Well, the impeachments were both highly necessary to hold the President accountable, in accordance with the very strong evidence that he had committed impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors.
Yes, the Republicans have clearly decided to abuse governmental protocols to the fullest possible extent, but I think you’re being very naive if you imagine that they would have acted any differently if the Democrats hadn’t impeached Trump. Look at their previous impeachment of Clinton, and repeated efforts to impeach Obama.
We need to stop trying to blame Republican irresponsible lawlessness on Democratic choices to behave lawfully and responsibly. I get that many Democrats still find it reassuring to do so, because it conveys the illusion that Democrats have power over Republican behavior. But it’s time to let go of that illusion.
I don’t think anyone would argue that helping to bail out a Capitol rioter would be impeachable. Despite how bad the rioters are, they have a right to raise bail pending trial.
The Republicans will impeach Harris because Trump was impeached twice. And the Republicans will impeach Harris if Trump had only been impeached once. And the Republicans will impeach Harris if Trump hadn’t been impeached at all.
The Democrats aren’t provoking the Republicans into doing these things. The Republicans do these things because that’s who they are.
Nobody with any sense would argue that or believe it. But there are people who will make that argument and there are people who will be convinced by it.
Control isn’t enough – you need a 2/3 vote in the senate to remove. Neither party is likely to have that big a majority, so we’re not going to see presidents removed for trivial shit.
I have the news on in the other room and they’re showing Lindsay Graham complaining about Mitch McConnell (because Trump just wrote a letter about him). The rest of what that syncophantic ass clown has to say is irrelevant to me. His voice is every bit as grating as Trump’s was.
Bottom line, I don’t care what that spineless weasel says, he’s irrelevant riding the coattails of a buffoon. I pay more heed to a 5th graders opinion than to Lindsay’s brainless gibberish.
Because you need 2/3 to convict. And if we reach the point where there are 67 GOP Senators then something very dramatic has changed in the nature of US politics. Particularly 67 GOP that would remove a Democratic President on specious grounds.
Remember 7 current GOP Senators voted to remove Trump, so clearly they did not believe it was purely political. Some other number (McConnell, at a minimum) seem likely to have voted to convict if they didn’t have the fig leaf of Trump being out of office.
Graham is talking nonsense. He knows he’s talking nonsense, but he really likely being on TV.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the last four years, it’s that we have to take what a powerful politicians says seriously - even if (perhaps especially if) it bears no connection to reality. These people have the power to impose their irrationality upon the rest of us.
At the time of the second Impeachment, they thought the votes were there. Then Moscow Mitch delayed it, until he could convince all the very rightly scared Members that it was Ok, and that the parties survival depended on voting acquit.
Why would that matter? There was no widespread election fraud, either. Obama was not born in Kenya, nor did he spy on Trump.
All “responsible”, “serious” Republicans need to do is not claim that their opponents are raping children and drinking their blood and their claims can be considered “reasonable”. Truth no longer matters to a good portion of the population and the big media companies are only going to call out the worst of it.
The votes where never there to convict Trump. At best, they could have gotten maybe ten Republican votes, leaving them at least seven short of conviction assuming a full seating of the Senate. I heard some pundits opining that a number of Republicans might just absent themselves, lowering the threshold for a quorum sufficiently to get conviction but McConnell made sure that would never happen.
It was important to impeach Trump in order to get it into the history books that he was the first president to be impeached twice, and impeached for inciting insurrection, but this was always a dog & pony show with no realistic chance of conviction.
Republicans are now pretty much reduced to ethnonationalism. They’re the modern equivalent of the Dixie-Crats or the Southern Democrats. Joe Biden being an old white guy is harder to take swings at, but Harris is an easier target.
That’s what I’m thinking as well. Regardless of whether Trump’s impeachments were legit and Kamala’s were illegit, the overall effect that this will teach most voters will be that “impeachment is now merely a weapon, not a serious and earnest matter.”
