Here’s the story I found - apparently Roberts let it be known ( love that passive voice! ) that he had no interest in presiding over the trial and felt no obligation since Trump was no longer President.
But the article pissed me off…it implies that Roberts’s refusal has something to do with the way “the left” treated him on social media during the last impeachment.
What the Fuck, NPR? You’re usually smarter than this. Have you forgotten how the QANON #TrumpArmy trolls went after Roberts for declining to gear the bogus election fraud cases? How they implied he was a Satanic pedophile?
The senators and congressmen aren’t just bending to Trump’s will because he’s threatening to run alt-right candidates to primary them. They’re scared for their safety, of being followed and harassed everywhere they go, of threats made to their families. And I think Roberts is, too.
While using the power of the ballot box to bend politicians to your will is fair game, I guess, I’m not sure anyone foresaw someone like Trump wielding that power so blatantly and publicly. It’s not a good time to be a moderate Republican, and the Republicans that think they still can be moderate Republicans while acquiescing to Trump haven’t learned the lesson they need to learn, which is that it’s not going to stop.
His demands are just going to get worse and worse, until at some point they’re just…”penced”, I guess. They’ll hit that wall where they just can’t do it anymore and the whole degrading Stockholm Syndrome exercise will have been for naught and they’ll end up with the Trump Army chasing them around a homemade gallows anyway.
Really, any Republican that wants to hold onto any scrap of mainstream respectability needs to nip this in the bud. They all just need to close their eyes, hold hands and jump, letting the chips fall where they may.
No matter how bad it is, it’ll be a little less bad if they act together, and a lot less bad if they act now. But they won’t see that, of course.
BTW, I found it interesting that the suit Dominion filed against Guiliani was in DC. It’s probably the one place they stand a chance of getting a jury without a MAGAnut on it.
Can’t anyone represent oneself? And if he isn’t disbarred (by the time this case comes up), then that old adage applies about a lawyer who would defend himself . . .
Aha! I see where this is going. Trump hisself is banned from Twitter, but his silly “Office” is a separate entity that will have its own twitter account. So all of Trump’s nastiness can eminate from there now. Will Twitter have the gumption to ban that account too?
Well, since this account doesn’t have the weight of Presidential authority behind it (not like there was any of that during the past four years), it shouldn’t be treated any differently than any other normal user.
Which means ideally, Twitter should have a heap of AI code monitoring this new account 24/7 like the Eye of Sauron, ready to lay down the banhammer if the account posts anything half as incendiary as Trump did.