Here's the Axios article too, which has a decent amount of info and is still being updated: https://www.axios.com/trump-impeached-house-of-representatives-a685e463-57be-4b1f-a015-439234165db5.html
Given how unexpected (at least to me) it was to see him win in 2016, I question all of my assumptions about what makes someone electable/unelectable and how all of the myriad of factors contribute...
Given how unexpected (at least to me) it was to see him win in 2016, I question all of my assumptions about what makes someone electable/unelectable and how all of the myriad of factors contribute to how 2020 will go. Russian influence campaigns, Fox news, Democratic party internal politics, etc etc.
There are a lot of reasons to think that he'll be swept out of office in 2020, but then I thought that there wasn't a chance in hell that idiot on an escalator would last a month in the Republican primary. So I would love to be convinced that he's on his way out regardless of how the Senate trial goes. A lot of my uncertainty comes because there's still some months to go before we know who the Democratic candidate will be, and how they'll stack up in a direct head to head vs Trump.
Agreed, there would always be spin. However I worry that it's going to be worse because he's now impeached, but the House is going to "aquit" him. Which will be played from now until next November...
Agreed, there would always be spin. However I worry that it's going to be worse because he's now impeached, but the House is going to "aquit" him. Which will be played from now until next November as proof that there wasn't anything substantial to the impeachment charges. And he gets to keep playing the victim.
I guess it's to much to hope for that there's anything Trump could possibly do to turn his base against him. Hell I wonder if he could do it if he tried.
I believe there might be one thing that can: A great recession on the scale of 2008 or 1929. Many Republicans praise trump for high employment, high gdp growth and being business-friendly so...
Here's the thing: There is nothing that can be done to convince Republican voters. They will always vote Republican. It doesn't matter if their candidate is a war criminal, a pedophile, or a nazi.
I believe there might be one thing that can: A great recession on the scale of 2008 or 1929. Many Republicans praise trump for high employment, high gdp growth and being business-friendly so presumably if the industries and small businesses Republican voters work on suddenly come crashing down (which is likelier and will turn out worse for them because more Republicans work on jobs which are more easily automated, harder to replace when lost due to the huge physical space they take up and already in a downswing due to newer technology) and they lose their jobs or their companies go bankrupt because of something during the trump presidency they might just realize trump's policies aren't for them but for their bosses and that a safety net just in case this happened could have been useful. They can't blame us because we lost power 4 years ago and enacted all the changes they thought necessary and blocked all that did not and the left doesn't really influence the economy and they shut off the immigrants a while ago. Just my opinion though.
Here's the thing to understand about Trump. He is always going to be the worst. He will always do whatever crimes or corruption he can get away with and he will always heap as much abuse on...
However I worry that it's going to be worse
Here's the thing to understand about Trump. He is always going to be the worst. He will always do whatever crimes or corruption he can get away with and he will always heap as much abuse on detractors as he can. He can't get "worse" since he is already maximally bad. The only things that can change are what limiters you put up around him and his badness. So he gets worse without censure.
The only thing that can go badly is that we're in the middle of a full blown Constitutional Crisis and it's hard to say what happens when the Republicans collude with the White House to undermine the trial. But that's not a Trump thing, that'
A competent Trump that didn't polarised the left and was good at negotiating would have far, far worse. Imagine who you're going to deal with in 2024 not that the bar has been set so low. The left...
A competent Trump that didn't polarised the left and was good at negotiating would have far, far worse. Imagine who you're going to deal with in 2024 not that the bar has been set so low.
The left will be too busy patting themselves on the back to vote, because they either spent the last 4 years undoing the shit Trump did, or they finally outlasted Trump, and in sweeps Palpatine.
There can't be a competent Trump who doesn't polarize the left. The entire reason Trumpists like Trump is because their most deeply held political motivation is to "own the libs." They love him...
A competent Trump that didn't polarised the left and was good at negotiating would have far, far worse.
There can't be a competent Trump who doesn't polarize the left. The entire reason Trumpists like Trump is because their most deeply held political motivation is to "own the libs." They love him because he polarizes the left. If he didn't do that, they wouldn't love him.
The American conservative movement is largely just the nation's unfiltered id all hopped up on paranoia and narcissism. The reason Trump is such a perfect avatar for them is because he is a creature who is all id, paranoia, and narcissism. The idea of an Emperor Palpatine version of Trump is certainly scary, but it is highly doubtful that such a person can exist and gain influence through any of the paths available in contemporary American society. You see it across the board. All the hard right wingers across the democratic countries are just total clowns.
The closest to what you're talking about would be a character like India's Modi, who is actually fairly competent. But it's kind of a stretch to say he's owned by the oligarchy since he's just as likely to piss them off as help them out.
I think we've seen in the past few elections that swing voters don't matter nearly as much as we used to think, and there really aren't as many of them as was once thought. The way to win...
I think we've seen in the past few elections that swing voters don't matter nearly as much as we used to think, and there really aren't as many of them as was once thought. The way to win elections in the 2010s is by mobilizing your base. If you can get a high turnout from your base, it doesn't matter how many people the other party sways, they won't be able to counter you.
They were somewhat of a factor in 2016 according to polling, but realistically, how many people actually didn't know who they were voting for in that election?
I'm concerned that this impeachment just ends up incensing trump voters and mobilizing them in a way that a ho hum regular run of the mill incumbent election wouldn't.
So this depends on context. This becomes more and more true the larger the electoral group is. So it is truest in Presidential contests. It is also very true for Senate and Governor's races,...
I think we've seen in the past few elections that swing voters don't matter nearly as much as we used to think, and there really aren't as many of them as was once thought.
So this depends on context. This becomes more and more true the larger the electoral group is. So it is truest in Presidential contests. It is also very true for Senate and Governor's races, though less so. It becomes less and less true the smaller the constituency though. There are plenty of swing voters at the congressional level, but the districts themselves are so intensely gerrymandered that they get diluted out of every race. And once your at local politics it starts to get pretty tenuous and even the high level party ideology at that point starts to get fuzzy, especially in one-party states.
It won't matter for three reasons: House Republicans have voted entirely on party lines against Trump's impeachment. The Republican controlled Senate will undoubtedly do the same and not remove...
It won't matter for three reasons:
House Republicans have voted entirely on party lines against Trump's impeachment. The Republican controlled Senate will undoubtedly do the same and not remove Trump from power. If the Senate actually forgoes the Republican Party line and convicts Trump, I will genuinely be speechless.
If American voters didn't care about Trump's bigotry, narcissism, shady backroom deals and all the xenophobic things he's said about various minorities during his 2016 campaign, they aren't going to care about him being Putin's lap-dog.
The Democrats don't really have any good options going into 2020. When Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bloomberg are your best options, you have no chance of standing up against a boisterous celebrity figure like Trump. Sanders is too old to run and Biden is not only too old himself but will also have a lot of dirt dug up against him that could harm his campaign. And don't even get me started on Andrew Yang's chances of winning the nomination.
Can someone explain how this is going to change anything in practice, realistically? Symbolically I totally understand this to be significant. But, at this point, I wouldn't be surprised if this...
Can someone explain how this is going to change anything in practice, realistically? Symbolically I totally understand this to be significant. But, at this point, I wouldn't be surprised if this somehow blows up in the Dems faces and Trump gets re-elected. Is there anything really stopping that possibility?
If Trump gets re-elected, his supporters are inevitably going to point to everything Democrats did in the last 4 years and shout "this is why Trump won again!". Including not just impeachment but...
If Trump gets re-elected, his supporters are inevitably going to point to everything Democrats did in the last 4 years and shout "this is why Trump won again!". Including not just impeachment but the Mueller investigation & report, whoever the Democratic nominee is, and whatever scandals happen between now and next November.
At this point I'm OK with doing the right thing and not worrying overmuch about the electoral consequences it'll have a year from now.
An impeached/convicted president is still able to run for re-election IIRC, unless he is forbidden from participating in the 2020 election when he faces Senate verdict in January. But yes, this is...
An impeached/convicted president is still able to run for re-election IIRC, unless he is forbidden from participating in the 2020 election when he faces Senate verdict in January. But yes, this is more of a symbolic moment for the history books than anything else.
I have a dark-horse theory that some Republican senators might not actually be friends with Trump (they didn't like him before and he's not exactly making things easy for them) and might secretly...
I have a dark-horse theory that some Republican senators might not actually be friends with Trump (they didn't like him before and he's not exactly making things easy for them) and might secretly favor a chance to be rid of him, but won't say anything against him ahead of time.
I don't have any actual evidence of that, and I don't think surprising reversals (betrayals) happen like that very often in politics, but they'll have the chance.
They are all in on Trump whether they like him or not. They have had innumerable chances already to show some backbone and even the safest of them (Romney, Cruz, Rubio) have failed. They know...
I have a dark-horse theory that some Republican senators might not actually be friends with Trump (they didn't like him before and he's not exactly making things easy for them) and might secretly favor a chance to be rid of him, but won't say anything against him ahead of time.
They are all in on Trump whether they like him or not. They have had innumerable chances already to show some backbone and even the safest of them (Romney, Cruz, Rubio) have failed. They know they've been riding the tiger all this time to stay in power and if they try to get off now they get eaten. Nobody is going to break unless there is a big shake-up to the composition of the Senate Republican leadership like McConnell would have a heart attack or Lindsay Graham would have his open-secret of a sex scandal finally break.
And his supporters don’t give a flying fuck. They still say in social media that Democrats and the “political stablishment/deep state” are trying to destroy this good man. I don’t know how people...
And his supporters don’t give a flying fuck.
They still say in social media that Democrats and the “political stablishment/deep state” are trying to destroy this good man.
I don’t know how people will understand and probably they wonder the same:
“Why fucking idiot liberals don’t get it?”
How can we improve things?
No matter how terrible is the next thing they discover a Republican or Trump did, they just don’t care!
I feel hopeless sometimes.
I can watch Fox and not turn into a valueless Trump supporter. If it was a "trap", it's such a stupid and obvious trap adn it also seems awfully good at ensnaring people that were already rabidly...
I can watch Fox and not turn into a valueless Trump supporter. If it was a "trap", it's such a stupid and obvious trap adn it also seems awfully good at ensnaring people that were already rabidly racist.
More sources are good, but there needs to be some curation and comment. Dumping 50 links of headlines copy pasted from another megathread or grabbed headlines from search results without...
More sources are good, but there needs to be some curation and comment. Dumping 50 links of headlines copy pasted from another megathread or grabbed headlines from search results without additional info isn't useful. Maybe the breaking story, a small selection from the Big Trusted Orgs (Times, WSJ, CNN, Fox, etc.), and then only additional sources that bring something unique, with each link showing source showing the source and why it's included. e.g.
[NYT] House vote to impeach trump succeeds
[Fox] Trump has been impeached
[WSJ] Trump was impeached
[NPR] Impeachment of trump (Includes info about X's vote)
[The Week] Trump's Impeachment (Discusses impact on Y)
As a curious bystander I wonder is it feasible that the republican majority in the senate will actual find him guilty? My vague understanding is that there will be a trial in the senate where they...
As a curious bystander I wonder is it feasible that the republican majority in the senate will actual find him guilty? My vague understanding is that there will be a trial in the senate where they will vote on a verdict.
Is all this more of a tactical move from the democrats to gain a senate majority by making it harder for the acquitting senators to get reelected?
We need twenty republican senators and all of the democratic and independent senators to get a guilty verdict. This is really about getting those republicans to cross party lines on this issue....
We need twenty republican senators and all of the democratic and independent senators to get a guilty verdict. This is really about getting those republicans to cross party lines on this issue. Last I heard there were five, maybe six willing to do it.
If the impeachment vote were a secret ballot, so that no one could tell which republicans crossed the line, they might do it. They don't like Trump either. There's no way in hell they'll go on the record as impeaching him, though, because for most of them that's a political death sentence which will cost them reelection.
The senate would have to vote to change their own rules to allow a secret ballot, which they can do - but it's likely Mitch will shut down any attempt to do that because he knows it might get Trump impeached.
I've considered this impeachment process to be a giant nothingburger from day one and so far I've seen literally nothing to change my mind. This has never been about the facts, it's just a giant political distraction at the exact worst time possible for the democrats while they try to choose a presidential candidate.
It's their Constitutional obligation to impeach upon evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors. I don't think you need to go any more 4D chess than that. They've been dithering on doing their jobs...
Is all this more of a tactical move from the democrats to gain a senate majority by making it harder for the acquitting senators to get reelected?
It's their Constitutional obligation to impeach upon evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors. I don't think you need to go any more 4D chess than that. They've been dithering on doing their jobs for a while now, but it got bad enough that they couldn't dodge it any longer. The congressional elections of 2018 were largely about having people in place to hold the President accountable.
There is some talk that Pelosi might not forward the articles to the Senate. It would be ironic if she and the Dems in the House let it hang over his head and used it to build enthusiasm in their...
There is some talk that Pelosi might not forward the articles to the Senate. It would be ironic if she and the Dems in the House let it hang over his head and used it to build enthusiasm in their base for 2020 Senate elections - like Republicans did with the Supreme Court nomination in 2016. It's almost an insurance policy in that sense, because I personally don't doubt Trump will do anything he can to rig the elections. It will color the entire election, and if it doesn't get sent to the Senate he can't say he's been acquitted.
He doesn't really need a narrative to spin his base up, and I'm not sure the Democrats are sufficiently off book and/or ride or die enough to pull a similar stunt to withholding Scalia's seat.
He doesn't really need a narrative to spin his base up, and I'm not sure the Democrats are sufficiently off book and/or ride or die enough to pull a similar stunt to withholding Scalia's seat.
Here's the Axios article too, which has a decent amount of info and is still being updated: https://www.axios.com/trump-impeached-house-of-representatives-a685e463-57be-4b1f-a015-439234165db5.html
This feels right. It also feels like it might be a huge strategic mistake, and I'm worried.
Given how unexpected (at least to me) it was to see him win in 2016, I question all of my assumptions about what makes someone electable/unelectable and how all of the myriad of factors contribute to how 2020 will go. Russian influence campaigns, Fox news, Democratic party internal politics, etc etc.
There are a lot of reasons to think that he'll be swept out of office in 2020, but then I thought that there wasn't a chance in hell that idiot on an escalator would last a month in the Republican primary. So I would love to be convinced that he's on his way out regardless of how the Senate trial goes. A lot of my uncertainty comes because there's still some months to go before we know who the Democratic candidate will be, and how they'll stack up in a direct head to head vs Trump.
Agreed, there would always be spin. However I worry that it's going to be worse because he's now impeached, but the House is going to "aquit" him. Which will be played from now until next November as proof that there wasn't anything substantial to the impeachment charges. And he gets to keep playing the victim.
I guess it's to much to hope for that there's anything Trump could possibly do to turn his base against him. Hell I wonder if he could do it if he tried.
I believe there might be one thing that can: A great recession on the scale of 2008 or 1929. Many Republicans praise trump for high employment, high gdp growth and being business-friendly so presumably if the industries and small businesses Republican voters work on suddenly come crashing down (which is likelier and will turn out worse for them because more Republicans work on jobs which are more easily automated, harder to replace when lost due to the huge physical space they take up and already in a downswing due to newer technology) and they lose their jobs or their companies go bankrupt because of something during the trump presidency they might just realize trump's policies aren't for them but for their bosses and that a safety net just in case this happened could have been useful. They can't blame us because we lost power 4 years ago and enacted all the changes they thought necessary and blocked all that did not and the left doesn't really influence the economy and they shut off the immigrants a while ago. Just my opinion though.
Here's the thing to understand about Trump. He is always going to be the worst. He will always do whatever crimes or corruption he can get away with and he will always heap as much abuse on detractors as he can. He can't get "worse" since he is already maximally bad. The only things that can change are what limiters you put up around him and his badness. So he gets worse without censure.
The only thing that can go badly is that we're in the middle of a full blown Constitutional Crisis and it's hard to say what happens when the Republicans collude with the White House to undermine the trial. But that's not a Trump thing, that'
A competent Trump that didn't polarised the left and was good at negotiating would have far, far worse. Imagine who you're going to deal with in 2024 not that the bar has been set so low.
The left will be too busy patting themselves on the back to vote, because they either spent the last 4 years undoing the shit Trump did, or they finally outlasted Trump, and in sweeps Palpatine.
The American Oligarchy is in full control.
There can't be a competent Trump who doesn't polarize the left. The entire reason Trumpists like Trump is because their most deeply held political motivation is to "own the libs." They love him because he polarizes the left. If he didn't do that, they wouldn't love him.
The American conservative movement is largely just the nation's unfiltered id all hopped up on paranoia and narcissism. The reason Trump is such a perfect avatar for them is because he is a creature who is all id, paranoia, and narcissism. The idea of an Emperor Palpatine version of Trump is certainly scary, but it is highly doubtful that such a person can exist and gain influence through any of the paths available in contemporary American society. You see it across the board. All the hard right wingers across the democratic countries are just total clowns.
The closest to what you're talking about would be a character like India's Modi, who is actually fairly competent. But it's kind of a stretch to say he's owned by the oligarchy since he's just as likely to piss them off as help them out.
Senate, not House. I think they will talk it up but I don't see it as having much effect on the election.
I think we've seen in the past few elections that swing voters don't matter nearly as much as we used to think, and there really aren't as many of them as was once thought. The way to win elections in the 2010s is by mobilizing your base. If you can get a high turnout from your base, it doesn't matter how many people the other party sways, they won't be able to counter you.
They were somewhat of a factor in 2016 according to polling, but realistically, how many people actually didn't know who they were voting for in that election?
I'm concerned that this impeachment just ends up incensing trump voters and mobilizing them in a way that a ho hum regular run of the mill incumbent election wouldn't.
So this depends on context. This becomes more and more true the larger the electoral group is. So it is truest in Presidential contests. It is also very true for Senate and Governor's races, though less so. It becomes less and less true the smaller the constituency though. There are plenty of swing voters at the congressional level, but the districts themselves are so intensely gerrymandered that they get diluted out of every race. And once your at local politics it starts to get pretty tenuous and even the high level party ideology at that point starts to get fuzzy, especially in one-party states.
It won't matter for three reasons:
House Republicans have voted entirely on party lines against Trump's impeachment. The Republican controlled Senate will undoubtedly do the same and not remove Trump from power. If the Senate actually forgoes the Republican Party line and convicts Trump, I will genuinely be speechless.
If American voters didn't care about Trump's bigotry, narcissism, shady backroom deals and all the xenophobic things he's said about various minorities during his 2016 campaign, they aren't going to care about him being Putin's lap-dog.
The Democrats don't really have any good options going into 2020. When Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bloomberg are your best options, you have no chance of standing up against a boisterous celebrity figure like Trump. Sanders is too old to run and Biden is not only too old himself but will also have a lot of dirt dug up against him that could harm his campaign. And don't even get me started on Andrew Yang's chances of winning the nomination.
In my country impeachment entails removal from office. So I was very happy for a while, and a bit less happy when I learned the difference.
Can someone explain how this is going to change anything in practice, realistically? Symbolically I totally understand this to be significant. But, at this point, I wouldn't be surprised if this somehow blows up in the Dems faces and Trump gets re-elected. Is there anything really stopping that possibility?
If Trump gets re-elected, his supporters are inevitably going to point to everything Democrats did in the last 4 years and shout "this is why Trump won again!". Including not just impeachment but the Mueller investigation & report, whoever the Democratic nominee is, and whatever scandals happen between now and next November.
At this point I'm OK with doing the right thing and not worrying overmuch about the electoral consequences it'll have a year from now.
Especially since the vast majority of voters who actually decide the president don't have a memory longer than a couple of months.
I feel like if you've been impeached you shouldn't be able to get a second term, but what do I know
An impeached/convicted president is still able to run for re-election IIRC, unless he is forbidden from participating in the 2020 election when he faces Senate verdict in January. But yes, this is more of a symbolic moment for the history books than anything else.
I have a dark-horse theory that some Republican senators might not actually be friends with Trump (they didn't like him before and he's not exactly making things easy for them) and might secretly favor a chance to be rid of him, but won't say anything against him ahead of time.
I don't have any actual evidence of that, and I don't think surprising reversals (betrayals) happen like that very often in politics, but they'll have the chance.
They are all in on Trump whether they like him or not. They have had innumerable chances already to show some backbone and even the safest of them (Romney, Cruz, Rubio) have failed. They know they've been riding the tiger all this time to stay in power and if they try to get off now they get eaten. Nobody is going to break unless there is a big shake-up to the composition of the Senate Republican leadership like McConnell would have a heart attack or Lindsay Graham would have his open-secret of a sex scandal finally break.
It's highly unlikely, but then again, there are quite a few republican congressman opting not to run for re-election
And his supporters don’t give a flying fuck.
They still say in social media that Democrats and the “political stablishment/deep state” are trying to destroy this good man.
I don’t know how people will understand and probably they wonder the same:
“Why fucking idiot liberals don’t get it?”
How can we improve things?
No matter how terrible is the next thing they discover a Republican or Trump did, they just don’t care!
I feel hopeless sometimes.
Maybe the media managed to brainwash them?
There’s also rich brilliant assholes like Cliff Asness supporting him.
I can watch Fox and not turn into a valueless Trump supporter. If it was a "trap", it's such a stupid and obvious trap adn it also seems awfully good at ensnaring people that were already rabidly racist.
Side note: I don't understand the purpose of that long list of headline links without commentary. Isn't it just a bunch of duplicate articles?
More sources are good, but there needs to be some curation and comment. Dumping 50 links of headlines copy pasted from another megathread or grabbed headlines from search results without additional info isn't useful. Maybe the breaking story, a small selection from the Big Trusted Orgs (Times, WSJ, CNN, Fox, etc.), and then only additional sources that bring something unique, with each link showing source showing the source and why it's included. e.g.
As a curious bystander I wonder is it feasible that the republican majority in the senate will actual find him guilty? My vague understanding is that there will be a trial in the senate where they will vote on a verdict.
Is all this more of a tactical move from the democrats to gain a senate majority by making it harder for the acquitting senators to get reelected?
We need twenty republican senators and all of the democratic and independent senators to get a guilty verdict. This is really about getting those republicans to cross party lines on this issue. Last I heard there were five, maybe six willing to do it.
If the impeachment vote were a secret ballot, so that no one could tell which republicans crossed the line, they might do it. They don't like Trump either. There's no way in hell they'll go on the record as impeaching him, though, because for most of them that's a political death sentence which will cost them reelection.
The senate would have to vote to change their own rules to allow a secret ballot, which they can do - but it's likely Mitch will shut down any attempt to do that because he knows it might get Trump impeached.
I've considered this impeachment process to be a giant nothingburger from day one and so far I've seen literally nothing to change my mind. This has never been about the facts, it's just a giant political distraction at the exact worst time possible for the democrats while they try to choose a presidential candidate.
It's their Constitutional obligation to impeach upon evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors. I don't think you need to go any more 4D chess than that. They've been dithering on doing their jobs for a while now, but it got bad enough that they couldn't dodge it any longer. The congressional elections of 2018 were largely about having people in place to hold the President accountable.
There is some talk that Pelosi might not forward the articles to the Senate. It would be ironic if she and the Dems in the House let it hang over his head and used it to build enthusiasm in their base for 2020 Senate elections - like Republicans did with the Supreme Court nomination in 2016. It's almost an insurance policy in that sense, because I personally don't doubt Trump will do anything he can to rig the elections. It will color the entire election, and if it doesn't get sent to the Senate he can't say he's been acquitted.
He doesn't really need a narrative to spin his base up, and I'm not sure the Democrats are sufficiently off book and/or ride or die enough to pull a similar stunt to withholding Scalia's seat.