The Constitution has almost always been an “as recommended” document.
Every pre-Lincoln President
Lincoln
FDR
Truman
Reagan
Bush I and II
Obama
Trump
Have all defied it, taking shelter under the Art. II umbrella. Some for good, most for bad.
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It doesn’t get mentioned a lot, and I know it wasn’t unconstitutional at the time ( he definitely saw the constitution as something that could be gotten around though), but we did once have a president for life.
My point is that I believe a significant percentage of Trump’s support (like Obama’s Iowa voters) from 2016 is not as intractable as you’re purporting.
I’m not saying these people are “good” by the most charitable definition; I’m saying Bernie can flip them by showing how he can help them in a dynamic way that sharply contrasts him with Trump.
I don’t expect many of these folks to be the tip of the socialist spear. I expect them to say “Bernie will give me more stuff, and Trump is kind of annoying rn”.
At this point, I’m happy to take the saps’ votes, take the bully pulpit, take the least charitable interpretation towards the wealthy the Constitution can handle (and then blast past that), and worry about changing hearts and minds later after all the good stuff has happened.
We don’t need all of them, most of them, and a lot of them. We just need to peel off 10-15%. Then we can do what we want.
No one cares about everything. There are a lot of wonderful people who for one reason or another pay no attention to national electoral politics and care about and do stuff for other people and causes that you and I don’t know or care about.
As soon as Trump starts sending police to Bernie rallies (after he wins the nom) and arresting and killing people I will be fully on board with what you’re saying.
Do you really think that’s the betting favorite?
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I fully agree there’s a decent chance he cheats (that’s a betting favorite), but how is he going to do it, specifically? I really do think he and his handlers are too incompetent to cheat well enough to beat Bernie.
I ask this question genuinely. I’d like to hear the nuts and bolts of how a wide-scale cheating operation under the greatest scrutiny an election has ever had will work. I’ve heard concerns of deepfakes, and the like, but never how they’ll affect voting; is he going to hack voting machines (how, specifically); will it matter if he enlists Russian support, etc.
People are the same more or less everywhere, but it’s still impossibly complicated. I don’t know what circumstances lead to South Korea like demonstrations with 100s of thousands of people out day after day and what leads to 1930’s Germany. “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” - YB
In a way, the fact that it happened and was exposed insulates Bernie in 2020.
Any attack against him can be met with: “Don’t believe the lies that Trump, that liar, is making against me. He’s using the same Russian trolls that helped him win in 2016.” It won’t matter if they’re “better now” if everything against him can be dismissed so readily.
I mean, if they were so good, how did they get caught?
This
Mueller concluded that Russian interference was “sweeping and systematic” and “violated U.S. criminal law”, and he indicted twenty-six Russian citizens and three Russian organizations. The investigation also led to indictments and convictions of Trump campaign officials and associated Americans, for unrelated charges. The Special Counsel’s report, made public on April 18, 2019, examined numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials but concluded that there was insufficient evidence to bring any conspiracy or coordination charges against Trump or his associates.
seems like a weapon for Bernie to wield, not hide from, in 2020.
ETA: and this Wiki misstates Mueller’s conclusion: it wasn’t that evidence was insufficient; it was that he deemed that he wasn’t the appropriate person to determine that and bring charges!
I would have said what Yogi Berra said. I never made any predictions about massive resistance happening. I’ve been to lots of demonstrations with like 12 people. I know it’s not easy.
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Type them up, and I’d be glad to. But we both know you’re not serious.
Only question I have is if your plan is to go back to aidsing up every thread or not.
I will say I loled hard at “first” impeachment thread though. Good work.
Because 95 percent of this site completely ignored the impeachment (a lot of who live in states where their senators would respond to them about it). Instead that subset spent thousands of posts whining about the Iowa Caucus at the exact moment the Constitution was being shredded with the purpose of making these things called votes not matter at all.
I actually spent the time, and can answer most questions about this, including the significance of it. I’m assuming by my track record you mean ‘since people hate you and you use words instead of snarky comments to make your points’.
I was seriously interested in how you viewed all the predictions you made and how you square them with reality.
Thanks, though I’m not sure how active I’ll be, just based on how this thread is starting out.
I tacitly give that approval any time I made a post in a public space. I would like every GOP senator to be sent my video, but I don’t know if that’s the kind of attention this site would want or what could come out of that for me that could very bad. It’s also probably worth noting that the types of people who might be swayed by any ‘content’ I make or write to visit this site would likely be very turned off by the vitriol here. I’ll leave it to others to make the ultimate choice here, the voters.
What was it about 10% of Hillary voters who did not vote Obama and about the same for Bernie who did not vote Hillary. Dont know how many would not vote Bernie but there is a lot of resentment for him so id guess it would be higher then either.
Maybe im wrong trump is inspiring.
There are multiple parts to this idea. It’s worth asking if the Dems made a charging mistake going into a rigged trial, in addition to them not bringing enough charges. I know you like to follow crime stuff closely, and this falls under a lot of the kinds of things that make for very compelling documentaries. This is most common in a case where there are multiple victims of varying statures. In some cases, one victim might be unsavory and another might be a ‘good person’. In nearly all of those cases, they take the ‘good person’ case to trial over the other one, because they don’t believe the jury will care that the unsavory person died. That’s a form of a charging mistake, especially when the case is weaker related to the ‘good’ person.
I first heard it brought up by Chris Hayes how brilliant the Articles of Impeachment were based on what they got to the heart of, related to the president being above the law, the president’s powers, and the separation of powers fundamental in the Constitution. Once I saw the perspective, I agreed. When I first read them, I thought they had made a charging mistake by making them too broad. I think the reason they did that was because they kept hearing from the GOP that the inquiry was too narrow (never listen to the defense ever when constructing a case other than how to head them off). What the House decided to do was say, ‘okay, here’s your rigged trial, so we’re going to put the Senate on trial. If you vote against these, you’re effectively killing the Constitution and any right you have to do oversight over a guy you just claimed was above the law’.
I think it’s very obvious in hindsight that they should have written the Articles of Impeachment differently to not make such a dramatic outcome related to the Constitution happen. I think the reason they did this was because they’re planning multiple impeachments. I think that’s a mistake on Trump, since the Senate spoke, let them eat alllll this cake. And the Senate said there’s literally nothing they will remove Trump for doing with this acquittal. The House should now move to the others for impeachment (Pompeo first, Barr second, then Pence). If the blocking continues, then we’ll have the answer about Congress’s oversight ability (zero). If they actually do remove Pompeo and Barr (who have both committed a lot of impeachable offenses), then my arguments about the death of the Constitution are overblown. That’s something that needs to start happening ASAP. Pound Trump on the trail about his corruption and the complicit Congress to win the election (nailing the GOP on their votes), but continuing to go down the impeachment road with him is a mistake.
I’ll try to make it fast related to additional charges. First of all, Trump wouldn’t have been in this mess at all if he had just notified Congress that he was holding the aid back. Watching the GOP senators do backflips trying to say that what he did with usurping Congress was a-ok was something to behold. They ‘forgot’ that it’s against the law for him to stop money from being obligated when the corruption standard in the deal had already happened. It was the most feckless thing I’ve seen in Congress related to money. They just rolled over for him.
They should have charged him with bribery (hey, he gets acquitted whatever). They should have charged him with Obstruction of Justice. I think they spent too much time worrying about the ‘definition’ of bribery by the framers, and should have just said sounds good to me. It would have been fun watching Trump’s team saying a bribe is not what bribery means (remember Zelenskyy did not need to accept the bribe for it to be a bribe, just asking is a crime). Without an underlying ‘crime’, you can’t charge him with Obstruction of Justice, and that’s why they didn’t do it. Again, I feel the reason they did this was because they were planning multiple impeachments. It was a charging mistake. They should have kept the two, and added the two or three. For bonus, they should have charged him with extortion of a foreign ally in a hot war.
You give lots of cover for Senators who felt he did one but not all. Schiff was right that they would tear down any additional stuff in a technical argument, but that doesn’t matter. They were never giving a fair trial, so throw it in there. I think it was ultimately correct to leave the Mueller stuff out, and is the one place where they can bite the apple again if only to show ‘more’ of Trump’s character we already knew once the court cases are resolved. Of course that could end up being after November. Justice delayed is justice denied, and they would have charged over Mueller if the Ukraine scandal didn’t happen (disagree with me all you want).
The other huge mistake the House made was not immediately trying to bring in McGahn when the court ruling came down favorably. It suggested they weren’t really interested in hearing from him. I think that happened in the week before the Articles were drawn up and voted on, and it would have caused a delay (though McGahn wasn’t coming). I’m of the firm belief that they wanted to dispose of this before primary season, but Pelosi ultimately decided she wanted to time it to wrap up right before the first primary and right before the SOTU. The Senators would have flipped if he used the SOTU for a victory lap, so they delayed the vote. They claimed it was because the defense wanted more time for their closing arguments (lol). The GOP absolutely did not want the weekend news cycle talking about that solely right before the first primary (caucus) and SOTU. What ultimately happened was that the acquittal was buried in all the other insanity that happened, the opposite of what should have happened. This would have been over in mid-January if Pelosi had walked them over right away, and that’s what should have happened.
The worst, and I am dead serious, worst thing that happened in this was that Pelosi didn’t turn the Articles of Impeachment over right away. These articles were specifically geared to say that Trump was a massive national security threat that needed to be removed immediately. Every single person on this site knows that she was never going to get a single concession from GOP senators in regard to process. It’s not her job to wrangle how the Senate conducts its trial (they have the sole power of a trial). It’s her job to get the articles over there. She should have had the Impeachment Managers chosen based on them doing their best work, not say, ‘I need to know what kind of trial we’re having before I choose who to send’. Nancy, it ain’t gonna be a fair trial. Send your best, and pound the public with them. Now Schumer could have whined all he wanted once he got the Articles of Impeachment, because he’s in the Senate. The House can do its job without criticism from anyone else, and the Senate can do the same. Neither body should criticize the other for its handling of the impeachment process. Within the bodies is another story.
If Pelosi had gotten the witnesses out of it, then maybe it would have been okay. The problem that I’ve had throughout this process of waiting on impeachment is that it completely diminishes the urgency of the argument (and it really is urgent). Trump is an overwhelming national security threat, who needs to be removed immediately (see his Friday actions). Any lack of urgency suggests they don’t feel he really is a threat (when it comes to passing laws, he’s neutered, but not related to abusing power). The reality is they can’t properly keep an eye on him, so they had to move. Huge huge huge error for her to do that, and numerous GOP s***bags, plus the defense pounded the delay in the Articles of Impeachment. It was one of their few ‘good’ arguments.
The lack of witnesses in the trial was a joke. They didn’t want to see the evidence, and almost none of them paid attention during the House part of the process. They knew they couldn’t explain acquittal with witnesses, which is why they weren’t willing to do it. They’re complete cowards.
Jerry Nadler was combative on the Senate floor, and the media and senators freaked. Pelosi ripped up an effing speech on the House floor, and the GOP freaked, I mean freaked. Normal people hate people being mean to them. That’s why no one’s pounded how the Dems need to fight harder. That’s why everyone was talking about what a statesman Schiff was. He was really mean with his words, but he said them in ways that didn’t sound mean. The GOP senators all said ‘we need to come together as a country’. That’s effing bonkers to think they’re not trying to rip the country apart, but they believe that’s the message they need to win. They’re standing there with a gun behind their backs when saying it, too. That’s not a good answer, but it’s the reason.
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Great look for you to be here in such bad faith brother.