I wonder how Bill Weld will signal?
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I very much doubt the Senate will ever turn on Trump, they’ve show it time and again. By not proceeding with impeachment they’re looking quite weak after the 2 year investigation and postponing it for too much longer in this type of short news cycle will only embolden Trump and the GOP further. Just do it, it might fail, then let the people know WHY it failed, they’re protecting a criminal. There’s plenty in the report they could be telling people about, most Americans will not have read the report and are only getting what information they have on it from media and the media is doing a piss poor job as usual. Don’t let Trumps information bombardment strategy bury this.
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This is the thing that I don’t understand: they have a questionably elected president who is stepping all over the Congress and doing an incredible power grab. I would think that the Senate would be censoring if not impeaching just to maintain their own power base…
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I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
Andrew Johnson & Bill Clinton were impeached, but neither were removed from office.
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With 51 GOP Senators, conviction in this highly partisan case is nigh impossible. The House could easily call for impeachment and get the votes, but beyond that we wouldn’t see any progress.
Best to arrest the orange bastard and his family at the end of his term. If we can disbar President Clinton after his term, then we can reasonably demand that justice will be served, eventually.
Clinton wasn’t convicted.
It still messed up his time in office.
In your example, he also wouldn’t have been disbarred if impeachment proceedings hadn’t occurred first.
And I don’t know why people keep pushing the idea that conviction in the Senate is the only standard for political success. Any legal process has been shown to put Trump on the defensive, where he’s weaker, when he’d prefer to be on the offensive, outside of an evidence-based framework.
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Agreed. But that was back when being caught in a lie has political consequence. We have a President that doesn’t seem to care what his opponents think, as long as his rabid fanatics believe that everything is a liberal plot by the mainstream media.
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Let the Speaker of the House know how you feel. Here’s the link.
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Historically, he still does worse to himself in a court setting or on the witness stand than anywhere else.
It’s one of the only avenues to deal with someone who lies. It’s what caught Clinton up.
Otherwise it is mostly just masses of pundits batting around opinions without end or effect. Trump thrives there. It’s unlikely to be where Trump is hemmed in, unless the Democrats produce a better trash talker (they haven’t so far).
The Clinton impeachment didn’t make Republicans beloved, but it kept them powerful. Lindsey Graham, for example, wasn’t hurt by pushing an impeachment that didn’t tick over the last step. I doubt he regrets a thing.
Right now, Democrats are like a prosecutor saying, “I hope people don’t think I’m too tough on crime.” Strangely, people forgive prosecutorial zeal much faster than weakness. Trump understands this. He knows it’s better to go too far, than to not show up. It’s only sad he uses it for racism and self-enrichment, instead of something that helps people.
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There’s talk about him getting impeached since day 1 after he got elected.
All talk, no action so far …
This is a really good point. Trump avoided questions under oath in the Mueller investigation, but he cannot avoid it in Impeachment. He’s contradicted himself several times over on many of the key points of the obstruction question. If forced to answer yes/no as to why he fired Comey, why he told his staff not to cooperate with the investigation, why he threatened Cohen’s family on Twitter, etc. at some point he’s going to lie in a way that’s provable or he’s going to incriminate himself.
Meanwhile, he’s definitely losing support among even Republican congresspeople. When he vetoed the resolution against his fake emergency, then the resolution to end US support for the war in Yemen, he burned bridges with the more moderate Republican senators who backed those resolutions.
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If you look at his business career, he’s always been strongest on P.T. Barnum salesmanship on the front end, where a person can make any wild and unverified claim more forceful than any possible objection.
But any time he’s been near a courtroom situation, he’s more dangerous to himself than the opposing lawyers. A really great example of this is what happened to him when he was trying to break into professional football ownership and league building.
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The problem is, without impeachment, there’s a clear message being sent: “You can do whatever the fuck you want, no matter how illegal, and it doesn’t matter.” That’s pretty dangerous to the future of this country.
There also needs to be a counter-narrative to what’s coming from Trump. Because he was allowed to control the discourse largely unchallenged, he managed to convince half the population that the investigation was a witch hunt, redefine “collusion” to his advantage, claim he’s innocent of obstruction (when the opposite is true - Mueller was leaving prosecution of the case to congress), and now he’s trying to turn the investigation itself into a political cudgel with which to turn his opponents into “traitors.” We need to have someone publicly pointing out that the report details numerous crimes - both committed and many, many more attempted - on Trump’s part, contrary to his assertions. A congressional impeachment investigation could act as a means of swaying public opinion and counteracting Trump propaganda (which could end up being dangerous if left unchallenged).
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My issue with that is that jumping right to impeach (particularly before the report came out), only furthers the “witch hunt” claims. Basically ceding to Trump and the GOP another opportunity to shut down any counter narrative. Which given that impeachment will not lead to consequences or an effective check on Trump’s actions. His eventual aquittal will simply validate their narrative of which hunts and political persecution.
The impeachment process is not in itself a punishment. And isn’t a meaningful check on the executive if it’s conducted in away that can be played to his benefit.
The Mueller report shifts that a bit (mostly in the direction of it being hard for house Dems to avoid impeachment if they really would like to avoid it). But it doesn’t really alter the playing field particularly much. And we won’t really know if and how much impact it has on public opinion till next week when polling catches up to the news. You need to see some kind of negative impact for Trump in both public opinion and support among GOP voters.
The correct thing to do right, even if impeachment is the ultimate goal. Is to get as much of the Mueller report in front of the public as you can as quickly as you can. And to investigate other wrong doing and get that in front of the public. In hopes of maximizing that impact on public opinion. Especially if that can lead to something clearer to hang impeachment on. If Mueller testifies in a week or two and says “it’s clear Trump committed obstruction of justice and if I could have charged him I would have, and I would have expected conviction” then you’ve got something that fits the bill. But that’s very unlikely.
And the DNC are doing just that. They’ve already subpoenaed the full unredacted report and the investigation’s records, they’re lining up testimony for Mueller and other. And before the report was released they issued a bunch of subpoenas relating to other scandals and investigations. Mostly having to do with Trump and his company’s financials.
Impeachment starts with investigations of exactly this sort. Then once triggered has its own investigation phase. It’s all about timing, and selling the public on impeachment. Right now only around 40% of Americans support the idea of impeachment. It is not a popular position.
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And I don’t think you read my comment carefully. I didn’t say anything about impeachment equating to being removed from office, so I don’t know where you got that from, or why you’re linking to Wikipedia.
I was responding to @Boundegar, who wrote that Warren was “the first to demand impeachment.”
But what she actually wrote was that “the House should initiate impeachment proceedings against the President of the United States.”
I was pointing out the difference between “demanding impeachment” and “initiating impeachment proceedings.” They’re not the same thing.
I hope it’s clear to you now.
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In fairness every modern president has some vocal minority calling for impeachment. Without fail. Even Carter.
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I have not read the report yet but wonder if the russian tactics differ very much from our own. Is there anything in it about the counter measured taken agains the meddling?
I’m sorry to say but that ship sailed a long, long, time ago. Obama with extrajudiciary drone assasimations of innocents and even a US citizen. Bush 2.0’s WMD BS excuse to thrust us into a perpetual War on Terror. As if War on Drugs was not abstractly pointless enough, I see War on Hurtful words in our horizon. The list goes on and on with the Executive overextending beyond what we permitted them to with the Constitution. Trump is just the latest one and definetly the most tactless, colorful, and outspoken but certainly not groundbreaking.
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There wouldn’t be. First they wouldn’t want to reveal that. B. Mueller’s purview was to investigate the circumstances of the interference around the election. He wasn’t tasked with investigating our response and or pushback.
There’s been scattered reports on what’s being done in the news. Most of it not very good. Lack of a coordinated program to protect election systems or push back in anyway. Trump administration disinterest, GOP refusal to consider it serious or authorize an adequate response. I’m sure somebody in intelligence has a couple guys looking for Putin’s dick picks, and we had to have some level of propaganda effort in this vein before hand. But it doesn’t seem that there’s a whole lot going on in terms of preventing Russia from having another go. So I doubt there’s much in the way of a coordinated reprisal attempt.
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It would seem that finding out how this happened would be high priority. That said, propaganda is hard to protect against. Personally I am happy any time the inner workings of government with or without skelletons is exposed, be it by Chelsea, Snowden, or Fancy Bear. Having the corrupt inner scheeming of the DNC or RNC exposed is good for all of us. Sunshine and all that.
