That was a pretty shitty thing, for sure. But that’s not the topic, and that does not present a “Get out of jail free card” for othe presidents to do whatever criminal behavior they like.
We’re allergic to Whataboutism around here.
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Yeah, it’s true. It’s only the independent voters that should be considered. The 30 percent of the US voting public that are registered Republican are, at this point, total write-offs. They simply can’t be reached.
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Poll ranking is all but meaningless this early in the primary race. At this point in the 2008 election cycle many people hadn’t even heard of Barack Obama.
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I don’t even think that’s the case. Truly non partisan independents are like a couple hundred thousand people at this point (Shit I’ve been an independent my whole life and I can count the times I voted for anyone but a Democrat on one hand).
And from the looks of wonky polling stuff all of those independents, and a sizable portion of the ones that are routine GOP fans have already skipped town to the nearest leftist.
I think its 100% about maximizing turnout right now in terms of elections.
But in terms of Trump. His base, the true believers are by any metric only around 30%-40% of GOP, or 25% of gen pop at max. Everyone else who backs him seems to do so for partisan reasons. Or was, there’s a lot of numbers showing an offloading of non-Trumpist GOP members into the independent space and its been getting hard to tell. If Trump is doing anything for the party its condensing it all around the hard right. What’s left are the GOP base but not neccisarily Trump’s. And if you can get them pissed enough about Trump’s behavior. You can make senators scared. Senators get scared the situation starts changing.
But I really think if we impeach tomorrow. Then a plurality of Americans will be high fiving each other about how Trump got away with it for next 25 years. Huge chunk of those people are folks that think this shit is good. The rest will applaud partisan action. It doesn’t really help us much if our grand children’s grandchildren view him as a monster, if he keeps doing what he’s doing now.
note: beer has happened
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You are not understanding me. Excusing the bad acts of one individual because of the bad acts of another is kindergarden sandbox level argument and in no way my point. My point was that the current buffon is not as much a pioneer as he is been made out to be. He
is merely a more colorful and less cultured version. But I digress as we are going down a rabbit hole whith nothing but muck at the bottom.
Then don’t do that.
Still incorrect. He’s breaking new ground in breaking the standards and practices of our democracy. He’s playing chicken with the Constitution, and as much as we’d all love to see him crash and burn, part of the problem is that he might take the Constitution with him when he immolates.
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Others have obliquely brought this up but I’ll take this point one step further: there was blowback to Clinton’s impeachment because Clinton was broadly popular at the time, with approval ratings in the 50s and 60s. Trump has only cracked 43% twice since the almost non-existent post-inauguration honeymoon period wore off, and one of those times was over 2 years ago. Massive controversies that would rock most other presidencies have resulted in only modest swings in Trump’s approval rating because so much of his support comes from people who will back him even if he does shoot someone on 5th Avenue.
A president who is already riding a 38% approval rating through scandals like record-length government shutdowns, family separation, the ruination of Puerto Rico, attempts to repeal the ACA, and plain daylight obstruction of justice—not to mention the myriad cabinet-level scandals dogging pretty much every single one of his appointees—is not going to suddenly become wildly popular because the House decides to actually maybe look into all this criming. Any blowback is going to come from the people who were already going to vote for Trump in 2020 to begin with, and the more those people are put on the defensive, the better.
Incidentally, Trump doesn’t love a fight the way a lot of people think he does. He loves to be the bully, but he has absolutely zero gas in that tank. His frantic screaming on Twitter about how vindicated he is and how terrible it would be for Democrats to open impeachment proceedings against him is plain evidence that he’s fucking terrified of the prospect. Nobody with a coherent plan to counter an impeachment hearing goes on Twitter to scream stuff like this:
translation:
Trump will bitch and moan and pretend to be the tough guy while getting the vapors at the merest hint of accountability no matter what Democrats do, so why not actually do their god damned jobs?
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And I do wish someone would quantify this claim. From what I can see, the only blowback was that the Republicans lost some of their majority in the House (while maintaining that majority), and people got tired of Newt Gingrich as an individual.
Clinton’s personal popularity bump didn’t translate to political influence, electoral wins, or legacy projects, at all.
On the other side, how much money do you think the Republicans gained from the nearly twenty years of “Let’s get even with the Clintons, did you see how hard we fought them?” What do you think the hard dollar figure is on “Lock em up”-motivated donations? How many seats do you think were held over the last decade, partly because a Republican could point to their no-holds-barred push against the Clintons?
I could handle Trump being extra popular with his supporters, combined with an eventual Pelosi retirement, if it meant the same bonuses for Democrats and progressives.
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It is amazing to me how good of a job the Russians did with their misinformation campaign.
Looking back, it is easy to see the Russian meddling. It’s easy to see what happened, what “facts” are Russian Propaganda, and what beliefs, facts, and thoughts are false because they are based on these “facts”.
And yet, every day, I see a post from someone who clings to those Putin Propaganda beliefs because climbing down off that cross and saying “Yep; I got fooled. Whoops. Won’t happen again” is too hard, so they double down on their position and still do Putin’s work, effectively and for free, long after it’s been revealed because their damn pride.
And I see it every day on both the left and the right.
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I predict you will have a short and unsuccessful career on this BBS.
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I was not doing that. Try to follow now…
Once again, several presidents in the past have done exactly that. I’m sorry but I cant keep repeating the same thing over and over so I digress.
Too bad we don’t have a way of reviewing the conversa…wait a minute…
I’ll be more specific, then. Many presidents have either attempted or even succeeded at shitting on individual liberties in one form or another. The Bill of Rights has taken a lot of body blows over the years and it’s still going strong. The reason why Trump is different is his all-out assault on Articles 1-4. Checks and balances are built into the Constitution. Here is but an example of one tiny facet:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/22/politics/donald-trump-organization-financial-records/index.html
Trump’s lawyers argued in the court filing that Cummings’ did not have the constitutional right to subpoena Trump’s financial information because it served no legislative purpose.
Of course it has no legislative purpose, but that isn’t the extent or limit of Congress’ job. They are explicitly granted - nay, tasked! - with providing a check on executive power.
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It will be interesting to see just how far the admin stonewalls Congress on Trumps taxes. Sure they’ll go thru subpoenas, contempt and lawsuits but at the end of the day if the Trump DOJ refuses to prosecute and SCOTUS rules against them, what is Congress’s ultimate recourse? Sounds like we’re headed towards Constitutional Crisis either way.
IANAL, but the way I read the statue Cummings is using, it’s all between congress and the Director of the IRS. Third parties (including the president) can do whatever they want, but Congress can subpoena the returns and the IRS director is compelled to provide them. So far, the House has been playing nice. If they wanted to, they could call the IRS Commissioner to testify, demand the returns, and if he failed to produce them, throw him in jail for contempt. Then they could call his chief of staff, demand the returns. If she doesn’t provide them, then she’s in contempt and goes to jail. Wash, rinse, repeat down the whole IRS org chart until they get the returns.
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“Government shutdown,” I believe – unfortunately optimized and normalized over the last few years. Whatever is still happening during a “government shutdown” is how things will work under the dictatorship.
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