If congress starts impeachment, it won’t be about the final vote. Hell, there may not even need to be a final vote. It will be about the process - hearings after hearings, with Mueller and Comey and Kushner and more, quote after quote, on TV instead of in the newspaper, etc. I don’t know if impeachment helps the Democrats, politically speaking, more than it hurts, but the help will be from the process, not the vote, barring something really weird.
There will be hearings with or without impeachment, of course, but they’d have more attention and more weight if it was for impeachment. Mueller might be more likely to open up as well.
Regarding a potential Senate impeachment trial, Republican senators have vowed to quickly quash any impeachment charges. This Lawfare article, from a few months ago, discusses what they could do. A quote from it:
If there is anything the last 3 years have taught me, is that the Constitution is probably irretrievably broken. It requires too much faith in the goodness of people and too little responsibility on those same people.
It wouldn’t be the first time the Constitution has been broken, JohnT. What was the Civil War? Was that a Constitution that worked? What was FDR’s threat to pack the courts? Was that a Constitution that worked?
The Constitution was written by rich, white, aristocratic men. It’s not the Bible. In fact, one of our founding fathers had this to say about constitutions generally:
Yeah, that’s not good. At the very least, we need to work hard (after Trump is vanquished) to get the Senate up to 104 members, four of whom would come from Puerto Rico and DC.
From Democrats who are not running for president, which is still the majority even if it sometimes seems otherwise.
In one outlier poll, by a pollster that 538 assigns a grade of C+ to.
538’s rolling average shows a very different story: Today, June 4, he’s at 41.7% approval, 53.4% disapproval. IOW, his approval/disapproval is pretty much where it’s been for the past 15 months.
You might should have taken your own advice before posting this nonsense.
Oh really? Is it nonsense that people knowingly voted for a sexual predator?
Is it nonsense that 76% of Americans said the Mueller report doesn’t change their opinion of Trump? (10% changed said it changed their opinion positively).
Trump’s poll numbers will go down when the country stops believing the myth that the country is performing well under this president. But opening up impeachment hearings when the country is still cautiously optimistic about the economy is not a good idea. It could easily backfire.
When will we ever learn? Only asahi knows what he’s talking about. We should all just be thankful that he’s generous enough to share his wisdom with all of us ignorant doofuses.
Ah, well. Two hundred and thirty-years under this Constitution. I guess that’s a good run.
Time for the revolution. We’ll start overthrowing the failed government and putting people against the wall to be shot. Y’know, the guillotine was much more fun: “A tisket, a tasket, a head in a basket, it won’t give answers to questions you ask it.”
Meant to respond to this earlier (good series of posts, btw):
Yeah, it does, but it always does. In any democratic system, whether it’s an aristocratic democratic republic or a more popular form of democracy, there are people who don’t really want to share power. There are people working to undermine the system for their own benefit. That will never change. Vigilance is a must.
It is, and that’s one of the flaws of our current system. Our political system has mechanisms which have resulted in a minority constituency having the power to govern the majority. This is something also that the Russians know they can exploit – not to mention their ability to weaponize legal “dark” money and grass roots politics.
I said in 2010 and I’ll say it again: Justice Scalia is the 20th/21st Century answer to Roger Taney, except that he somehow elevated the status of corporate non-persons over natural born persons.
I’m open to the possibility that the Senate might be forced by public opinion into having a trial, and that that wave of public opinion might be strong enough to force Trump from office. I just think it’s exceedingly unlikely, and shouldn’t be the basis for any plan. Hopefully that’s so obvious that I don’t need to defend it.
I think it would get messy if the impeachment process had a serious overlap with next year’s primary season. I don’t know that I can defend that; it’s just a gut feeling.
Based on #2, it would be wise for the House to finish up its work on impeachment in 2019.
Time should be allowed for the House Judiciary Committee to consider the available evidence in an unhurried, judicious manner appropriate to the seriousness of the matter. Hopefully that doesn’t need any defending either.
#2, #3, and #4 would strongly suggest that the Judiciary Committee commence its inquiry into impeachment as soon as possible. (I think Nadler’s decision that the Judiciary Committee will read the Mueller Report suffices as a good first step.)
The general public has little idea of what’s in the Mueller Report, and up until Mueller’s press conference the other day, had every reason to believe it was somewhere between a nothingburger and complete exoneration of Trump.
Trump’s already gotten all the exoneration he needs, and it has freed him and his minions to go on the attack.
The usual run of hearings won’t change that. People don’t pay much attention to them.
People do pay attention to Presidential impeachment hearings.
A full airing of grounds for impeachment including, but hardly limited to, those in the Mueller Report, will do Trump’s standing with the public a lot more harm than good.
The public takes its cues from politicians and media on things that they haven’t had the opportunity to come to their own conclusions. The Democrats have the opportunity to signal to the public that yes, what Trump has done is a Big Fucking Deal, and to put the whole package together for them that they’ve only seen in dribs and drabs across the past few years.
Whatever the Senate does, or doesn’t, won’t change #10 and #11 much. If they vote, everyone will know it’s a political vote, and that it doesn’t change the underlying facts. The 40% will take it as exoneration, but Trump needs more than 40% to survive.
A House vote for impeachment puts the Senate on the spot, which is a Big Fucking Deal from our perspective: we need to win the Senate (and get rid of the filibuster, but that’s another story) in order for a Dem President to accomplish anything. This puts the heat on Susan Collins and Cory Gardner and Martha McSally and Joni Ernst and Thom Tillis and David Perdue and whatever other vulnerable GOP incumbents there are in the Senate.
Whatever each individual Dem was running on in 2018, they were riding a wave of anti-Trump antipathy. That’s why they picked up 40 seats.
That antipathy is still there. And now the Dems have the chance to act on that antipathy. Democrats asserting themselves will benefit from it more in 2020 than Democrats being supine.
If you don’t impeach Donald Trump, are you ever going to impeach any Republican President for any reason ever?
So your rebuttal is, ‘Let me change the subject. I won’t admit I was wrong here. And I surely must be right about something else, so let me say some other random noise that comes into my head.’
I’ve concluded the same about you. You are welcome to continue to respond to my posts with whatever non sequiturs you can come up with. I’m responding to you here for the last time in this thread.
It’s pretty relevant to point out that if you want impeachment to achieve the desired political outcome of making Donald Trump less popular, you need to have evidence that it will make him less popular. I’ve repeatedly pointed out that you don’t have that evidence.
Which strikes me as a pretty airtight argument. Impeachment is for when the vast majority of the public and Congress are aghast, like “OMG, we have to get this guy out of here yesterday”. (Which may still come, if his mental state continues to deteriorate.)
But one of the problems with assessing where the public is, is that pollsters will never ask the question you really need answered.
The main thing people seem to be concerned about is that going forward with impeachment will “hurt” the Democrats in 2020, and this is almost always based on pointing to the Clinton situation. I’ll just mostly leave that aside, personally, I don’t think it’s applicable, the situations are different in two major ways, one is the gravity and scope of the offense and the other is popularity going in - Clinton was at 63% going in.
Anyways, pollsters are asking “Do you think Trump should be impeached” or “do you support impeachment” or some variation on that. And I believe it’s still in the low 40’s%. But that’s not the question you need answered if you’re afraid. The question you need answered is:
You need to isolate so-called independents who disapprove of Trump but do not currently support impeachment, and ask “Will you punish Democrats if they move forward on impeachment?” Or at least get their non-support broken down into strong, middling or weak.
I understand why pollsters would not ask that question that way, but that’s what you need to know.
