However, justly imprisoning an unrepentant criminal who happens to be prominent in a large powerful party that suffers no want of leaders to take over the banner, does not harm democracy. How many governors of Illinois have been locked up?
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This whole deal is another part of what Trump exposed, that a lot of what we thought were hard and fast rules over 200 years were just unwritten “gentlemen’s” agreements based on individuals’ sense of honor and shame. We would silently make an unspoken pact that as long as any misbehavior stayed strictly white-collar and the public scandal was limited, we would not go after one another for the sake of hurting one another.
True. The flip side of a deep bench is that if it’s made mostly of rotten people, it’ll take decades for the first good one to rise from dog-catcher, through Mayor to any office with real power.
The “fix” for the R party’s excessive love of totalitarian thinking will be decades in the making. Not 2 or even 4 election cycles.
Sadly, this is also true. I’ve seen a few (still) self-identified “moderate” Republicans lament that, if they were to really try to “take back” their party from the extremists, losing those votes would let the Democrats win almost everything for a decade or more.
And yeah, that’s almost certainly true. It’s also the price they’re going to have to pay for letting their party get this bad in the first place. That might suck for them, but sometimes you just have to accept the suck in order to fix things. The longer they let things slide, the worse the suckitude is going to be.
OTOH if you’re a self-identified “moderate” R, you may still prefer living in an RW theo-totalitarian white supremacist state to living in one ruled by D or Progressive values. At that rate, having the far right take over the party isn’t so bad; you still get your key preferences satisfied even if some bad comes with the good. The sheer weight of numbers of the far-right crowd are what get and keep your team elected.
Actually, the preceding paragraph is a bit too harsh. Let me try again …
The self-identified “moderate” R will likely be able to rationalize that continuing the current R trend leading to increasingly far-right government won’t be too bad (for them). And hence better (for them) than D-led government.
Then they’ll be unpleasantly surprised when it does turn out to be too bad (for them too). If not after the first election, certainly after the next. But by then it’ll be too late to go back. Like they used to say about nascent democracies in the Mideast after the Arab Spring: “One man, one vote, one time.”
The country will be in deep “stuff” as long as roughly half the citizenry are in thrall to for-profit hard right agitprop.
I think it is best for the long term good of the country if justice is done. The correct punishment for Trump’s crimes is at least 25 years. 20 with good behavior.
It would boost democracy everywhere and restore a lot of the confidence rightly lost in America by Americans domestically and allies internationally.
No, I think it’s right on point. There’s a whole BUNCH of voters who voted for Trump (both times) knowing that he would promote fiscal policies that would benefit them. Trump didn’t rubber-stamp the Federalist justices because he was hoping to overturn RvW; he wanted them in to preserve/enhance Citizan’s United. I think a lot of people ignored the grift because they knew they were too smart to be grifted, and they held their noses against the racism thinking it wouldn’t affect anyone they knew. I think that there are a number of Senators and Congressmen who put up with the Greenes and Boberts because they know their pet cause is going to be supported, and that in every district there is a not insignificant number of low-information voters that are easy to rile up to vote for you.
I’m all for economically conservative, socially liberal Republicans. I don’t necessarily agree with their economic views, but I can respect them and welcome the discourse. I’ve very occasionally voted for vaguely Faulconer-type CA-moderate Republicans in my distant youth. Not often, but a couple of times when their Democratic opponents were pretty weak. But yeah, if you’re willing to support a whackadoodle narcissist intent on subverting democracy for your own narrow economic interests, you’re dead to me.
I don’t think Trump cared a whit about Citizens United, and I don’t think he would even recognize the reference; I think he decided he needed the votes of the Christian right for him to win, and rubberstamping Federalist Society judges was the way to get that support. Strictly transactional.
As much as I despise Trump and everything that he did before, during, and after his presidency, I don’t think that pardoning him (or commuting his sentence) is such as bad idea. For one thing, it is a virtual certainty (IMHO) that the next Republican president will do it if Biden doesn’t. For another, I don’t buy the argument that imprisoning Trump will dissuade any others from acting in a similar manner to his since they don’t see anything wrong with what he did.
Trump and his supporters already believe that Trump is a martyr. Putting him in prison will only serve to fuel this belief and we’re already close enough to the downfall of our country. We don’t need to push it closer.
Would it have to be prison? How about some sort of community service? I wouldn’t mind seeing him picking up litter in the park or working in a soup kitchen.
The elegant solution for Presidents is supposed to be the impeachment provision for disqualifying the person from holding office again. Because the Founders understood that what most hurts the sort of person in these offices is being denied the power of office. The second impeachment should have proceeded to that effect never mind end of term.
But noooo, Mitch said, “hey, he’s going away anyway, why bother,” he said. “Get over it and move on,” he said.(*)
And so Trump is still a problem and the Republicans still are as mentioned earlier, so bloody hung up in that "nothing can be worse than the Democrats being allowed to enact their policies. Even if it hurts me and everyone else."
(* “Let’s get over it” is an old standard . So what if there was slavery since 1619: it got abolished, stop dwelling on it and get over it. So what if people put up Confederate moniments: now you have the right to vote and be in public accommodations, stop dwelling on it and get over it. Hey, we stopped taking Native children away to erase their culture: stop dwelling on it and get over it. Never mind that there were no WMDs: stop dwelling on it and get over it. Hey, we arrested Harvey Weinstein, and got a bunch of other people fired: stop dwelling on it and get over it.)
Impeachment only works if the Senate is willing to honestly weigh the facts and make a fair decision like a real jury hopefully would, which was never going to happen… twice.
Not only did the Republicans not impeach someone clearly unqualified to be president, they brazenly stole a Supreme Court seat from a sitting president.
Will sending Don to prison, assuming they can find a jury honest enough to convict him, change anything? I genuinely doubt it.
Well, that’s — incorrect? You can call an arsonist a rapist, or a shoplifter a perjurer, or a plagiarist a blackmailer, but it just seems — weird, I guess.
Hey everybody has opinions. You can think mine is wrong and I can think yours is wrong.
The world keeps spinning.
Advice and Consent. The hearing is advice, consent is measured with the vote. Both were denied. That was theft of the Supreme Court Justice that America should have had. You are free to disagree, but that’s all it is, disagreement. On the internet. Imagine.