This warrants its own focused discussion.
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I can’t wait to be hopelessly disappointed.
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If this is anything like their weak approach to the kavanaugh hearings etc. I am girding myself for the Republicans to run it off the rails.
Its going to be weaksauce halfassed clownshoes bullshit in an attempt to win votes from slightly left of center while they run down the clock until next November.
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Phone transcript of the conversation drops tomorrow.
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I hope that the Democrat-run House impeachment inquiry is run differently and is more thorough than the Republican-run Senate confirmation hearings of Kavanaugh.
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Bad guys: Has power. Abuses power. Acquires more power and pushes limits of power at every opportunity.
“Good guys”: Afraid to use what little power they have.
Also good guys: Why do we keep failing and losing?
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Oh come off it.
The reality of the American political system is that if the GOP controls the Senate, it is literally impossible to successfully impeach and remove from office a sitting GOP president.
It is absolutely the right play to drive long-running slow-burn formal impeachment inquiries and run the clock out. It keeps him on the defensive. It opens up avenues to publicize crimes and hopefully affect public opinion.
The worst possible thing the Democrats could do is actually pass articles of impeachment and hand them over to a GOP-controlled Senate with the current approval polling where it is. If his polling drops low enough, then formally impeaching and daring the Senate to refuse to follow through could be the right call. Time will tell.
The sole power the House has today is to drive inquiries and investigations. They can’t pass laws the GOP won’t approve of. They can’t make an impeachment trial succeed. Investigation is literally all they have. Don’t pretend otherwise.
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JPEG has been getting me prepared.
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None of what you said is wrong but with current leadership I don’t expect anything but a weaksauce halfassed clownshoes bullshit job of it. They don’t actually want to do it, its like making a kid eat their peas. They push it around the plate and whine and waste time. All this is they were cajoled into taking a grudging bite. I have zero faith in this having any effect. With different leadership with guts and vision I’d feel differently.
Why do you say that? You realize the constraints the Democratic leadership has to work under, right? What do you actually expect them to do differently?
They don’t want to do it because it will not work.
Not yet at least.
I implore you to tell me what the Democrats in the House could specifically do differently that would be effective here.
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I say that because almost everything that the Democratic party has done since 2000 has been timid and ineffective or allowed to be torpedoed or neutered -even when they had complete control- and I don’t see that changing. I don’t even trust them to run the impeachment investigation just to make life hard for the GOP. They will find some way to fuck it up.
I know nothing about anything.
Me (looks at the letter from Blue Cross Blue Shield I received 5 days after my son with was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect stating they will not cover any issue related to his heart then remembers the the ACA protected his right to health coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions): I fail to see the truth in this statement.
Sure, they’ve had missteps and fumbles but they’ve done an incredible amount of good with the things they did manage to accomplish.
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This is why I say almost. The preexisting condition provision was one of the few effective parts of the ACA. But the ACA as a whole is broken as fuck. I could afford insurance on $11.50 an hour in 2008. Now I make nearly twice that and my insurance would cost over 1/4 of my paycheck with a $5000 deductible if I chose to get it despite working for a law firm that administers multimillion to billion dollar class action settlements because the ACA lets them. I haven’t had insurance since the ACA passed because we cannot afford it on two incomes. It was cheaper to pay the $600 fine. If I get sick I just won’t pay. They can sue me and ruin my credit or whatever because credit is pretty much meaningless now anyway because of Equifax.
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Democrats have done a fair amount of good!
However, they could have done a lot more!
Both of these statements are true.
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That’s kind of what panfriedmarmot is saying about the impeachment. Its good, but it won’t be enough.
The White House has released a memorandum on the Ukraine call. Some news outlets are calling it a “transcript” but it is not and it says so explicitly in the release. But even so, that thing itself is damning as well. It is only 5 pages, which is a bit weird for a phone call that was supposedly half an hour in length, but even these 5 pages are damning as hell, with Trump explicitly asking for favors, saying that he will direct his personal attorney to get involved, and implicating Barr. He also just randomly throws Angela Merkel and the EU under the bus to prop up his stupid ego.
On why Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want to impeach Trump:
"Thirty-seven percent of voters say that Trump should be impeached and removed from office, while 57 percent say he should not be impeached, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday morning.
The poll was conducted from Thursday through Monday, as details were emerging about Trump’s July call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump acknowledged he asked Zelensky to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son."
Granted, this poll was conducted before the “transcript” was released today, so those numbers could and probably will change. But enough to get 67 Senators to vote to convict? Highly doubtful.
On why Nancy Pelosi is going forward with an “impeachment inquiry” anyway:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/25/watch-senate-republicans/
"The beauty of impeachment proceedings on Ukraine is twofold. First, the facts will come out. Second, a number of GOP senators — perhaps not enough to remove Trump but certainly enough to humiliate him — cannot justify using U.S. taxpayer dollars for leverage to extract dirt on a political opponent from a foreign government…
By their silence, the squeamish Republicans underscore the wisdom of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s move toward impeachment. There is no good answer on Ukraine for Republicans outside of deep-red locales. Reasonable Americans, regardless of party, will not buy that Trump’s alleged conduct was acceptable, nor are they likely to look favorably on senators who pretend it is. Moreover, Republicans who are vulnerable in 2020 can expect to see the sort of protests, sit-ins, and telephone and letter campaigns that activists mounted in the fight over the Affordable Care Act. Conversely, Trump’s rabid base will attack any senator who steps out of line…
Once the full contents of the whistleblower’s complaint are known, Senate Republicans have a few options. They can call for Trump to step down. They can try to “bargain” for the president to avoid resignation/impeachment by accepting a penalty such as censure. They can refuse to endorse him for a second term. Alternatively, they can pretend, as Trump and his spinners on Fox News do, that it’s perfectly fine to extort a foreign government with American aid, set up a parallel State Department headed by his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and try to obtain or create dirt on a political opponent. Judging from the initial reaction of a good many Republicans, the last option does not appear viable. Hence, you can understand the discomfort of Republicans, who for the first time in the Trump presidency might be required to show some spine."
An impeachment inquiry has a small possibility of moving public opinion enough for actual impeachment, but I doubt it. But even if it doesn’t, by moving forward with the inquiry, Pelosi has put moderate and vulnerable Republicans over a barrel.
Moral of the story:
Nancy Pelosi is damn good at her job.
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Exactly. I’m increasingly annoyed at people who naively decry her leadership, despite the fact that she is one of the strongest speakers of the house in modern history.
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