By Terrance Turner
The U.S. Senate voted against hearing witnesses in the Senate impeachment trial, 51-49. Of the Republicans, only Mitt Romney and Susan Collins were willing to have a legitimate trial. With this vote, the trial is essentially over. An acquittal vote is set for Wednesday. Now that the president has gotten away with breaking the law, there’s nothing to stop him from doing it again. Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney confirmed as much. “We do that all the time,” he said when a reporter pointed out the illegal quid pro quo that led to the charges.
The Government Accountability Office said that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) : “Faithful execution of the law does not permit the president to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law. OMB withheld funds for a policy reason, which is not permitted under the Impoundment Control Act (ICA) […] Therefore, we conclude that OMB violated the ICA.”
Meanwhile, after months of failed negotiations and the resignation of a prime minister, Brexit is complete. Britain officially left the European Union at 11 pm. on Friday. There is mixed reaction about the exit, but economists seem to have reached consensus. In March 2019, the Peterson Institute for International Economics analyzed 12 economic studies about Brexit’s impact. Only two of them saw any gain for the UK from Brexit — and both those studies were deemed unrealistic by the three lead researchers. “The consensus view of the economic studies of Brexit is that it will damage both the UK and the EU and that the damage will be far worse for the UK than for the rest of the EU (EU-27).”
So two superpower nations made huge, life-altering bad decisions on the same day.
Reaction on Twitter was displeased, to say the least:
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