Due to an interruption in my personal web connection (due to a minor windstorm, some cables outside my house came down, and I had to spend all day dealing with it and the phone company), there will be no column today. Thankfully, everything seems to now be working, so there should be a new column up tomorrow. Thanks for everyone's patience, and I apologize for the lack of column today.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

President Donald Trump and all his coterie of apologists are right now angrily focused on impeaching the credibility of the whistleblower who complained about Trump's call to the new Ukrainian leader. And, yes, "impeaching" is the right word for what they're trying to do. But it's all both meaningless and irrelevant, because the scandal has already moved beyond any questions of bias or credibility of the whistleblower, largely due to the release of both the semi-transcript of the call itself and the whistleblower's complaint. Trump and his minions are, in essence, screaming about how they're going to sue the heck out of the locksmith, while the barn doors hang wide open and all the horses are running willy-nilly across the landscape. At this point, the story is the horses who are running free, not the lock's possible failure.

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This has been an extraordinary week, in a presidency chock-full of extraordinary weeks. Call it extra-extraordinary, we suppose. The country went from hearing vague things about Trump stonewalling a congressional committee to full-on impeachment in a matter of hours, it seemed. Or days, at the longest. We went from zero to impeachment in record time, giving Trump a new superlative to brag about: fastest scandal ever.

Because this situation is so extraordinary, and because Democrats are all currently missing such a gigantic messaging opportunity, today's column will be an extraordinary one as well. We're not going to spend a whole lot of time here in the introduction, because everyone already knows exactly what is going on, so none of it really needs repeating. We've just got a few short side issues to raise, and then we're going to move quickly on. This week's talking points are unique as well, because instead of seven discrete talking points, the entire rant is essentially devoted to one single word. You can probably guess what it is, from this week's column title.

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We all know how much President Donald Trump loves superlatives, most especially when they are used in reference to himself or his presidency. This week added yet another one of these superlatives, since Trump is now at the center of the fastest-progressing political scandal ever. Think about it: a mere two weeks ago, nobody knew anything about it; and now we've seen the public release of a president-to-president phone call's semi-transcript, the public release of the whistleblower's slightly-redacted complaint, testimony on the scandal before both houses of Congress, and the start of impeachment proceedings. To say the past week has been a whirlwind doesn't even begin to accurately describe the blinding pace of the growing scandal.

Of course, a lot of in-depth research would have to be done to prove the accuracy of the "fastest scandal ever" title, but because things are moving so fast there simply isn't time to do such digging. Perhaps the Teapot Dome scandal moved faster, or perhaps the speed of the unveiling of the XYZ Affair was quicker. But it's doubtful. What can accurately be said is that this is the fastest-moving scandal in living memory -- mine, at any rate. Normally there is a drip-drip-drip of revealed facts that builds over time (usually many months of time), but this one has been an absolute firehose rather than slow drips. As with all things connected to Trump, the narrative changes so fast that taking the time to type an article such as this one leaves me wondering what I'm missing in the meantime -- things that might make what I write obsolete before I even publish it.

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One of Donald Trump's presidential heroes is Andrew Jackson. Jackson rose to the presidency in 1828 after his first attempt failed. The centerpiece of his second campaign was to shine a bright light on the "Corrupt Bargain" in the House of Representatives, which named John Quincy Adams president in 1824 even though he had fewer Electoral College votes than Jackson (it was a four-candidate race and none of them got an outright Electoral College majority, which threw the election's decision into the House). I was reminded today of a central quote from Jackson's second campaign where he spoke about what had happened in the 1824 election, because it seems downright appropriate when discussing our current president: "There was cheating, and corruption, and bribery too." At this point, that seems to accurately sum up Trump's 2020 campaign as well.

Of course, Jackson's problems were all domestic, involving Speaker of the House Henry Clay, and Jackson's political rival John Quincy Adams. Jackson had a point, after all, since the legislature of Clay's home state of Kentucky had specifically told him to vote for Jackson in the House vote, but Clay went ahead and threw his state's vote (and his significant political weight) behind Adams -- even though not a single person in the state of Kentucky had voted for Adams in the popular election. Two days after the House elected Adams, Clay was nominated by Adams to become the new secretary of State. Hence the label "Corrupt Bargain." But even Jackson likely never would have dreamed of such election corruption stretching beyond America's shores.

Yesterday, Nancy Pelosi announced an impeachment inquiry, before the semi-transcript of the Trump call with the leader of the Ukraine was released. Doing so was a gamble, because neither she nor any other Democrat had seen the content of the document. Today, Pelosi looks prescient, since the semi-transcript is so damning. There was indeed corruption, and bribery too. All to provide Trump with the means of cheating in the upcoming election.

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Up until today, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has been the person riding the brakes on the growing calls to impeach President Donald Trump. This is no longer true. Pelosi has now begun the process of Congress attempting to remove a sitting president from office. By waiting this long, though, Pelosi is now absolutely immune from any accusation that she's in any sort of rush to judgment.

Impeachment is a momentous action, since it represents the most severe check and balance on the power of the presidency written into the U.S. Constitution. Impeachment against a sitting president has only happened three times in all of American history: Andrew Johnson's impeachment and acquittal by the Senate, Richard Nixon's articles of impeachment which forced his resignation, and Bill Clinton's impeachment and acquittal by the Senate. Ironically, the two times impeachment was followed by a Senate trial the president remained in office, while the one time it didn't reach a conclusion was because the president resigned before it could. We will now add a fourth instance of an impeachment inquiry, that of Donald Trump.

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Well, the numbers are in, so it's time to take another look at the Democratic horserace, after the third debate shook things up a bit. There are new polls out at both the national level and in Iowa, the Democratic National Committee just announced the new criteria for the fifth debate (to happen in November), and the field continues to shrink as time goes by. So a lot's been going on out on the hustings.

Campaign News

We'll begin with the departure from the race of Bill de Blasio, who really had no business running for president in the first place. He has slunk back to New York City, where he's supposed to be in charge of running the city. This still leaves a whopping 19 candidates in the running, but at least that number is now in the teens instead of the twenties.

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We're in the midst of a brand-new breaking scandal -- one that's so new it hasn't even been assigned a "-gate" label yet. Ukraine-gate? Kiev-gate? MassiveTrumpCollusion-gate? As was entirely appropriate, Hillary Clinton had the pithiest tweet of the week: "The president asked a foreign power to help him win an election. Again."

What Trump did, apparently, was to pressure the leader of Ukraine to reopen an investigation into Joe Biden's son. Trump reportedly used the threat of stopping military aid to the country to extort his desired outcome. Then when a whistleblower complained about it, the White House and the Department of Justice conspired to cover it up by withholding the official complaint from Congress. That's the crime and the coverup in a nutshell.

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reversed course today and allowed a bill with $250 million in new election security spending to advance. It looks like the "#MoscowMitch" campaign worked, in other words. We got to him, and he finally caved!

It's important to put this issue into some context. While $250 million may sound like a lot of money, in Washington it is absolute peanuts. In terms of the whole federal budget, this is the equivalent of some loose change found in the couch cushions. And not even that much loose change, at that. As the old saying about federal spending goes (a saying so old it was mythically first uttered by a senator who died in 1969): "A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." Given that bar -- again, set in the 1960s when Dr. Evil thought "one mil-li-on dollars" was a lot of dough -- $250 million only adds up to one-eighth of what was considered "real money" over a half-century ago. Like I said, peanuts. This is what Mitch McConnell was fighting so hard to avoid ponying up.

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This was supposed to be the week when President Donald Trump unveiled his preferred plan for gun safety reform. He still might do so tomorrow. But so far, the entire process on the Republican side of the aisle has appeared rudderless and leaderless, due to Trump's ever-increasing vacillations on what he'd be prepared to support. Mitch McConnell has doubled down on this leaderlessness by insisting that he will not move on any bill until Trump expressly signals his support for it. The buck gets passed back and forth like the political hot potato it is. No Republican wants to be the one with his name associated with an anti-gun law, because they all live in terror of the political power of the National Rifle Association -- which isn't going to support any new gun laws at all. Congressional Republicans are looking for Trump to lead the way out of this conundrum, but Trump seems increasingly incapable of doing so.

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