligence Committee released is a straightforward and clearly written document.
Forget what you saw in 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington'
As growth slows in wealthy countries, Western food companies are aggressively expanding in developing nations, contributing to obesity and health problems.
In what may seem a paradox, the worse off Illinois government gets the more the wealthy are willing to spend to gain control. It is part of a national trend that has seen ever escalating spending battles for even down the ballot offices. Down the ballot, a $1 million legislative race in Illinois used to be an oddity. Last year 23 topped $1 million, with five between $5 million and $6 million, according to Redfield’s analysis of state campaign finance records.
In a Senate floor speech on the sixth anniversary of Citizens United, Senator Elizabeth Warren laid out steps that Congress and the Administration can take to root out the influence of money in politics.
It is no exaggeration to suggest that the legitimacy not only of President Jacob Zuma and the ANC, but also the notion of the liberation struggle itself is in shreds. For some of us, it was unthinkable that such an alliance of forces could degenerate into a moneymaking, lawless and violent operation represented by people who were prepared to trample on the values that we understood the movement to embody. Certainly, this did not happen overnight.
Successive High Court decisions have done more than enfranchise corporations at the expense of the rest of us. The same logic in the same cases now defines public corruption down: that a direct and palpable quid pro quo must be seen to operate. Absent that smoking gun, the financial elite has no limits on bankrolling campaigns whose candidates then vote their interests. To the nation's founders, that untrammeled influence was the essence of public corruption.
Corruption is endemic to the capitalist system and has not been successfully regulated away. Perhaps a system change is warranted?
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