I know some are happy with him, but I also know many Republicans who aren’t.
Does anyone else notice the irony that Congress as an institution has been extremely unpopular for years, yet we are hoping they will do the right thing?
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It’s okay if Trump is Putin’s pawn and he’s guilty of blatant obstruction of justice. Because Hillary wasn’t liberal enough. Or something.
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You mean “over two centuries”, not “years”, right?
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Except this country isn’t receptive to more than the two parties that we have now.
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It seems that partisanship-by-design has created a situation where Republicans know that they’re headed toward disaster, but are powerless to stop it. If you’re a Congressman from a solidly Republican gerrymandered district and you see that the president’s agenda is creating a huge backlash that will give power to the Democrats, how do you respond? You have no moderates to come to your aid if you try to right the ship. You’ve organized things so that your constituents are all Fox News junkies who are completely out of touch with the rest of the country—and now you have no latitude, no choice but to go along for the ride while your party self-destructs.
The silver lining to this administration is that it’s reminding us why certain norms existed in the first place. The Republicans, by trying to effectively exclude the Democrats from any voice in government, have tethered themselves to the crazies like Trump and Bannon, and when the shit finally hits the fan, they’ll just possibly remember why bipartisanship and moderation made sense—it gave them room to maneuver when the mood of the country changed.
They can’t impeach until Trump does something so egregious that it upsets their base, and by that point it’s going to be far too late. They’re going to try to ram through as much as they can before the 2018 midterm halts their legislative agenda, and then Trump will serve out the rest of his term as the albatross weighs them down going into 2020 (when we elect not only a president, but also the legislators who will handle redistricting).
If they had left themselves some choice, it wouldn’t be so predictable.
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But also, this:
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I share the sentiment, but I suspect that only way this shit is ever going to be over is if the country has to endure four years of it. Things have to get worse before they can get better.
The midterms aren’t going to halt their agenda, they’re going to release it.
The GOP agenda is currently on half-throttle because the party is divided. The laity are dominated by the Trump faction, the legislature is dominated by the Pence faction.
The contest in the 2018 midterms is not between D and R; there aren’t going to be a significant number of seats changing hands, courtesy of gerrymandering and disenfranchisement. The real contest will be found in the GOP primaries, when the Trump faction moves to expel non-loyalists from the party.
Y’all ain’t getting rid of the GOP in 2020 either. They control the electoral roll, they count the votes. They have clearly demonstrated that they are willing and able to use this power, and it would be suicidal for them to unilaterally abandon it. There is no reason to expect them to do that.
Single-party GOP rule at the Federal level isn’t going to go away via conventional electoral means. A revolution is required; at the very least, a general strike of sufficient scale and duration to grind the country to a complete stop.
The GOP can be overthrown, but not while playing by the rulebook that they control. Business-as-usual is completely inadequate for the situation.
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So you’re yet another person who is all too eager to point out every problem with the broken system yet you offer no viable solutions, or really anything other than spiteful rhetoric and derision?
Great; because we don’t have nearly enough of those in stock already.
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Take your pick: Obstruction of justice, sending Jared to their embassy in an attempt to circumvent our security, the list goes on!
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I’m good with either outcome. I despise the TGOP and 45 both.
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Egregious to his base would be something like kissing another guy.
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But they’re already worse!
http://dickvandykeshow.tumblr.com/post/5934554843/laura-petrie-and-the-empress-carlottas-necklace
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Exactly. Anything short of that and his base will canonize him as a martyr. The Kool Aid drinkers already refer to him as “the first citizen president” (literally) who gave up his lavish lifestyle to serve Real Americans™.
It has to be a solid, recorded, irrefutable betrayal of America. If the Democratic party jumps too soon, the GOP will pull it out from under them.
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Absolutely. Trump is a symptom of the sickness that’s been festering in their ranks for a very long time. He didn’t run a good campaign in any real sense. He just ran a campaign that unapologetically stated everything they’ve been pushing for decades without the usual politalk bs filters. The red-faced red-state bigots ate that shit up.
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Yeah, I’m hoping for another year and a half of this idiocy while congress twiddles their thumbs. Trump’s base is never going to abandon him, but everyone else will. Hopefully, that makes enough of an impact on the midterms to cripple Pence’s post-impeachment agenda completely.
Then, Bernie.
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Have you been paying attention? Pence has dirty hands, there’s already ample evidence available. He’s working hard right now to distance himself. As does Paul Ryan, and a huge number of Republican elites. The corruption on this runs very deep. When this pimple pops many will be flushed from the political process.
The problem is the party that can do something about it is corrupted. The minority party (democrats) has an interest in dragging it out, thus nothing will happen till the 2018 election. That is my point. Neither party has an interest in doing anything about it other than the Republicans who are blind to calculus of how this plays out.
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I can’t even imagine what this would be. I’m not trying to be funny. I can see his base excusing just about anything Trump could do. Excusing it, or refusing to believe it as long as Breitbart denies it.
I have been paying attention, but this is the first I’ve heard of this two-month-old story. I think we can safely assume that Trump supporters don’t know or care about Pence’s Russia ties. I WANT TO BELIEVE. But I can’t.
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