January 21, 2020

Watch Chuck Schumer Make the Case for Impeachment in 90 Seconds

“We are staring down an erosion of the sacred democratic principles for which our founders fought a bloody war of independence.”

Stefani Reynolds/CNP/Zuma

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Addressing the Senate at the outset of the historic impeachment trial against President Donald Trump, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the offenses of which Trump is accused “crimes against democracy itself.”

“It’s hard to imagine a greater subversion of our democracy than for powers outside our borders to determine the elections from within,” the senator from New York said. “For a foreign country to attempt such a thing on its own is bad enough. For an American president to deliberately solicit such a thing, to blackmail a foreign country with military assistance to help him win an election, is unimaginably worse.”

Schumer then attacked Trump’s oft-repeated claim that Article Two of the Constitution enables him to “do whatever he wants.”

“We are staring down an erosion of the sacred democratic principles for which our founders fought a bloody war of independence,” he concluded.

Watch the full address below:

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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