Because it doesn’t matter how many Republican votes there are in the House. All that matters is that there aren’t 24 Republican votes to convict in the Senate and never will be. If the man slaughtered and ate a live baby on TV there wouldn’t be 24 Republican votes to convict in the Senate.
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Sunday morning talk fests require that the guest, D or R, say as much as he/she can in the allotted time. Who knows how many people actually watch these things anymore? There are too many others ways to find out what’s on Schiff’s mind or any other member of Congress. Which leads me back to the question of why does TPM post them for us. They lead only to heated arguments about what did he REALLY mean when he said X, Y or Z and why didn’t he cut to the chase: Impeach Now.
@ncsteve When moron said what he did about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue and getting away with it, he had no way of knowing he was predicting what the McConnell chamber would do in the face of his lawlessness. Or maybe he did know.
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Because we don’t feel like going out and doing something useful with our lives, and Josh is always willing to step up?
I hear you. And just to remedy that I’m going to look at the funny papers for starters and ease into book reviews.
Of course, Adam one GOPer isn’t enough. But ya gotta start somewhere and for Justin to step out takes balls all the other GOP pukes haven’t shown. I admire what he did. It may cost him reelection but he did the right thing. Maybe some GOP senators will come to their senses and see what must be done. It takes 67 yea votes in the Senate to convict. But just a simple majority in the House to send articles of impeachment.
Is that written down somewhere? Are you prophesying?
If a grand jury does not indict, it essentially exonerates the targets of the investigation. An impeachment of a President is essentially an indictment by the House. If they don’t impeach, it essentially exonerates the President because they are saying that the evidence does not support a trial.
So what, Donald’s lawlessness is enough to impeach him, whether Republicans do it or not really doesn’t matter, Democrats have to act.
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And act quickly because it looks like Donald’s self preservation instinct is telling him that starting a war would be a good way to avoid being impeached.
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Its on them then.
Chump commits crimes. Republicans thwart every attempt of Ds to hold him accountable and to safeguard our govt. against criminal corruption. Our govt. gets corrupted by a criminal who gains control of the levers of law enforcement and DOJ. The entire R world, politicians and media go on a 24/7 crusade to short-circuit every means of accountability and criminal proceedings, and to lay their lives and careers down as human shields for a petty criminal tyrant. And DEMS are exonerating him?
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Trump is gonna say, “I was completely cleared. If there was any evidence, the Democrats would have impeached me. Even the Democrats knew it was a witch hunt.”
Or something like that.
There is no downside to impeaching him, even is he is not convicted by a partisan vote in the Senate.
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I read Madame Speaker’s strategy as a game of chicken. She is holding off hoping that enough R’s can find a reason, as did Amash, to publicly oppose Trump when there is still time to get on the right side of history. If an R waits too long, he risks getting branded as a Trump sympathizer and could be swept out of office once the public understands just how corrupt Trump is.
The strategy has risks that many have already clearly described, but a few more good news days like today tend to give me hope that
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Only if they are investigating for impeachment. Until then, no investigation means no exoneration. You can’t excuse what you haven’t looked at. That said, I’m all for the preliminary investigations to continue and expand, leading to more and more Amash defections.
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Shorter Schiff: “If we Democratic leaders do our constitutional duty it will anger a segment of the voting population, so we won’t do it. We Democrats don’t give a shit about pissing off OUR base, we only worry about pissing off republicans.”
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FFS just do the right damn thing for a change and leave it to the Senate to figure their shit out. Stand the fuck up.
I read her strategy as just the chicken part. Afraid of impeachment despite overwhelming evidence of crimes and betrayals akin to treason. And pretty strong public support for impeachment.
Both the Post and NY Times report she told House Democrats to forget about impeachment and focus on policy. Despite a criminal compromised to a foreign government in the White House. Justin Amash showed more courage on this issue than any House Democrat. It’s a goddamned disgrace.
Then let the Senate try toive that down. And no one really knows what the Senate will do. If the House were to hold impeachment hearings laying out the crimes in the Mueller report and elsewhere it would be devastating. If public opinion were to turn decisively in favor of impeachment (and support is already quite high), pretty good chance more Republicans start to peel off to save themselves. If not, let them defend acquitting a traitor in the upcoming elections.
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Tell that to nearly 1,000 former federal prosecutors who signed a letter that president traitor would be charged with crimes of obstructing an investigation into an attack on our elections by a hostile foreign government were he not president. And this is just false:
“Okay, so what do the Dems have to work with, to justify impeachment? Just the Mueller report? That isn’t enough, even if they get an unredacted version, because the principal investigator concluded that the Trump team was too stupid to actually work out a conspiracy deal with the Russians. They were just acting “in parallel.” No crime.”
On conspiracy/ coordination, the Mueller report concluded only that it could not establish those crimes beyond a reasonable doubt - a very high standard meaning a near certainty. The Mueller report also specifically- and rather pointedly- stated that just because something wasn’t established didn’t mean there wasn’t evidence it happened. And the report sets out loads of evidence of a conspiracy. Probably enough to meet a preponderance of the evidence standard. And the criminal standard of beyond a reasonable doubt does not apply in impeachment proceedings.
Note as well that the report stated in many cases it failed to establish things due to acts of obstruction of justice.
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Mitch McConnell has to state for the record that money laundering is an activity that the US opposes. For example, while the Russian economy would probably gone into recession anyway in late 2014 with the collapse of oil prices, Western sanctions did have a modest impact on Russia’s economic misery. Part of why the sanctions were not that effective, however, was money laundering. If an American was facilitating this activity, he or she was undercutting our nation’s own policies. Some countries like Fiji or Marshall Islands understandably may not have the ability to supervise international transactions of their banks, but larger central banks in the region such as Australia or New Zealand, can certainly help with such tasks. Since the US is not an emerging economy, where is the excuse? Something that is inherently bad for our government’s conduct of foreign policy and stability of its domestic market cannot be treated as something good by the same government.
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