US Politics April 2019 Thread: 'I find that pretty hard to believe'

I don't know whether rapidly proceeding to impeachment would hurt Trump's chances for re-election compared to using House committees to investigate and publicize his misdeeds with no formal commitment to proceed to impeachment. I do know that if articles of impeachment are brought to a vote in the House and pass, no further political issues will receive a single moment of media attention for the rest of 2019. That includes M4A, GND, and every other policy on the progressive wish list.

After Trump is not convicted by the Senate, not only would he sell this as complete exoneration, but the 2020 election would be fought on the issue of whether the Democrats had overreached their just powers by attempting to overturn Trump's election through impeachment, which you can't trust the voting public to answer as you would like them to. I think it is safer ground to fight the election on whether Trump is a good president who is steering the country in the right direction.

That said, I hate that political expediency is going to override civic responsibility. He has committed offenses for which he ought to be removed from office. But there is no national appetite for impeachment and for now Pelosi is reading the country correctly. To impeach, that fundamental political fact must change.

I think it is safer ground to fight the election on whether Trump is a good president who is steering the country in the right direction.

that's the thing, though - a large part of the argument that Trump is not a good president is that he has repeatedly acted in ways which are impeachable. But if that's the case, why didn't they impeach him?

Democrats who preemptively declare impeachment off the table are mistakenly (or intentionally) conflating one possible end result of the impeachment process for the process itself.

I'm sayin'. Some people act like impeachment is like a presidential ejector seat. I just want to see the fucker get grilled on the record, for chrissakes.

As I said, if you want impeachment, Congress is first going to have to lay a solid factual groundwork, with a convincing narrative. Up until yesterday, the full contents of Mueller's findings were a closely held secret. People could read Trump's tweets, or WaPo and NYT articles based on investigative reporting and leaks by non-Mueller lawyers, and everything was contested or speculative. That clouds the facts.

Congress needs to push the facts further into the open and pound them into the public mind before impeachment can get off the ground. Jumping straight to articles of impeachment will instantly draw battle lines based on where the public stands as of today and freeze most voters into their present position. More people need to be on your side of the battle before the real shooting starts.

Yeah, by that standard, impeachment or censure for their own sake sounds good. Question: if a pres is impeached does it *automatically* go to the Senate, or can Mitch just say fuck it?

Mitch could delay it, but if he stonewalled it, it would be a HUGE gamble and basically break the system entirely.

If there are impeachment proceedings could they get trump to testify in front of congress in an open setting?

The stupidest piece of nonsense was the face that mueller didn’t subpoena trump. “Afraid it would delay the investigation” — the thing already took twelve years

If Democrats & Republicans agreed on one thing it was that Mueller was a straight shooter and that they'd accept whatever came down in the report. Even the White House (idiotically) championed the report after Barr intentionally misled the press and claimed exoneration before anyone had read it. I get that there's nothing really ~new~ here, but the right can no longer hide behind the "FAKE NEWS" or "WITCH HUNT" defense, not only was it all true but there is a clear and consistent pattern of Trump lying to everyone about everything and misleading the country. Impeachment won't succeed but you need to get everyone in Congress on the record, right now: are they willing to condone lying, traitorous behavior, and selling out their country to save face and remain in power? Any Dems who think this will galvanize the GOP is insane. They're not acting on a Buzzfeed article or a mysterious dossier. They're not still "reeling" from the 2016 election. The only people who are gonna revolt against this are the ones who were voting Trump in 2020 anyway. It's time for them to finally do their damn jobs.

sorry to ask pointless questions that cannot be answered, but in this case, i must:

what are the chances that trump has read more than 25% of the mueller report?

a HUGE gamble and basically break the system entirely.

hmm, doesn't sound like Mitch McConnell

there is no chance Trump has read an entire page of the Mueller report

Seriously. Unless someone tweeted it at him page by page, it'll never happen.

the role seth abramson was was born to play

Hoyer is my representative because he’s a gerrymandering little fuck and I plan on calling his office and harassing him as much as I can without getting arrested

I just saw my first piece about how bad the Mueller report is ... for Obama. Didn't read it, but can't imagine there aren't more coming, because of course.

yep but hey let's just wait around and see what the voters think about after a year and a half of this shit

I suppose the reason the Dems should hammer hard is that if they don't the GOP will fill the void with bullshit.

xpost that's on CNN right? started reading it, stopped, but the point it made was slightly true, which was that Obama could have been more forceful on Russia than telling Putin to cut it out in 2016. Not sure if it mentions what a shit show that would have been for Obama though as it would have looked like his administration was interfering in the election on Clinton's behalf, which you know is what the Trump campaign would have screamed. Lose/lose situation for the Obama admin.

mitch mcconnell forcefully intervened to delay and weaken the obama administration's response to Putin's election meddling, as it was happening, before the election

written by some Bush/Mitch dude, so fuck it.

Speaking of people who are not Donald Trump, but are still absolutely human garbage:

Rep. Matt Gaetz hires ex-White House aide ousted for white nationalist ties

Rep. Matt Gaetz — one of President Donald Trump’s most avid supporters in Congress — has hired a former White House speechwriter who was forced out last year amid scrutiny over his ties to white nationalists.

The Florida Republican announced Friday that former Trump administration aide, Darren Beattie, will join his Capitol Hill office.

“Very proud to have the talented Dr. Darren Beattie helping our team as a Special Advisor for Speechwriting. Welcome on board!” Gaetz tweeted Friday.

Beattie was fired from the White House in August 2018 after reports that he had delivered remarks at a 2016 conference, dubbed an “active hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, alongside a well-known white nationalist, Richard Spencer.

As for Pete's graphics: those are cool and I really like them. Best campaign graphics since Obama's. But I don't think design won Obama's campaign for him and it won't win Pete's for him either. I'm leaning heavily toward him for many reasons not only hooked to stated policy, some of them important (I think it's very important to have a gay candidate with so much support) and some of them irrational (I just like a guy who likes Ulysses, ok?), but that doesn't mean I don't want firm policies from him. I do. He needs to start outlining what all of them are.

but like John Mulaney's bit about Trump/Horse loose in the hospital, there's a part of me that is lazy and would like to go back to not worrying about the presidency because the person in the office is smart and seems good at their job.

sorry I think this was meant for the dem candidate thread. see I'm all confused now.

The severity of this misconduct demands that elected officials in both parties set aside political considerations and do their constitutional duty. That means the House should initiate impeachment proceedings against the President of the United States.

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) April 19, 2019

niiiiiiice

president liz <33333

booming post girl!

Disappointed that the Mueller Report has not confirmed my hypothesis that Trump appears in public wearing an overcoat so often because he's gotten too fat to fit into a lot of his suit jackets

— The Discourse Lover (@Trillburne) April 19, 2019

the kind of cowed, insecure, oh-no-how-will-it-look posture that typifies Dem leadership was exemplified by Obama pulling punches on original Russia intel. It backfired because OF COURSE IT DID.

Like, what kind of narrative do they continue to imagine will fill the void every time they fail to assert their own?

But no reason to expect anything different w/r/t impeachment

Go Liz!

Hopefully this will pull some other candidates along

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/439765-romney-sickened-by-trumps-behavior-in-mueller-report

joseph fucking smith what a dip

it’s better than nothing

That's great of Romney but what's he going to do about it? Primary Trump, or leave the GOP, or support impeachment...do something other than complain.

the answer as always is sweet fuck-all

-Bob Dylan

If he wags his finger sternly enough I'm sure Trump will feel duly chastened.

i'm finally getting a chance to read the mueller report. decided to skip straight to vol 2, and i'm only about 20 pages in. i don't know how anyone could read this and not think he's guilty as hell, but no one's going to actually read it. i keep thinking of the mom in the 6th sense when everyone figures out she's been poisoning her own kid and they stare at her in horror. but in the world we live in, the proof is in a report instead of a VHS, and no one's going to read it

I skimmed it a bit and it doesn't really offer anything super new as far as I can tell? All the links between his people and Russians with links to the Russian gov have been reported on. Obviously all written down in one big report it looks v damning but there's also no proof of any crime by trump - which will be the take away for his fans.

How keystone cops his people are is v funny. Papadopolous telling a foreign diplomat that the trump campaign had been told by the Russians that they had dirt on Clinton and that person then going to the fbi 😂

but there's also no proof of any crime by trump

this isn't true, though. there's plenty of it (read the executive summary of vol 2). the key is that approach, by design, could NOT find that the president had committed crimes. just check out these bits from the intro, where they "describe the considerations that guided our obstruction-of-justice investigation":

https://i.imgur.com/QunL3us.png

https://i.imgur.com/62l8JnG.png

Mueller: "we determined not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the President committed crimes."

world: "mueller did not find that the President committed crimes!"

https://i.imgur.com/pBcY7eN.png

Oh yeah wrt obstruction sure.but we also knew that right? E.g. reports of him asking if he could fire Mueller etc.

These were all things previously spun as "fake news" and usually from anonymous sources and are now confirmed as legit.

The "i'm fucked" thing was new

Plus it sounded more like telling - not asking - ppl to fire him and they just didn’t

Xp. Yes and now they're spun as "Mueller report did not find proof of criminal activity" and the status quo remains.the only hope that it'll have any effect is the other investigations that are ongoing

It's basically the Saturday Night Massacre if Robert Bork had said "fuck you, Dick!"

Xpost right wing media and talking heads were going to say that even if the report was a snuff film. The reaction by idiots to the report shouldn't be the rubric the report is judged by.

Also it's not that he found no proof, it's that he found insufficient proof and he started with the assumption that you can't indict a sitting President and worked backwards from there

I mean when the Barr summary was all we had, Trump and co never left message that he was exonerated and he even offered kind words to Mueller.

That he's now resumed throwing a shitfit over the report means he's reacting because even an idiot like him can smell that the narrative is shifting.

oh my god Romney

"I'm sickened by the President's dishonesty and willingness to sell out his country. Thank God he got away with it."