Honest question:
Since the house is majority Republican, can they appoint a “special prosecutor” to look into the Benghazi affair, and whose investigation will have limitless funds, ability to subpoena anyone at all, and be able to look into every single thing done in the past 4 years regardless of it’s relationship to Behghazi?
I’m actually wondering if this is on the cards…
Ah, another elder, who remembers the long ago times of the 1990’s.
There might be some stains on a blue burka somewhere!
I don’t think so. IIRC, the legislation that gave them that power lapsed during the Bush administration. They’d need to pass it through the Senate and Obama again, and I’m guessing the Dems learned their lesson on doing so during the 90’s.
I think we’ve passed the point where the WH should give them the time of day when it comes to such issues. Just move ahead with governing this nation (please) and pay no attention to the screaming crazies trying to drag everything down.
Thanks - I hoped that they could not just unilaterally do this.
No it doesn’t. An excluded middle would have said something like, “Will the House turn a blind eye to every crime committed by the President, or will they impeach him for something trivial?” Listing a bunch of different options on a spectrum, ending with an extreme option, is the exact opposite of an excluded middle.
But that’s not the question posed in the OP. The question is, will they fish?
It’s one thing to detect a scandal unfolding and respond to it. It’s quite another thing to spend significant energy looking for scandals and trying to manufacture them.
In the strictest sense, we aren’t a “direct democracy,” of the Athenian model, where everyone voted on everything. If this sort of thing exists on a spectrum, you might say that U.S. States with voter-submitted Propositions are “closer to true democracies” than states without.
But, shrug. It’s been a talking…er, drooling point for the right since the 60’s, at least. When it was obvious that We, The People did not support the war in Viet Nam, the Republicans said, “Tough; this is a Republic, not a Democracy.” i.e., the popular will isn’t important when it doesn’t suit them.
(Of course, when the courts overruled California’s Prop 187, many of the same people expressed their typical style of mock outrage that the “will of the people” had been overturned by “activist judges.” It never really ends, does it?)
Well, I know the Republicans were a bit upset with Christ Christie after the election, but still…
Whoa. . .whoawhoawhoawhoa. . . whoa.
Obama’s the messiah, and don’t you forget it!
Well, yeah. The Founders recognized that and used republics as models. But usage doesn’t care about strictness. Words change meaning over time, and accrue new meanings as well. That’s what happened with democracy.
And direct democracy on the small scale was very much a hallmark of the U.S. The legendary New England town meeting, where every citizen could attend and argue for his side was extremely close to an Athenian-style democracy, only better because the entire population, not just a tiny slice of elites, could attend. (I’m not sure how much talking the women were allowed to do, but they could attend.) This direct effect on decision making was not possible in the European countries they had immigrated from. A bottom-up style of democracy was something that outsiders commented on.
The push toward universal male suffrage preceded those campaigns in most other countries. Andrew Jackson led a motley coalition of motley non-elites and that was a new thing as well. From both the inside and the outside, the U.S. - though repressive by our standards today - was a new model in history of allowing democracy to the masses. It helped that Greece had a major revolution throughout the 1820s. The connection between Grecian democracy and the American experiment was major news and Americans supported the cause of democracy in a huge way. Upstate New York, where zillions of small communities in what was then the “west” were being founded, named dozens of towns and villages after Greek literature and history, including what is now Greece, NY, a suburb of Rochester.
It wasn’t just the American Revolution that fostered the notion the the U.S. was a - in fact THE - democracy, it was a long series of events that hammered it home. Republic connoted the Roman dictators; Democracy the Grecian masses. Americans revered Rome, but they identified with Greece.
It’s weirdly anti-intellectual for some people to defend American exceptionalism and at the same time insist that the U.S. is not a democracy. It was the process of making America a democracy that created its exceptional nature and status to Europeans, and the reason they came here in the tens of millions over the next century. America is America solely because it is the world’s great democracy.
It could get interesting if/when Boehner comes up with a compromise to stave off the “fiscal cliff”. I’ve heard a little speculation that it could lead to a leadership challenge. God only knows what kind of partisan rancor we’d see if Cantor took the reins.