Sanford, M gov

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</div><div></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see rooney politico on impeach:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>This could prove to be Trump’s salvation. Even among those Republicans not predisposed to defending him, there is the silhouette of an emerging consensus: That the president’s dealings with Ukraine were foolish, unbecoming and unfortunate—but not impeachable.</b></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Even Sanford admits that if he were still a voting member, he wouldn’t be ready to support impeachment.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> “I think there’s a very weighty, complex judgment to be made here,” he says. “I object to this president on a variety of levels. But I would still say another shoe has to drop.” Sanford pauses. “Then again, this is a guy who said he could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and get away with it, and he was pretty clairvoyant on that front. So, I don’t know what that shoe would have to look like.”</span></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mark Sanford, a former South Carolina congressman and governor, campaigns in Manchester, New Hampshire, in Sept. 2019. Sanford is running against Donald Trump for the 2020 Republican presidential nomination.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mark Sanford, a former South Carolina congressman and governor, campaigns in Manchester, New Hampshire, in Sept. 2019. Sanford is running against Donald Trump for the 2020 Republican presidential nomination. | Elise Amendola | AP</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Amash, who voted for the House inquiry to proceed, is wrestling with that same question.</b> “I think we’ve seen plenty of evidence that the president is abusing his power, abusing the office of the presidency,” he says. The independent congressman understands that his former GOP comrades disagree, or at least say they disagree, with him on that front. What he wonders is what, if anything, could change their minds; whether even a smoking cannon of misconduct linked directly to Trump could convince them of their responsibility to impeach.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Just as we sit discussing this mystery inside Amash’s congressional office, the nearby television flickers to life with a CNN breaking news bulletin: “White House admits to quid pro quo with Ukraine.” A short while earlier, Mulvaney—one of Amash’s closest friends during their time together on Capitol Hill—had taken to the White House press podium to declare, among other things, that Ukraine’s military funding had indeed been held up at Trump’s behest and that people should “get over it.”</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Amash</b> shakes his head. “I mean, I’ve known Mick for a long time, but I don’t really know what his life is like at this point, and what he’s thinking, and how much just being in that world warps your view of things,” he says. “The administration’s approach with a lot of things is to put out really bad information and then pretend like it’s not bad. It’s sort of a different way of covering up. I<b>t’s gaslighting—just put out the bad stuff and then tell everyone it’s not bad, and that you’re shocked that anyone would think it’s bad</b>. ... Trump understands that. He’s figured out that he can say and do pretty much anything and people will cover for him.”</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The administration’s approach with a lot of things is to put out really bad information and then pretend like it’s not bad. It’s sort of a different way of covering up.”</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">—REP. JUSTIN AMASH</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Both Sanford and Amash, once integral players inside the conservative House Freedom Caucus, say that if the roles were reversed—if Barack Obama were asking foreign nations to investigate Mitt and Tagg Romney—that Jim Jordan, the group’s founding chairman, would be leading the charge toward impeaching the Democratic president.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Oh, no doubt,” Sanford laughs.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“100 percent,” Amash says.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">With Sanford and Amash exiled, and Trump’s alliance with the </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">House Freedom Caucus</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> strong and symbiotic, it’s unclear whether even a single member of the organization—one founded on the order of principles over party—will consider a vote for impeachment.</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Jordan and Mark Meadows, his wingman and Trump’s soothsayer on the right, have so thoroughly transformed the identity of the group from feverishly independent to ferociously partisan that it’s difficult to imagine any of their lieutenants stepping outside of what’s become a Trump-topped chain of command.</span></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>There is, however, one conservative who continues to be monitored closely: Chip Roy.</b></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A former federal prosecutor who made a name for himself in Washington as Ted Cruz’s original Senate chief of staff, Roy is a true believer who was sharply critical of Trump throughout 2016. When Roy decided to run for Congress in 2018, in fact, he was reminded to scrub his social media of attacks on the president. With so many of his Freedom Caucus colleagues springing to the president’s defense in recent months, Roy’s silence has been a subject of growing concern. Although the freshman congressman hasn’t indicated that he’s prepared to impeach Trump, he hasn’t soothed anxieties by ruling it out, either.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Freshman Republican Rep. Chip Roy speaks at a press conference outside the Capitol.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Freshman Republican Rep. Chip Roy speaks at a press conference outside the Capitol. | Tasos Katopodis | Getty Images</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In an interview, Roy tells me he has yet to see evidence supporting a case for Trump’s impeachment. That said, he is clearly uncomfortable with the reflexive attempts by his colleague to insulate Trump at every turn, often resulting in sloppy and self-contradicting arguments.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I have not associated myself with any of the defenses of my colleagues on this issue, because I’m going to make my own assessment and frame it however the facts present themselves,” he says. “I’ve got my own views on this, and I don’t necessarily believe the arguments I’ve heard to date have been the best arguments, because people are just firing on the fly without thinking it through.”</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Roy acknowledges his reluctance to speak on the matter. He explains that he has been marking up hundreds of pages of documents and building a prosecutor’s case file from which to draw his ultimate conclusions. Unlike some of his colleagues, Roy says, he sees “a line” that needs to be enforced as a matter of precedent. It’s just that Trump, from everything he’s gathered thus far, has not crossed it.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The president’s allies have long believed his greatest threat from within the Republican Party comes from the middle; that given the cultish devotion he enjoys on the right, a moderate with lukewarm constituents could get away with defying him before a conservative with MAGA-clad constituents could. This thinking had led Trump and his team to keep a close eye on certain individuals, such as Adam Kinzinger and John Shimkus and Fred Upton, who fit the description of the centrist, traditional, Bush-friendly Republican who have been known to voice their displeasure with the president. And indeed, both Kinzinger and Shimkus leaped off the radar in recent weeks due to their broadsides against Trump. But their invective had more to do with abandoning the Kurds than pressuring the Ukrainians...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">gov sanford primary</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/this-republican-is-launching-a-primary-challenge-against-trump/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/this-republican-is-launching-a-primary-challenge-against-trump/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trump-might-actually-get-a-serious-challenger-from-the-right-wing/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trump-might-actually-get-a-serious-challenger-from-the-right-wing/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">weld chafee and sanford app trail</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><div></div>appalachian trail, now in House rep<div>
</div><div><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Sanford%27s_disappearance_and_extramarital_affair">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Sanford%27s_disappearance_and_extramarital_affai</a>r</div>