Happy Pearl Harbor Day! You probably should ask the Republicans who attacked us on that day because there’s a chance they will say it was Ukraine. Ukraine apparently attacked our elections in 2016, so President Trump did nothing wrong by yanking around their new president and trying mightily to extort political dirty tricks from him in exchange for American support.
On December 2, I asked why congressional Republicans weren’t asking the Democrats to allow a vote to censure the president as an alternative to impeaching him. Today, Politico reported on the responses they got when they asked Republicans this question directly.
A censure or sense of the Senate resolution to condemn the president has barely been discussed, according to interviews with more than a dozen Republican senators and House members. On the prospects of his conference supporting a censure or something similar, Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said simply, “I doubt it.”
Sen. Thune apparently has plenty of justification for his doubt.
“I’m not in favor of it,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said. “We’re going to wait and see what comes over here, but I haven’t heard anybody discuss it. I haven’t even thought about it until you raised it.”
“I don’t think the Democrats are going to offer that,” said Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio), a Judiciary Committee member who was around for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment. “Nor do I think there would be Republican support.”
They’re not talking about and they wouldn’t support it even if it was an option.
“The sides are in their bunkers, and I don’t see that as a likely outcome,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said of the GOP endorsing a reprimand short of impeachment.
I get that the Republicans feel like they’re in a war, but this seems like a pretty ridiculous position:
“There’s no point in censuring because [Trump] didn’t do anything wrong,” Rep. Roger Williams (R-Texas) said…
…Vice President Mike Pence attended a closed-door meeting with House Republicans ahead of an impeachment hearing Wednesday morning at which he urged them to stick together and thanked them for supporting the president.
Afterward, McCarthy — one of Trump’s top allies on Capitol Hill — said that even a handful of Democrats talking about censure “there’s no reason to impeach this president.”
“He’s done nothing wrong,” McCarthy said.
Typical of these kinds of articles, the explanation offered is one part fear of Trump and one part fear of the Republican base.
Trump has called a censure “unacceptable,” and any suggestion that he did anything wrong could provoke a volcanic reaction from the president. The conservative base would also revolt if Republican lawmakers embraced anything nearing Democrats’ contention that Trump abused his office…
…Putting any distance between the GOP and Trump would likely undermine efforts to defend his GOP majority, which is filled with members tying themselves closely to Trump.
Here’s what reporters are missing. Imagine if the Republicans agreed to censure the president and then lined up to sing his praises as he accepted their nomination for 2020. How would that look? How would they enjoy answering those questions?
This is the same reason the few, if any, Republicans will vote to impeach or convict him. If they knew he’d actually be removed from office and therefore banned from seeking office in the future, they’d have no big issue. The base would quickly refocus on helping the new nominee, and only a few diehards would stay home. But any Republican who voted to remove Trump from office would have an impossible time advocating for his reelection even after an acquittal.
In 1998, the Democrats asking for a censure vote against Bill Clinton did not face this dilemma. Clinton was already serving his second and final term. The Republicans can’t prevent Trump from winning the nomination unless they convict him, and that’s definitely their best option. But they’re not going to contemplate it until they feel like they have the numbers to actually pull it off. For now, they feel like they can’t admit he did anything wrong, even though that’s absurd.
For the Republicans in the Trump case, Justice is not only blind but has a bag over her head.
And the bag is underground.
I keep thinking that Ford nearly won in 1976. Non-Trumpian GOP leadership is short-sighted and dumb. Not that this is much of a surprise.
You are certainly correct that the new impeachment element here is an impeachment of a post WWII prez in his first term, and not his second (and last) term. This complicates the Repubs’ “dilemma” (to the extent that they actually consider this a painful situation.) (Yes, Andrew Johnson was impeached in his first term and then did not seek renomination–but that was a more intelligent era.)
The critical issue is, would the Frankenstein Monster white base REALLY just blithely accept a conviction by senate Repubs and happily begin finding a new (rotten) “conservative” nominee? If it were truly the case, one would think that some House and Senate Repubs would be covertly talking about the matter, and if there really were a serious consensus, trotting down Pennsylvania Ave and performing the Nixon maneuver on Der Trumper, i.e. get out or be thrown out. This is most assuredly not happening.
The reason most likely is that there is no stomach to betray the deeply sadistic and radicalized “conservative” base, whose rage would be unquenchable. This is why it was so reckless to have fascist-ized 40-46% of the American public. We are now in the situation Germany was in around 1936. There was no discrediting the Fuhrer in the eyes of a huge segment of Germans then, and there is no conceivable means to discredit Der Trumper in the eyes of our Fascist Forty%, which is a small majority across all the various seats held by Repubs. There’s no margin for error to maintain the Repubs’ (democratically illegitimate) hold on power, and thus they have no choice but to hunker down and let the artillery bombardment continue.
John Corndog (R-Tx) sees the battle as both “sides are in their bunkers”, but frankly it’s the Repubs who are in the Fuhrer Bunker right now, while the Dems are running a pretty powerful mobile offensive that is hitting home with anyone still in the reality/fact-based community. That looks to be about 50% of the populace, certainly no more. The Dems will be pushing their offensive right up to the Seigfried line of Moscow Mitch’s senate, and presumably partisan “justice” CJ Roberts will be forced to allow the House managers to present their case and call the witnesses they would like (with the exception of any that Trumper declares to be “privileged”: Rudy, Pompous-eo, Bolton, Micky M, etc.) without too much Repub interference.
At the point the Dem prosecution rests, home field advantage will shift and the fantasy-based National Trumpalist movement will begin their “defense”, calling both the Bidens and every pro-Putin Ukrainian misfit with whom Rudy is now coordinating lies, phony documents and stories. This perjury-based concoction will be parroted without objective context by the Noise Machine and the corporate media. It will be interesting to see what rebuttal or cross examination the House managers will be permitted by the partisan “conservative” Justice. Let the chips fall where they may.
The “conservative” movement created the lower education white monster that these “elite” Repubs (like Rubio and Corndog) now have to deal with and placate. This vicious, minority faction base is now effectively in charge of Repub operations, not the Beltway “leaders”, who have been forced to throw in their lot with the dangerous demagogue who is dismantling the last vestiges of the failed “democracy”. But these are the wages of constantly dragging the ignorant reactionary helots down into the shit and never trying to help pull them out of it. You find yourself down in the reeking sewage with them, cramming huge handfuls of it down your own gullet. Taste great, Corndog? Heckava job, “conservatives”!