Which evil thing is Trump doing despite the best efforts of his party to prevent him? I think the answer is ‘nothing’. I can’t think of one evil thing he is doing that they could not effectively prevent, yet they do not intervene. They are enabling the evil things he does. Why is that not evil?
I believe that things really fell apart when Boehner and Obama ALMOST reached a grand bargain on the budget, and then it all fell apart. And both sides told different stories about what happened.
I dunno how accurate this retelling is, but here’s a piece from the NYT about it.
Most of this is the kind of thing that FOX News does so well. They take a quote out of context and play it to the end of time to demonize Democrats. Basically FOX’s m.o. at this point is just to dig dirt on Democrats and replay it 24 hours a day.
Obama probably did say something like that in a news brief but it was probably proceeded by a question like “McConnell says that you Mr. President are going to have to do what he says from now on.” and then they pulled the reaction quote out of context to be played ad infinitum.
- Many in the party were against the detaining of the children, and spoke openly about it
- A good number where against him speaking ill of Mccain as well
- A good number where against his hedging against white supremist
- Many of in the party were shocked he didn’t call out Russia and they passed their own sanctions
And the list goes on…
Trump is attempting to dismantle that existing party and force out the people who call him out, and use the existing political tools like partisan narratives, scandal overload, and normalization to get as much as he can get done in his position of power
The one thing you are right about, why not seek impeachment? Probably because the decent minded folks know they will only get one shot at it, and just waiting for the political winds to surge in a direction that will a decent chance of that occurring. Though, I cant think anyone is thrilled with the idea of Pence in the presidents chair…
Deals break down all the time. They’re not norm-destroying events.
Norm-destroying events are things like making secret deals to sell arms to our enemies in order to generate slush funds you can use to fund illegal wars, or launching nonstop spurious investigations for the purpose of finding any pretext to drive a President from power, or shutting down the government in order to force the other party to adopt your platform, or secretly carrying out a program of kidnapping and torture, or announcing that you see your job as destroying the government of your opponent by opposing anything he proposes without exception, or stealing from a duly elected sitting president his power to appoint a replacement Supreme Court Justice without regard to who he nominates.
You’re drawing your line in the wrong place, and probably not coincidentally because it’s a more amenable line for both-sidesism.
Put another way, they did absolutely nothing of substance in any of these cases. Right?
Passing sanctions and limiting the presidents power to ignore congress about Russia is not “nothing of substance”
What can congress do about a president spouting bullshit, its about policy they can take action.
GOP wanted tax breaks they got it. They were split on ACA, so they didn’t do anything there of significance. It was mainly the president, doing ad hoc defunding and through action destabilizing and sabotaging ACA that it got really hurt.
They don’t want the Tariff wars (and said so) but I think they believe it will blow up in his face, and give them a reason to act.
The President simply ignored their sanctions bill. He’s still ignoring it. What are they doing about that?
The absolute bare minimum they could have done about the separating-children-from-their-families bit is to pass a resolution of censure. They could then threaten to draw up articles of impeachment if the President didn’t immediately cease a policy that so transparently violated fundamental principles of human rights.*
Of course, all they actually did was some rhetorical pearl-clutching, and only a few of them, and only for one news cycle.
*One may reply that this is a political impossibility given the current GOP, which I would respond is precisely the point.
What can they do?
Declare war on him? That will be a fine constitutional crisis.
They are playing politics, waiting for him to sink himself with his own chaos and then take action when they have a goof chance of it accomplishing something.
Others like Nunes are bootlickers, other are like Trump only caring what they get for themselves, but I believe on both sides their are people that are serving and trying to do the right thing. The president is a walking crisis to America and some like Flake are walking out with dignity intact, other like Collins are just waiting for the opportunity to do some actual good - verse vain gesture of defiance.
And the consequence of this is that history will record they were spineless lickspittles, which they are.
They have actual powers! Any two of McCain / Flake / Collins / Murkowski / Corker could simply have said we will hold all of your nominations until you do X. They don’t even need the party to make that work, just one other ‘principled’ partner. Even if they were alone, they could still do it with anonymous holds, and at least force the party to call a vote over their obstructive bodies.
Instead of issuing ‘concerned’ tweets, any one of them could say ‘I’m going to caucus with the Democrats.’ There’s a lot they could do. Instead, they tweet.
In addition to what the politicians themselves could and should do, Republicans across the country could be calling their Senators and Congressmen to demand that they take action. Are they? Or are most Republicans cool with all this because they think they’re getting what they want? If there was a huge Republican outcry against all this horrific shit then you can bet your ass that the GOP would actually do something. But no one on the Republican side actually cares.
That’s central to my point. People are buying these partisan narratives, that are not accurate and intentionally being duped, left or right. Its more impactful right with the right, because they hold all the power, but its just as inaccurate/unbalanced when the other side has control. Well, not exactly, because right now a criminal holds that office and doing a good job of manipulating all sides into inaction, and using the unrealistic protections of his office to full effect. I’m sorry a bad president should NOT be above the law no matter who they are, and they should have the ability to pardon people that represent a clear conflict of interest in criminal or nation interest matters…
That’s a fair point, a good question, I’d like to hear there response to that one. The difference, I’m not going to assume there isn’t a good reason, but if there isn’t, I’m there with you…they might be good people…but their inaction as leaders allowed evil…if you will.
Well, I mean, I did. And then I left the party.
In some ways, McCain reminds me of things I tell folks who hated Scalia, or hate Ginsburg… as they tend to do one or the other. But those two justices were good friends. And that, to me, suggests that there was more to both of them than what the partisan hacks would have us believe.
Likewise, with McCain, he was a very good friend of a number of Democratic icons, like Biden, and Kennedy. That suggests to me that there’s something more to him than what some folks here would like to imagine.
Obama was awesome, but Biden by his side will always be perfect.
And we definitely need more like you. I’m not registered as a Democrat but would do the same if the entire party went the way of the GOP.