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As the U.S. House of Representatives drafts its report on its impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, more activists throughout the country are planning rallies in support of impeachment.
Actions for the "Nobody Is Above the Law" mobilizations are planned for more than 323 cities in 46 states and Washington, D.C. On the night before the House votes on whether to impeach Trump, hundreds of thousands of grassroots activists plan to rally in support of impeachment.
On the eve of the House vote, protesters will gather in front of the district offices of House members as the lawmakers finalize their positions and at U.S. Senate offices as senators prepare for a likely trial. Activists will call on lawmakers to uphold the U.S. Constitution and their oaths of office by supporting Trump's impeachment.
We now know Trump pushed Ukraine to interfere in our 2020 elections, using U.S. military aid to pressure Ukraine officials to dig up dirt on Trump's political opponent, and then engaged in a criminal cover-up. While Congress continues its work on health care, the economy and other important issues, it also needs to continue these impeachment proceedings, because nobody - especially Trump - is above the law.
Last week, EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland, a Trump appointee, testified that the president was aware of and directed a pay-to-play bribery scheme involving Ukraine. Trump solicited an official Ukraine investigation to benefit himself in exchange for official U.S. actions.
Americans from Los Angeles, Calif., to Beckley, W.Va., are ready to amplify the need to impeach, hold their representatives accountable and declare that not even the president is above the law.
Activists who want to get involved can RSVP for a "Nobody is Above the Law" event or participate in a town hall or rally in their district.
The Nobody Is Above the Law actions are organized by ACRONYM, act.tv, Action Group Network, Blue Future, By The People, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Center for Popular Democracy Action, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Common Defense, CREDO Action, Daily Kos, Defend American Democracy, Demand Justice, DemCastUSA, Democracy 21, Democracy for America, Equal Justice Society, Florida LGBTQ+ Democratic Caucus, Free Speech for People, Georgia Alliance for Social Justice, Greenpeace, Impeachment March - Worldwide, Indivisible, Lewis-Clark 4 Democracy, Mainers for Accountable Leadership, March For Truth, MAYDAY America, MomsRising, Mountain Dems of Colorado, MoveOn.org, National Action Network, LGBTQ & Veteran's Committee, National Organization of Women, Need To Impeach, NextGen America, OWS Special Projects Affinity Group, People For the American Way, People's Action, Progressive Democrats of America, Progressive Turnout Project, Public Citizen, Resistbot, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), SOSAmerica2019, STAND Central New Jersey, Stand Up America, Strong Economy for All Coalition, United We Dream and Women's March.
Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people - not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country.
(202) 588-1000"It is a power grab in the service of killing people outside the law based solely on the president's own say so," said one expert.
The Trump administration reportedly told members of Congress that the president's deadly, unauthorized airstrikes on vessels in international waters can continue indefinitely, deploying a rationale that the Obama administration applied to its 2011 bombing of Libya.
The Washington Post reported Saturday that "T. Elliot Gaiser, head of the Trump administration's Office of Legal Counsel, made his remarks to a small group of lawmakers this week amid signs that the president may be planning to escalate the military campaign in the region, including potentially hitting targets within Venezuela."
Under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, the president has 60 days to terminate military operations not approved by Congress. The 60-day clock starts when the president notifies Congress of military action.
Monday marks the 60th day since Trump informed Congress of his first strike on a boat in the Caribbean in early September. The strike killed 11 people whom the administration accused without evidence of trying to smuggle drugs from Venezuela to the United States.
Trump has since authorized more than a dozen other strikes on boats in international waters, killing more than 60 people in what human rights organizations and United Nations experts have described as blatant violations of US and international law.
The Trump administration has told lawmakers that the US is engaged in "armed conflict" against drug cartels that the president has designated as "terrorist organizations."
But the White House is insisting that Trump's military actions in international waters are not constrained by the War Powers Resolution, claiming the operations "do not rise to the level of 'hostilities'" because the administration says American troops are not likely to be put in danger.
Brian Finucane, a former legal adviser at the State Department who now works at the International Crisis Group, observed Monday that the Trump administration's narrow definition of hostilities echoes "arguments made by the Obama administration in 2011 with respect to the military intervention in Libya."
"The Obama administration's interpretation of 'hostilities' was not well received, including by the US Congress," Finucane wrote, pointing to a May 18, 2011 letter that Republican senators sent to Obama accusing him of flouting the War Powers Resolution.
One of those GOP senators—Rand Paul of Kentucky—is backing a bipartisan war powers effort to prevent Trump from unilaterally and unlawfully attacking Venezuela.
Finucane stressed that the implications of the Trump administration's decision to interpret hostilities narrowly "are significant," noting that it paves the way for the US government to "continue its killing spree at sea, notwithstanding the time limits imposed by the War Powers Resolution."
"Second, the executive is arrogating to itself greater power over the use of force that constitutionally is the prerogative of Congress," Finucane added. "It is a power grab in the service of killing people outside the law based solely on the president's own say so."
On Saturday, Drop Site reported that the Trump administration has expanded its "drug cartel target list" to include sites inside Colombia and Mexico amid concerns that the president could soon attack Venezuela and launch an effort to overthrow the nation's president, Nicolás Maduro.
"At an Oval Office meeting in early October, Trump administration officials and top generals discussed escalating the pressure on Venezuela to go beyond the semi-regular attacks on boats in the Caribbean," the outlet reported. "The discussed plans include striking on land inside Venezuela... The same October 2 meeting included a previously reported directive from President Trump, who dialed his special envoy Richard Grenell into the call, telling him to cut off diplomatic communications with Maduro."
Asked during a newly aired "60 Minutes" interview if he believes Maduro's days as Venezuela's president are "numbered," Trump responded, "I would say yeah."
"To speak of 3 million years of human life erased is to confront the true scale of this atrocity—generations of children, parents, and families wiped out," said the head of a US advocacy group.
As Israeli forces continued to violate a fragile ceasefire agreement with Hamas, killing more people in the Gaza Strip on Monday, the largest Muslim civil rights group in the United States renewed calls for cutting off military aid to Israel, citing a new study in The Lancet.
"This new Lancet study offers more evidence of the catastrophic human cost of Israel's genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people," Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) national executive director Nihad Awad said in a statement.
The correspondence published Friday by the famed British medical journal was submitted by Colorado State University professor Sammy Zahran, an expert in health economics, and Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British Palestinian surgeon teaching at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon.
Zahran and Abu-Sittah provided an estimate of the number of years of life lost, based on an official death toll list published by the Gaza Ministry of Health at the end of July, which included the age and sex of 60,199 Palestinians. They noted that the list is "restricted to deaths linked explicitly to actions by the Israeli military, excluding indirect deaths resulting from the ruin of infrastructure and medical facilities, restriction of food and water, and the loss of medical personnel that support life."
The pair calculated life expectancies in the state of Palestine—Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem—by sex for all ages, using mortality and population data from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs for 2022. They estimated that a total of 3,082,363 life-years were lost in Gaza as a result of the Israeli assault since October 7, 2023.
"We find that most life-years lost are among civilians, even under the relaxed definition of a supposed combatant involving all men and boys of possible conscription age (15–44 years)," the paper states. "More than 1 million life-years involving children under the age of 15 years... have been lost."
CAIR's Awad said, "To speak of 3 million years of human life erased is to confront the true scale of this atrocity—generations of children, parents, and families wiped out. It is a deliberate effort to destroy a people."
Israel faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice over its conduct in Gaza, and the International Criminal Court last year issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
"The United States and the international community must end their complicity by halting all military aid to Israel and supporting full accountability for these crimes under international law," Awad argued.
A report published last month by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the Costs of War Project at Brown University found that the Biden and Trump administrations provided at least $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel since the start of the war.
Federal law prohibits the US government from providing security assistance to foreign military units credibly accused of human rights abuses. The Washington Post last week reported on a classified State Department document detailing "many hundreds" of alleged violations by Israeli forces in Gaza that are expected to take "multiple years" to review.
With President Donald Trump seeking a Nobel Peace Prize, the US helped negotiate the current ceasefire, which began on October 10, after over two years of devastating retaliation for the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel. The head of Gaza's Government Media Office said Monday that Israeli forces have committed at least 194 violations of the agreement.
As of Sunday, the ministry's death count was at 68,865, with at least 170,670 people wounded. Previously published research, including multiple studies in The Lancet, has concluded that the official tally is likely a significant undercount.
About 375,000 people have been pushed into famine after 30 months of civil war, said the world's top hunger monitor.
The world's top authority on hunger said Monday that a ceasefire in Sudan is needed to "contain the extreme levels of acute food insecurity and acute malnutrition" that have taken hold in the war-ravaged African country as it declared famine has spread to two regions there.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a United Nations-backed partnership, said it has detected famine in el-Fasher, the city in North Darfur State that the government's former allied militia, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), seized last week, and Kadugli town in South Kordofan.
The IPC said at least 20 other areas in Darfur and Kordofan are at risk of famine, but fighting between the RSF and Sudanese government forces has impeded the group's assessments in places like the besieged town of Dilling, where the situation is likely "similar" to that of Kadugli.
"Urgent steps should be taken to allow full humanitarian access and assessment in this area," said the IPC.
In the towns where experts have been able to take stock of the humanitarian disaster—now one of the worst in the world, according to the United Nations—hundreds of thousands of people are facing “a total collapse of livelihoods, starvation, extremely high levels of malnutrition, and death.”
The IPC, which rates hunger on a scale of 1-5, determines that famine has taken hold in places where malnutrition has caused at least two deaths per 10,000 people, or four deaths per 10,000 children under the age of 5; at least 1 in 5 households severely lack food; and at least 30% of children have been found to suffer from acute malnutrition.
In the two regions included in the IPC report Monday, about 375,000 people have been pushed into famine (IPC Phase 5), and another 6.3 million people across the country face are in IPC Phase 4, classified as an "emergency" hunger crisis.
More than 21 million people face acute levels of food insecurity.
Towns near el-Fasher are also at risk of famine, including Tawila, Melit, and Tawisha.
Food supplies have been largely cut off in el-Fasher over the last 18 months as it has been under siege by the RSF, which killed more than 1,500 people in massacres last week as it took over the city.
Nearly 10 million people have been internally displaced by the civil war—the world's largest displacement crisis—with many sheltering in overcrowded public buildings with inadequate access to food as well as sanitation.
More than 19 million people in Sudan are expected to experience acute food insecurity by January 2026 as humanitarian aid groups continue to be blocked from getting supplies to starving households and harvests in Darfur and Kordofan are expected to be "well below average due to insecurity, despite favorable agroclimatic conditions."
Food prices are also expected to remain high and ultimately rise in the first half of next year as stocks decline.
"An immediate ceasefire and humanitarian access are a must to prevent further deterioration and save lives!" said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization.
The IPC said only 21% of people in need currently have access to humanitarian aid, and in Kadugli, the aid group Save the Children said that its food supplies ran out in September as fighting there escalated.
Tens of thousands of people in the town are trapped there as the RSF—which is backed by the United Arab Emirates, whose government has received military support from the US—tries to seize more territory.
The IPC previously declared famine in three refugee camps near el-Fasher and in part of South and West Kordofan provinces, since fighting began in April 2023.
The UN has estimated more than 40,000 people have been killed, but aid groups warn the true death toll is likely much higher.
The International Court of Justice said Monday that it is "taking immediate steps regarding the alleged crimes in el-Fasher to preserve and collect relevant evidence for its use in future prosecutions."