Despite telling senators this week to not surrender to the President’s stonewalling, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) hesitantly admitted that House Democrats surrendered to Trump’s stonewalling during an interview on CNN Sunday morning.
The headline does not reflect the nuance of Lofgren’s response. On to something else, now.
Well, c’mon, TPM.
Trumpers will find a way to distort this, but why do it for them?
She said it was a “surrender” in the sense that they stopped trying to enforce the subpoenas … BECAUSE THEY HAD ENOUGH EVIDENCE TO GO FORWARD ANYWAY.
The real surrender would have been to fritter away their impeachment opportunity letting the courts slow-roll their litigation.
They made the right call.
“If we had waited for three or four years, the election would be over,” Lofgren said. “The issue would be almost moot.”
That is a true statement about the reality of our court system. Acknowledging reality and playing the hand you were dealt is not “surrender[ing] to the president’s stonewalling.”
Ugh, this headline is not what she said. This is more of a Fox headline than TPM.
What they said
Please take this entirely misleading story down before it is plagiarized by other outlets.
Good grief, TPM, although I already sensed that this was not accurate before I read the post and the comments.
An unfortunately common problem here.
Meanwhile, if these sorts of things aren’t jury trials, why can’t a court prioritize it and come up with a judgment in a week and an appeal be submitted by the losing side in a few more days and so on?
I’m sure there are readers here who know the answer to this.
Terribly misleading headline.
Better point: The courts have been entirely incapable to date of making Trump cough up anything whatsoever, whether it’s in a criminal investigation or a congressional oversight matter. Based on that record, we correctly assessed that waiting on the courts to do something, and then hoping that President Drumpf would honestly comply with whatever the courts ultimately ruled, would be pointless. The evidence we already have establishes beyond any doubt that Orange Julius is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors. And you, Jake Tapper, don’t have to pretend otherwise just for the sake of pretending you’re some kind of elevated being who exists on a plain beyond the partisan fray.
Fallacious click-bait article…
I thought Chait (nymag) had the best response to this:
If the House has indeed failed to do its job, shouldn’t the Senate correct the error? Instead, McConnell insists the House has done a rushed and shoddy job of collecting the evidence, and therefore the Senate must not collect any more. Claiming the House has failed to do its job, he now insists the Senate must likewise fail to do its job.
I especially like your snide comment about Tapper. He does seem to think he is the Grand Poobah of the Truth, doesn’t he?
Even when he actually announces a True Thing That Is True, Jake Tapper’s air of extraterrestrial superiority is unmistakable.
It is disheartening to see a favorite news source use such a “sensationalized” headline. Tapper’s interpretation of what happened does not need to be memorialized by TPM.
When SCOTUS is motivated to take a case, seemingly, they can do it in a heartbeat. For example, the stay they put on the release of his financial records.
Similarly, when the House is considering an action as weighty as Impeachment, I strongly believe their cases regarding witness testimony should have been expedited and adjudicated in short order by SCOTUS.
The Dems could have stayed in court for the next two years and most likely won, but that would be in two years. The election calendar doesn’t work that way.
Advantage, GOP. The best example is when SCOTUS acted immediately to short circuit the 2000 presidential election (ad in, GOP), and more recently declined to take up the 5th Circuit attack on the ACA (ad in, GOP). Not that I see a pattern here.
Exactly. The House and the Senate aren’t discrete competitors in a foot race. They’re supposed to be a legislative tag team.
“Surrender” is a horrible verb here. When you’re in a fight, is it “surrendering” to choose the strategy you feel gives you the best chance? Do prosecutors not make this sort of decision–whether to try on the evidence they have, or wait to collect more–every single day? Do they “surrender” when they decide to proceed? The GOP is living rent free in too many of our heads. They’re constantly influencing our choice of verbs. Free yourself up, TPM. No more headlines that trade on stereotypes about democratic weakness, disarray, surrendering, etc. It’s not even, as many posters have said, what Lofgren was trying to say.
One other thought: don’t give in to the siren call of alliteration. Yeah, “surrendering to stonewalling” sounds nice. Rolls off the tongue. That doesn’t make it accurate or useful.