IOW, rushing anything is exactly what I don’t want.
First, what in the meantime?
In the meantime, we’re smacking the playground bully with the best we’ve got.
And this all helps us, how?? This is on the order of:
The PR of impeachment is simple, IMHO: fighting back against the neighborhood bully will always look better than just letting him rule the playground and doing nothing about it.
At this point, we’ve already seen what good “the power to call witnesses and TV cameras” has done by itself. Trump laughs as we ask for documents and witnesses, and he tells us to fuck off.
An impeachment inquiry isn’t exactly the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, but (a) it’s that or let him rule the playground for another 20 months, and (b) as in 1974, it can and should be done with what’s already available, which means Trump can’t fight back against it.
Trump would still have the initiative in many ways, but so would the House Judiciary Committee. And when “Trump and his gang commit more crimes, openly” it at least turns into additional articles of impeachment to be flung in Mitch McConnell’s face, rather than the Dems doing nothing about those crimes.
And at the end of the day, this is all about the Senate. It’s the opportunity for Dem challengers to say, “the House proved that Trump committed the following crimes. Why did Senator Stupidhead think the Senate shouldn’t even have a trial?” The Dems can make this about the GOP destroying the integrity of the Senate as an institution. (It can even wrap the House legislation that the Senate refused to consider into this with a campaign saying that the GOP was afraid to even debate these bills. Nationalize the fucking Senate campaign in 2020 by calling them a bunch of scaredy-cats.)
Um, NO. There has been nothing like the Ervin Committee hearings, and nothing like the Saturday Night Massacre.
The Dems blew their best chance to do something like that, short of impeachment, by not having hearings right after the Mueller Report came out, where they went through the report and summarized it in a way that was a public counterweight to “no collusion, no obstruction.”
Now Trump and his gang rule the playground. That’s the new normal. That doesn’t help us next year.
Nancy is being the adult in the room. The toddler keeps demanding attention. He’s getting it in the form of subpoenas, but I do think Trump wants an impeachment because he has been told the Senate will not follow through on it.
One possibility -
Nancy is waiting for Trump to do something so utterly insane (a very high bar to cross considering) that even the Senate will have to take notice or be seen as complete fools as well.
This is a dangerous game that could get many killed.
Cool. A neat story for a day or so, then back to the new normal where Trump rules the playground.
The trade war might hurt Trump a little, but there sure have been a lot of stories where tribalism seems to have won out, where the farmers are saying they’re sticking with Trump anyway. I think sitting back and waiting for Trump to beat himself just moves the new normal into a worse place than it’s been, rather than heightening the proverbial contradictions.
The Dems are going, “Trump’s gone way too far, so by God, we’re going to…wait for the next election.” Yeah, that gets me motivated to vote Dem. :rolleyes:
The new abortion laws - which have nothing to do with Trump - are what might really save the Dems’ asses here, by keeping the Dem base angry enough to turn out in 2020 like they did in 2018.
But you know what? I absolutely HATE having to say, “thank God for these horrible laws.”
And what worries me more is that showing a lack of fight now, makes me even more concerned that - IF they should win the Senate - they won’t have the fight to do stuff like get rid of the filibuster.
If you’re the adult in the room, you do what you can to constrain the toddler. You don’t let him rule the room.
I’m trying to find the Ulysses S. Grant quote on this, but it boils down to: many Union generals let themselves be constrained by what they feared Lee, or Jackson, or Longstreet, or Beauregard, or whoever was going to do. Grant acted, and let the other general worry about what he was going to do. This one’s close:
I agree here except that it does have to do with Trump. The states would not have passed these laws if Trump wasn’t stacking the courts.
Trump supporters that are not his base may finally realize that they made a poor choice. Oh, they will never ever admit it, but they may just stay home instead of voting. On the other hand, people that value decency, honesty and democracy will come out in droves.
I disagree, the parent is the Senate and they will do nothing.
I’ve been going back and forth. Yes, the House should just impeach and let the pieces fall where we know they will (Senate will not do their duty, Trump uses failed impeachment to get re-elected). But the House would be doing their duty. I do tend to look at things that way. This is what is required of you. Do it. It makes choices very easy.
But what if by doing their duty today, it causes more problems for the future?
What if confronting the parent turns a brat into a homicidal maniac?
…to claim “there is not evidence that it would work” simply means that you don’t understand why people are in favour of impeachment.
Almost everyone on these boards who support impeachment don’t support it because it “may” or “may not” move some people to vote a certain way. They support impeachment because it is the appropriate action to take for the actions of Trump and his administration. Justin Amash lays out the case here. Its about a clear a case for impeachment that you can get.
Irrelevant.
I’m not so sure.
The Constitution and the rule of law is all that stands between Trump and an authoritarian state. Trump keeps getting defeated because of the Constitution, because of the law, not because we pretend those things don’t exist.
It appears to be working that way at the moment.
Trump was a terrible presidential candidate and that didn’t stop him getting elected to the Presidency. In time the same amount of people who voted for Trump in 2016 will probably vote for him again in 2020. I don’t know why you are so confident that this is going to change.
Trumps support from his base really hasn’t changed. They are doing everything they can to suppress the marginalised vote. They are changing the nature of the Federal courts and nobody can do anything to stop them. They’ve bought in the former people from Cambridge Analytica to help run the 2020 campaign. They’ve removed almost all of the protections the Obama administration bought into protect trans rights. They are fighting to destroy the ACA. We found out that there are thousands of more cases of separated families at the border than we originally thought.
Pelosi played the government shutdown perfectly. But that doesn’t mean we should trust her about everything implicitly. I stand by the contention that Obama was the best President America’s ever had. But he fucked up big time on many occasions and I believe that Pelosi is fucking up here. “Letting Trump beat himself” isn’t a smart strategy because its a strategy that is completely out of the Dems control and gifts all the power to Trump. This isn’t just about stopping Trump but about stopping the damage that is being done (much of it being done in secret) by his administration.
Allowing “Trump to beat himself” means giving him a licence to do even more damage to America without consequence for two more years. That might not matter to you. But it matters to women seeking abortion and to people struggling to pay for healthcare and to trans people who have lost all of their newly won protections.
You don’t even play regular 2-D chess with the neighborhood bully. You either take him on with everything you’ve got, or you let him rule the playground.
It’s a very 1-D game, about as uncomplicated as you can get. You’re pushed, and either you push back or you don’t. No sophisticated analysis needed. It’s what Josh Marshall used to call the ‘bitch-slap’ theory of politics, before he decided that sounded too sexist.
SO what you are saying is that Trump is to evil and destructive that that he must be attacked immediately with a futile charge of the light brigade. And he isn’t then when presented in 2020 with an actual chance to take him out, your feeling will be hurt and you might decline?
There’s ‘we the people’ (or at least the portion of the citizenry that regards Trump as a problem rather than as the solution), then there’s the House Dems, and only then there’s the Senate. However you view who the parent is, ‘we’ aren’t in a position where we can demand anything of the Senate, at least for the next year and a half. Only the House can do that.
The problem is, you can what-if until the cows come home. What if the absence of anyone pushing back on his bad behavior lets the brat escalate into a homicidal maniac? When has a bully ever dialed it back on account of being given free rein to push the other kids around as he pleases?
I don’t know. But I really don’t think “we could do something, but we won’t because we’re worried about what Trump and the GOP might do if we did” is a winning approach for the Dems.
Look, I will vote for the goddamn Scared Rabbit Party no matter how many times they pull a Brave Sir Robin. I show up and vote even in the off years, and I vote D every time. And I contribute heavily to Dem candidates in between. ETA: There are only two things that could cause me to fail to vote, and vote D, in 2020: (1) I’m dead, or (2) I’m in a hospital bed, in a coma. That’s it.
The voters you should worry about aren’t the freakin’ base. The voters you should worry about are the marginal voters - those who will vote D if they vote, but based on past history, they may or may not show up in a given election.
If people like me who will vote are disheartened, I worry about them. And so should you, and so should Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer.
What do you call firing your FBI director in a blatant, obvious attempt to obstruct justice? What do you call sacking your Attorney General for not recusing himself? I’d say that’s pretty Nixonian, and it hasn’t moved the needle at all, and it’s not going to until people begin to understand that the country is going into the shitter and that Trump isn’t a good president.
I really don’t get why you think having it right after the report would have made a difference. I think this is just a wild assumption on your part. Really, they could have it right now if they wanted to. Whether they had hearings right after the report, right now, next week, or next month doesn’t matter because Trump has made it clear he has no intention of complying and letting people give testimony until and unless he is absolutely forced to do so. We’ve already seen that just because Democrats want hearings doesn’t mean they’re going to have hearings, so again, I think you fundamentally misunderstand the dynamics at play here. Your country has changed on you. Don’t worry, it’ll change back once they understand that Trump isn’t a billionaire who’s going to help them get rich too, but that he’s a fake billionaire and a moron who’s putting the final nails in the coffin of the American Dream. The courts might help out with some specific types of evidence, such as the Deutsch Bank records. The State of New York might help as well. There’s also the Southern District of New York’s investigation. I would welcome anything that comes to light, and as we’ve already discussed, it’s not like Democrats and Trump’s opponents are sitting around doing nothing. There’s a lot that’s happening right now, and a lot that keeps Trump worried at night. We don’t need to have an impeach or nothing dichotomy.
Yes, they do, and they rule the playground because the voting citizens haven’t punished them for their behavior. That’s what the “impeach now” crowd needs to understand: it’s the people, the voting people that matter in an impeachment. You can’t just make them care. You can make them like a president less, but you can also make them like the majority party less as well, as House Republicans found out when they pressed for impeachment despite overwhelming evidence suggesting the country wasn’t on the same page.
The marginal voters are going to be marginal voters. I can’t spend my time worrying about them, and I seriously, seriously doubt that they’re going to sit at home because Nancy Pelosi didn’t go all the way with impeachment in April.
The difference is that there was a brief moment when public opinion about the report was up for grabs. Now it’s pretty much settled. It’s obviously harder to change minds that have not only accepted a conclusion, but have already moved on to thinking about other things entirely.