I sacrificed my sanity, and made this video going through the GOP Senators’ floor deliberation speeches prior to the final Impeachment Trial vote. Watching even 30 seconds of the below video will give you the idea of what’s coming throughout the video related to style. I hope you’ll watch all of it for the informative value of GOP Senator cowardice that is firmly on display.
My desire is for it to help you focus your anger more toward the nearly lock step gutlessness of the GOP than members of the party trying to stop them, something that has always been sorely lacking on this forum. Only 37 of the 53 GOP Senators were willing to give a speech about this on the Senate floor. 36 are in this video, as Romney doesn’t belong in the context of it. After listening to their remarks, Romney’s Abuse of Power conviction really is earth shattering to their ‘defense’ of Trump, even though I didn’t think so at the time he voted to convict. History will look very favorably on him, even though it really shouldn’t because of his acquittal on Article II that has far bigger implications for the future of this country.
I stopped posting here well before the Articles of Impeachment were drafted and any of the strategy related to them. If you have any interest, this thread can be used as sort of an AMA related to what I think about any of this (you know I’m highly informed on it) and where we go from here, as long as any questions are in good faith. After sitting through the dozens of hours of bad faith arguments, lies, and misrepresentations of the GOP and Trump’s defense team (a defense team filled with fact witnesses with conflicts of interest), I have little patience for bad faith anymore. I’m very angry, and maybe this is a good place to vent. Ask away, and I’ll answer as time permits.
P.S. If a ‘We Are Almost F***ed’ badge is made, I would join that group. I’ll join the other group if we lose in November, but I doubt I’ll be posting after then if it happens.
At best, a very small number of political historians considered dorky even by that metric will maybe write a couple of monographs about him. History writ large will not look on him at all, favourably or otherwise.
Lurking, I read everything of importance. My blood boils daily, but at least I don’t waste any time writing.
You live in effing Ohio, why don’t you stop being such a self-righteous a-hole? Your vote matters, and you are making the worst case for Bernie Sanders supporters in history. We are in an existential threat moment, and people like you are the ones with your finger on the button. Do us all a favor and pull your head out of your a**. You’re gonna need the supporters of the other candidates to beat Trump, and what in the world makes you think they’d want to cozy up to someone like you if they knew you?
It’s a good thing the internet is ‘probably’ not representative of real life. I don’t think you have any kind of serious strategy for how to make this country turn way left. I’ve articulated it on both the exiled site and here. You’re in the burn it down camp if you keep up with the way you are right now. Millions and millions of people will be affected by that in ways you can’t comprehend at this time.
Hot take that’s not so hot: The eDems are going to align behind Bernie after Super Tuesday if he’s in the vote lead, because they’ll be scared his supporters won’t vote for anyone else. If there’s one thing eDems know how to do, it’s to ‘vote blue no matter who’ in the general election. Anyone who doesn’t do that isn’t even remotely an eDem, they’re in a different wing entirely. Try being a liberal Democrat in 1992. Try being Bobby Rush. We’re at the moment where we’ve finally tipped the power from the center-right Dems to the left, and you want to splinter it when the eyes are distinctly on the prize. Do you want a 7-2 Alito Supreme Court? If so, by all means sit out the 2020 election. You’ll guarantee that.
I’ve seen you say it’s not about Bernie, it’s about the movement. The problem is that the rest of your words suggest that if it’s not Bernie you’re not voting. Any movement that depends on one person to accomplish its goals is not a movement, it’s a cult.
sup bro
You don’t live here. This is the main shot in the killing of our Constitutional Democracy. There’s an election coming that could change that, but no one should even entertain the remotest idea that it will be free and fair. It will be the least free and fair election of our lifetime. And we have to depend on people who are way way way too stupid to understand the impact of this at all yet.
This moment will have tons of words written about it. Every single GOP Senator not named Rmoney went up there and talked about it being a ‘purely partisan impeachment’, and that was the reason it shouldn’t have happened. Most said not one word about the facts of the case that they denied the public and themselves at all. Rmoney’s conviction vote makes it the only Impeachment Trial conviction to ever cross party lines.
History will miss that he convicted on the wrong Article of Impeachment, because of how lock step the GOP Senate and House was on this. Their entire argument boiled down to the prisoner’s dilemma. If we don’t blink on this, we win. The problem is that the victim was the U.S. Constitution. Rmoney blinked. Murkowski for sure would have voted for witnesses if she wasn’t vote 50. I think she had an agreement with Gardner that he broke. His speech is basically a conviction speech while saying f*** you for trying to use my election against me.
History will be brutal to the GOP Senators on this (if this country devolves the way it might, it won’t be historians in this country doing it), especially the ones who voted to convict Clinton on lying about sex and covering up lying about sex. There were 7 of those (Shelby only convicted on covering up lying about sex, but he’ll be damned if he thinks extorting a world leader in a hot war to open investigations into the president’s political rival in the 2020 election is impeachable).
Next generation Dan Carlin: “well there was one vote to convict on one of the articles, but that entirely symbolic gesture does nothing to obscure the utter moral and political depravity displayed by the Republican Party throughout this presidency.”
Yeah, see that’s it. Great pub quiz question for the field trip fundraiser, that kind of thing. If your democracy, such as it is, falls apart, no-one will talk about Romney’s vote - bigger fish to fry. If it doesn’t, no-one will talk about Romney’s vote - who cares.
I know you’re very… persistent, but I’m really not interested in litigating this intently. I’ll read a reply, but probably won’t respond to it. I’ll cheerfully agree to disagree and I suppose we’ll see.
Maybe it is smart for Bernie supporters to maximize eDem fears that they might sit out if anyone else is the nominee. Centrists like to raise the specter of defections if the nominee is too far to the left. Progressives can only combat this with a greater threat of defections if the nominee is too far to the right. Bernie is the only candidate whose supporters can credibly make that threat.
It will be written about. This will be the end of impeachment if we lose the election, and that was the Trump defense team’s goal that they overtly said in their opening arguments. When you read their idiotic legal briefs, you can now see they were written under the idea that he would be acquitted in the Impeachment Trial. They’re going to use that as a precedent, and it will now be up to the courts to say, ‘no, that was a sham and the Constitution matters’. Do you have the confidence to believe the current SC will do that? I don’t.
I do agree it was a hollow gesture, especially because Rmoney voted on the wrong count to convict. The existential one for the Legislative Branch was Article II. When this ‘trial’ started, I felt there was a strong case for Article II, and that what a president is allowed to do is ambiguous to an extent. It was an easy out for the senators. In the run up to the vote for witnesses, the Trump defense team said they would fight any subpoenas in court if witnesses were called. If they just let the witnesses be called, the senators could have acquitted on Article II, because it was the ‘proper’ place for ‘due process’. The Trump defense team was too scared to allow it to play out, because it probably would have resulted in Cipollone and Philbin being called as witnesses for their roles in both Articles of Impeachment and the whistleblower complaint.
Once the witnesses and documents were produced, it would be nearly impossible for them to justify a vote to acquit on Abuse of Power since the redacted emails already are terrible. The only way they could provide any cover to themselves was to not vote for witnesses and documents. And they did that in the face of an overwhelming amount of normal Americans wanting those witnesses and documents. It’s an amazing amount of cowardice.
Johnny, this is the kind of s*** I’m railing about. Everyone sees problems, but no one sees solutions (if we lose in 2020, the correct solution is to burn it all down, but not before). For me, I want every single candidate on the Dem stage to be pounding fighting corruption, especially people like Trump, and fixing the Constitution relentlessly. We can’t change the laws if we can’t win the Senate. Keep the House, win the Senate, and get a candidate who is fiercely anti-corruption in there as pres. Warren and Sanders are definitely both that and doing that. Pete is also talking about the right kind of reforms. But sorry, the filibuster absolutely has to go in these conditions and Sanders says he won’t do that.
Here are the top 5 things that I think need to be done to start:
Make sure people absolutely understand that this election is about the Supreme Court more than just about anything else.
Overturn Citizens United
Fix the Voting Rights Act that was gutted, and force the ‘bad actors’ to play by the rules they had been forced to play by until Roberts gutted those out of ‘good faith’. The ‘bad actors’ returned right to what caused them to have the Voting Rights Act instituted.
Legislate all that the president can’t do, and what things are actually impeachable offenses. That means making sure a president like Trump can never exist again without being impeached and removed. Define election crimes that are Congress laws instead of FEC laws, which has an absence of a quorum right now meaning no election crimes can be enforced.
Kill the filibuster.
You aren’t going to get a single one of these done if the Dems don’t win in 2020, and especially if they don’t win the Senate. When I say existential for this country, I mean it. You’re talking about tangential issues for the country that most people don’t get. The Senators voted to make Trump a King and killed any idea of any investigations of him. If Trump gets back in, the mandate is that the American people want and endorse open corruption. They don’t want the Congress to matter at all. We all need to do everything we can to prevent that if we care even a little bit about the future of this country. Our absolutely strongest way to do that is to vote, and get people to vote.
By the way, you said I’ve been wrong about nearly everything. I have no idea what you’re talking about. Give me 5 bullet points of what I was wrong about that you define as nearly everything, and don’t try to use things like timelines against me.
There are a lot of ways that can go wrong. There’s no guarantee that people will vote Bernie, and no one will know his prospects until we come out of Super Tuesday. I actually remember 2008 and sweating Super Tuesday for Obama. This is Bernie’s time to get that same sweat. I predict he will come out of that the nominee, unless something really weird happens in the meantime. I’m not willing to gamble with the future of the country after the impeachment vote and what it meant, and I just say there is zero way Bernie gets ratfucked. The only person who would get ratfucked is Pete. He’s really not the eDems’ guy.
It’s this whole thing about your vote having much more weight than most here. And you’re being a mega a-hole about it.
The GOP’s mantra is, they just let us do it cuz that’s what they think we are, and they’re eating each other up. That’s so so good for us. It’s amazing people can be this shortsighted, but I’ve read nearly every post in the Iowa Caucus thread…
It’s quaint to think the Iowa Caucus will matter at all in the 2020 election scheme of things. Meanwhile the Constitution was shredded by Wednesday’s vote, and you’re like ‘nah, I’ll sit out and let Trump be King’.
I mean there just isn’t anything to say, what you’re saying is patently absurd. Establishment dems won’t ratfuck Bernie but will ratfuck Pete? No point in even trying to refute that nonsense. It’s not in any way tethered to reality.
Ah, something that you think will happen in the most consequential presidential election in our lifetimes so far related to ratfucking is the standard version of reality. Got it.
