Get over it – There will be no impeachment
A friend who pays scant attention to politics asked me, “will there be a constitutional crisis?”
I was a little surprised by the question. Republicans control the executive branch and the legislative branch. Some interesting cases may be brought to the federal judiciary (which as of 8:30 am is still independent) but those are sideshows.
Our current AG is not going to investigate the President and the current Congress is not going to prosecute him. Period. But let me be even more cynical.
Will Trump’s deep connections with Russia affect the mid-term elections? No. Why would they? Voters knew about all of that prior to this most recent election and were not swayed. Democrats are still no closer to offering voters and AFFIRMATIVE case for why they should vote FOR some the Democratic Party’s version of government.
In the absence of some affirmative argument for why they should govern, Democrats will fail to make the headway in the upcoming midterms they need to change anything. So, it is Puppet Trump being operated out of Moscow for at least the next four years. 
You’re being ridiculous. There’s this thing called “public pressure” that’s being applied here. The longer the GOP stays this course, the more they will be discredited by the revelations.
There’s a big difference between sources saying this stuff and the evidence being released.
Your winning streak ends here. There will be an impeachment because it will be the only way for Republicans to prove they’re not traitors too.
There is also something called “American nonexistent attention span”.
If the GOP can white-knuckle though this, people will move on and get complacent. A Kardashian will have a nip slip, or some sports-baller will do something OUTRAGEOUS!
To get even darker, the SCROTUS needs a terrorist attack at this point. W hit 89% approval rating after 9/11. Not saying the pigfucker is going to (or mentally capable of) master-mining a false flag attack, but you can bet he’d let something happen… either out of intentional negligence, or because he is just that inept.
You give your fellow Americans far too much credit, Alby. They let this ass hole get elected, most of the white people voted for him….. I hope you’re right, but I sort of KNOW Jason is.
And … if Paul Ryan would use his head, impeachment will come sooner rather than later. The reason: Pence, as toxic as his beliefs might be to most readers of this blog, does have an understanding of governance.
As public pressure increases, the likelihood of the GOP retaining a House majority in 2018 (or at least the ease of retaining the majority) decreases. And, the longer Trump remains tolerated by his own party, the less likely the GOP retains control of the White House and Congress in 2020.
The best long-term scenario for the GOP is to dump Trump ASAP and rally behind Pence.
The GOP’s sudden primacy could easily turn out to be a fleeting illusion. As of right now, their rallying cry should be “Pence makes sense.”
Republicans also dont have to worry about future elections if they can just strip voting rights away from the people who would vote against them…. I’m sure you see that is their goal.
@Ben: They already do that and they barely win. There’s no getting the genie back in the bottle at this point.
I’ve been marching, and I’ve met the protesters. They are regular folks, and they are pissed off.
We don’t need to change anyone’s mind. The bumbling of the Republicans is doing that for us. All we need to do is keep people mindful that there’s a way out of this, and it involves voting for Democrats.
It involves Democrats being electable. Rolling out the corpses of Pelosi and Schumer as “party leaders” is no friggin way to do it.
I think people might have learned a lesson about not voting for the lesser of two evils.
The key variable is the gap between the two evils. If one is only slightly worse than the other, it’s hard to motivate people to vote. When the gap is enormous and glaringly obvious, not so much.
To illustrate the point, Obama’s vote total in 2008 remains the record. Why? Bush.
I will try to let your optimism move my opinion. I am still somewhat convinced we have seen our last free election. If the GOP demonstrated any spine at all, I might feel better….. but pointless celeb crap is what’s trending this morning. NOT the fact that top admin officials are Russian spies. This country deserves what happens to it.
The chaos and criminality of this administration should disqualify it from holding office.
Should…
The blatant unAmerican contempt for our laws, history, and traditions should splash onto Republicans disqualifying them, but that is not how it works. Partisan polarization will allow Trump to be as lawless as he wants to be.
The only real “check and balance” was a 240-year tradition of putting our identity as Americans above our factional identities. It is impossible to argue that Republican lawmakers, or voters, put their Amercian identity above their Republican identity.
They don’t. It is a plain fact.
^ this. The Tea party did away with any semblance of patriotism in the GOP. Now it is all white resentment and hippie-punching. How the fuck can Congress have a 10% approval rating, but incumbents keep getting re-elected? All the in-breeders hate all the *other congresscritters, but love their own. Look at McCain if you want proof. He should be leading the charge against a “man” who mocked him from being tortured….. but he’s got his arse high in the air and is being just as submissive as all the rest of em.
@Jason and Ben: Remember, a lot of people thought Trump’s shtick was an act. Then a lot of people thought it was just the liberal media making stuff up.
It took a year for the public to realize the Watergate story wasn’t going to dry up and blow away, and even longer for them to realize how serious it was.
And it’s still been months since I’ve had to look at more than the occasional HuffPo front-page photo of Kim Kardashian or her shit-gibbon husband. We are not back in 2016.
@Ben: You are judging them all by the loudmouth 20%. The other 80% have just been going along for the ride because why complain? This gives them a powerful reason to complain.
Remember, these people are not swift on the pick-up. It’s only beginning to dawn on them that there’s not actually a pig in that poke they’re holding.
Nobody reads huffpost other than liberal partisans who would never do anything other than loath the SCROTUS.
For now, the major networks are covering the story (fox, who called FBI Clinton leakers “patriots” are now calling drumpf leakers “unamerican” ) The problem is, we still cared about Haiti after 3 weeks. We still cared about Flint after 3 weeks. I give this wave of anger at the WH 2 more weeks before it retreats back to liberal-only blogs.
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-trump-administrations-lies-about-voter-fraud-will-lead-to-massive-voter-suppression/ These laws will pass. Guaranteed. You can write off all these states a perma-GOP. All the anger in the world wont overcome it. Add to that, many of the same states are passing laws making it legal to run over protesters.
You have no idea how the media actually works.
If by “they” you mean the public, I’ve got a news flash — the public didn’t care about Haiti after three weeks — it never cared at all. Same with Flint.
Selling the country out to the Russians matters more to people than whatever the latest tragedy to befall black people happens to be.
The media eventually covers whatever people are interested in . The point of HuffPo — which is linked to aol, which means lots of normal people see it — is that the Kardashian stories don’t get enough clicks to stay on the front page day after day. It’s one day and gone.
If aol/huffpo are ignoring celebrity news for political news, it’s because people are clicking on political news more than celebrity news.
I couldn’t care less what’s “trending” on facebook or twitter, which are curated and therefore not all that accurate.
“These laws will pass. Guaranteed.”
Many of them already have been struck down.
” You can write off all these states a perma-GOP.”
Nonsense. It will take a couple of years, but the courts have been resistant to them, even the more conservative circuits.
“All the anger in the world wont overcome it.”
You are wrong about that. It’s already overcoming it. The longer the GOP says we’re paid protesters, the more people will join us. Ignoring the public is not a good look in a democratic republic.
“Add to that, many of the same states are passing laws making it legal to run over protesters.”
In fact, North Dakota lawmakers rejected that proposal just yesterday. The rest of your concerns are just as poorly grounded in fact.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-north-dakota-bill-idUSKBN15T2D5
I’m not sure about any of this. The GOP is between a rock and a hard place. Impeach Trump and lose his supporters – which make up a significant percentage of R voters – and then lose elections due to those voters staying home. Don’t impeach Trump and the Dem base stays motivated and paints Rs with Trump (which gets easier by the day), which could result in losses in 2018.
Trump, and what to do with him, is the biggest problem facing the GOP. All choices come with Yuge risks.
Mirror image of what was going on with the GOP eight years ago in regards to the lamentations of not having any legislative options.
The big difference is that the Democrats and left, seem to be way more motivated and mobilized in their community organizational abilities…They also have the overwhelming support of the majority of media, especially in the(most influential of all) entertainment industry.
After the country moved to the left during the previous administration, the left seems like it will stop at nothing to ensure that this move is not jeopardized.
Take the advice of jason330, and “get over it”. The tide will turn again soon enough, and your protest signs can once again be put in dry dock awaiting the next swing of the political pendulum.
The two-party system is working. The middle will be the end result, as it should. be.
the GOP’s only choice is to remove that “democratic republic” aspect of our country. They are all too willing to do it… I am not convinced they can be stopped.
This isn’t comparable to Haiti or Flint. The release of information so far has been extremely well coordinated. For the past two nights information has been leaked late enough that newspapers don’t have enough time to include it on their front page. It extends each of these stories lifespans by an entire day. This is also about a thousand times more intriguing than Haiti or Flint to the average American, House of Cards in real time.
Trump’s tweets from this morning basically confirm that all of this is true. This will not end save a major destabilizing event.
fightingbluehen saying that I’m right is compelling evidence that I’m wrong.
” This will not end save a major destabilizing event.”
I completely agree.
anyone who would prefer a Mike Pence presidency is an outright fool
Everything is relative.
Of course there will be no impeachment. The Right is going to continue to believe they are using the President right up until the moment that he purges any dissident elements.
This is a test. We are only about a month into it, and right now, despite a few tactical victories, we’re still losing. They’re not seriously pushing yet. They’re testing, finding out where pushback begins, finding out what their supporters will accept, finding out how effectively they’ve damaged the media, finding out whether anybody will really react when DHS ignores the Courts, or states pass laws criminalizing protests to the point of legalizing vehicular homicide.
Our flaw is that for all of our carping, we are a “high trust” nation–we have an unusually high level of trust in our institutions, and an inability to turn on a dime when the people in charge of those institutions are nihilists.
More to the point, we haven’t hit any sort of crisis, domestic or foreign, yet, and the normalizing instinct is already taking over.
You know we are in serious trouble when, at the State level, Tom Carper currently looks like the most principled opponent of the Trump regime and we are about to hand control of the Senate to the GOP.
If the SD10 special goes to the Republican… hoo boy, that would confirm all of my worst fears.
Yeah, millions of people are going to suddenly say hey, this grab them by the pus** , incompetent, bigotry enabling, bellicose circus clown is an immoral psychopathic narcissist and we made a huge mistake voting for him and his party.
Professor Newton has it just right. No surprise. If the majority party doesn’t make a strong move before the purges happen, it’s game over. We’re all done. But we’ve been conditioned to believe it can’t get that bad. That predisposition of ours is an enormous advantage for Bannon. The roof will collapse before anyone thinks the fire in grave enough to pull the alarm.
It’s like a game of political chicken and we’re in the middle of it. The only thing that can stop this is Republican members of Congress. I look at Ryan and McConnell and I am not sanguine.
@RE_V: From your vantage point, it’s really down to Ryan. To eliminate any concern about McConnell, SCROTUS gave his wife a cabinet position.
Good point. It is a classic move.
I just saw Coons step up and demand an investigation
This is a test. We are only about a month into it, and right now, despite a few tactical victories, we’re still losing.
Who’s this we white man? You’re Libertarian….
I thought pandora Quit and went running away with her gal pal? this is so confusing
I miss smart women telling me how stupid I am.
Hey Mouse- would you settle for a really smart man calling you stupid?
I don’t know what events y’all are following, but anonlib is the only one here with an understanding of what’s gone on the past 24 hours. This shakes the foundations of this administration.
They will try but fail to bluster their way past this, but it’s a scandal that encompasses the traits of both Iran-Contra and Watergate — political skulduggery tied in with secret contact with enemy interests.
The international intelligence community has held these cards all along, and let the Republicans implicate themselves before playing them. There’s little doubt that copies of these transcripts are in the hands of many Fourth Estate outlets, or they’d be a lot more circumspect in what they’re stating. The smart thing to do would be to come clean at once, but of course they won’t do that. Their error will be to our advantage, because every day they stall the pressure against them will continue to mount.
I’m not saying investigations will happen overnight, let alone impeachment, but the longer they try to stonewall the worse the entire GOP will be implicated in what’s easily portrayed as treason. IIRC, it took over a year for calls for investigation to bear fruit in the Watergate case, then months more of investigation. For all the comparisons to fascist movements in other countries, this isn’t other countries. We have a long tradition of conducting investigations, if only so Congress can try to clear itself. I could be wrong, but I think this opera buffa is just getting started.
I hold this impeachment to be self evident, with the departure of Flynn the can of worms is officially open. Strategy and master plan or not believe it’s gone way past the hush it up stage, this will go like Nixon. First one voice followed by many and small defeats and revelations along the way. At some point the Republicans will move to cut their loses, and that spells impeachment or a forced resignation.
donviti–in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m an American. That would be the “we” here–so stick it up your ass.
Alby–I get what you’e saying, but you neglect the fact that it will soon become a race between the administration’s ability to gut the institutions that could check it before that happens, and you completely underestimate what will happen once we hit our next domestic or international crisis. I continue to believe that you and others have not grasped the new rules. I also hoping I am quite wrong.
But I don’t think so.
@Steve: What you have overestimated is their ability to enforce those new rules. You seem to forget that the establishment of both parties is under attack, and as with the judiciary, they will band together to protect their domains. Whether appointed by Democrats or Republicans, under those robes they’re all judges. That goes for the Deep State, obviously, but it’s also true in all those bureaucracies that these folks would like to dismantle.
Remember, this is not the A Team running the White House, or the B, C or D teams. This is the Socially Promoted Team. They’re inept, as they demonstrated with the Muslim ban roll-out. For all the scary stories about Bannon’s intent, let’s remember that he ended up with Trump because he had scraped through the bottom of the barrel. Compared to other Wall Street whizzes of his generation, he was a failure. These aren’t the best and brightest; they’re the winners of the Dunning-Kruger Pageant.
They intend everything you think they do. They just can’t pull it off in the face of opposition, and they have been getting that opposition every day since Jan. 20.
To continue: Sure, they would like to roll out a new voter ID program, but how can they justify doing that with the open question of Russia out there? How can they address anything with that hanging out there?
An interesting development: In the House, where most Republicans hold impregnable seats, they’re as eager to bury this and move on as your cat is to cover a turd in the litter box. But Republican Senators, who face a statewide electorate, are showing a lot more concern.
The Deep State has signaled that it is willing to “go nuclear” in its fight with the White House. It is willing to destroy all of them the way it destroyed Flynn, and it might be able to do it. Trump (Bannon) is going to try to take over the intelligence agencies, according to this Times account, which should lead to all-out war:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/us/politics/trump-intelligence-agencies-stephen-feinberg.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=b-lede-package-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
The people in the streets are not the only ones fighting this regime. As you have pointed out many times, this is not Weimar Germany. And, unlike the Tea Party, we have actual grievances fueling our anger.
Why we suck and why none of this matters:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/just-resisting-trump-wont-do-enough-for-democrats/2017/02/15/35a3a27a-f22f-11e6-8d72-263470bf0401_story.html?
Unless we get a DNC that is actually effective at more than just raising money to line the pocket of their fat pig consultants, we’re doomed. And maybe it is already too late.
I dont know if it is too late for all of us, but it is definitely too late for the DNC.
After this administration rewrites (strips at gun point) fundamental rights to hold on to power, get their way, exterminate “undesirables”, the next president who ISNT a Bannonite wont be a dem. A new party has to emerge. Democrats took this humiliating loss and rejection of spineless democrat cronyism …. ELEVATED SCHUMER AND STAYED WITH PELOSI! Jesus christ, I hope Cali-exists just to get rid of her.
The DNC will go with Perez, lose all the senate races and hopefully that will show progressives it is time to move on en mass. If there is an America left in 16 years, it will be considered a dead party.
Alby, tactical question… If the R’s wait until next year to start going after dampnut, wont that make them look WORSE for mid-terms? If they think there is going to be an electoral punishment for supporting him, isnt in better for them to distance now and claim credit for making things go better?
I think they know they dont have to worry about being voted out. For all our outrage, I think we’re past the point something could have been done about it. You’re right… under the robes, judges are judges. But they are also people. Awful, sinister, self-preserving people. If enough of them decide to go arse up and submit to/ support “daddy”, no amount of howling or protest or mocking will save us.
I wonder how many judges are salivating at the idea of weighing in on some terrible thing he wants to do and giving him the go-ahead.
Yeah, I reluctantly take criticism from smarter men but there’s something much more delightful when it comes from a woman. I especially enjoy it from one of the type A demanding DC transplants here at the beach. I should have married one of them lol
Alby–I have carefully avoided direct comparisons to Weimar. There are plenty of others more applicable to use here, but that would get really, really wonky.
The “deep state” concept is one that I’m really surprised to find you using in this context. As it’s normally used, it represents an almost Illuminati-like conspiratorial element, when it’s really more like the inertia of bureaucracy and special interests, plus the gradual erosion of traditional controls. Almost every “mature” society possesses such a “deep state” but they rarely function in the ways being attributed to them now.
On the other hand, there is a point to be made about the functioning of the Intelligence Community–especially the professional, sub-cabinet elements. Yet the fact that this particular Deep State entity(?) is arrayed against the President is not, in and of itself, good news. I’ve worked around that community for nearly thirty years, occasionally as a peripheral contractor, and I say now as you sometimes chide people about the newspaper business–I don’t think you really understand how it works.
It is anti-Democratic, careerist, excessively paranoid, and not nearly as creatively adaptable as you’d like to believe. It protects its prerogatives more certainly than it protects either American interests or American democracy. It would be quite capable of coming around to a position to support the Trump Administration, and in the long run it is far more likely to come to an accommodation with him than go to war with him. It cares not one whit for American domestic politics except as they interfere with its function. It also–despite the connotations placed in recent news stories–selectively briefs every President. That people are now perceiving this community–which regularly pushes for the routine surveillance of every American 24/7/365 (including all communications) to “keep us safe”–as some sort of “white knight” counterbalance to Trump is not just disturbing, it’s dismaying.
As far as the “legitimacy” of grievances, that’s always in the eye of the beholder, and the objective validity of such grievances is always quite secondary to the subjective ability of those grievances to motivate large groups of people. The Tea Party, regardless of who is funding it or even who is manipulating it, is now a well-established sub-culture in America, and it took them nearly a decade to achieve that.
I’m glad you–curmudgeon as you are–remain optimistic. I just think you vastly underestimate the damage already done to our balancing institutions and overestimate the stabilizing forces available. Again, I will be happy to be wrong.
If you guys like the warm feeling of pissing your pants, I feel like I shouldn’t ruin it for you. Don’t let all the signs that resistance is working encourage you.
@Steve: That comment was directed to the earlier comments, not yours.
I do not see the deep state as a friend or white knight, but it is a player, and cozying up to Russia simply isn’t going to fly in that world. That’s why they have moved to cripple him.
The only institution that so far has proved useless is Congress, and that’s hardly a new revelation. And as I noted, the Senate is a lot more receptive than the House because they must face statewide electorates.
The institution that’s being destroyed here is the Republican Party. Of course, it might take them years to realize that — they still don’t understand that there was a reason they couldn’t enact their unpopular policies before Trump arrived on the scene. The Democrats still don’t understand that their neo-liberal party is destroyed, too.
The people in this administration are not supermen. I think most of them are below average, many of them well below average. I brought up Weimar not because you reference it as a parallel but because you have shot it down when people bring it up. The big difference is that the streets of America are filled not with Communists fighting fascism but with young and middle-aged women who have never protested anything before.
Conservatives’ long-running project to take over the government isn’t going too well, is it? The reason is simple: Our system was not designed to prevent tyranny so much as to encourage compromise and make government responsive to the people. Conservatives thought that if they just gamed the system and ran everything they could do without the consent of the majority.
Our system doesn’t work that way. Without the consent of the governed, this ceases to be a democratic republic. They can try to take it away, but they won’t do so without a fight. And I believe that the public response to this government so far shows that they will destroy is root and branch if necessary to deny this minority government complete power.
@Steve:
Hear, hear! Excellent!!
@Alby
You wrote:
“The institution that’s being destroyed here is the Republican Party.”
You’re kidding, right? I mean where are the Democrats in power?
“Conservatives’ long-running project to take over the government isn’t going too well, is it?”
What planet do you live on?