Please don’t tell me you think you know why the stock market dropped today. And if goes up tomorrow, does that mean impeachment is less likely? Go ahead and discount Pelosi if you want, but she is arguably the most powerful person in the Democratic party right now.
But being the ‘most powerful person in the Democratic party right now’ is fairly meaningless…TODAY. At least wrt the subject we are discussing here. As for the stock market, yes, it goes up and goes down…but you can’t sit there with a straight face and tell me that the current political discord has zero to do with the tumble it took today…can you? Zero? :dubious:
Look, I get it. Lots of anti-Trump threads. It’s good to try and cool things down, to be skeptical and all that. And right now, the Dems are keeping it cool wrt impeachment because they don’t really matter…today. But the Pubs now…they do matter right now. And…well, as I said, it’s a feeling. I think this shit is more balanced on a knife edge than people think it is. YMMV.
Read her carefully, though. She’s not saying, “We’re not gonna impeach.” She’s saying, “You’re gonna need a strong case before talking about impeachment.”
So yeah, I guess that’s momentum-dampening–but it might just be making sure your gun’s loaded before pulling the trigger.
One of the more interesting news bits from this insane news day is the exchange between House Speaker Ryan and House Majority Leader McCarthy
So, yeah, they’re joking. But they’re kind of not joking, because that’s not a joke they told about, say, Clinton. And Ryan, confronted with genuine worries about collusion between the Republican candidate and the leader of an unfriendly foreign nation, decided his “family” was his party, not his country.
I’m hoping this Trump thing has coattails smeared in shit, and that they drag Ryan and McCarthy along with him.
He’s already given numerous depositions in the many civil lawsuits he has been involved in. There is no requirement that any high crimes or misdemeanors had to have been committed while in office. Some of the impeachment of federal judges have been for allegations and/or criminal offenses committed prior to assuming the bench.
A fairly big pending lawsuit is regarding whether his current ownership status of his businesses violates the Emoluments clause. If he is required to give a deposition for that case, there is a high likelihood that its contents would become public relatively quickly.
And the best part of that story:
“I didn’t say it, and I didn’t mean it!” Okay, Speaker Ryan.
When she said it, I agreed with her. Investigate now, then proceed to impeachment or not based on what is found is exactly the right thing to do. Don’t impeach unless you think you can succeed in removal. And I didn’t think we were near that two days ago - not with actual evidence.
But you also have to admit, she said that on the 15th. In the last two days, we’ve heard more and more bad things (that need to be investigated, I mean). Just got this one about Flynn this evening. Still need evidence, but things are looking worse for Trump.
Just musing here, since the news is starting to turn to the topic of President Pence, but I wonder how gracefully Trump will go, if the Republican Party starts to turn against him and he senses Pence starting to loom over him from behind?
Already, the media is starting to try and paint Pence into a bad position, by linking him to Flynn and Manafort. But Trump is the guy who was willing to take on Pence in return for the Presidency, who would dial in to local newspapers to keep them up to date on his divorce proceedings, who gave out Lindsey Graham’s phone number, who has been accused of recording phone conversations, and threatened to reveal tapes on conversations. He’s not above being petty or shameless, and particularly not in the hopes of extracting what he wants out of it. If it takes threatening the Republican party to stay in the Presidency or even just to stay out of jail, he’s probably going to do it.
And while we can assume that Trump has been carefully excluded from some of the more important discussions in DC by the RNC and its members, we can also assume that he was right in the dead-center of quite a few of them, and probably some interesting calls with Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and others. If the Republicans have been up to shady shit, I have to imagine that Trump was right there with a tape recorder on at least a few key occasions.
Trump will probably sit for a few days, maybe a couple of weeks, trying to be quiet and dignified, at his lawyer’s command. But eventually he’s going to remember that he’s the fucking President and the world’s best deal maker. He’ll start trying to get the political machine to move to protect him at all costs.
If this is how things play out, then we would probably want to watch for Trump’s signing pen to suddenly stop one day without much explanation. The Republicans will lose their rubber stamp while they’re being forced to deal with whatever all blackmail Trump starts to throw their way behind the scenes.
The Republicans have a majority in both houses, don’t they? So they can get rid of Trump at their whim.
Trump will go out kicking and screaming. He will lie, threaten, call on his supporters to seek “Second Amendment solutions”, or at least riot in the streets. He’ll seek to drag down everything and everybody around him. Whomever is SecDef had damned well better make sure that the military is instructed to ignore any launch order.
If one believes the extreme fringes of the Russia CT, by this time this is done America may be looking at President Hatch. I chalked the idea of the FBI having Ryan on tape talking about Russian money laundering up to crazed partisan wishful thinking, but now there’s a recording of Ryan and friends talking about Russia and Ukraine and “joking” how Trump is paid by Putin. This is where the robots have to reboot the Matrix because I don’t believe this is the real world anymore.
I’d love to see Trump answer questions under oath for 11 hours. He can’t even give a five minute interview without making a fool of himself.
Mattis is known for being one of the few competent and sane Cabinet members Trump has, so I think that’s a safe bet.
Yeah - I hope you’re enjoying yourself over here. The music’s good, isn’t it? There’s going to be a drum circle, later. Let me get you another drink!"
I was hoping for a Heavy Metal recurring riff with a lead singer screeching in Black Metal voice, “Special Prosecutor…! Special Prosecutor…!” 
Much better! Ave!
It actually makes a lot of sense for Pelosi to do this. If Trump is impeached and removed from office now, by the time the 2020 elections get here he will be a distant memory. Better to let him continue as POTUS, too distracted by the scandal of the day to effectively move the Republican agenda forward. With Pence as president things might actually get done, but those things would be the Republican agenda that Democrats oppose.
Edited to add. Maybe in the back of her mind she is also dreaming of being speaker again after the 2018 midterms and once again being second in line to become president.
But there is zero chance he would be removed from office, so why would anyone worry about that?
Well, Pelosi wants facts. We should have confidence that the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history will produce a few facts, no?