Program Note:

Welcome to the second part of our look at how impeachment was seen by Alexander Hamilton, when he was arguing in the anonymous Federalist Papers for the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Today, we have Federalist Paper Number 66, or "Objections to the Power of the Senate To Set as a Court for Impeachments Further Considered." It was published in the New York Packet newspaper in March of 1788.

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Program Note:

I'll be spending today and tomorrow in preparation for our year-end awards columns, so I thought I'd run a special historical look back for my readers by reprinting the two Federalist Papers written by Alexander Hamilton on the subject of impeachment. Obviously, this is relevant to current events in Washington.

Both of these (today's and tomorrow's) were published in the New York Packet newspaper in March of 1788. As with all the Federalist Papers, they were published anonymously under the signature "PUBLIUS." The Federalist Papers were a series of arguments in favor of adopting the newly-written Constitution, and were countered by the lesser-known Anti-Federalist Papers, a series of arguments against adopting the new form of government being considered.

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It has only been two weeks since we last took a good look at the Democratic presidential field, but we've got another debate coming this week on Thursday night and we'll likely not be able to examine the horserace until the new year, so we thought it'd be worth a last look for 2019.

The field has gotten a wee bit smaller in the past two weeks, as Kamala Harris dropped out, leaving only (!) 15 Democrats still running. Michael Bloomberg has jumped into a solid fifth place, and Pete Buttigieg's poll bounce has faded a bit. So there have indeed been developments worth talking about.

Campaign News

The voters and the donors are having their say, and it is finally winnowing the debate stage. That's really the biggest campaign news in a nutshell.

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And so we come to the close of the most momentous week in Washington of the year. In one week's time, we've seen articles of impeachment move to the floor of the House of Representatives, an agreement between House Democrats and the White House to move forward on the U.S./Mexico/Canada Agreement, a truce declared in the budget battles (that had threatened to shut down the government once again), Democrats agreeing to the creation of the "Space Force" in exchange for paid family leave for federal workers, a tentative trade cease-fire declared with China, the Senate unanimously backing up the overwhelming vote in the House to declare the Armenian genocide for what it was, the release of an inspector general's report that totally debunked most of the conspiracy theories about the initiation of the counterintelligence operation at the edges of the 2016 Trump campaign, President Trump being forced to pay a $2 million fine for misuse of his own charitable foundation, and the House passing a landmark bill to fight the greed of drug companies by finally using the federal government's buying power to force lower prices on prescription medication. Again: all of these rather large things happened in a single week.

That's pretty productive, you've got to admit. Although the impeachment battle was the one issue which sucked up all the media oxygen, there were plenty of other things going on in Washington that didn't get anywhere near enough attention. Like Donald Trump having an epic hissy fit over not being named Time magazine's "person of the year." But we're getting ahead of ourselves....

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One week from tonight the top Democratic presidential candidates will gather once again, for another televised debate. There will be fewer of them on the stage this time around, since as of this writing only seven of them have qualified. After the first of the new year, the debate schedule will accelerate, as we'll get four debates in January and February, one in each of the early-voting states. Taken together, these five debates may be the most influential yet, since voters will assumably be paying more attention. But throughout the whole process, my metric has always been to picture each of the candidates on a stage not with their fellow Democrats, but with Donald Trump. Because that is precisely what they're all vying for -- the chance to take on Trump in the general election.

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Occasionally, I like to take a look far down the road in an effort to see long-term political dynamics that others may be missing. I'm often accused of taking too long a look when I do. But I have to admit, a story today in Politico brought forth the same reaction from me, because it is concerned with the dynamics of Joe Biden's re-election effort, in 2024. I'll pause for a moment while you digest that one.

The gist of the article is that Biden is privately considering the possibility of only being a one-term president, by choice. This, of course, skips over the entire 2020 nomination process and general election, but it is couched in a contemporary question: should Biden now pre-emptively announce that if elected, he will only serve one term? After all, should he be elected, he will be 82 years old at the end of his first term in office. Is America ready for its first octogenarian president?

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Today, House Democrats unveiled two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. This is a historic development, since it has only previously happened on three other occasions. Somewhat surprisingly, the Democrats opted to only focus very narrowly in the charges they brought, limiting them to the fallout from Trump's attempt to get the Ukrainian government to do opposition research on a political opponent. Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership made a decision in drafting such narrowly-focused articles, since they had the option of including other obviously-impeachable offenses, but in the end chose not to.

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This isn't a real column, I fully realize, so my apologies in advance for that. But I had to spend time today catching up on getting ready for the holiday season, so I just didn't have the time. I did listen to a fair amount of today's hearing in front of the House Judiciary Committee, but it all seemed like more of a rehash than anything new, so I don't really have much more to say about it than that for the moment.

Instead, today I am throwing the nomination process open for our annual year-end "McLaughlin Awards." I am going to commit to publishing these on December 20th and 27th, the final two Fridays of the year. With such a short holiday season, I just don't think it's possible to move that up to starting with our awards this Friday, so we'll have one final Friday Talking Points column of the year before the awards. That's the plan, even if it does mean I'll be real busy the two days after Christmas. I have no idea what other columns will be appearing this month, so stay tuned for other updates.

A few years back, I decided to ask for input into the awards categories, and this has worked out pretty well -- I've gotten some brilliant suggestions in the comments section that I had completely forgotten about. So I made it a tradition along with the columns themselves. Which brings us to this year's prizes.

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The impeachment train is rolling right on down the track, and nothing's going to stop it now. That was the big news this week, without question. This has all been happening at breathtaking speed, when you consider the usual glacial pace of things getting done in Washington. Just this week, the House Intelligence Committee put out its report on impeachment, handed it off to the Judiciary Committee, who then held their first hearing, and by week's end Nancy Pelosi was calling for articles of impeachment to be drafted so that the House could vote on them in time for the Christmas break. That all happened in one week.

Of course, Pelosi has had complete control over the timing of all of this, and she is gambling that moving faster rather than slower is going to work out better for Democrats. This decision is already being second-guessed -- and likely will in the future, as well. Pelosi could have chosen a different path, but she has signaled that the impeachment train will continue on the fast track.

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There is good news for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot who espouse progressive policy positions, according to a recent poll cited by today's Washington Post. But even putting it like that buys in to a rather enormous falsehood that both the media as a whole and the Republican Party would dearly like us all to believe. For decades now, they've been beating the drum of "the American public is center-right," when it is just not true (if indeed it ever was). You see this in the constant framing of Democratic candidates in the media as "too far left" or "going hard left" or "dangerously left ideas" or any of the other myriad of misdirection the media routinely loves to push. As this poll stunningly reveals, this is absolutely false because the wide mainstream of political thought in the public at large is actually currently somewhere between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, on the political ideology scale.

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