Discussion: Pelosi Tips Her Hand On Democrats' New Impeachment Strategy

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Why do people fear Trump will see a Clintonesque surge in popularity if impeached ? He won’t.

They are completely different personalities and the cover-up is over completely different things-

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I think she might have a point, but it’s also moot. It’s not going to enable them to get documents faster or anyone to come and testify that doesn’t want to. I vacillate on this every day, but in the end, I don’t think it matters much. Historically, I do think it will be seen as a failure of responsibility if they don’t impeach.

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It’s so insane that people are looking to the Clinton impeachment rather than Nixon, which is far more comparable, even though it was longer ago. Trump is a Nixonian character, although he has none of Nixon’s virtues and owns hundreds of greater flaws.

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It is not feared that his approval would skyrocket. What is feared is that the incredibly small, but electorally meaningful percentage of registered republicans or conservative-leaning independents who might have been disinclined to vote for him in 2020 will frame the election as an “us vs. them” and go back into their bunker, rather than view the election as whether they really want to pull the lever for him again.

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Three dimensional chess being played against a 1/2 dimensional Dotard.

Please proceed as planned, Madam Speaker

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[quote=“carolson, post:3, topic:88219”]
Historically, I do think it will be seen as a failure of responsibility.
[/quote] Of course, this will depend largely on the outcome. In the event he is ultimately impeached (which I believe he will be), it will make not one bit of difference.

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It’s not concern about a change in popularity, but a change in enthusiasm.

As a purely political question, I think it’s a defensible position. Democratic voter enthusiasm is turned up to 11 right now. You can’t really eke out anything more out of the base. The Republican base in 2018 was pretty ho-hum, and if there is no possibility of removal, then there’s no reason to enfroth them.

This isn’t exactly my position, but I see the merits of it.

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Pelosi and the D leadership are playing to the inside the beltway crowd…even still it’s kinda dumb in my opinion. Worse, it ignores the greater Dem world which seems to want an actual concrete process rather than some subtle inside-baseball strategic game. We’ve seen before that Dems will stay home on election day for any reason they possibly can come up with, regardless of it’s in their best interest…don’t give them more reasons to stay home.

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Could not agree more.

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Except of the simple fact of the math. We out number them. People forget that Trump barely won in 2016, with the assistance of a massive and successful vote suppression effort. That will not work in 2020.

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The grasping at any way to not start Impeachment is reallyvtiresome. With each new excuse we look weaker than and weaker.

Would it be so hard to say that the current trajectory suggests Impeachment hearings are coming.

It’s not a “Yes”, but better than the constant “No”

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I think someone was as unprepared to discuss infrastructure with Democrats as he was to discuss world affairs with Putin. What do you think? And he took ANY excuse to claim it was Pelosi’s fault.

The man is a moral monster. But he does resemble this profile of Adolph Hitler drawn by the Office of Strategic Research (later the CIA) during WW II:

The Office of Strategic Services prepared a profile of Hitler that is starkly similar to what we are experiencing with Trump today:
> “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.” (OSS Psychological Profile of Hitler, page 46. cia.gov)

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Impeachment is what trump wants so he can weaponize it while he still has some strength. The step by step wears him down and he flails about throwing tantrums and self destructing. All the while, the work of the committees in the House continue, chipping away at the beast until the water is full enough of blood to go in for the kill. Pelosi mentioned this some time ago when she said he would impeach himself.

It’s a good strategy.

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If Trump would predictably also stonewall impeachment then it makes sense to get the court cases going and continue on the present course. Trump is looking weak up against Pelosi.

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If by " Historically" you mean “Already”

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Well at the least the media’s question is now why aren’t the Dems impeaching this guy yet, rather than complaining about Dem’s even talking about the “I” word.

But the issue of course is that if the house does impeach him, then what? It goes to the senate where nothing good will come of it.

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Impeachment without conviction is an exoneration. Never mind the reality, it is trivially easy to spin it as exoneration. Leaving Trump’s crimes unresolved is a better situation than gift-wrapping them a “see, it was all a witch hunt!” narrative. The goal is the removal of Trump from office, for which the only viable mechanism is the 2020 election. A failed impeachment reduces the chances of removing him via election, both for the exoneration and the rallying effect.

Once removed from office via election, his crimes can be resolved via regular prosecution.

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“That was what disappointed him, because he didn’t see this rush to impeachment coming out of our caucus,”

but _____ and _______ said

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Not a good week for Donald

Buttigieg accuses Trump of faking disability to avoid Vietnam draft
Veteran and 2020 candidate said Trump, who received a deferment for bone spurs, used ‘his privileged status to fake a disability’
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/23/pete-buttigieg-trump-vietnam-war-disability-accusation
Speaking at a Washington Post event on Thursday, the 37-year-old continued: “I mean, if he were a conscientious objector, I’d admire that, but this is somebody who, I think it is fairly obvious to most of us, took advantage of the fact that he was a child of a multimillionaire in order to pretend to be disabled so that somebody could go to war in his place."

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