How is this a tangible argument considering the current behavior of the Democratic Party?
Bush won on a technicality. The Senate was tied and the House was near tied.
Failure to access Grand Jury materials weakens the potential to damage Trump in public hearings.
Oh, I want it all, Boo-boo kitty. But, I'm also of the mindset that if we got the latter (a big and loud investigation), not even red state Dems would vote against the former.
...He could do that even if we impeached him because he'd still be in office.
"Technicality" being a 5-4 bullshit SCOTUS decision, as I described above. He lost the popular vote and very likely lost FL if all the votes had been counted. He didn't win because the GOP had impeached Clinton. You're the one who drew a false connection between the two!
I really don't see where this confidence is coming from on the latter point... Or if you would even want that given the political implications.
If we don't impeach him now, we won't have a case to when he cheats and wins again.
And if we impeach him tomorrow....he can still cheat! This "he'll cheat if we don't impeach" thing makes zero sense. So we impeach him today. He cheats again and wins in 2020. We don't get to impeach again!
I think you've got to flesh out what it means to "preserve" the "power" of impeachment, then, because we might be thinking about them differently. It seems to me that if you care about the fact of there being this idea that Congress can check a president through the impeachment power, the last thing you want is a really definitive vote that says: no, as long as a president maintains a really low bar of support in the Senate he is completely untouchable. Right? Like, what you want is for impeachment to be seen as completely toothless and something that presidents shouldn't be scared of at all. The best outcome, from a norms-preserving perspective, would seem to be that you fail to have that definitive result for reasons that are at least facially unrelated to it being toothless. Even if bumbling incompetence is the reason that impeachment doesn't happen, that would seem to do a better job of preserving the idea that impeachment can be a check on a president than a definitive showing that impeachment is meaningless.
But we basically give approval by not doing anything about it.
Again, we passed a bill to protect our elections. It was the first bill the house passed. No, it's not getting approved by the Senate...but neither will impeachment. We have tried to secure our elections. Moscow Mitch refuses to cooperate. It's also REAL hard to sell "We're impeaching him so he can't cheat." That's just a terrible message and a real stinker of a plan.
See, here's the thing. I agree that it's easier for the GOP to sell their shit...because their voters are fucking morons. lol. Like, they're just not bright. They are spoon fed shit and they eat it up. Democrats are like herding cats. We have morals and principles so it's harder for us to take the blind trust we'll always support our guy/gal stance. So, my issue becomes you're (universal not coming for you specifically here) calling for us to run an impeachment that doesn't have the votes in the House, doesn't have public support, won't have media messaging support, doesn't have leadership support....and then just magically hoping that it'll turn out okay. I don't buy that. I don't trust the media to report this fairly, accurately or without bias.
Yeah, to be clear, I've been arguing that the impeachment argument is purely an argument about political tactics, but I'm not arguing that we should not impeach. There are reasons for and against, it's just that they're all to do with political strategy rather than Constitutional duty or whatever. I would say that political forecasting is sufficiently hard that no one should be very confident about what the effect of impeachment will be, and further I doubt that it will have a big impact either way. So as far as I'm concerned the House can go for it. Or not. I think that whether there is eventually an impeachment depends on Democrats in conservative districts being scared of primary challenges, and Pelosi isn't going to budge unless she's got the votes in the House.
It actually is for a lot of folks. Like, I'm sorry but I feel that folks feel so powerless that they just need something big and tangible to hold onto, and impeachment is the thing of the day. (Before this it was the Mueller report.) Like I've said before, Trump absolutely deserves to be impeached. But, like Gandalf told us, sometimes people don't get what they deserve. The moral imperative to impeach in this situation absolutely must be weighed against the potential political costs. I can't fault someone for doing the math differently than I do, but I certainly think there is ambiguity on how advantageous it would be. Also, AOC's assertion that Congress is basically as bad as Trump for not impeaching is horrible, and a clear example of what I mean. As is the constant complaining about Pelosi.
And I feel that a lot of folks who are chanting impeach impeach impeach are not reading the temperature of anyone who isn't incredibly online. Like...I hate that defense because it sounds like a cop-out, but it's really not. There is no majority in the country for impeachment. It's pretty toxic with independents. It's popular with partisans, of course, but that's neither here nor there. Your average John Q Public doesn't give two shits if we impeach Trump or not. Maybe they should, but they don't. So, the idea that "if we don't impeach everyone will stay home because they'll be super sad you guys" doesn't work on me.
are you actually just trolling the side you're ostensibly taking
Find 177 Republican House members to vote yes on an impeachment inquiry in 2019.
I mean if a question is framed:
