There will be an orderly transfer of power, from a blink-and-you-missed-it Pence administration.
Trump can’t be allowed to stay in office. There have to be consequences for inciting an insurrection. He is the proximate cause of four deaths yesterday (never forgetting the three hundred thousand deaths he owns through stupidity and inaction) and has done untold damage to our government and our image (already besmirched and lo-rez before him) around the world.
The message that future authoritarians aspirant take away from this cannot be “oop, my bad, I’ll just be over here with the nuclear codes.”
Remove him. Try him. Seize his assets, throw him an oubliette and drop the key in the Potomac.
Now, if you’re part of a bank robbery, and some customer has a heart attack from the excitement, and dies from it weeks later, everyone in the gang is up for murder changes, even the getaway driver who was never in the bank.
Proving that the mob riot was his idea all along would be a problem.
“Those who choose to stay, and I have talked with some of them, are choosing to stay because they’re worried the president might put someone worse in,” he said.
So will this be the line from all the lackeys? I took the job so that someone even worse than horrible but cuddly old me didn’t get to put their boot on your face? I always say thanks sir or ma’m when I put the boot on someone’s neck.
“An attorney representing President Trump in one of his dozens of lawsuits challenging the 2020 election moved to withdraw from the case on Thursday, telling a federal court that the president used him to “perpetrate a crime.”
Philadelphia-based attorney Jerome Marcus asked the court to allow him to withdraw, citing concerns over Pennsylvania’s professional conduct standards for lawyers.
Marcus wrote that “the client has used the lawyer’s services to perpetrate a crime and the client insists upon taking action that the lawyer considers repugnant and with which the lawyer has a fundamental disagreement.”-TheHill
I also love, really love, the way he says the alternative is someone “worse” than he and all the other Trump appointees. Like not bad, but worse, tacitly accepting that they are all a bunch of shitty collaborators.
Notably, Katie Porter is now on the Oversight Committee she says needs to investigate the complicity of Capitol Police and failure of federal agencies to prepare for what happened yesterday.
At this point, from a strategy standpoint, we should probably let him try. It will wind its way up to SCOTUS and they’ll make a decision. Likely not in his favor, but possibly. And then that will either settle it or cause a Constitutional Amendment. Maybe future presidents can be enabled to UNDO past pardons. Who knows? Lots of things could happen. Maybe this could be the catalyst for creating some parameters around presidential pardons.
No, we absolutely should not. You don’t strengthen any norms by having criminal elements actively probe them for weaknesses. You either shore up those weaknesses pre-emptively, or you keep the criminal as far away from the boundaries as possible at all times.
