brilliant
Are you suggesting that Nancy break out her handcuffs and arrest Trump personally? I would like to know what this magic power you seem to think the Democrats have that does not involve the courts. (I presume that we can rule out a cooperative DOJ.)
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Tell me more about concern trolling, dear.
Of course that âconcern trollâ âunicornâ thingy only gets trotted out⌠selectively.
You also might want to have a gander at that Assault on Reason book â because empty character assassination attempts are very much part of of that. Folks who uprate this shit without doing some goddamn homework might want to reconsider. @rollinnolan
Thatâs if the actual record matters any more. In the Age of Trump, it very well may not. God damn, this is bullshit. Straight outta the fucking Trump playbook.
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20 acres of a 551 acre park seems reasonable to me but I donât live there. Sounds like a well reasoned decision by the judge at this point.
The under 50% of the public that is pro Impeachment tells the tale. Given the events of the last two and a half years, I am sure many are wondering why that number is not 73% (!00% less the % of the population immune to any reasoning on Trump)
Even in the mid fifties will move the chains on opening up an Impeachment Inquiry. It takes some people stepping up.
The status quoâno evidence coming our wayâis not acceptable. One way or another people will move toward wanting to hold this criminal accountable.
The way opinion toward Impeachment goes in fits and startsâŚwith the bolder influencing the less boldâŚthen the cautiousâŚthen over to the other side⌠the varying types of Trump fans (weak, sheepish, committed and fanatic)âŚ
And public opinion can change rapidly.
By the wayâŚDonald Trump is our best motivator toward Impeachment. For that (and that ALONE) I thank him
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This seems to be lost on a lot of people but my point is really a simple one: if you go to court put yourself in the best position to win, period. Thatâs legal strategy 101.
What a lot of folks donât get is that the case law gives greater weight to impeachment to defeat executive privilege claims. Exec privilege v standard oversight can be more of a 50-50 question. Itâs fact based and judge based.
Nancy Pelosi has chosen a political strategy: to impose a public approval threshold before you even start a formal impeachment inquiry. That has not been done in any of the prior impeachment situations.
Because of that political strategy, the House Dem lawyers arenât using impeachment as the basis for the subpoenas. Theyâre using standard oversight and legislative intent. That doesnât mean the Dems will lose. It just means there is a higher risk that they might lose on 1 or more of these cases if the WH invokes executive privilege.
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SLOW WALK ALERT
just saw nadler on Maddow.
Remember how Hope Hicks defied the Judiciary Committee subpoena?
That was a week ago. Nadler has done nothing to force her compliance â and isnât going to do anything until she doesnât show up to testify on June 19.
Yeah, thatâs right. Even though Nadler has the power to hold Hicks in contempt, and to take her to court to compel document production, heâs slow-walking the whole thing, and nothing will happen until AT LEAST two weeks from the time she refused to comply with the subpoena.
âŚbut nobodyâs slow walking stuffâŚ
@george_h
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âSome lawmakers have warned that, without an impeachment inquiry, theyâll be handicapped heading into certain courtrooms.â
For example, the courtroom of Trevor McFadden, who ruled last week that the House of Representatives did not have standing to bring suit to block Donald Trumpâs effort to transfer taxpayer money from its intended purposes to pay for the wall, for which it was NOT appropriated.
A member of the Federalist Society since he began law school, McFadden was one of the first Deputy Assistant Attorney Generals to join Jeff Sessionâs Injustice Department in January 2017. In June of 2017 Degenerate Don nominated McFadden to be a federal judge, and the Republican Senate confirmed him in October 2017. Iâm certainly not an expert on judicial ethics, but I wonder how on earth there could NOT be an appearance of impropriety when a judge who had worked for Donald Trumpâs Injustice Department and was nominated for his judgeship by Donald Trump was judging whether Donald Trump was improperly misusing taxpayer money.
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I think legal strategy 101 is to prepare your case before filing your case (and continue your preparations once filed and before trial). I suspect that we understand your point, and have done so previously. There is, perhaps, disagreement about when is the best time to get to that stage. As long as Democrats are willing to pursue investigation during the election season, you might yet get what you want (just not when you want it). If the idea of leadership is to delay until after the election, I suspect that more of us will be repeating your grumblings of discontent.
The thing is, the Dems are in court right now and are preparing to go to court for additional subpoena enforcement claims against McGahn, Hicks and others. This is one of the reasons why the Judiciary Committee wants Pelosi to green light a formal impeachment inquiry now rather than later. They can add impeachment as the basis for subpoena enforcement and defeat an executive privilege claim more effectively and more quickly.
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. . . if one wants to move quickly. If we did impeachment right now, how long could we really make it stretch out (based on information we actually have and are likely to be able to reveal in hearings)? And what happens after impeachment (assuming that the House votes in favor of impeaching the president)? Where are we on the calendar when we reach this point?
The GOP impeached Clinton, without that much in the way of hearings, in about 6 weeks. It took another 4 weeks or so for the trial with about 2-3 weeks in between the impeachment vote and the trial start.
Dems could run hearings for about 4-6 weeks on the Mueller Report findings, focusing on obstruction, depending on how they manage the schedule, vote out articles, debate for 1-2 weeks and vote it all out. What the Senate does is their business, but our business would be to put McSally, Gardner, Ernst, Collins, and Tillis on record and on the spot. One of the things Iâd like to see in the articles is a determination that the House believes based on Muellerâs report that Trump broke federal law on multiple counts of obstruction and that he should be impeached so he can face trial when he leaves office. That leaves the most indelible stain and puts Trump on notice that if heâs afraid of Biden now, heâs going to be shit scared in the fall of 2020 if he doesnât cut a deal to resign. If he loses to Biden, heâs headed to trial on multiple felony counts in multiple courts.
Then they can run several other potential hearings with either impeachment or censure on things like DHS/child separation, Census lies, collusion etc. It can be a conveyer belt of accountability. If Pelosi adopts Nadlerâs plan, she can manage both the legislative calendar and the accountability tasks.
If you game that out, start the inquiry now, get through the courts on witness testimony and negotiate to get them in front of the committee, get all the hearings done on the Mueller report say by September or October, vote out articles and then keep going through referrals from the other committees to judiciary.
And is this a good outcome a year before the election? Will anyone other than those of us who are already watching remember? Might that be just too early since we will still have Trump in office at the end? (I donât see Trump resigning, and if we are reasonably confident of winning in 2020, I am not sure that I want a deal that lets him off.)
I think itâs a good outcome because it will rev up the base, put Trump on the defensive, expose him, create a chilling effect for him and his subordinates and raise his criminal liability exposure.
He will think about resigning if he sees the criminal charges that await him piling up and the prospect of winning diminishing. He would need to cut a deal w/DOJ to do it and/or seek a pardon from Pence.
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But would it be best to do this a full year before the election, or closer to the main event? Would the Democratic base get at least a bit deflated if impeachment in the House is followed by a dud in the Senate? Would the Democratic base be any more revved up by impeachment than simply knowing what this crook has gotten away with (so far)? (I am assuming that the Trump base will be revved up pretty much no matter what happens, or does not happen.)
Trump is not a normal, reasonable or rational human being, and cannot be assumed to work in normal, reasonable or rational ways. I think he would wait to see the outcome. After all, polls had him losing (big time, or big league, as he likes to say) to Hillary, and we see how that turned out. I am not sure that he will accept defeat even once it happens, let alone in anticipation.
And that timing/process effectively limits the impeachment to the Mueller Report. That, IMO, is very shortsighted and is liable to forego information, and charges, that could potentially alter perceptions and change minds. To short-circuit the investigative/oversight process to such a limiting degree sidles too close to malpractice and criminal neglect on the part of Democratic (hell, any) Representatives, as well as making it way too easy for Senators to vote not guilty.
The dude has played at the edge of the law and stayed out of jail for 4 decades. He makes tactical retreats constantly. Heâs not as crazy as people think. He is crook smart and everything else dumb. Weâre living in his world. Put the burden on him to make him live in ours, according to our rules. Youâll see things change fast.
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Of course, I specifically did not use the word âcrazy.â and I specifically explained how he might justify holding out until the bitter end. (Indeed, it might even be considered rational, in a rather distorted way.) I think the main flaw in your thinking is that our problem is not just Trump. Republicans have succeeded in undermining many of our institutions, and pretty much all standards of basic decency. Right now, Trump has a lot of help and control over most of the enforcement mechanisms for our laws (presuming that the laws themselves still exist and are not merely conventions that exist only as expectations). The Senate is his ace card, since they will never move against him as long as Mitch McConnell is in the catbird seat. The DOJ is now basically his, and Barr sees himself as Trumpâs personal lawyer (a virtual Roy Cohn). The judiciary is a mix of judges who still understand their job, and judges who have been planted to force conservative agendas. The Supreme Court now must count on Justice Roberts as a swing vote (and how he will rule in any of these cases is by no means certain). It is not really âcrazyâ for Trump to hold out, and my instincts tell me that he will. Losing the election will be the only thing that may break his hold, and even then he is probably counting on the fact that we will play nice, as we typically do. After all, we did not even prosecute anyone in the Bush administration for obvious crimes and public offenses. And Reagan basically got away with Iran-Contra, the prototype of so much that has followed.