Bernie Sanders inches toward backing impeaching Trump

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday inched closer to supporting impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump, saying “it may be time” for the House Judiciary Committee to determine whether to start the process.

“I do understand where House members are coming from. And you’ve got this guy who is refusing to respect the Constitution, equal powers, and is rejecting requests for members of the administration to come forward,” the 2020 Democratic White House hopeful said on CNN.

“So, you know, I think it may be time at least to begin the process through the Judiciary Committee to determine whether or not there are impeachment proceedings.”

Calls by Democratic lawmakers to launch an impeachment inquiry have ramped up since Monday, when the administration directed former White House counsel Don McGahn to defy a subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee to testify publicly and produce documents related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

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Sanders said Wednesday that if Trump “continues to not understand the Constitution of the United States, the separation of powers, the fact that the Congress has every right to subpoena,” it might be time to start the impeachment process.

Sanders, a Vermont Independent, also said House Democrats must remain focused on progressive legislative priorities.

“The House has got to continue going forward, raising the minimum wage to a living wage, making sure that all of our people have health care, dealing with climate change, dealing with voter suppression,” Sanders said. “If all we talk about is Trump, Trump, Trump, I think he benefits.”

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No War With Iran, Say 62 Groups in Letter to Congress

The White House is continuing its march to war with Iran, but resistance is growing—most recently by a group of 62 organizations that issued an open letter to Congress on Tuesday calling for the representative body to exercise its power and stop U.S. aggression.

In the letter, the 62 groups call on Congress to “fulfill its constitutional duty and enact further constraints to unequivocally prevent the administration from launching an unauthorized war.”

The push to war has been led mainly by President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Trump himself has been noncommittal, expressing support and hesitance in nearly equal measure depending on the day.

Nevertheless, a number of the letter’s signatories said in a statement, the administration’s actions require pushback from Congress.

“Trump and his National Security Advisor John Bolton are taking this country to the brink of a completely avoidable military confrontation,” said Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian-American Council. “It’s time for Congress to turn its words into action by passing legislation to stop Trump and Bolton from starting an illegal war.”

Under the Constitution, only Congress has the ability to declare war. But that right has been eroded over the last seven decades as presidents have used language like “police actions” and other euphemisms to go around Congress and start wars at will. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) in the wake of the 9/11 attacks has been used (pdf) over 37 times by Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump in over 14 countries.

In response to congressional cooling on war, the administration on Tuesday used a briefing from Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick M. Shanahan to continue to raise the specter of a vicious, calculating foe while telling members of Congress that the threat, for now, has abated.

“I’d say we’re in a period where the threat remains high,” Shanahan told reporters Tuesday. “And our job is to make sure that there is no miscalculation by the Iranians.”

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Gwen DuBois, the president of the Chesapeake Bay chapter of PSR, made clear that the horror that could be seen in Iran was previewed in Iraq. In a war with Iran, DuBois said, “likely hundreds of thousands if not a million or more people would die, as in Iraq, from the indirect consequences of war—such as infections and the collapse of the healthcare system.

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Bernie Sanders is bringing back the most underrated education policy

Over the past two decades, education reform has been a major topic of debate and policymaking, from President Bush’s No Child Left Behind bill to President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative. Reforms have generally followed the pattern of adapting mechanisms from the for-profit business world to “fix” supposedly broken aspects of the public education system: weakening teacher unions, replacing public schools with privately-run charters, tying teacher pay to test score results, and so on.

Yet there is one idea that was once a major focus of reform efforts, but has been set aside for years: racial desegregation.

That is, until now. Last week, Bernie Sanders released a plan to revitalize school integration efforts. It’s both an excellent plan and brings attention to a vitally important racial justice issue.

Historical context is important here. For a couple decades after the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, the federal government put real effort into forcing school districts to integrate their populations. The main objective was to equalize educational opportunity, particularly in the South. Stuffing black populations into crummy, under-resourced institutions was one of the major mechanisms of the Jim Crow apartheid system — but if white and black children went to the same schools, then they should receive education of a similar quality (or at least a lot closer than before).

Because cities across the nation were (and remain) extremely segregated, and whites violently resisted any attempt to integrate actual neighborhoods, the only realistic option was using transportation to achieve a decent demographic mix. But this led to an enormous white backlash across the country.

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So what would Sanders do? He would end the prohibition on funding desegregation transport (a relic from that 1970’s backlash), provide several pots of money to encourage schools to desegregate, triple funding support for the poorest schools, expand funding for minority teacher education, ramp up desegregation orders, and provide more money for school construction and maintenance, (as well as several other policies not directly related to desegregation). It’s an excellent start, to say the least.

School integration has been outside the main political discussion for a long time, and it’s long since time we started talking about it again.

Bernie Sanders deserves enormous credit for bringing it back on the national radar and offering a meaningful plan to address it.

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Hear the Bern is a new podcast from Bernie 2020 that explores the people, stories and ideas that are driving this political revolution.

On Episode 6, hear about how the campaign is about bringing people into the political process who would otherwise never get involved in order to defeat Trump.

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Starting off with Bernie speaking to Iowa’s KCCI:

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