The fact that one man doesn’t care about the rule of law is not scary, what’s scary is that so many of his supporters don’t care about the rule of law. Republicans repeatedly brought up the possibility of impeaching Obama on the flimsiest definitions of “impeachable offense” (as former Nixon counsel John Dean publicly said they were clearly trying to impeach over political disagreements, not any high crime or misdemeanor.)
The question isn’t whether Trump will commit some impeachable offense, the question is will the GOP give a shit if (when) he does.
(I’m not sure how much trust I have in the theory that they actually want to impeach him so they can have a more reasonable President Pence, this sounds fraught with problems.)
Trump jumped on an existing, already rolling bandwagon when it come to erosion of public respect for newsmedia. Newscorp, Clear Channel, Breitbart and their like began greasing the skids for someone like him years ago.
And as lollipop indicated (in his response to the cited article, not Doctorow) they’ve been aided by the casual, haughty authoritarianism of our mainstream elites.
“I told you we would build the wall, and we will! I’ve conferred with the best advisors, and they say that the wall needs to be along Texas’s north border, not the south. We’re going to make America great again!”
When that one guy said something about shrinking government down to the point where it could be drowned in a bathtub… I think this is what drowning in a bathtub looks like.
I can’t think of this as simply another 4 years to wait for someone reasonable. The Trump appointee for SCOTUS is going to last a lot longer than that. Far worse, is the lesson it teaches the red team: Throw a temper tantrum, threaten to shut the government down if you don’t get your way, obstruct the constitutional duties spelled out in your job description… do all these things, and you’ll be richly rewarded. When the very legitimacy of the government can be called into question, it’s going to be a sunuvabitch to put the genie back in the bottle again. I don’t see a reset button in four years, he’ll be fortunate to survive his first 100 days at this rate.
If the democrats in the senate have any backbone, they will deny his nominees a vote just like the republicans did to Garland… Sauce for the goose, or something…
There are a lot of really good people in Texas, and the GOP establishment is sweating about how close Texas is to being a swing state - hell, my district is shaped like this:
I doubt I need to point out which area here is extremely religious white suburbs and which is inconveniently diverse.
That only works if the dems have a majority in the senate, though, and I’m not sure “further erode our institutional norms” is a good game to be playing right now.
A good analysis of the situation. I have had many presidents in my lifetime that I did not like, but none that leaves me sweating and quaking with fear for our country the way Trump does.
