The Senate Trial of Donald J Trump for High Crimes

[Kane]

I've got over 500 slugs for my tactical mossberg 12 gauge and a good 500 rounds for my pistol....but I'm gonna need more. The pistol is a walther .22 so it lacks....everything.

[spacemonkey]

[spacemonkey]

[John Galt]

sometimes through the fog, lucidity emerges

[Saz]

[Philly]

I feel vindicated in completely ignoring the Mueller Report and then completely ignoring the Ukraine stuff and impeachment. Without reading any news or watching any television on the topic, I was able to piece together that Trump withheld military aid from the Ukraine in the hopes of pressuring the Ukrainian government into investigating Hunter Biden's questionable appointment to a high paying board position with a Ukrainian firm. Got it. Don't really care and Biden's career is over anyway, certainly not cause of Hunter.

I similarly was able to gather without actually following any of the news on the Mueller investigation, that the Russian government undertook an effort to covertly influence the process, discourse and outcomes of our domestic political system with the goal of increasing the chances of outcomes that they felt would be in their own government's interest. Again, got it and don't really see why this warrants all this hysteria. Many people who have heard me express this response take a condescending tone and tell me that if that's my reaction then I don't understand the geopolitical dynamic at play and am too naive to comprehend how troubling this all is. But then again, these are all people who ostensibly did not believe Russia (and multiple other countries) ever made an attempt to compromise and influence our domestic politics before the 2016 cycle, so maybe I'm not the naive one.

I get that the Democrats controlling only the House means that executive oversight is a much more actionable ambition than actually trying to make any legislative proposal into law against the odds of the GOP Senate and White House. But maybe they should take note of who is on the verge of running away with the Presidential nomination for their party. It's the guy who, whenever prompted to speak about impeachment, briefly condemns Trump for his scandals and lack of ethics before immediately pivoting to emphasize that major political and policy driven changes are needed to get our country on the right course, and that even if you could be successful in using a legal procedure to get rid of Trump, it would still be no substitute for the necessary political recalibration that we need to start making things right for the American people. Maybe the House would have been better served if they bothered to pass ambitious and principle-defining legislation like Medicare for All (even though it wouldn't make it through the Senate or WH), to demonstrate to the country that they stand for something beyond trying to take down Trump.

What did all these years of Russiagate and then Ukraine impeachment actually do for the state of American politics, other than downplay the real political and policy differences among our elected leaders that actually impact peoples lives in favor of making everything a referendum on Trump's poor character and ethics. Funny, I seem to remember that playbook being deployed by somebody in 2016 who went on to defy all the odds by losing to Donald Trump when the dust settled.

But of course, this is more consequential than just a messaging strategy tied to what the Democratic House has done since taking the majority. While the majority of House Democrats have endorsed the Medicare for All bill, it's not just the prioritization of investigations and impeachment votes that are preventing the House Dems from passing it. The number of House Democrats supporting the bill would certainly be much larger if not for the fact that Nancy Pelosi is actively against it. She stands against a majority of her caucus, and what only is not a vast majority because many would-be supporters of the bill have not endorsed it as a favor to Pelosi out of loyalty or fear. So keeping the one half-branch of government where the Dems have control constantly focused on Trump scandals and impeachment procedures is not just wasting the only institutional platform the Democrats have within the federal government - it is actively papering over the conflicts within the Democratic Party. Pelosi is trying to hold her tenuous grasp on the House Democratic Caucus together while - above all else - avoiding anything that would jeopardize the real source of her enduring power among her fellow House Dems; her ongoing relationships with big donors who allow her to play the rich benefactor for financially struggling re-election campaigns every 2 years.

If Pelosi can lead in the only place where the Dems are in power without confronting and resolving the large substantive conflicts that put stress on the coalition that makes up the House Majority, because we're always just going after Trump instead, then I guess none of this will get hashed out unless Trump loses and we have a new Democratic President who will certainly call on Congress to move forward an agenda. Of course, at that point, the House Dems will have already re-elected their leadership for the next 2 years without confronting the conflict in a serious and public way, and we'll spend the 2 best (and as Obama showed us, possibly only) years of a President's term to actually try and do something legislatively to finally have this confrontation and blow the chance to actually redefine the Democratic Party in a serious and positive way. But Pelosi's donors will be happy.

[John Galt]

you didn't watch any of the trial? schiffy was so f**k good

Pelosi didn't want to go all in on impeachment, but the president forced it. That said I think you are going about it wrong: the congress has a duty to do the impeachment. it wasn't her fault. you complain that she is doing things she finds politically expedient but impeachment wasn't. sure, she most certainly cares about donors. sure, massive change is very difficult to do. LBJ repeatedly cut the heart out of republican bills on civil rights, but once he got the chance he championed his own version of it and completely changed the political landscape. He was able to do that once he had enough of a majority in the house and senate of people who supported it

so the question is, does a majority of the people in either house support Medicate for All? not a majority of her party, a majority of the politicians in the house. Could it even be pushed through? yeah you have a good two years to get it done, but it's going to expend an awful lot of capital. and i think that's part of the hangup. Obama used all his political capital on some premier piece of legislation that this is going to entirely supersede.

Also if Bernie is the nominee, it will become all or nothing on this shit, it will be on the party as a plank of the party. and I think Pelosi will do everything she can to accomplish the goals of president bernie

[Philly]

We are not CLOSE to a majority of the house supporting M4A. That’s the problem - there are genuine skeptics of it in the Dem caucus but there are also people who don’t support it right now because Pelosi’s opposition gives them pause. If you’re right about her then I expect her to endorse M4A immediately if Sanders is nominated. Most of these squishy moderate Dems will eventually come around on whatever the brass is for if you give them some time. The issue right now is that even if we had a majority for it in both the house and the senate it still couldn’t pass in either cause the Sen Majority Leader and the Speaker of the House both wouldn’t bring it for a vote because they are adamantly opposed to it.

[Saz]

[Philly]

I agree with all of that, Saz. These days, if you ever come across an actual person who is truly enthusiastic about the Democratic Party as a whole (not a particular candidate or one of their policies, but just an unconditional love of the Democrats as a political entity and by extension, pretty much anyone high up in the Dem establishment) you are in for a very bizarre experience. First of all, they are just completely detached from reality, as they must be to think that either party as a brand and signifier of values/world view contains anything coherent at all, much less something worthwhile for people to be invested in and identify with. But beyond that, if you ever try to get them to tell you one political value (meaning actual politics, not decorum, civility or rule-following) that is essential to the Democratic Party remaining so admirable in their eyes, they will just talk about how, the whole 2020 field is better than Trump and we urgently must put adults back in charge, blah blah blah. On some rare occasions, you'll get someone who says that mention support for abortion rights as a political stance that they expect Dems to maintain, but that's about it.

Beyond that, they are all unable to draw a clear line in the sand about what's politically non-negotiable and what's politically unacceptable in terms of positions that could be raised to prominence in within the Democratic Party. Instead they talk about shit like "decency" and "respect for the rule of law" because they've been conditioned to have no political convictions and evaluate everything as a question of preserving institutional norms and replacing political preferences with aesthetic ones. On the one hand, this is a very unhealthy characteristic of one of the two major parties in this country. On the other, the absolute lack of any existing political principles among the the voting base that makes up party loyalists seems like an opportunity for Sanders to bring these voters onboard with his principles without even having to first convince them to give up the neoliberal politics of everyone they claim to love from Bill Clinton to Nancy Pelosi.


The cycle in my lifetime has been very obvious. The Dems have no political content to their political party, so even when they run the bureaucracy with competence and do a good job keeping the ship steady with an intelligent and professional approach, the fact remains that the ship is never sailing in any particular direction, so periodically the GOP wins just because they can articulate a general sense of which direction they want to head for. The last 2 Democratic presidents both served 8 years and had high approval ratings on the day that their successor was elected. Both had Dem nominees running to replace them with little political or ideological difference. Al Gore and Hillary Clinton both ran as continuity candidates for the popular outgoing Presidents they hoped to replace. Unfortunately for them, the sentiment of "I really like Obama and think he did a good job" does not translate to voting for Clinton as continuity choice because there are no political commitments attached to personal affinity for Obama. Then, subsequently, the GOP pushes it's luck way too hard and crashes the ship, which sweeps another politically vapid Democratic wave back into power.

Looking at the last 30 years or so of US politics, it's rather striking that the Democrats have basically lost as much as they've won despite only having to compete against a party that basically sets the whole country on fire every time they get power. In both Clinton and Obama, Dems elected heads of the executive branch who were adept and ran competent administrations that displayed good stewardship of our state institutions. But as we've witnessed repeatedly, good stewardship of institutions without any political commitments linked to significant constituencies is no match for an opposition party with even the most crude and foolish of political commitments.

After FDR oversaw the implementation of his New Deal agenda, the Democrats held an ironclad majority in the US House for 60 straight years, and during most of that time the Republicans did not even bother to talk about hopes of winning it back. Idiotic shitlibs to this day will tell you this phenomenon occurred because people just loved FDR so much that they continued to vote Democratic for generations as a result. They never seem to consider that FDR wasn't just a personally popular guy, but the president who gave everyone Social Security. It was a political commitment that was meaningful to a broad constituency. For generations, people voted for Democrats in Congress and raised their kids to do the same because the Democrats were the Party of the New Deal and keeping them with at least some power meant that no one would take away their Social Security. LBJ's commitment to Civil Rights solidified a huge black constituency favoring Dems over GOP that still exists today. But since then, we've had three more Democratic Presidencies and none of them managed to put use their office to establish new political commitments that would renew the commitment of mass constituencies to the party. Instead, all three of them half-heartedly rode the coat-tails of Civil Rights while actively eroding what remained of the New Deal identity of being a worker's party in favor of becoming a party of a much smaller group, the educated professional class.

This is why the Dems need Bernie more than they realize. They desperately need to be a political party that has actual politics once again. Otherwise, even if they manage to win this election, they're just sitting around waiting for the next insane Republican shithead to show up and knock down their house of cards all over again, provided he has a halfway distinct political message that he can put up against their complete nothing.