4757

I agree, but not for an FBI briefing. The manner in which I agree is under normal leadership the President would have addressed the nation. This of course was not that.

4758

Tell me how we could’ve gotten an article of impeachment voted for and sent to the Senate with rules that would allow a full trial with witnesses called and that allows POTUS a full defense as he’s allowed constitutionally and how all of those things would be done before January 20, 2021 at noon ET. Even if they’d have started on the morning of January 7, 2021 with an article of impeachment.

4759

There’s a massive gap among posters here in terms of faith in our remaining institutions, and it’s gotten wider (understandably) over the past week. I’m not totally sure where I fall on that spectrum, but said institutions have certainly taken a drubbing lately and my confidence is certainly at an all time low.

4760

If you’re upset that there’s no fast way to remove an unstable, freakshow president from office within a week…well, the framers of the Constitution really didn’t see the need for that coming.

Impeachment is not meant to remove a president from office quickly, and that is by design.

4761

In fairness to the framers, the electoral college (as originally conceived) was kinda supposed to stop that from happening in the first place.

4762

Yup - they built several mechanisms into the process, the Electoral College principly, to prevent someone like Trump from being elected.

We fucked it up.

Edit: vinrath: JINX

4763

The media i listed above does not.give.a shit enough to break away from dr Phil to inform or update the citizenry of the official status of the investigation, however light on specifics it may have been. And it pisses me off

4764

I think that’s a great extra point. Not only is Mitch saying they won’t take it up until the 20th anyways, if the goal is really to get him removed and barred from office in the future, they really need a Democrat controlled Senate to set the rules that allow really bringing up everything on the Senate floor to put pressure to get the 17 Republican votes they need. You don’t want it like last time where the Senate rules were specifically crafted to keep evidence out of the Senate.

4765

The schedule to vote tomorrow was revealed several days ago, wasn’t it? It’s not a new development today.

Honestly, I can’t see any reason to be incensed.

4766

I’ll note that if McCarthy and McConnell stepped up to a podium and said, we want him gone, he’d be impeached already.
This is going as fast as it can with one party actively pushing it, and the other doing nothing to stop it - but aren’t helping it along either.

4767

I don’t think anyone should tell you how to feel. You’re not wrong to feel incensed.

But since the impeachment is political theater that won’t result in Trump’s removal anyway, I suspect that some orchestration is going on so that a political narrative can be generated from events.

4768

Yes exactly.

If this was 1974 and there were some senators with some courage in the GOP caucuses in the House and Senate, you could move along faster for sure. Mitch and McCarthy throwing up roadblock and facing very little in the way of blowback for it doesn’t help.

4769

I mean, all of this is happening because the institutions…were faithful. None of the election fraud bullshit was taken seriously by any institution, and Trump as a result tried to stage a coup, and the coup failed because none of the institutions would back it, and now the institutions are moving to punish Trump.

4770

Seems to me that all of that has to do with the Senate. If the only reason for the House to vote on impeachment is to get Trump actually booted out of office before the 20th, then they probably shouldn’t bother. If impeachment is just a thing that they’d like to get on record at some point, then schedule it all for June or something. If the point is to say that Trump deserves to be impeached regardless of his remaining days and that the Senate ought to take up the question as soon as possible, then there’s no reason to be having a vote trying to tell a different branch of government how to handle the situation. Use that time to vote on the articles you had yesterday and use the rest of Trump’s time in office to shame the Congresspeople who didn’t vote for it and the Senate leadership that’s slowing it down.

4771

The incense thread is over there:

4772

They are quite clearly using this time to get support from some House Republicans, and that seems to be working. The passage of time and the worse and worse revelations are pressuring some GOP Reps to vote for impeachment, and there is little reason to shortcut that if it can’t result in a rapid conviction in the Senate anyway.

4773

It kind of seems like this was the reason they did this very limited press conference. They wanted to say that they were initially charging the misdemeanors but that they are working on the felonies. The felonies all have to go through a Grand Jury. I don’t know how many Grand Juries DC has running at one time (I would bet they will add some but that takes time too), but when I was on one in Chicago we had 4 or 5 total running and each Jury meets for just one day a week normally. For like all the Federal crimes in the Northern District of Illinois. So even assuming they have all the evidence and paperwork needed for an indictment ready, they now have to get all those cases through the Grand Juries whose time is normally scheduled months in advance. AUSAs will like horse trade for 15 minutes of time. This is a super well oiled machine and everything will get expedited and worked through the system but you just aren’t going to see hundreds of federal felonies charged in a few days.

4774

That’s a good point – is the purpose of impeachment:

  1. to get Trump out as soon as possible? They should have voted on the 7th.
  2. to make a point that what Trump did was impeachable? And possibly keep him from getting elected in the future? It doesn’t matter when you do it. Take your time and do it as right as possible.

I’m on team “2”, here (since Trump isn’t going anywhere before the 20th, just ask McConnell), but it’s true that they seem to be taking a middle ground, which doesn’t make much sense.

4775

In the framer’s time, how much damage could an unstable President really do given an extra week or two? Compared to now and access to drone strikes, the capability to deploy the US military globally very quickly, nuclear weapons, etc… the world is a different place these days.

4776

He could write very ill advised correspondence to France and then wait four weeks to get a response.