So why, in your theory of how Republicans think, has the Republican controlled Congress started at least three investigations into the Trump campaign and Russia? If Republicans were inclined to stonewall the investigations, that’s something you do BEFORE diving in to the investigations.
I don’t think you have a very solid grasp on any of the dynamics you’re making predictions about.
Oh, Trump may well flail around and do something desperate like firing Muller, but do you really think Congressional Republicans are going to throw themselves on their swords for him? Do you think he inspires that level of devotion?
Put it this way, let’s say you’re a conservative Republican congressman who wants to kill Obamacare, cut taxes for rich people, ban abortions, make poor people starve, etc. Given a choice, who would you rather have as president, mercurial and unreliable Donald Trump, or boring, uncontroversial Mike Pence?
He doesn’t inspire devotion. His supporters might. They are the modern version of Hitler Youth. Whatever Donald says is right. Look how many of them don’t think that the Don Jr. meeting ever happened, despite Don Jr. himself providing the evidence. If the Hitler Youth thinks you’re disrespecting Donald in any way, you WILL get primaried and you WILL lose your seat. So the motivation to toe the Donald line isn’t love of him, it’s fear of his follower cult.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t the investigations started prior to special counsel being retained? If not for special counsel, with Republicans in charge of both committees, they could have just stonewalled. Hell, Nunes had to recuse himself for attempting just that.
Are you saying the goldfish has a cult of followers who through their electoral power, are already making us, right now, a de facto totalitarian dictatorship?
Pretty much. The country may be roughly evenly split, but the cult of Donald has about 20% of the vote sewn up. They WILL show up and they WILL destroy any Republican who dares to think for himself. And they WILL vote for everything with an R next to it in Novembers. So just by turning out in massive numbers, that 20% of the brain dead pretty much run things.
If that’s the case…if there’s some 20% of the population that will doom Republicans if they don’t do what Trump wants, and Congressional Republicans are so scared of them, they’ll roll over, then why are they holding Russia hearings right now? And why has Trump’s record of getting bills through Congress been so lousy, so far? He got Gorsuch confirmed, but he hasn’t done much else. The first attempt at Obamacare repeal failed in the Senate, and the only way they were able to vote to open debate today was by McConnell saying, basically, "Vote to open debate on the bill, and them we’ll figure out what bill we’re debating.
My point is, Trump isn’t acting the way you described. He’s not acting like some self assured leader, using the bully pulpit to keep Congress in line. He’s acting like somebody flailing around, begging Congress to do something so he can take credit for it, and alternately flattering and ranting at a bunch of Congressmen who are doing their best to ignore him.
But McConnell is Majority Leader and would likely shut things down given the chance. Can’t he remove committee chairs if he wants? If need be, I’m fairly certain he could muster enough support from members to shut it down, no matter how much Burr might squawk. Grassley on the other hand is little more than a partisan toady and would follow orders.
The other problem here is that impeachment is an action by the House, not the Senate. I don’t know how there would ever be a vote on impeachment held in the House. Paul Ryan has rolled over and gone along with the President everytime he has been expected to. When has he ever acted in way that would make you think he will ever put the good of the country before his own self-interest?
Well you are the “moving party” in this argument, you have to admit, which involves some responsibility. I think you have to be more rigorous in your analysis. Who says it’s “evenly split”?
So are you in the de facto dictatorship camp? Sounds like it’s all over but the crying. Isn’t it a little soon to give up?
As usual, those are your words, not mine.
Well you can step up to the mic and say. So what’s the guardrail between us and dictatorship right now? I haven’t seen it in any of your posts.
It’s true that Trump is struggling to find direction, but don’t let that fool you for a moment: we’re in extreme danger of sliding into something other than the democratic republic we’ve been used to.
They’ve been holding Russia hearings – so what? None of the congressional committees have been really interested in moving these investigations forward. And the real investigations have repeatedly been rebuked in public by the very branch of power that is responsible for conducting intelligence gathering and getting to the bottom of what actually happened. The President has fired the one person who has probably been most involved with overseeing the investigations, and he is already threatening to fire more. He’s already asserting the right to pardon anyone connected to this investigation, including presumably himself. And there is no indication at all that he’s going to be stopped.
The Republicans in 2017 are the conservatives in late Weimar Germany, operating under the belief that they can use a narcissistic, bombastic buffoon to their advantage. Assuming that they will know the precise moment to pull the plug if he goes too far. But just take a look at what the Republican agenda is: taking healthcare and public transfer payments from tens of millions of people who depend on it for their basic necessities and quality of life, and replacing it with, well…nothing. See, this is the thing: the republican party probably on some level identifies with Trump and isn’t too eager to investigate anything related to elections because they know that the average American absolutely does not benefit from their agenda. The Republicans have been deliberately making America less and less democratic precisely so that they can get away with what they’re doing. We’re becoming a plutocracy. And knowing full well that Americans don’t identify with it and will eventually be outraged at what Republicans are selling them, their next concern after taking away people’s quality of life and then their democracy, is to take away their freedoms to organize and be heard. We will become a security state.
I don’t think any of us knows what a “dictatorship” would look like in the United States. There are differences between the United States today and Germany in the 1930s. We have a tradition of decentralization, regionalism, and states with independent streaks, which together might make it more challenging for a would be American fuhrer to take over completely. What concerns me more is the plutocracy, where one class of people become so powerful that they end up making all the important decisions that relate to economy and policies.
I didn’t even notice this thread until it had grown to several hundred posts! Apology if someone else has made the point I’m making.
The question in OP reminds me of Bernie Madoff, another billionaire fraudster who had a big decision to make when justice was preparing to file felony charges.
Madoff, like fathers have done since time immemorial, laid down his life to save his children. He pled guilty and devoted what remained of his life to the fiction that his sons were too stupid to even know about the mammoth fraud. I do not endorse criminality, but one must give Mr. Madoff some credit for this loyalty to his family.
Trump, OTOH, treats loyalty only as something that applies to others’ feelings towards Trump. He’d cheerfully push Melania in front of a moving train if there were a few million dollars in it for him. If he thinks Mueller is getting ready to file criminal charges, he’ll turn against his children. We’ll “learn” from his Tweets that the criminality in which he has wallowed was all the fault of Ivanka and Donald Junior. Poor little Donnie was the doting father led astray by his evil spawn. (No one with any sense would fall for such a lie, but Trump has never thought of others as human beings with intelligence.)
When Trump starts signing Presidential pardons, the only three names he’ll think of will be “Me, Myself and I.”
HTH.
And Trump’s children will put everything back on him and claim they were just desperately trying to cover up their beloved father’s, who might the sliding into dementia, criminal behavior. I wonder if you get a conservatorship over a sitting President? :rolleyes: