Republican ‘Star’ Defects From Party After Sham Impeachment Vote

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As the 2020 general elections keep getting closer, the tide of opposition to President Donald Trump is continuing to grow. Now, former House Republican Congressional Committee Investigative Counsel Sophia Nelson has announced that she too is done with the GOP. She made the announcement that she’s leaving the party despite having worked alongside it right there in Congress following the Friday vote in which a slim majority of the Senate that was comprised entirely of Republicans voted down a proposal to include witness testimony in Trump’s impeachment trial. Witness testimony is included in trial after trial across America on a daily basis — but that was too much to ask of the Senate GOP, apparently.

Nelson commented:

‘As an attorney admitted before the illustrious Bar of the U.S. Supreme Court, I cannot associate myself with conduct so cowardly, craven, and unpatriotic, so brazenly partisan and so disrespectful of the Constitution’s impeachment powers. The arguments made by the president’s defense team require us to suspend reality.’

Some of those more brazenly outrageous arguments include the claim from the already controversial Trump impeachment defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz that — to only barely paraphrase — the ends justify the means and nothing that Trump could do to help his re-election campaign could be appropriate grounds for impeachment.

In a shocking escalation of deference to the personality cult of Trump, Dershowitz told the Senate:

‘If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.’

In other words, he’s claiming that if the president does it, then it can’t possibly be illegal, which is a gross overreach of executive power at the very best. It’s a continuation of Trump’s past false arguments that Article 2 of the Constitution gives him the power to do whatever he wants and well-reflected in Trump’s pompous pronouncement this weekend that he’s “America’s greatest president.”

Contrasting the current state of affairs with the Republican Party that she originally joined in the ’80s, Nelson continued:

‘This new Republican Party is beholden to a lawless, immoral, godless man. I have watched people I have known for decades twist themselves into human pretzels to defend him, excuse him, exalt him. The current state of the GOP is not good for anyone in our two-party system that breaks down without lawmakers who can work together, and move legislation forward.’

Nelson works as — among other roles — an adviser for The Lincoln Project, which is a largely Republican-led anti-Trump group that counts figures like prominent conservative activist Rick Wilson and Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway’s husband George among its other figureheads. (She’s also a commentator on MSNBC.) The Lincoln Project has already rolled out a selection of video ads targeting the president’s supporters, including their memorable debut piece that interspersed evangelical Christians lavishing praise on Trump with some of his most belligerent and often expletive-ridden public meltdowns.

Going forward, Trump continues to lose in most polls pitting him against possible general election opponents, and he could drag other Republicans on the ballot down right along with him.