And this has also been floated as another “strategy” Trump might use to add wrench to impeachment inquiry works.
Filing deadlines are passing every day as well. In Texas, the deadline is December 9th, and Cornyn already has 2 challengers:
This may matter:
Impeachment inquiry just passed in the House (I was watching C-Span). Votes were something like 232-193 (not sure if that’s the final numbers), with 2 Democrats voting nay and 1 independent (former Republican Justin Amash, I believe) voting aye and a handful of no votes.
This almost certainly isn’t true but, one could note, all of the testimony that we’ve seen so far has said that various people went to Bolton, telling him that they were concerned about Trump’s Ukraine activities.
From what we know of the whistleblower, he is a person whom a variety of people talked to, telling him that they had concerns about Trump’s Ukraine activities. Occam’s Razor would tell us that between supposing the existence of two figures who match that description, we should only expect there to be one.
Bolton rage-quit and/or was fired. Shortly after, the whistleblower came into existence.
And, of course, Bolton is the “scorched earth” sort.
Counter to all of that, Trump’s just soooo criminal that we probably don’t need to bring Occam into this and I’m not sure that this is Bolton’s style.
There was a old Pubbie of Niger
Who smiled as he rode on a tiger;
They returned from the ride
With the Pubbie inside,
And the smile on the face of the tiger.I’m finding it hard to sympathetic. They’re in a hole of their own digging.
Reps. Collin Peterson of Minnesota and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey are the two Democrats who voted with Republicans against the resolution.
Yes, I came here to say that. Here’s an NPR story:
" Just two Democrats voted no — Reps. Collin Peterson of Minnesota and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey.
Amid the debate, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called it a “sad day.”
“It’s a sad day because nobody comes to Congress to impeach a president of the United States. No one,” she told reporters. “We come here to do the work, make the future better for our children, for America’s future. We take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, and that’s what we cannot ignore and will not ignore when the president’s behavior indicates that that investigation, that inquiry, is necessary.”
I don’t know. My take on Bolton is that he’s a war hawk who fancies himself as the greatest patriot of all and that he is very much a hawk with respect to Russia. If he genuinely believes that the Ukraine blackmail has the effect of strengthening Russia’s hand then I can totally see him being outraged enough to testify and to build the case for impeachment and conviction. He doesn’t see himself as owing Donald anything, if anything he thinks that Donald is his debt for gracing the room with his presence. I’m sure it didn’t take long for Bolton to realize what a chump DJT is and that his presidency poses a clear and present danger to the nation.
Congressman Peterson doesn’t accept emails from people outside his district, so I sent him an “Appearance Request” inviting him to speak to a group about why he is ashamed to have let down his country in this difficult time.
So the House Republicans want us to believe that trump wanted to root out corruption in the Ukraine. PLEASE! This president is corruption PERSONIFIED. His interest in Ukrainian corruption was limited to getting a PIECE of it. This explains why they wanted to get rid of the ambassador and replace her with a stooge. This explains Rudy and the “two Shrecks”. This explains why Bolton called the whole thing a “drug deal”. This explains everything.
I hate it that congressmen generally don’t accept emails from outsiders. If they’re going to grandstand on the national stage the least they can do is take the flak from a national audience.
Peterson is basically a Republican… but he’s in a Trump +31 district, so I don’t really think there’s much point to being pissed off about him in terms of partisan politics. He’s probably better than the alternative for that district.
New trivia question!
Who is the only Democrat to vote for an impeachment inquiry into Bill Clinton (D) and against an impeachment inquiry for Donald Trump ®?
Collin Peterson, that’s who!
How long before Mr. Peterson goes on Faux?
It’s actually a good time to be a leader and explain to your district why this matters. I assume he voted no because he doesn’t want Trump impeached. That’s incomprehensible to me, but there you have it.
I wonder why *former *members of the Senate and House are able to see things more clearly?
Wow! Pelosi actually sounds like a reasonable, mature, responsible adult. Trump’s certainly never gonna sound like one!
Whew, that was a lot of pages to catch up.
I won’t get into it in too much detail here because I don’t want to hijack, but I think we need to stop defending Clinton. Were the Republicans utter hypocrites then and now? Absolutely. But with the benefit of hindsight, I’m not sure Clinton shouldn’t have been impeached, albeit on slightly altered articles. Perjury and witness tampering, and sexual favors he obtained literally in the oval office, from a young intern, while he was president. If that happened now, by a president of either party, I would likely support impeachment. We need to stop minimizing it as “lying about a blow job.” But by all means, we should hold Republicans’ feet to the fire about how that impeachment was conducted, and why these charges would deserve any different treatment.
In actuality, what the near-transcript shows is that he is too dumb/incompetent to NOT do quid pro quo. I think he believes it isn’t quid pro quo if the quid and the quo are not in the same sentence. Also, after Vindman confirmed that the ellipses do indicate omissions, I strongly suspect there’s a quid pro quo sentence that got removed. (Which would be why he was so confident the record of the call had “no quid pro quo.”) I wonder if anyone tried to explain to him that that isn’t how it works.
I also mentioned several pages back that there should be a campaign of taunting to get him to testify. It certainly could work to just get him to publicly incriminate himself, too. People should be saying that he’s not smart enough to tell us his plan. It probably wasn’t even his plan, and he probably didn’t even understand it, etc. Although, come to think of it, he publicly incriminates himself all the time, no taunting needed.
“Support for the President” and “support for impeachment” aren’t the same thing. There are a lot of people out there who don’t like Trump, but aren’t sure that impeaching him is necessary or appropriate. Those people could be swung around to supporting impeachment without Trump’s core support dipping much below ~37%.
Who are these people and how can they follow the testimony and not feel that he crossed a line? Where on earth is the line for those people? Do they even have a line?
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