3693

They will, of course, do that anyway regardless. They already are. Indeed, they have been doing just that since the beginning.

3694

John Heilemann made the point the day the report dropped and Barr released his “summary” is the day any energy for impeachment stopped, arguing that Democrat’s failure to act with sufficient ruthlessness as Republicans might to counter it sealed the deal, today’s hearing notwithstanding. What Heilemann fails to mention is how the media helped Barr (and trump) with the perception that the Mueller report let trump off the hook. Barr’s gambit worked (even some posters here bought it.)

It’s sad commentary that since Mueller’s testimony today wasn’t performance art much of the mainstream media did a collective yawn, eagerly awaiting their next hot take on how politically savvy trump’s bigotry is. The argument to wait is as weak as the argument that the Senate won’t convict. As @scottagibson points out, it takes leadership to sway public opinion (in which case the Senate’s failure to convict becomes a political liability.) Democratic leadership has failed to do that - they’re reacting to polls, not shaping them. Instead the House has been content with passing ‘messaging’ bills, bills that are completely ignored.

And here we come to the crux of the matter. How does this make these Democrats any different from Republicans who are afraid to break from trump? If an impeachment inquiry had started, all the evidence of obstruction and conspiracy would have been on full display. Instead Barr and trump’s lawyers have successfully thwarted ‘regular order’ simply by saying no. They could not have done that otherwise. So instead for the next sixteen months, all we’re going to hear about the election is immigration and socialism.

TL, DR: The impeachment ship has sailed.

Some grist for the mill:

This is Going to Get Worse

(Edit: To be fair to Pelosi, this is not solely on her. If she can’t get her caucus to support an impeachment inquiry then there’s little she can do but deflect.)

3695

I think Pelosi believes that she can’t risk starting the investigation because it will quickly become obvious that an impeachment vote is warranted, and that vote will fail in the House. Not the Senate. The House.

I suspect that she is right. There aren’t enough Democrats in seats that are safe enough to roll those dice.

3696

At a more meta level I worry that I’m approaching the point of losing confidence the Dems have the ability and willingness to win the big picture fight and save our country. I’m not sure where mindset leads, so I’m trying to retain at least a minimal level of, if not optimism, at least stubborn determination. But I have to say, it’s hard to maintain determination in the light of the overall performance of the national Dems.

3697

The more I think on it, the more this seems to be the missing puzzle piece. The disparity between the two wings of the party is larger than I thought.

I think it was the slow walk on getting trump’s tax returns that got me to that point. That, and they were so easily stonewalled. I’m not sure if my expectations were just too high or if Democrats fumbled the ball. In any case it’s rather dispiriting and it feels like the normalization of trump is complete.

3698

Vulnerable House Members in purple districts were elected by their constituents in 2018 for a reason: To do something about Trump’s abuses. The best way to get them re-elected might be to actually deliver on that charge. It’s possible that Pelosi doesn’t have the votes to pass articles of impeachment now, but she doesn’t need the votes to pass articles of impeachment now. They just need to 1) start an impeachment inquiry, and 2) stop openly discounting the prospect of impeaching him.

And if she can’t get the votes to authorize an inquiry now, then she’s a terrible Speaker and that’s actually the problem.

3699

It cuts both ways, unfortunately. Pelosi also knows that impeachment hearings mean that Trump will never ever agree to sign legislation that the Dems support. While there’s now not a lot of agreement between the parties, impeachment essentially shuts down the government for the next 18 months. If you can’t even get the Dems in the House to support it enough to pass the articles, then everybody loses.

I agree, however, that an impeachment inquiry should begin right now. Pelosi’s job, right now, is to get out there and convince enough Dems in the House to support it.

3700

I think this is true whether there are impeachment hearings or not. The Dems have accomplished nothing legislatively since taking control of the House, have they? Yes, I know they are passing symbolic bills, but the symbolic bills themselves are weak sauce — a bill to raise the minimum wage to $15 in 2025 is hardly a great symbol of what Dems could do if the voters gave them more power.

3701

Atrios is always right.

3702

It looks like Mr. Tribe was subsequently heartened by Schiff’s questioning:

His currently pinned tweet is something I’m down with:

3703

Adam Schiff was remarkably good and effective yesterday. It helped that he was on the side of right, but he more or less single-handedly made the impeachment case.

3704

More from Atrios:

3705

But how would the impeachment inquiry change that? Why wouldn’t the answer to subpoena’s, etc. not still be “lol fuck you”?

I get the argument that it’s the right thing to do, but what in practice will be different than the 11 or so current ongoing investigations other than the name of the committee?

3706

There is an argument that the force of subpoenas is greater in an impeachment inquiry because impeachment is an articulated Article 1 power of Congress. Trump’s own lawyers made that argument in the tax return subpoena case, saying that they probably could not resist a subpoena in an impeachment inquiry but could otherwise if the subpoena had (in their words) no legitimate legislative purpose. I don’t subscribe to that argument and have no doubt Trump’s lawyers will reverse themselves when it becomes convenient, but it’s certainly possible Congress could get stronger subpoena support from the courts.

And it’s more about the aggressive nature of the proceeding. Atrios is right: What Democrats are doing now is slow-walking these other ‘investigations’ as if they want credit for them without actually being aggressive at all. It takes them months to decide to try to enforce a subpoena in a court, and then they usually end up making a deal like the Hope Hicks deal, where she shows up and basically tells them to fuck off in private where no voters can see it happen.

Edit: Beyond that, the status quo is a messaging disaster. The Dems’ message is that Trump is a traitor who used a foreign government to illegally help him get elected and then used his power to obstruct any investigation into what happened. He is a liar and a crook who did all the crimes, they say, and now we will sit back and do nothing about it while he does more crimes.

3707

I think Chuck Todd and others weren’t too far off on their hot take yesterday that, while Dems got what they wanted all neatly wrapped up in Schiff’s 5 minutes, the entire rest of the hearing was an optical disaster.

Today we have Trump and the GOP crowing from every rooftop (with the media’s near sycophantic assistance) that Mueller was “low energy” and “unconvincing”. They’re tossing around ridiculous phrases like “presumption of innocence” and using Mueller’s reluctance to defend or elaborate on sections of his report as grounds to prove Trump “won”. THAT is the message being broadcast to America this morning.

Meanwhile, the Democrats got exactly the confirmation they needed during Schiff’s excellent examination of Mueller. Did Russia interfere with our elections? Yes. Was the Trump campaign not only cognizant of this fact, but complicit in it? Yes. Did they obstruct justice in the course of your investigation? Yes. Those facts, backed by all the evidence of the investigation, are more than enough grounds for impeachment. The proper counter to the GOP message today would have been to announce a special impeachment inquiry into election interference and obstruction. Even if the inquiry never actually began, just the announcement that Dems were moving forward would counter the terrible optics of what happened yesterday, and probably freak Trump and friends out enough that they would further soil themselves publically.

Will impeachment happen? No. As stated in many posts above, the support probably isn’t there even in the House, where cowardly Democratic reps (who somehow can’t see that they were elected precisely to do exactly this) seem to think that they’ll lose their seats if they go up against Trump. Even if it passed the house, the corrupt GOP Senate would strike it down, vindicating Trump in time for 2020 and probably handing him another last minute thin margin victory.

However, the object here should be to keep Trump and the GOP scared and distracted. If they THINK impeachment is still on the table, if they KNOW investigations are ongoing, if they FEAR that more evidence of corruption, collusion and obstruction could surface, they, and especially Trump, will continue to flail about, making more mistakes, and pandering even more loudly to the staunchest members of their base, which drives away more independents and fence-sitters and moves the needle in the right direction for 2020.

Sitting on our hands doing nothing, “slow walking” an impotent set of investigations nobody even knows are happening…all that does is give Republicans and Trump a win. It allows them to relax, gaslight the shit out of the entire situation unopposed, and set them up to gain more traction and support for 2020.

I’m beginning to have my serious doubts that the current crop of Democrats, Schiff excluded, have what it takes to win in 2020. They don’t seem to understand there is even a battle to fight, much less how to use the weapons available to them to fight it, and their grasp of how the media influences everything is pointedly lacking.

3708

This is pretty wild. Seems like someone is publicly trolling the president.

Side by side comparison:

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3709

There’s basically no reason to assume that a perfunctory acquittal in the Senate will benefit the GOP in the next election. Voters already believe Trump is guilty, and that sort of naked whitewashing is at least as likely to be punished as it is rewarded.

Edit: The only comparison we have to go on is Clinton, and in that case the public thought the charges themselves were trumped up and unfair; and in any event, the GOP did not actually suffer a dramatic setback by failing to convict Clinton.

3710

“Optics.” Sometimes I think this country deserves its fate.

3711

Come the revolution, we’re going to need a lot more lampposts.

3712

Do they though? I mean, sure, reasonably intelligent people who bother to do a minimum amount of fact checking believe this to be the case, but as we’ve seen proven again and again in the past few years, a sizeable portion of American voters don’t fall into that category. Also, naked whitewashing seems to have been a very effective tactic for Republicans lately as well.

Given the dramatic increase in partisan politics, social and mainstream media influence and indirect foreign interference in our political system these days, I do not think you can reliably compare anything happening today to the political climate of 25 years ago. The GOP knows the corner it has painted itself into, it understands that the party only has a reliable base of less than 25% of the country. So it’s tactics become a combination of rallying that base along with disenfranchising as many other voters as possible, up to and including voter suppression, accepting aid from foreign actors, and outright lying to America. We have never been this far down the rabbit hole before.