Ah, thanks. I do know that the Senate is the court. Did not realize that the Chief Justice would preside over the proceedings.
Several of you just got whooshed. I thought the scare quotes would be enough of a hint! (My wife does say my humor is sometimes overly dry.)
Yeah, you were just joking. That’s the ticket.
:rolleyes:
I already believe you’re an idiot. You don’t have to repeatedly demonstrate it, I’m already convinced.
I told you, you’ve already persuaded me that you’re a freakin’ idiot. You don’t need to go overboard.
Well, you probably do, to satisfy internal needs of your own.
Impressive display of plumage, though.
nm
So, you were just trolling earlier then?:rolleyes: You dont actually want a meaningless vote in the House?
And then the Senate, where McConnell may not even allow a vote.
The problem is, they’re not controlling any narrative that I can see. Trump himself is a roar, and the assorted House hearings are muted conversation. They’re in the news for a few minutes here and there, but that’s about it AFAICT.
Which, if an impeachment inquiry starts today, might be September if we’re lucky: there’s a lot to be done first.
Um, no. After articles of impeachment are presented, they get debated in the Judiciary Committee, voted on in the Judiciary Committee, debated in the full House, and voted on in the full House. (Which should probably take us to October or November.) And only then
I keep wondering how that’s going to work. John Roberts will preside over the impeachment trial, and while he will try and tip the scales in ways that there’s a plausible excuse for, he’s not going to go along with something so blatant as refuse to let the House impeachment managers make their case for each article passed by the House.
After that, it won’t matter much if the House managers are shut down: the rebuttals are still going to be crap, if they don’t just skip to a vote. (And that’s assuming Mitch doesn’t just refuse to have a trial in the Senate, which is what I expect.)
Fodder?! There will be weeks of debate in the House, between committee and House floor. The case for each article will be spelled out, with no interference, both in the Judiciary Committee and in the full House. I’d consider that to be considerable benefit.
And then, IF there’s a trial, they’ll get to make the case for each article on the Senate floor.
Either way, there will be a metric ton of repetition of the case for each article, on network TV, enough repetition that it will sink in to most people’s minds. Impeachment won’t be a one-day story; it won’t be a one-month story. It’ll go on and on, like Butter Emails did a few years back.
Trump may want an acquittal vote, but not so badly that he wants impeachment. Trump does great when he’s the one who’s got the initiative, when he can be the aggressor, but if you remember from his debates with Hillary last year, her standing in the polls went up after each debate, because she was the one throwing the punches.
Impeachment will be better than that, because throughout the House process, Trump won’t even be a participant. He will have no control, no means of intervention. The Dems will have total control. It will damage Trump severely in the public mind.
I’m okay with the impeachment coming at a time that throws the GOP campaign season into maximum disarray.
No, RTF is right: they don’t have to send it to the Senate immediately.
But what the Democrats would have to do is to immediately deal with the fallout of calling it an impeachment, and they’d better be ready – again, this is a political process we’re talking about here, not a legal one. Trump and his defenders would immediately go into attack mode, and they would immediately put pressure on the Democrats, many of whom come from moderate districts and didn’t vote for their Dem rep to impeach Trump. The message would be, let’s put it to a vote now and be done with it for the good of the country. They’ll claim that impeachment is weakening economic conference. They could conceivably blame an economic downturn on impeachment. People would eat it up because after all, they voted for this sonofabitch.
Even if that’s not how it turns out, just look at what happened the last time there was an impeachment of a president who was regarded as relatively effective. Did people like Bill Clinton? No, but their conclusion was “He’s a creep, but at least he’s not fucking up my 401K. Republicans are threatening to remove a president who hasn’t fucked up my retirement,” which was totally the opposite of Nixon in 1973-74 who was presiding over one of the worst recessions in the 20th Century.
Another problem is that whatever the hell democrats want to make as their core message in 2020 will take a back seat to impeachment. That will be their campaign issue. They will have absolutely nothing else to talk about because that will be the sole issue. People already know that Donald Trump is corrupt as hell – there’s no way they can’t know this. What they don’t know yet is that he’s going to fuck up their country.
:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: back atcha. Your defensive theory of the case, to avoid admitting you were whooshed, is that I actually believed the courts would prevent impeachment from happening. Izzat right? And I just happened to put scare quotes around “the courts” why, exactly? What a **coincidence **that it was just a couple days after Trump said this same (incredibly asinine) thing! :dubious:
You got whooshed, even when I put the quotes in there specifically to act as training wheels (my first impulse was to be even drier and not use them). Deal with it.
ETA: Please tell me someone got this joke before I had to dissect and thus kill it dead.
Can any of the actual (as in professional) constitutional scholars weigh in on this. ISTM that the Senate must convene as a court if the House sends the articles of impeachment to the Senate.
In case no scholars step up, you might find this recent NYMag article interesting.
The article goes on to point out that Trent Lott did exactly this for the Clinton impeachment - and the Republican Senate didn’t even like Clinton.
Sure, I can see them, shining a big spotlight on what would normally be the quiet, boring part of the process! Self-own, big time.
With only a few exceptions, ‘moderate’ is as bad as it gets for them. And Dems are overwhelmingly in favor of impeachment AND removal.
The people who were still voting GOP in 2018 would. Everybody else will be pointing and laughing at such ridiculous nonsense.
And how’d that work out in 2000?
How many times have I made the point that that’s why the process needs to get started now, so it can finish up by the end of the year?
There, all bolded so you can’t miss it.
Best timing: the Dems lay out their case for impeachment, in detail, in the Judiciary Committee right before Thanksgiving, so that over Thanksgiving tables everywhere, all the pro-Trump types are a bit shell-shocked. Not changing sides, of course, but realizing that anything they might say will sound stupid after what’s been all over the TV for the previous 2-3 weeks. (Speaking of which, I wonder what Fox News would do while the Judiciary Committee hearings and debates are dominating the airwaves? Can’t wait to find out.)
Centrist Rep. Tim Ryan says it’s time to move forward with the impeachment process.
If guys like him are on board with this, where exactly is the intra-party resistance coming from?
It might seem ridiculous, but Trump is getting relatively high marks for economic performance, and his approval ratings are the highest they’ve been in over 2 years.
Think about that. Yes, more and more democrats are enraged with each new tweet and each new middle finger to the rule of law, but guess what? The rest of the country doesn’t seem to care. He’s as popular as he’s ever been. He needs to be worn down. I want you to think here, man. He’s already proven that you could have him admitting to groping women on a live mic and people won’t give a piss. In 2019 America, people don’t elect politicians to be role models or even law-abiding people; they elect them not to fuck up their lives.
The same way it did in 2016. You had a country (most of which is white and conservative or moderate, by the way) that had 8 years of the progressive party in power and decided they were tired of it and wanted to change.
If I understand your position correctly - feel free to correct me (even harshly if you wish), you think that the president can’t be successfully impeached and convicted in the Senate no matter what but that impeachment alone would make him unpopular enough to lose an election. And because the Senate won’t remove him under any circumstances, it’s best to get this over with.
I have a different hypothesis. Like you, I think that the odds of a successful impeachment are long - way long - but that possibility actually does exist. I think it is possible that Trump could become so toxic that he could be impeached and that the Republicans might scramble to either a) try to run Mike Pence or b) try to come up with a new ticket. Yes, yes, yes…long, long, long odds. But if Trump’s popularity actually does crash - and it absolutely could - it will take the GOP by surprise, and they will be like a shocked army fleeing and running into trees and each other in the middle of a night ambush in the forest.
But the only possible way that an actual impeachment can succeed is if the public who voted him into office, who bought into this insane idea that any jackass can run the country, is disabused of that notion, and in very direct, harsh, and personal terms. And if things get to that point, it won’t matter when we impeach him. He could be impeached in the middle of August 2020 - he and what’s left of his base could cry they’re rigging the elections and it would not mean a fucking thing. Impeaching early just to be some arbitrary deadline makes no sense if the public support for the president’s performance is strong. Impeaching him even in the middle of October 2020, even on election day 2020, makes all the sense in the world if the public can’t stand him. It might not be necessary, but that’s not the point.
In the meantime, the investigations continue. The hearings continue. All of this will frustrate Trump but so what? Congress is simply doing ho-hum oversight. The State of New York will force Trump to release his tax records at the state level. Courts will undoubtedly demand that Trump respond to some of the federal requests. He can run, but he can’t hide. All of this will chip away at his strength. All of this will undoubtedly force him to do more unhinged shit that only gets him deeper into the political quicksand.
To use a boxing analogy, Democrats don’t want to start using up all their energy swinging at the head. They need to box, jab, go to the body. Wait until the eyes get puffy and blood starts trickling down the nose in rounds 6, 7, and 8. Then start going for the head.
The intra-party resistance isn’t necessarily intra-party; it could be inter-party. I’m thinking of someone like Conor Lamb who represents a very centrist district in Western PA and ran on an issues platform, barely mentioning Trump’s name at all in the campaign. He’s not the only one.
Wait for more of these headlines to come out – and they will.
Trump is painting himself into a corner, and he won’t be able to escape it. Give it time. That’s what I’m saying.
You forget. He works in an oval office - no corners…