We disagree on our definitions of ‘of use.’
IMHO, impeachment for bona fide high crimes is ‘of use’ if they actually impeach. The Senate can do what it will, but the point is that one party cares about this shit enough to actually do something about it, even if the other party won’t.
If both sides do nothing, then no distinction has been drawn between the good guys and the bad guys.
The call is more disturbing than surprising. It’s almost refreshing to see there are still a few vertebrate Republicans.
The crazy thing is this should affect the run-off votes. It’s that crazy. It sure would in Canada. But it won’t. My prediction? A 50-50 split. Hope I’m wrong.
And I do, of course.
“Throw good money after bad”???
How much money? Oh, another twenty-seven cents? Oh damn, we can’t afford that!
I too am interested in what can actually be done. The House can actually impeach. They can’t make the Senate act, but they can put the Senate in the position of refusing to act, or put GOP Senators in the position of having to vote. Either one is good.
And I guess that if the Dems fail to win both GA Senate seats tomorrow, then by your metric, the House should just close up shop, aside from the annual appropriations bill. Because any other legislation they pass will be ‘useless.’
Predictably, Republicans including Kevin McCarthy and David Perdue are out defending the call, downplaying the “find me the votes I need” as just the President calling out irregularities and improprieties in the elect. But they are OUTRAGED that someone would leak a recording of the call to the media. There’s your real crime, lamestream media!
If only the man would’ve said, Are you thinking of paying me if I “found” the votes? Then they could’ve had him.
It’s my understanding that Raffenssberger ordered the recording to be released himself. But only after Trump lied about the call in a Sunday morning tweet.
My insane acquaintance texted me and said the election really was a fraud, and I don’t have logic or reason and , oh yes, anyone who voted as a democrat in 2020 should not be allowed to vote again. wow.
They shouldn’t “close up shop”, but they definitely need to change how they negotiate with the Senate. The last decade or more of endless cycles of “This? NO! How about this? NO!” needs to be broken. It’s been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Republican Senate simply will not meet the Democratic House half-way on any issue, so no matter where the Dems start the negotiations, they’ll end up going nowhere.
The House needs to insist that the Senate pass any bills first, so the House can then decide if “this” is good enough. One of the reasons the GOP Senate keeps getting away with their shit is they never have to actually say what they want, they only have to keep saying, “No, that’s not it, try again!” Make them put their goals in writing. At least then, even if the House decides not to support it, we’ll have the GOP’s own words on record to show why the House opposes the bill.
This is one of the reasons I said Trump was stupid. He’s been savaging the governor and SoS and he didn’t think that they would protect themselves by recording the phone call?
I disagree, but it seems we’re at a stalemate on this, so no need for me to keep kicking the horse.
At this point I’m against impeachment. Even if it could happen before Trump is officially out it would make it easier for Pence to pardon him.
I don’t think that would work. If the House tried this approach the Senate would just do nothing and them blame the Dems for actually doing nothing instead of doing nothing and them blame the Dems for doing nothing when they weren’t doing nothing, so it could even backfire in that it would have more truth to it than before.
So I don’t agree that it would force the Senate to pass their version of bills.
Elvis was there, too. And Jimmy Hoffa.
I really like the preceding portion of the transcript:
TRUMP : How may people do that? They moved out, and then they said, ‘Ah, to hell with it, I’ll move back.’ You know, it doesn’t sound like a very normal — you mean, they moved out, and what, they missed it so much that they wanted to move back in? It’s crazy.
Yes Donny, people move between states and sometimes, I know this is crazy, but hear me out, sometimes they move back to a state where they previously lived. I’m not even lying.
I’d say it’s another in a long list of items proving that Trump is a colossal idiot. He’s just doing what he’s always done: bully and threaten people who stand in his way.
The only situations that would possibly work are situations where the Senate feels compelled to pass something. And even in some of those, it might well backfire.
Say the Dems want to increase the minimum wage. The Senate will do nothing, because why should it? They haven’t experienced any consequences of leaving the minimum wage at $7.25.
Or say the Dems want an election reform bill. If they let the Senate go first, it’ll be all about voter ID, being able to toss voters off the rolls more quickly if they show up on the USPS’ National Change of Address (NCOA) file, eliminating any requirements for availability of absentee or early voting, etc. And then the public debate gets centered around these: first-mover advantage and all that.
So there may be an occasional situation where the House is in a position to tell the Senate to go first, but it’s not something that can be done with any regularity.
Elie Honig is a regular commentator on CNN and he said that Trump sounded exactly like some of the mob bosses he’s prosecuted.
There’s also the issue that under the Constitution, revenue bills MUST originate in the House.
My brother just posted on Facebook that this call shows that:
GA SOS is admitting that there was fraud but he is unwilling to do anything about it.
Any disagreement between him and Trump is on extremely minor issues. The MSM is blowing it up in an attempt to divide Republicans.
He was a never-Trumper in 2016 and resigned from his town Republican Committee in 2017 because he couldn’t stand the xenophobia (he’s South Asian American). But his contempt of Black people and anti-vaxx anti-science beliefs brought him back into the fold with a passion in 2020.
His response to everything is “still better than Marxism”
The Donald just can’t believe that anyone who escaped Georgia would go back. Yet another example of the disdain he holds his supporters in - he is the very definition of a “Coastal Elite”, yet somehow his base celebrates him while raging against what he actually is.