Let’s start at the beginning, before we go further through the news. Let’s focus on what is precisely impeachment. Impeachment, by its nature is a political process created by the founding fathers of America when they wrote the United states constitution in 1787. This constitution established a clear break between the different powers with checks and balances. As you probably know, the impeachment goal is to hold a federal official into account by the Legislative branch represented by the United States Congress. Common misconceptions about impeachment are that, by itself it means removing somebody from office but it’s more complicated than that.

The Constitution lays out three kinds of offences that are grounds for removing any federal official, including the president, from office. “Bribery”, “treason” and “High crimes and misdemeanours”. The first two are pretty comprehensible, treason means helping enemies of the United States and bribery means taking money or gifts in exchange of any political favour. But the last category has been a source of debates for decades because the constitution simply doesn’t give any definition for this quote. Consequently, for the three United States president who faced an impeachment process, the question of whether to remove them from office or not depended on whether their behaviour fitted into this third category.

Being impeached is when charges of wrong-doing are brought against a federal official by the lower chamber of the United States Congress, called the House of Representatives. Any member could introduce an impeachment resolution but plenty go nowhere because impeachment charges need to be approved by a majority of the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, then the full House of Representatives votes on whether to impeach, and if the House votes yes, the president or the federal official is officially impeached. But, at this point you might wonder “So the current president will be removed from office because the house of representatives is currently controlled by democrats” . But this is when the biggest common mistake comes up because being impeached doesn’t mean you are removed from office. For that to happen the upper chamber of congress, the United States Senate would have to convict the federal official after a trial. Basically, the senators act as the jury, they would hear evidence from both sides and if 67% of the senators vote to convict the president, then the president will be forced to leave office…but this has never actually happened. In 1863, a house majority voted to convict the president Andrew Johnson for an unfair firing of his secretary of war and in 1998 Bill Clinton was also impeached for his conduct in the affair of Monica Lewinsky. But in both cases, not enough senators voted to remove them from office, Johnson was only one vote short but It wasn’t even close for Clinton because of partisanship. What it tells us is that impeachment and being removed from office is not just about committing high crimes and misdemeanours but it is also about losing support of one's party.

As we said, two presidents have been impeached before: Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson, but none has been actually removed from office (Richard Nixon was facing allegations after the Watergate scandal but left office and resigned after loosing support of his party). But what is Donald Trump facing in this impeachment inquiry?

In order to understand the scandal, let’s look back in time. Earlier this year, Volodymyr Zelensky defeated the incumbent to become president of Ukraine. After that President Donald Trump decided to call him to congratulate the newly elected-president of Ukraine. After the transcript of the phone call was released, a lot of people who decided to read the transcript were only seeing a normal conversation between two world leaders but the conversation took a turn with a single line from Donald Trump which is the following “I would like you to do us a favour though…” and what Trump said next, forms the core of the impeachment proceeding against him that could end his presidency. And this 30-minute phone call may become one of the most important moment in American history.

Let’s look back just one month before the call. The United States Congress had just approved 391 million dollars in military aid to Ukraine to help defend against a possible Russian attack. But Trump told his staff to withhold the money because he wanted to talk to president Zelensky first. After sharing some formal courtesies with Zelensky, Trump quickly changed the subject and he talked about the Billions of dollars in military aid that the US had given Ukraine in the last few years.

TRUMP - “[…] The United States has been very very good to Ukraine, I wouldn’t say that it’s reciprocal necessarily because things are happening that are not good, but the United State has been very very good to Ukraine”

ZELENSKY- “Yes you are absolutely right, not only 100% but actually 1000% […] We are ready to cooperate for the next steps”

(from the official transcript)

You probably have noticed the “I wouldn’t say that it’s reciprocal”. In other words, Trump wanted Zelensky to understand that Ukraine owed him something. Now let’s keep digging

TRUMP- “I would like you to do us a favour though…”

(Trump ran through a few requests and then he got to this one)

TRUMP- “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son”

At the time of the call, Joe Biden was the leading candidate to run against Trump in 2020. Polls from two days just before the call indicated that voters preferred Biden by a wide margin (49% Biden 39% Trump). So when President Trump made that call Biden was a huge threat for his re-election. And that’s why what he said next is so important:

TRUMP - “ […]Whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. If you could look into it…it sounds horrible to me.”

At this point you might wonder “What is he referring to ?”. Well, Trump has a theory on Joe Biden and his theory has to do with his son: Hunter Biden. In 2014 when Joe Biden was Vice-President of the United States, his son Hunter took a job in an Ukrainian gas company called “Burisma”. But it turns out that the British government was investigating the owner of that same company: Mykola Zlochevsky for money laundering. The British government asked the Ukrainian prosecutor general Victor Shokin to pursue this case, because investigating corruption was his job. But Victor Shokin ignored them and Burisma’s owner: Mykola Zlochevsky has never been prosecuted.

It wasn’t the first time that Victor Shokin had failed to investigate corruption, And people were fed up with that. That is why in march 2016 a huge popular movement in Ukraine was initiated in order to ask for Victor Shokin’s resignation with citizens and members of parliaments taking to the streets. Some United States senators including some republicans even signed a letter asking for “urgent reforms in the prosecutor General’s office”

To sum up, a bunch of people were pushing for Shokin to go because, as a Prosecutor General, he was accused of blocking major cases against allies and influential figures and hindering the fight against corruption in Ukraine. Among the enormous bunch of people pushing for Shokin to go, there was also the Obama administration and his Vice-President: Joe Biden. Joe Biden went to Kiev and made this statement: 

“I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kiev. And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. I looked at them and I said: “I’m leaving in six hours, if the prosecutor is not fired, you are not getting the money”. Well son of a bitch (laughter) he got fired.” And he was right, the prosecutor general Victor Shokin is no longer in office. But in the famous call with the Ukrainian President, Trump hinted that Shokin was fired for a different reason.

TRUMP - “ […] I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that’s very unfair […] There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you could look into it…it sounds horrible to me.”

So what is the favour that Trump is asking here to Zelenski ? it looks like he is asking Zelensky for some proof that Joe Biden pushed to get Shokin fired to protect Hunter. Which doesn’t even make sense because Shokin was fired for not investigating Burisma and other cases. But Trumps is requiring Zelenski to make it look as if Biden had done something shady in order to help him win re-election.

Zelenski agreed, he promised his next prosecutor would look into this situation.

Several staffers listened in on this phone call and wrote down what he said, that’s normal. What’s is not normal is what happened next. Instead of putting the records of the call in the normal archive, where more people within the US government would have been able to see it, Trump’s staffers hid the transcript in a computer system reserved for classified material even though this call had no reason to be classified. Multiple White House officials were worried the president had crossed a line and they told a CIA officer who wrote to congress “I have received information from multiple US government officials that the president of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S election". Meanwhile, Trump released, just a few weeks later, the 391 million dollars in aid to Ukraine.

There have been many Trump scandals from obstruction of justice, abuse of power to multiple welcomes of foreign interferences in US election, but this one stands out for its simplicity and distinguishes itself by an open sense of immunity from the president. President Trump directly asked a foreign leader to investigate his political opponent and influence the 2020 election. Then, his staff tried to cover it up. This phone call is showing that President Trump has abused the office of the president for personal interest and to hold on power. Not only the president is abusing his office but he also did it to undermine the voters will in order to advantage himself from his political opponents. That is why this phone call could end his presidency if enough members of Congress believe it should.

 The United States Democracy that used to be quoted as an example has fallen from a model of separation of power to one of the less representative among the current democratic regimes. The first example is the number of constituents by congressional district that a congressperson represents. As things stand today, there is about one representative for 749 000 Americans which consequently does rank the United States House of representatives as the less democratic representative chamber around the world. The founding Fathers of the country (the colonies that wrote the constitution) didn’t want that number to be as huge as it is today. James Madison, one of the main fathers of the constitution wrote “there shall be no more than one house member for 50 000 people”. These facts just underline how much the democratic system in America has become different from than the one that the founding fathers wanted it to be but, it also makes the current system different from that the one that may fit to the American voters. Every political system needs to be legitimate to be stable but can the American representation be considered so?

1) The electoral college

As you may know, the president of the united states is not elected by the popular vote but by an electoral college. Thoses “presidential” electors are in total 538 and each states has a preditermined number of electors based on its population. For example, the biggest one, California (39 000 000 people) has 55 electoral votes while Wyoming (500 000) has only 3. Futhermore, on election day, these electors would be designated by a “winner-takes-all” system. It means that the candidate who will win the popular vote in the state, will also win all the electors that the state own. The problem is that a lot of electors are actually not represented in the election. For exemple, let’s take as an exemple the state of Wyoming. The state of Wyoming is the most conservative state in the union (it always votes for the republicain candidate with more than 70% of the votes). Therefore the democrats living in Wyoming or in very conservative states are not represented in the election (it is the same for republicains living in progressive states like Maryland or California). This is why the candidates always campaign in the so-called “swing states” wich are not linked to a specific party and could flip and often decide the outcome of the election. This is the main reason why a president could win the election while loosing the popular vote because it simply doesn’t matter how big is the margin. You could win all the swing states with a one-vote margin and only get 1% of the votes in all others states and you will still win the presidency. Because of that system all the republicain presidents in the XXI century lost the popular votes in their first election (George W Bush in 2000 and Donald J Trump in 2016). It raises a democracy problem because the electoral college could put somebady in the white house while a majority of people woudn’t have voted for him. For that reason, a lot of democratic canidates running in 2020 want to abolsih the electoral college and switch to a popular vote system.

2) Gerrymandering

We alredy talked about gerrrymandering in the big lines but let’s explain again. Even if this practice is less and less used nowdays it still reflects how the politicals party may be ready to tearn apart their democratic values for their own interest. First of all you need to understand how the House of representatives works. It is the lower chamber of congress and it is composed of 435 members elected in different districs around the nation. As we said before, each states has to send a predeterminded number of representative to Washington D.C. But the backnone of the problem is how the shape of the districts are made. Most of the districts are created by the state legislature which is controlled by a political party and the huge problem is that a lot of elected officials are creating districst in order to give an avantage to the party wich they belong to (diagram just below). As you see, the main problem is thaht a lot of elected politicians are undermining democracy in order to give to they party an advantage without consideration to the voters’ choices. As a consequence, a lot of congressional districts are still nowdays with very stranges shapes.

As you have noticed the United States of America political landscape is composed of two parties: The Democrats who are more progressive and liberal and on the other side: the Republican party (or GOP) who are more conservative. In 2020 both of them will designate their candidate for president and vice-president who will face-off in the general election. But before the general election comes up, both of the major parties will organize primaries in order to designate who the nominees will be.

let’s take a look at the republican primary first. The incumbent president Donald Trump has already declared that he will run for a second term. In fact, his fist rally for re-election was held only 23 days after his inauguration day and, unlike other presidents, he organized a lot of rallies for his own re-election during the first year of his presidency. Today there is no doubt that Donald Trump will be the reappointed thanks to his incredible popularity among the republican’s voters (9 republicans out of 10 approve his action). Today a couples of moderate republicans have expressed an interested to challenge Donald Trump in 2020. The senator from Tennessee Bob Corker has considered to run just like the former senator from Arizona Jeff Flake. Both of the senators have been likely opposed to trump in the senate while they were in but neither or those two decided to stay in the senate and they both retired in 2018. The other frontrunner to be the trump’s opponent is the Maryland Governor Larry Hogan. Maryland is a democratic state that voted for Hillary Clinton by a considerable margin but as a moderate Larry Hogan succeeded to hold on to his seat. The former governor of Florida Jeb Bush even said “Larry is at the top of a list of leaders that I admire today because what’s happening here in Maryland is the antithesis of what’s happening the Washington DC these days”. Larry Hogan declared himself that his run would be motivated by his belief that Trump couldn’t be re-elected because of his “low re-election chances”.

Donald Trump isn’t in his strongest shape for his re-election fight and is not doing such great in the polls but there is time to turn this around. Barack Obama only had a 40% approval rating when he ran for re-election in 2012. If we look backwards in history, in 1981 when Jimmy Carter ran for re-election in 1981, he had also a very low approval rating but he won the primary to his democratic challenger Ted Kennedy but lost the general election to Ronald Reagan. Any republican who run against Trump will need to prove that he is not a wasted vote or a candidate that will divide the party and help give the white house to the democrats. Trump will, all the more, be a truly hard insider to take on, he has already raised more than 100 million of dollar for his campaign which is more than any candidate in history.

Now let’s tale a look on the democratic side. So far, on March 14, 2019 there are 16 candidates who are running for president and 4 others who have publicly expressed their interest (Joe Biden; Steve Bullock; Andrew Gillum and Stacey Abrams). This year’s primaries will be the most diverse one in history. First of all, women are running in record number this year with a lot of senators or representatives that are trying with all the strength they have to finally put a woman in the white house. This jungle-primary is an incredible tough fight for anyone who wants to stand out from the others. There are a lot of candidates but the two major frontrunners are senator Bernie Sanders and the former Barack Obama’s vice president Joe Biden. But the former vice-president Joe Biden hasn’t announced yet if he will run or not while all polls show he is the favorite despite the great number of opponents.

Joe Biden is the most well-known politician to run in the 2020 field thanks to his great job in the Obama’s administration. Joe Biden was already set on running for president in 2016 but he finally couldn’t because his son Beau was diagnosed with brain cancer. Beau Biden finally died in May 2016 at the age of 46. That tragedy ultimately forced Joe Biden to pass the 2016 race even if he admitted that he truly wanted to jump in the race. Joe Biden already ran for president when he was a senator from Delaware in 1988 but he finally cancelled his candidacy because of a scandal. 20 years later, he decided to try again in 2008. After his loss in the 2008 primaries, Barack Obama chose Biden as his running mate for the 2008 general election (vice-president) and they finally got elected together in 2008. But Biden’s 2020 path to the white house will not be as easy as you may imagine. He is a very strong candidate (3/4 of the democratic voters say they’ll be very likely to support Biden if he ran) and 63% of the democratic voters think he should run. Biden has also a very important network of rich donators and influent friends thanks to his decades spent in the political life. What it means for Biden is that, at the second he decides to run, he would be immediately considered as the frontrunner and would have enough money to run a credible campaign in the early states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. But Biden is 76 years old and this could impact his campaign or his energy. Joe Biden is also an old white guy who wants to represent a party who is going more and more diverse. And finally, to top it all, for a lot of young democratic voters Joe Biden, a man who spend 40 years serving in the senate and then 8 years as vice-president cannot represent the new fresh ideas that the democratic party is now embodying and the new face that they need in order to defeat Trump in 2020. And this profile doesn’t match the message that a lot of democratic voters expressed in the 2018 mid-terms who sent more female and more new faces in congress (like Alexandria Occasio-Cortez or Ayanna Pressley)

Finally, Joe Biden is a political pragmatist and he said it himself, he doesn’t hate or see the republicans as evil for what they are doing, even if he doesn’t agree with them, and that is just not where a majority of the democratic voters stand today. If we take a recent example, Joe Biden called Mike Pence (Trump’s vice president) a “decent guy”. After that, a lot of the democratic voters went crazy and pointed out that Pence was an opponent to LGBTQ rights, Biden quickly apologized after the story broke up. But if the Joe Biden campaign blueprint is to say something and apologize just after that, he may not keep his frontrunner position for a long time. Joe Biden will likely run in 2020 and he actually got good shot to be the next nominee to face Trump in 2020. But being the frontrunner doesn’t make you the nominee. And he will need to unify the whole democratic party behind him if he wants to unseat Donald Trump in 2020

He is, with the former vice-president Joe Biden, is the candidate who has more chance of winning the primaries and the general election according to the polls. Yesterday on Tuesday February the 19th, Bernie sanders announced his candidacy for president of the United States of America.

The former congressman, mayor of Burlington and current senator from the state of Vermont who shook up the presidential race in 2016 decided, after months of hesitation, to run again in 2020 despite his loss to former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. In the last few years Bernie Sanders went from an unknown senator to the most popular politician in the United States of America. Some people may think that Bernie Sanders is the actual frontrunner and will by farr win the primaries thanks to his popularity among democrats (70% approval rating) and his charisma and they are partly true. In the first 24 hours as a candidate, donations on his website exploded (6 millions in less than a day) with 200 000 individual donators.

But can Bernie Sanders truly recreate his 2016 campaign? Unfortunately, 2020 is a very different race than 2016. The most obvious difference is that the 2016 ‘s race was only composed of two majors’ candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. In this case scenario the race was simplified and the democratic party had to choose between the former center-left woman who has been in Obama’s administration or a Democratic-socialist Senator from Vermont who led a popular campaign. On the other side the 2020 race is already big and is only going bigger, there is already a dozen of major candidates who are very well-known in the democratic party. But the biggest problem is not that there are so many candidates, it is that there are a lot of left-candidates unlike in 2016 when Bernie was the only candidate representing the left wing of the democratic party, Today Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Corry Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand and more are trying to embody the candidate that the liberals would fall in love with. What it means for Bernie Sanders is that he will need to fight harder for this ideological space in 2020 than he did in 2016. What the Bernie Sanders’s campaign also need to think of is that the 2016 democratic party is very different from the 2020 one. The democratic party is younger, more diverse and more feminized and is also going more liberal. And today the democrats have more choice. they may give another chance to Bernie Sanders who is an old white guy (77 years-old with no disrespect) running in a more diverse party. Otherwise, the left-wing democrats may choose to move on and to elect a candidate representing a minority like African-American, Latinos or a woman (Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Julian Castro, Elizabeth Warren or Kirsten Gillibrand). In 2018 the democrats nominated a very important number of women and minority candidates like Stacey Abrams in Georgia, Andrew Gillium in Florida or Alexandria Occasio Cortez in New York. This story may look like the 2008 one when the democratic party primaries opposed junior senator from Illinois Barack Obama and the junior senator from New York: Hillary Clinton. In 2008 Hillary Clinton was the frontrunner for the democratic primaries but she finally lost to the freshman senator from illinois: Barack Obama.

The last element we may underline is that technically, Bernie Sanders is not a democrat, He may have run as one in 2016 But he admitted doing that only because he didn’t think a third-party member could win. In 2016 Hillary Clinton didn’t attack Bernie Sanders on his party affiliation because she preferred attack him on his proposals. But in 2018 Bernie Sanders refused to run as a democrat and just ran as an independent. So, in 2020 the democrats will choose between an independent or a lifelong democrat. And nobody knows what they are going to decide, maybe this will impact their choice or maybe they don’t care at all about his party affiliations and as Chris Cillizza said “the democrats dated Bernie Sanders in 2016 and they’ll marry him in 2020”.

Whatsoever, Bernie Sanders is going in a tough race in 2020 and has a real chance in 2020. In a democratic party he may be the candidate that can unite the party around his project thanks to his charisma and his leadership.

sources: NYT/CNN

22/02/2019

On February 1rst a conservative website called Big League Politics disclosed a picture of Virginia’s governor Ralph Northam 1984 medical school yearbook. On this picture we can see two men, one black faced and another one wearing a Klux Klux Klan’s robe. After the scandal broke up in  a state where 1 out of 5 residents are black, Northam released a statement where he said « That photo in and the racist and the offensive attitude that it represents, does not reflect the person I am today nor the way that I have conducted myself as soldier, a doctor and a public servant. I am deeply sorry ». After that a lot of people in democratic party asked him to resign from his office of governor but he refused. He even changed his speech in a press conference saying he was mistaking, claiming that it wasn’t him on the photo (even if he admitted it a little bit sooner). While the political world was still shocked by the governor’s scandal, five days later a woman just accused democratic lieutenant-governor Justin Fairfax (a rising star of the democratic party) had sexually assaulted her during the 2004 national convention in Boston. After that, Justin Fairfax denied the accusation and accused his rivals to tried to bring him down. Unfortunately, we all know that bad things always come in threes. 3 days later the democratic Virginia attorney general Mark Herring tweeted this:

« In 1980, when I was 19-years-old undergraduate in college, some friends suggested we attend a party dressed like rappers we listened all the time, like Kurtis Blow, and perform a song. It sounds ridiculous even now writing it. But because of our ignorance and glib attitudes and because we did not have an appreciation for the experiences and perspectives for others. We dressed up and put on wigs and brown make-up »

What does the honorable attorney general wanted to say by « Brown make-up » is that he also went to a party black faced. In order to recap the horrible week for democrats in Virginia: in less than a week there were three different scandals involving the three top elected officials all democrats in the commonwealth of Virginia with two white politician wearing black faced and a black politician facing sexual assault charges. But the story isn’t done yet, less than one week after the attorney general’s confessions a second woman came out from nowhere and accused Fairfax for assaulting her when they were both undergraduate at college and Fairfax again, denied the accusations. For the moment neither of three democratic politicians decided to resign indeed the call from the top officials of the democratic party.

But the most important thing is that the state of Virginia was a lean republican state over the past decades and progressively became a democratic success controlled by democrats since 2008 with always a 4-5 points margin over the republicans. This entire disaster is threating that progressive rise and may give the opportunity for republican to take back the state in local election and even in presidential race in 2020.

16/02/2019

She is now the third woman senator to launch her presidential campaign for the 2020 presidential race. Kamala Harris is a woman attorney born in Oakland in 1964 and who comes from a low-income family, when she was 10 she created a petition in her bulding for the creation of a common’s garden In order that the families could benifit from it. She graduated from Howard school and became an attorney. She first got elected in 2003 to be the San Francisco’s district attorney. In 2010 she won the election to be the next Attorney General of the whole state of California. In 2016, Kamala Harris decided to run in order to replace progressive senator Barbara Boxer who is not seeking reelection for a fifth term. During this election Kamala Harris will defeat democratic representative Loretta Sanchez with 62% of the vote and is now in charge to represent 40 millions of citizens in the United States Senate. Once in the Senate, Kamala Harris has been one of the toughest opponent to President Trump and his administration. After some rumors telling that she was considered by the former Vice President Joe Biden to be his running mate, She Finally decided to run for President on her own, some people are calling her « The New Barcack Obama ».

Yesterday, Elizabeth Warren launched an exploratory committee for a 2020 presidential run. By making this announcement she is the first(of many) credible candidate who decided to take a big step forward running for president. Elizabeth Ann Warren is a very famous political democratic woman who has become famous by winning a senate seat in Massachusetts in 2012 against a republican incumbent She is a progressive icon known for her opposition to the Trump administration. The Massachusetts lawmaker was born in Oklahoma on June 1949 in a middle-class family. After losing her husband of a heart attack Elizabeth Warren’s mother had to take a job as an operator in order to keep their home and pay the medical bills. Elizabeth will become an extremely talented law-professor and will teach 20 years in the very renowned university of Harvard, her specialties being: indebtedness and bankruptcy.

At 59 she will be nominated director of the Paulson plan in order to save the American banks from bankruptcy and will be after that nominated advisor to the treasury secretary. Under President Obama’s administration, Elizabeth Warren will be nominated director of the US Agency of consumer protection, an agency that she fought for. That the same year Elizabeth Warren will be called by the Times “The Sheriff of Wall Street “. At 63 she will become the first woman ever elected to US Senate from Massachusetts by defeating a republican incumbent in 2012. She also got elected thanks to of her speech where she defended middle class and was blaming the healthiest for not contributing to the American dream. After Hillary Clinton’s failure in 2016 she will join Bernie Sanders in his fight for health care and a fair taxation and will be one of the tougher opponents to the Trump administration. She also had to go through racism from president Trump who called her “Pocahontas” because of her Indian roots.

Elizabeth Warren is now a progressive icon from the democratic party and had announcing by a video that she was seriously considering a run while a lot of progressive figures like Bernie Sanders or Kamala Harris are still undicided.

As you may remember, the november senate election in Arizona opposed democrat Kyrsten Sinema agaisnt her republicain opponent Martha Mcsally. Kyrsten Sinema won this election by three point in Novermber making her the first woman elected to the United States Senate and rejecting Martha Mcsally because (according to the polls) she was too close to president Trump and unfit to bipartisanship. On Monday, Senator Jon Kyl,(the other senator from Arizona) who was appointed by Arizona’s governor, Doug Doucey to fill the vacant seat left by John Mccain, decided to resign. He made a statement where he declared that he decided to step down in order to permit the new nominee to take his office at the same time as other senators-elected in 2018, and to serve a full two-year term ,potentially four if the nominee wins re-election in 2020 and potentially 6 if this same nominee wins again in 2022. And no matter who wins in 2022, this person wil keep the seat until 2028.

During an annoncement Doug Doucey declared that he had chosen Martha Mcsally to replace Jon Kyl in the US senate, a very controversial and undemocratic decision because Martha Mcsally already lost the senate election less than 2 months ago and was rejected by a majority of arizona voters. A person who has been really critical to Martha Mcsally is Cindy Mccain (John Mccain’s widow) while she declared that she respected her Governor’s decision. She Judged Martha Mcsally too partisan and unfit to fight for her husband’s legacy. On the other hand, the decision was warmly welcomed by the president and the republican leader in the senate : Mitch Mcconnel who said that she would remain faithfull to the republican party. Whatever, McSally will serve until 2020, when voters will elect someone to finish Mcain’s final two year’s terms.

19/12/2018

Yesterday on the Capitol hill, a new bill was introduced by senator Sherrod Brown (Democrat from Ohio) and by senator Jeff Merkley (Democrat from Oregon) banning all the congresspeople to buy and sell stocks during their terms. This Legislation would be a very big step forward for transparency and would fight against what a lot of people are judging as a conflict of interest.

Today, it’s perfectly legal for a congressperson or a senator to buy and sell stock in the very businesses they are writing laws on. For senator Sherrod Brown, members of congress “have to serve the American people and not their own interest”. The problem is that a lot of members of congress are trading in stocks while on another hand they are making decision that would affect the value of those stocks (on health care, taxations, regulations…). It creates the perception (which is not necessarily false) that some members of congress (both democrats and republicans) are more focused on their bank account rather than building a better future for America. In 2017; 34 congresspersons traded more than 100 stocks while in office. During that same year, senator Jim Inhofe (republican from Oklahoma) bought more than 50 000 dollars in a top military contractor a few days after he pushed to invest 750 billion dollars in military spending. Sen. Sherrod Brown who is also the ranking member of the banking committee also said “It’s simply not right that a member of congress own stocks and then vote on issues because it’s a conflict of interest, specially a member of the banking committee”. This bill, named the “Ban conflicted trading Act” should be introduced to the Senate floor in February and if it has at least 51 votes on the 100 senators, then the bill would be brought to the House of representatives, controlled by democrats. Finally, if the bill is adopted by the House, it will be sent and the president’s desk, the president will next decide if he chooses to sign the bill and makes it become a law or if he opposes his veto. But even if the president decides to oppose the bill, his veto could be override with a 2/3 majority in Congress.

21/12/2018