"Unless there’s a witness that’s going to change the outcome, I can’t imagine why we’d want to stretch this out."GOP Senator Roy Blunt
Democrats win by losing.
Trump won't be removed. The endgame message is "Coverup."
Of course Trump will try to sell this as a win. Vindication! Democrats lost! Democrats will grit their teeth. Republicans will say they feel great.
Republican senators are on TV saying that nothing they could possibly hear would change their minds. They don't need to hear from witnesses. "It doesn't rise to an impeachable offense."
"For the sake of argument, one could assume everything attributable to John Bolton is accurate and still the House case wold fall well below the standards to remove a president from office," Lindsay Graham said in a statement.
So what if there was quid pro quo.
GOP senators have their justification, from Alan Dershowitz: "If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, hat cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment."
Wow. Read that again. It gets GOP senators off the hook. They don't need to confront evidence.
[Update. It gets better. Now, at 8:00 a.m. Pacific Time, Dershowitz is updating and correcting and saying that, actually, there was "nuance" being misunderstood. He didn't actually mean exactly how this seems. This does not reverse or eliminate the controversy. This expands it; it accentuates it; it continues the debate and makes people consider more intently exactly what he meant. As the rule is: when you are explaining, you are losing.]
Wow. Read that again. It gets GOP senators off the hook. They don't need to confront evidence.
[Update. It gets better. Now, at 8:00 a.m. Pacific Time, Dershowitz is updating and correcting and saying that, actually, there was "nuance" being misunderstood. He didn't actually mean exactly how this seems. This does not reverse or eliminate the controversy. This expands it; it accentuates it; it continues the debate and makes people consider more intently exactly what he meant. As the rule is: when you are explaining, you are losing.]
Republicans overplayed their hand.
Republicans had a pretty good political case going into this. They had the votes to assure Trump would be vindicated. Impeachment fit the GOP and Trump narrative that Democrats were out to get them from day one. The message resonated with Republican voters. It was simple and clear: the Democrats had it in for Trump.
Better yet, winning meant Democrats lost, a double win. Trump's tweets, insults, exaggerations and policies have the predictable result of infuriating Democrats, and Trump's base loves it when Democratic heads explode. Nothing is more fun for Fox News than showing some college town woke liberal sputtering with rage over something Trump does, or replaying Rachel Maddog tearing up on election night. After all, those snotty elitists think people like us, people who watch Fox and wear MAGA hats, are knuckle dragging deplorable racists with bad taste, so if Trump riles them up, great.
They could have stopped with that. Just say the Democrats hated Trump.
They could have stopped with that. Just say the Democrats hated Trump.
But then, it sours.
No witnesses. Now the message changes to "coverup." Trump is trying to hold back the tide. John Bolton has a story to tell. Lev Parnas has a story to tell. Senators don't want to hear it and aren't going to hear it.
Refusing to hear from witnesses will be a pyrrhic victory, changing the meaning of the big win. They will have won a rigged game that, worse, now looks like an obvious, undeniable rigged game. The big takeaway will be that Trump's obedient, intimidated Senators put their fingers in their ears and shut their eyes. Trump got off with a stacked jury and did it by saying that Trump's cheating is OK.
Then, the aftermath starts. Lev Parnas will seem a mixture of comic and pathetic as he tries to get noticed, and tell his story. Bolton's story will drip out, and then flood out. The public likes secrets being revealed. The revelation will be that it was way, way worse than we thought.
And, in time, the implications of the Dershowitz argument will get out there. It is so outrageous a proposition that it won't go away. Even people who are not very engaged in politics will think about that one, and it won't feel right.
Houston Astros spied on pitches, and got fined, a manager suspended, their victories now tainted. The steroid home runs have asterisks. The New England Patriots deflated footballs and even the beloved Tom Brady got suspended. Cheating is cheating.
GOP senators agreed Trump can do anything he wants as long as he thinks it will help him get elected? Really?
It says that the president can cheat. And he escaped being removed because the jury was stacked. That won't age well.
It says that the president can cheat. And he escaped being removed because the jury was stacked. That won't age well.
5 comments:
Evidence, schmevidence. As referenced here, Bolton himself in a contemporaneous television interview said the Trump-Zelensky phone calls were nothing but routine cordiality. Meanwhile, until a few days ago Adam Schiff has repeatedly cast Bolton as dishonest and prone to conspiracy theories.
There was no case to begin with. The articles as drafted were vague and overbroad, respectively, and any supposed violation was the product of question-begging. Biden's personal side benefit is clean if his overall purpose was the public interest; naturally, that same dynamic is not afforded Trump.
I suspect many of Trump’s supporters agree with Dershowitz‘s initial assertion of constitutional support for unbounded presidential power. I also suspect in the ‘fog of war’ and their rationalization of any of Trumps conduct (that Peter enumerated yesterday), GOPers under-appreciate the extent to which they are undermining the (small d) democratic balance of powers - until it’s too late- and it’s not their “monarch” in charge.
King Pyrrhus: If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.
The casualties here’s? The attention of the American people.
Take a step back and behold this breathtaking spectacle.
The Republican Members of The Congress of the United States are complicit in a failed scheme to extort an ally who is at war with an adversary, one who systematically interfered with the 2016 presidential election.
Trump is kicking himself for chickening out and giving Ukraine the money when the whistle blew. As it stands he could have followed through and gotten his "favor" with no fear of reprisal. Today we would be entertained by VP Biden interrupting his campaign to answer charges from Ukraine, and every Democrat would be guilty by association.
If the outrage felt by the majority of Americans was abating out of Trump fatigue; after Muslim bans, Tariffs, Tax cuts for the rich, Killing the EPA, "Good People on both sides", ad nauseam, it will now have a new renewed energy.
Randolph P
Tribalism wins out over evidence … every time. In a month, the Washington DC circus will be distracting us with another foodfight of the century (anybody remember the Kavanaugh hearings? maybe … but the others? ... a new one every week for the last 3 years ... see you've forgotten) Meanwhile … the 1% continues siphoning more from Federal coffers, creating more legislation for "our benefit" that only makes their grip on power more secure, and destroying the progressive gains implemented the last 120 years.
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