Nothing. Which, if one is a person espousing democratic ideals, is problematic.
Yeah…it is a stretch dems will get control of the senate in 2020. It is a near impossibility they would get 67% of the senate.
But, pretending that did happen, I think it would be very worrisome, politically, to overturn an election so soon after an election.
I am fine with impeachment in principle as a check and balance but I am not sure it is something to be done immediately following an election. Not that Trump does not deserve it (he certainly does) but rather as a political calculation.
I’m not speculating that the Democrats take 67 Senate seats, but that the Class 2 Senate Republicans take enough of a hit (combined with Trump just barely winning the electoral college) that the Class 3 Senators see that continuing to defend him will sink them in 2022, hence they abandon him if House Democrats start another impeachment process.
I have no expectation whatsoever that any Republican Senator has any loyalty to Trump personally.
The closest thing to a silver lining is that it has woken a lot of people up to how deeply dysfunctional tens of millions of Americans are, how much actual work we still need to do as a country and that we desperately need an organized, grassroots progressive movement.
Thats about the only silver lining I can think of.
That and the fact that a more competent autocrat would get more done. Thank god Trump is an idiot.
It gives the left something to gripe about.
I do tend to gripe about criminals doing crime and the government condoning criminals doing crime. Only now and then, mind you. I have other hobbies too.
Taking 67 seats in the Senate is virtually impossible by itself, but to have it happen in the same election with Trump winning is simply incompatible. The circumstances that would allow one thing to happen would preclude the other.
The silver lining so far is that Tramp has not yet feared that evidence of his treasons will be revealed and so hasn’t declared martial law and had dissidents interred. Stay tuned.
It would show the incompetency of the democratic party in being able to beat him.
I mean seriously people got very mad when Bush was elected the 2nd time but in reality you can blame the democrats for finding nobody better than John Kerry even though nobody really liked him plus they made fools of themselves in the primaries.
Yes, they could, but there’s no circumstance in a Presidential election year where that could plausibly happen, and almost no circumstance even in the midterms when that could happen. In a Presidential election year, it is utterly implausible that the voters would manage to drive one party to a 67 seat majority in the Senate while the Electoral College puts the other party in the Presidency. The EC and the Senate are very similar, setting up an ‘arbitrary geographical areas, not people’ bias in their outcomes; if the Senate was elected by national popular vote, while the Electoral College remained as it is, the question might actually make a good deal of sense, but it’s actually more likely that we’ll change the EC than the Senate at this point, and even the EC is pretty damn unlikely to be changed.
But let’s take a sliiightly more plausible scenario; a midterm year. Keeping in mind that in the last sixty years, there has NEVER been a senate supermajority that is not of the same party as the President, we can assume that the absolute upper limit of opposing party members in the Senate is 59. That means that in order for this to happen in a midterm year, the party doing it must turn at least 8 seats in the Senate while maintaining all of their current seats. More likely, the senate will be closer to a tie or even have a strong majority of the other party, meaning they would need to gain 17+ seats, out of the 33 that are up for re-election in the midterm year. In order for this to even be possible, the President’s party must control 17+ of the seats up for re-election, and the opposing party must successfully retain all of their seats and capture enough to put them over that 67 mark.
So, yeah, it’s…possible…but so vanishingly unlikely that it’s never going to happen. In any such scenario, the President’s party would simply vote against him in a bipartisan impeachment, because it would be obvious that they would lose that badly if it actually came to that scenario. After all, something would have happened in those two years to so radically change the opinion of the electorate as to want to kick the President out and give the opposing party a supermajority to do it if necessary. Any such event would be obvious to the President’s party, and they would turn against him to attempt to save themselves before it even came to that.
If you’re asking ‘according to the rules, is it possible?’ then, yeah, sure. Such a supermajority could kick the president out for any reason, because there’s no constitutional limit on exactly what represents ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ so the House can impeach and the Senate can convict over anything.
There are zero people left in this country who are ‘leaning’ towards voting Trump.
There are a shitton of people left for the Dems to alienate.
You are missing the part where Trump got ON the hook on a party-line vote, LOL.
For this long-time observer of the US public, easily the most comically naive political move in memory.
Without bi-partisan support for a clearly-violated high crime, every impeachment will fail to result in removal of a sitting President–and by design of the framers: They wanted a government by election, and not parliamentary support at-the-moment.
An impeachment based on anything but a high crime becomes a judgment call. If there is broad bipartisan agreement about such a judgment, you might have a shot at removing a President involuntarily. If not; you won’t find 67 agreeing Senators.
At issue is not whether an asshole President needs to be stoned, but whether those casting the stones would themselves survive a similar litmus test. On average, we want our leaders to abuse their privileges when it aligns with our goals, and to be held accountable when such an abuse does not. We are not very interested in whether or not they fudged their privilege. We don’t even care if our leaders pay much attention to laws if we think those laws are unimportant in a particular instance.
Many Democrats fussing about how horrible or illegal it is to put the squeeze on a foreign leader using publicly-assigned foreign aid as a leverage for personal gain seem to want that particular line to be toed; the same Democrats are willing to look the other way if whole cities provide sanctuary for “undocumented” aliens illegally in the country, because the don’t give immigration law the same weight as the laws under which they want the President removed…
When an impeachment decision is sharply split along party lines, the message is that the issue at hand is a judgment call, be it the around whether a criminal violation reached the level of a “high crime,” or whether a misdemeanor was so egregious that circumvention of the next election is warranted. And the ONLY thing that would lend weight to a judgment call is broad bilateral support. Without that, Democrats are in the position of suggesting that they are unilaterally pure and Republicans are unilaterally evil.
While such a suggestion might play well for the devout, it is so unlikely to be true for everyone else that a party-line vote to impeach has the opposite effect of what it intended. Instead of proving that Trump is evil, it proved that Democrats–and only Democrats–want to get rid of Trump without the electorate weighing in as a whole. It made the case for this being a pure judgment call instead of something more black and white. Once it’s a judgment call along party lines, any real case against Trump dissolves in the mist of political shenanigans.
The default (and accurate, I suspect) view is that no politician is without sin. In the case of impeachment, it doesn’t mean that no-one gets to throw stones. But if only one side throws the stones, it won’t look like the stoning was deserved. It will look like a mob who indulged themselves.
That is going to mobilize Trump’s base to a much greater degree than it will mobilized the Democrat’s base. In this country the winner for a given state is the one who turns out the most votes. This is subtly different than the polls, which can only measure the temperature of those intending to vote.
I will. And perhaps you will remember to revisit this post after the election. 
This is a Trumpian (and thus factually false) view of the “sanctuary city” issue. In fact, these cities aren’t violating federal laws, they’re just putting local priorities (like solving and preventing violent crime) ahead of federal priorities (like finding undocumented immigrants). It’s very important for local police and officials to maintain good relations with all the different demographic groups of their populations, because they will need their cooperation to solve and prevent crimes. If some group in the city is deathly afraid that going to the police could result in their deportation, then they’ll be much less likely to report rapes and other crimes (or otherwise cooperate with investigations).
Local police shouldn’t be doing the jobs of federal officials. The requirements of the job, and their goals, conflict.
A silver lining? Well, an asteroid hasn’t struck earth yet.
LOL.
The notion that sanctuary cities (and many other parallel pro-loose-border entities) don’t take an aggressive stance wrt protecting illegal aliens from immigration laws and policies they consider inappropriate is risible.
But my general point is that each of us (and thank you for this example using your own contortion here) finds good reason to defend violations of laws and/or less formal constraints or conventions, if such violations fit our personal paradigms.
The actual behavior of Trump strong-arming Ukraine for his personal gain resonates only with those who already despise him. The rest of the country doesn’t give a flying rat’s ass because it is not a severe enough violation of a law anyone cares enough about. Beyond that, I think the average sentiment of those who do not already loathe Trump is that most elected leaders indulge themselves in similar distortions of decency, and that for Democrats to pursue it as if they themselves were somehow purer is a farce. Trump for them might be far more blatant, but not far more naughty.
We’ll see in November if the Democrat’s gamble paid off. What I personally think is that their partisan impeachment mobilized the far left and the pro-Trumpers. Mobilizing the pro-Trumpers won’t hurt the Republicans. Mobilizing the far left will hurt the Democrats. Some blue-collar guy in a swing state who’s worked all his life is not that interested in giving everyone free stuff, or losing his retirement healthcare plan to a one-size-fits-all. The far left scares him. OTOH, his pension fund has never been sounder given the current stock market.
The bold is an indictment of those who excuse this behavior, not those who condemn. And your posts have been classic examples of false equivalency.
Apparently you get your information about sanctuary cities from Lou Dobbs and other mostly false Trumpian sources, because in the real world, sanctuary policies are about prioritizing fighting local crime and maintaining positive community relations over doing the federal government’s job.
As to your predictions about the election, they’re worth about as much as any random uncited assertion on the internet about an election several months away - nothing. Any prediction about the general election this early is a wild guess, period.
Yeah, I’m sure that these sanctuary city leaders are all pro-Trump firebrands who want to deport every single illegal alien, yet dammit, the budget just isn’t there for that so we have to leave it to the feds to do it and keep writing jaywalking tickets.
You don’t seriously believe that do you? These policies are enacted because of a political disagreement with current immigration law. From my understanding, all the feds ask them to do is honor an ICE detainer so the feds can come pick them up. Even though every city and state honors all other detainers from other states and federal detainers on all other laws, they refuse to honor ICE detainers because of budget reasons?
“Maintaining positive community relations”? Could you explain how this means anything other than we don’t like immigration laws and we are representing a minority of our citizens who also don’t like the immigration laws?
But Chief Pendant’s point is apt and it wasn’t picking on either side. When a politician whom you agree with kicks the ball back in the fairway, you have an attitude of everyone does it, why the big deal, so what, etc. When a politician with whom you disagree does the same thing, then it is the coming of the Antichrist and the worst thing any human being could possibly do.
It’s very simple. Sometimes undocumented immigrants are raped. Sometimes undocumented immigrants witness crime. Sometimes they have other information useful to solve crimes. If those undocumented immigrants are afraid the local police will deport them, they are much less likely to report crimes like rape and cooperate with investigations, and thus rapists and other criminals are more likely to get away to rape again. So sanctuary cities’ leaders have decided that preventing rape and other crimes, and solving rapes and other crimes, is more important than helping the federal government deport people.
Sounds pretty reasonable to me. I think preventing and solving rapes are more important than assisting the feds in deporting people.
Maybe for you, it’s okay when your side does it but not for the other side. Maybe for CP too. But that’s not the case for everyone. Some folks really do value some things more than partisanship, hard as it may be to understand.