I’m not opposed to impeachment. I’m for whatever gets us rid of the callous ignorant swine.
However, I’m not convinced it’s necessary if sufficient information about Trump’s malfeasance is released by the half dozen or so currently ongoing congressional investigations. I imagine that Nancy has some confidence that an impeachment process is not necessary to gather sufficient grounds to have Trump charged and convicted after he leaves office.
There is the argument that the Senate will acquit Trump, and he will be able to exonerate himself, like he did with the Mueller Report, something which appears to have so far had little to no lasting effect on his approval/disapproval ratings.
However, I think one could also make the argument that if the public could be educated about the evidence of Trump’s criminality through the hearings of an impeachment inquiry, then when the Republican senators quash the impeachment trial in the Senate, by fixing the trial parameters or ignoring the evidence in a whitewash, then that might turn the voters against Trump and the Republicans.
Impeachment is on the table - I don’t think there’s been any real disagreement about that. It’s a question about when to impeach. We don’t want to put the president in a position in which voters view him as the victim of a Democratic House majority that simply wants to remove him from office and embarrass his party. People need to understand that many impressionable voters will assume that impeachment isn’t being done to protect the Constitution, but rather to simply score a political victory.
Well, “we” dont. But *Pelosi *does.
NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll finds:
Continuing the investigations seems like the best option. Keep the pressure on. Keep making him think that impeachment might come, but don’t make him a victim of politics in the eyes of impressionable voters. He’ll make more unforced errors.
Yeah, I think the key there would be if he were able to get a majority of the Senate to vote to acquit, as Clinton did. That makes a huge symbolic difference. And I have my doubts about whether he would get the majority. There are some Republicans in blue states who have to worry about reelection, but more broadly, these senators know that a century or two hence, one of the few ways in which they will still be remembered in history books given out to kids across the country will be whether they voted for or against removal.
I think there would be one or two surprising names on the “Remove” side when it comes right down to it, and removal would probably get 52-55 votes. More if Trumpy has done some subsequent notably cray-cray shit by that time, which is of course easily conceivable.
If the economy is bad, if the president botches a response to a natural disaster in America’s heartland, things can change right quick. The key is that Republican senators, and a fair number in the House and in the party generally, must fear losing power. Senators must have a reason to fear losing their political lives and their access to the levers of power.
New advert by Republicans for the Rule of Law. It will air during an ad break on today’s “Fox & Friends”.
I think it would be useful to have one-minute Mueller Report summary adverts placed in Fox News ad breaks.
So he’s convicted. Then what? Fines? I doubt there is anyway he’ll spend time in prison. What do you do about his security detail?
I’d be all for a special prison just for him out in the Nevada desert, I really don’t know how the hell else they would do it. Except for the absolutely devout, I suspect most of his followers will just go back to inspecting navel lint.
I’m afraid it is way too subtle - the average Fox viewer is going to think it is an ad in support of the Barr investigation into the investigators.
Ah, but remember: Republicans are ALWAYS the REAL victims! :rolleyes:
Well, I know two who did, so I guess technically I’ve disproved that opinion. Now, neither were going to vote for Hillary, but both were going to sit out the election because they weren’t enthused about Trump. Instead both ended up voting for Trump to “spite” Hillary.
Never underestimate the power of even the mildest of insults and the capacity for people to feel outraged, rational or not. It was a phenomenally tone-deaf statement and an absolutely damaging one. Clinton should have had that election and her weak electoral strategy and occasional crap politicking is mostly to blame. Yes there were dirty tricks, but like bad refereeing in a sports game it wouldn’t have tipped the balance is she had done everything else right.
Cosigned. The grammar in that tweet has me gritting my teeth though.
Phenomenally tone-deaf? Really? How would you describe the shit Trump said on a daily basis? Talk about a double standard.
And I have yet to understand: since Hillary said only half of Trump voters were “deplorables”, why would every Trump backer who heard that assume she was talking about them as opposed to thinking they must be in the “non-deplorable” half?
It’s absolutely a double-standard, because frankly too many people have normalized Trump’s shitty behavior. He can get away with it - it’s part of his political persona. But you can’t out-wrestle a pig.
If you are going to go negative, concentrate only on Trump not his supporters. Lord knows there is plenty to concentrate on.
Because “half” is a big fucking number and in Republican country where most vote or leans red it soon becomes many of the people you know - neighbors, family and friends. It doesn’t matter if you think she is referring to you - if you think she might mean cousin John, that’s bad enough. “I mean sure, John’s a little bigoted, but he still has a good heart.” :rolleyes:
It would be have been marginally better if she’d said “5%” or some such thing, but it really doesn’t matter. It’s tone deaf, either way. Nor does it matter if it is right or not. You can believe it, just don’t say it out loud. It’s called being a politician.
I think you are wildly overestimating what’s in a school history textbook.
The way it’s been done for the brother-in-law of the Spanish king is by sending him to a prison wing that’s otherwise completely unused. The rest of the prison is women’s-only and that same prison has been used in the same way for other high-profile criminals. They’re not officially in isolation, they have access to all of the wing’s common areas during as many hours as any other person in general population, but there simply aren’t any other prisoners there. Do you guys have any semi-empty prisons laying about?
I think I have a pretty decent idea, given that I majored in history, my wife’s primary certification is secondary social studies education, and I’ve read James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me (in fact, I can see it on the bookshelf from where I am).
I’m not saying they will list a roll call vote, but there’s a good chance of mentioning those brave Senate Republicans who voted to expel him from office. And if your descendants know their great-grandpa was in the Senate around this time as a Republican, you’re going to want to be remembered as a dissenter.
Whatever the case for any given school or textbook, *history *(in a more general sense) will remember who was counted on what side. Within a relatively short window (say twenty years), I believe it’s going to look pretty bad to have voted to keep Trump in office.
Even if she had qualified the description somehow, the qualifier would not have been quoted. Only the d-word itself would have made it into the sound bite.
Her whole point was not to write them ALL off as pond scum.