AOC is saying what she wants to happen, what should happen, WHY they should have an impeachment vote, etc… She’s not leadership, so what she says is not really any indication of what Pelosi’s strategy is.
This is the strategy. Do as little as they can while still being able to go to their base and make it look like they’re trying, all while maintaining plausible deniability.
To the base: “Look, it’s basically already any impeachment investigation, it’s just not official yet. No discernible difference. We might have to make that choice later this year.” (And people who are just totally buying their bullshit eat it up.)
To everyone else: “Impeachment? What impeachment? We’re not impeaching, it’s just an investigation.”
Who cares about Hoyer’s opinion about it being an investigation vs. impeachment inquiry? It literally doesn’t fucking matter which one it actually is. Nadler has effectively given a bigger voice to the impeachment movement. Hoyer, Pelosi and the others won’t be able to ignore it forever. I mean go check out places with a more diverse opinion than this forum. There’s a huge crowd demanding for impeachment amongst regular citizens. Pelosi and Hoyer might be safe in their districts. Others are not.
The point is that they don’t need to ignore it forever, just long enough to effectively run out the clock. They simply don’t have that much time left to move on this.
Except if AOC was hopeless she would be aiming her words at Democratic leadership rather than Republicans. Not to say she is overly hopeful like nunnehi.
You’re takes are bad my dude.
EDIT: Also, I really think the Pres is losing his shit at an increasing volume where an impeachment process might not be his ouster.
I think Cuse’s take is +EV from an emotional perspective. Better to be angry about the Dem establishment being cowards now and be super suprised to the upside if they grow a spine than to have any hope at all that they’ll do the right thing and have those hopes obliterated.
Personally I think cuse is 85% likely to be correct. The other 15% is Pelosi running the briar patch play to make sure that the house votes for impeachment extremely close to the election for maximum impact with hearings about how awful Trump is dominating every news cycle between later this year and election day. I’m still slightly hopeful that’s what’s going on.
Also, I’d add Pelosi and Hoyer and some other might want to run out the clock, but I do think there’s a contingent with Nadler and others who would rather perform their civic duties.
Why? What’s the upside of her going after leadership publicly on this right now? I don’t think it would make any strategic sense for her. In fact, just by saying what she’s said to reporters, she’s gone after their strategy… just without calling them out too explicitly.
She’s not coming off as overly hopeful, she’s coming off as a member of Congress pushing her ideas/strategy.
But is impeachment even smart politically? If Trump is impeached he won’t be removed, that’s a certainty. Will a symbolic and doomed impeachment help or hurt Trump’s re-election chances? Will a failed impeachment help or hurt the chances of Democrats winning seats in the House or Senate? Those are the actually important questions of impeachment and it isn’t at all clear to me what the answer is.
The discovery process is going to be a goldmine of oppo research. There’s enough dirt in there to blot out the sun. The guy is probably a career money launderer lol. By the time you’re done parading out all his dirty deeds the Senate might just vote to convict. Highly unlikely, but voting to acquit after the discovery process will itself be politically disastrous.
You just slow roll discovery so that you don’t vote on his guilt until a week or two before the election. There’s so much material to go through you don’t even have to go that slow. The whole thing will be covered 24/7 by the news media because it’ll get crazy good ratings.
Remember that the reality TV arc absolutely includes the fall at the end. CNN, MSNBC, and even Fox won’t be able to look away. Too much money. Trump has always been great for ratings and he’ll mishandle the whole thing in a spectacular way. It’ll also be hugely distracting for him and make running his campaign any kind of well virtually impossible even if he was a well balanced capable individual.
This sure seems to be what’s going on. Time the investigations so that the big made-for-TV moments happen during election season and hope it hinders Trump’s chances.
There’s no ‘hope’ involved. Where there’s smoke there’s fire and there’s an Amazon scale plume of smoke coming off the Trump organization. We’re just getting the appetizers with stuff like these Scotland stops by the Airforce. There is going to be so much more. This dude is a full bore white collar criminal with no self control at all who has been POTUS for almost 3 years. His actions while in office are crazy stuff, but his whole career is available for being dragged in. This guy hasn’t done less than 100 felonies in a single year of his adult life.
Could still very easily backfire imo. Trump will be campaigning all through this process. It will be very easy to sell the attempt as a politically-motivated effort to get rid of him because the washington establishment despise him so much (it will be easy to sell because it’s largely true). He can say he’s out in the country trying to talk about ideas and policies to Make America Greater Again and the Democrats in Congress just want to make everything about him. And they’ll do any underhanded thing they can to stop him from MAGAing. Trump will say why don’t the Democrats just try to beat him in the election fair and square? Good question imo! Just win the damn election.
And Trump is a career money launderer? Maybe, who knows, but this sort of stuff is coming from the same folks who were (still are?) convinced that Trump was a Putin puppet or whatever so I don’t know man.
I mean we know he committed massive amounts of tax fraud at a minimum. I’m sorry but ‘this is politically motivated’ can be true and still be devastating. Plus dealing with it will occupy his every waking moment, so he won’t be able to campaign well at all.
Please explain to me why D bank gave a guy with an Ansonia credit rating of 15 (my company won’t do business with anyone under an 80 and the largest credit line I’ve ever gotten for a customer was 500k) loans worth XXX,XXX,XXX. Please note that D bank is basically has been money launderers favorite bank for the last 20 years or so. There is so so so much smoke billowing off his background. Also nobody innocent acts half as guilty as this dude lol.
+1 to what Keeed said. It’s not clear either way what effect impeachment will have. A fair number of people will think the Democrats are being divisive and wasting time and money. That Trump is a crook is so incredibly obvious at this point, it’s hard to imagine there are a huge number of people who are going to change their mind regardless of what comes out. I’m not saying it’s obvious impeachment helps Trump, it’s just not clear and it’s unknowable.
Impeachment can proceed or not and it probably won’t affect the Dems in the House much, but the Dem candidate for POTUS would be incredibly dumb to make it a huge part of their campaign as opposed to concentrating on a positive agenda of their own.