They need to do exactly this, though I’d prefer they simply call themselves independents. The Republicans have been so fearful of the wackos in the party that they’ve given them leverage. They can take that leverage back by leaving the party and then the Republican party would lose pretty much everything. Once they start losing, once the donor class realizes that the GOP is no longer viable, then problem is solved. The center right regains leverage.
Thank you. The worst part is seeing how sad my wife is. Her dad was hard-headed and sometimes a pain in the butt, but we miss having him around.
McConnell will move heaven and earth to stop it from happening. If he can’t, he and the GOP will go full scorched earth on any and all traitors to the party. It’ll make their decades-long character assassination of Hillary look gentle.
Excising the wackadoos would be a principled move that would also put the GOP out of power for years while they fight their civil war. Not gonna happen. There’s a reason these guys only grow backbones once they’re no longer running for re-election.
I don’t think McConnell will be able to stop this one. McConnell had a chance and a choice to control this outcome by moving away from Trump sooner. His best opportunity was to convict on last year’s impeachment and install Pence to take the weight going into 2020.
Instead, he decided to ride the rabid rhinoceros.
Now the principled Republicans are moving away from him. I don’t think he can’t stop it. McConnell already attempted to lead his party back from the nutty fringe when he pleaded with them to not force a voice vote on January 6th. Hawley and Cruz defied him.
This action becomes the best leverage sane Republicans have for controlling their fates. They know full well they may be in the wilderness for awhile. Obviously they care more about their country than about being in power, so it looks like they’ve found their backbones.
How does McConnell control that?
Democrats: “Think we should get into this?”
“Just a thought.”
You mean they’re talking about casting off the Tea Party elements?
I always considered them a radical narrow-platformed half-baked party.
They claimed to be strongly Christian and focussed on economic prudence, but it seemed to me their economic views were limited to “Don’t give tax dollars to the non-white pseudo-citizens.”
That party was formed long before The Donald started thinking about politics; I’ve argued for a long time that the name really refers not to historical events in Boston but rather to a lower-case t – the kind people used to see planted in some families’ front yards in the deep south, on fire. I really think they were a political incarnation of the men in hoods and bedsheets. And the GOP had lost my support years before the t-party was formed, but I thought it was a bad move for the Republicans to co-opt them. I really think they would have fizzled out sooner if the Elephants hadn’t let them join their pack.
–G!
They will never have any doubts about their worldview as long as the incredible badness is targeted at other people.
It is only one point in relation what Trump intended for the protest.
His duty was to protect teh constitution - its not just what he did, its also what he failed to do, he could have attempted to call the protest off once it became clear what was going on, he could have made the call for National Guard, instead of doing nothing - in the end the extra law resources were only called in when a way to bypass Trump was found - by Congress agreement that Pence and Pelosi had the power to call out the guard.
Just on his failure to uphold his duty and oath to protect the Constitution he completely abrogated his responsiblity - that alone makes him unsuitable for any further public office, and disqualification from such roles is one of the objectives of this trial
I didn’t find that article that compelling, 120 Republicans is not a lot when you consider how many people work with the party at the aide / staff level, and according to the article less than half of them want to form a 3rd party.
It’s some sort of acknowledgment that there’s a rift, but there has been for a while…the Bush / Ryan Republicans retreated 4 years ago but they’re still out there although they’ve been lying low.
But I think it goes to show that the Republican Party is shattering rather than splitting cleanly.
There’s this:
…
In California, more than 33,000 registered Republicans left the party during the three weeks after the Washington riot. In Pennsylvania, more than 12,000 voters left the G.O.P. in the past month, and more than 10,000 Republicans changed their registration in Arizona.An analysis of January voting records by The New York Times found that nearly 140,000 Republicans had quit the party in 25 states that had readily available data (19 states do not have registration by party). Voting experts said the data indicated a stronger-than-usual flight from a political party after a presidential election, as well as the potential start of a damaging period for G.O.P. registrations as voters recoil from the Capitol violence and its fallout.
…
Non-paywalled sources:
I forget where I saw it (it may even have been here), but there’s been a suggestion (I want to say from someone from Rhode Island) that the Insurrection and the electoral vote delay were linked. Basically that the bawbags tried to delay it so there would be more people around when the mob broke into the building. If true, that would be disturbing.
“Thousands” and “tens of thousands” is a definite statement, but 74 million voted for Trump. I’m afraid that’s not going to move the needle with Republican leadership.
So millions haven’t left. I’m glad that a relative handful of Republicans have regained sanity, but I still think it’s a relative handful. Nothing substantial is going to happen until we get some high profile defectors.
mcconnell brought this on himself. he could have convicted and tossed trump out. he still could have pushed through the judges he wanted. pence would have been easier to deal with and the pandemic would not have been so mismanaged. trump would have been banned by twitter sooner.
if any senator believes that the mob wouldn’t have turned on them, they are sadly mistaken. you could see and hear them turn on cruz, when they thought he had betrayed him. then one reread the paper and says “he’s with us.”.
if mcconnell had convicted last year, there would have never been a riot. he rolled the wrong dice last year. i hope it costs them for decades.
In 8 years Mitch Romney went from being the Republican nominee for President to being hunted down by Republican voters.
If you’re not following historian Heather Cox Richardson, you are missing out on some excellent context and analysis of current events. Here’s what she had to say about the trial yesterday:
“This case is much worse than someone who falsely shouts fire in a crowded theater. It’s more like a case where the town fire chief, who’s paid to put out fires, sends a mob not to yell fire in a crowded theater, but to actually set the theater on fire.”
This was how lead House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin (D-MD) explained Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection to the senators trying the former president Trump for inciting that insurrection.
Over the course of today, the House impeachment managers laid out a devastating timeline of the former president’s effort, beginning even before the 2020 election, to prime his supporters to believe the only way he could lose was if the Democrats cheated. Manager Joseph Neguse (D-CO) used the rioters’ own words to show that they were responding to Trump’s calls to fight for his reelection. Manager Eric Swalwell (D-CA) pointed out that the Trump camp spent $50 million on national “STOP THE STEAL!” ads that ran until the planned “big protest” on January 6. That presentation alone was powerful, as the managers put videos of rally speeches and tweets together to let the story tell itself.
But the tale grew riveting when impeachment manager Stacey Plaskett, a Democratic delegate from the U.S. Virgin Islands, took the story into the Capitol building itself. She followed the rioters using footage from their own cellphones and the cameras of journalists who recorded their actions. But she had more than those videos. Plaskett used previously unseen video from security cameras to illustrate just how close the rioters came to capturing Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, both of whom they were searching for specifically, as well as lawmakers in general. In some cases, the congress members and their staffs were within seconds of being caught.
The mocking, singsong, drawn out calls for “Nancy” from a rioter searching for the House Speaker as if he were a monster stalking a victim in a horror movie, and the angry chants to “Hang Mike Pence!” from rioters who had hung a noose from a gallows they constructed outside the Capitol, left little doubt the rioters were deadly. Richard Barnett, the man photographed with his feet on Pelosi’s desk, carried a 950,000-volt stun gun.
Impeachment manager David Cicilline (D-RI) took the baton from Plaskett, hammering home that Trump had continued to stoke the crowd’s anger against Pence even as the vice president was in lockdown at the Capitol, and that he refused to stop the riot despite pleading from his aides and allies. Manager Joaquin Castro (D-TX) brought the argument home: “On January 6, President Trump left everyone in this Capitol for dead.”
It was a riveting, damning presentation, showing just how close we came to an event even worse than the day turned out to be. In one particularly dramatic new scene from the security cameras, we saw Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, who later lured the rioters away from the Senate chamber to give the lawmakers enough time—barely—to get to safety, prevent Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) from walking into the mob, likely saving his life.
The story the managers told set out quite clearly that the insurrection was not only planned, it was timed to disrupt the counting of the electoral votes that would make Joe Biden president. As impeachment manager Ted Lieu (D-CA) put it, Trump “ran out of nonviolent options to maintain power…. What you saw was a man so desperate to try to cling to power that he tried everything he could to keep it, and when he ran out of nonviolent measures, he turned to the violent mob that attacked your Senate chamber on January 6.”
The House managers tried to make it possible for Republican senators to convict Trump. They focused on him alone, leaving untouched the fact that some of the senators in the chamber had themselves spread the lie that the election had been marred by massive fraud. (The one apparently in deepest, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, refused to watch the presentation.)
They held up Vice President Pence as a principled leader attacked while trying to do his constitutional duty, offering Republican senators a choice not between their party and the Democrats, but rather between Trump and Pence, Republicans both. They also detailed the attack on Capitol police officers, offering the chance for Republicans to side against Trump and with the officers.
In their defense of Pence, the impeachment managers made clear a curious thing: the popular anger at Pence was entirely manufactured. Pence’s role on January 6 was largely ceremonial; he could not challenge the counting of the electoral votes, and he said so, both in person and in writing, as Trump continued to pressure him to. Trump’s deliberate stoking of fury at the vice president meant the crowd was actively hunting for Vice President Pence and House Speaker Pelosi, the next two people in line for the presidency should Trump be removed from office.
And yet, there are signs that none of this matters to the Republican senators who have already decided to acquit the president. On Twitter, Senator Lindsey Graham tonight called the day’s presentation “offensive and absurd.”
Still others say that, even if what happened is horrific, the trial is unconstitutional because Trump is no longer president, although the fact the Senate voted that it is constitutional should mean that point is settled. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) told CNN correspondent Ryan Nobles, “I’m learning things. But, again, my basic point is we shouldn’t have having this trial.”
It seems likely that they are contemplating the experience of Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), whose state Republican Party pounced on his vote yesterday in favor of the constitutionality of the trial, saying it was “profoundly disappointed.”
But those doubling down on Trump’s leadership of the party have their own troubles. In the 25 states that have accessible data, nearly 140,000 Republicans have left the party since January 6, and tonight, Reuters broke the story that “former elected Republicans, former officials in the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Trump, ex-Republican ambassadors and Republican strategists,” are in talks to form a new center-right political party. While Trump spokesman Jason Miller called the people involved “losers,” they are savvy enough at political strategy to plan to make their influence felt not necessarily by running third-party candidates, but by endorsing the non-Trump candidate in a race, regardless of party.
He also went from being the definitional caricature of a mendacious politician to being the freaking Diogenes of the Republican Party, and he did it without changing a thing about himself.
That’s how far the ground has moved beneath him.
Is Senator Leahy ok? He doesn’t seem to have an entire grasp on what he is supposed to do. The woman sitting in front of him seems to be instructing him on everything.
senate parliamentarian was instructing him.
Seemed like she was more than instructing him. She was telling him the exact words to say. All the confusion at the end seemed to highlight that maybe he didn’t know what was going on.
I didn’t see it, but I’d damn well make sure I was saying everything correctly in this proceeding.