I love this quote:
“It’s basically Sidney [Powell] versus everybody,” the source said. “That is why voices were raised. There is literally not one motherf—r in the president’s entire orbit — his staunchest group of supporters and allies — who doesn’t think that Sidney Powell should be on that first rocket to Mars.”
A fuller version of the story is available at the New York Times. On Friday, there was a meeting in the White House where Trump’s “responsible” advisers chief of staff Mark Meadows and counsel Pat Cipollone had to repeatedly explain to Trump that Powell is a fraud who has no ability to preserve his presidency. Even Rudy Giuliani, who was phoning in, thought things were going off the rails.
It was a complete shitshow, but you don’t have to be a fly on the wall in the Oval Office to know that Trump is losing his mind. What’s he doing in plain sight is crazier than anything we’ve ever seen from a sitting president, including Nixon in his drunken last days. When we might expect him to celebrate the approval of two COVID-19 vaccines or huddle with his national security team to find a response to Russia’s extensive hacking of government computer networks, including ones used for our nuclear weapons, he’s shit-posting on Twitter instead and considering martial law.
All the while Mr. Trump was conducting a Twitter-borne assault on Republicans for not helping him overturn the election results, even warning Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, to “get tougher, or you won’t have a Republican Party anymore.” By this weekend, the president was considering naming a conspiracy theorist as special counsel to investigate voting fraud, for which there’s no evidence, asking his advisers about instituting martial law and downplaying a massive hack his own secretary of state attributed to Russia.
It’s going to be a rough ride to noon on January 20.
I’ve known people institutionalized for exhibiting either homicidal or suicidal behavior. In Trump, until 1/20 we have a POTUS guilty of treason and negligent genocide. And for another month this piece of shit who owes Putin over $400 million has access to the nuclear launch codes.
Trump is getting weaker every week. He has spent most of the time since Nov 3 trying to get the election result changed, since what he wants is the power that elections can give to you. The latest notion of seizing the ballot boxes is still along those lines. If you are going for strong man, you just say “who cares about ballot boxes.” The strong man move doesn’t really work, because too much of the power in the USA is in the hands of the state governments. I have grown quite thankful about that this last year.
Yep. The advantage of being decentralized with elections is that there is no way to easily ‘steal’ the ballots. States want to maintain their power and won’t willingly just give it away, at least not unless there is some benefit in it for them to do so.
Indeed, one of the reasons for having three co-equal branches of power was so that each would be able resist acceding power to to make one branch dominant (who wants to give up power?), but they never imagined that a political party would be so corrupt so as to actually willingly do this in service to a fascist madman, as the senate has done the past four years. This is a fundamental flaw of the constitution that needs to be rectified. I’m not exactly sure how, but I have thought that the 2/3 majority for conviction in the senate is too high, and should be like 55, but then also include a majority SC judges, none of whom can have been appointed by the president under trial (also, this should go hand in hand with SC reforms as others have talked about to take most of the politics out of that process).
Regardless, this election and the last four years have taught us that we need many more safeguards, at both federal and state level (e.g., WTF happened in WI SC with only a 4-3 win to not throw out democracy in that state???).
I think the man is literally insane and we should drag him off to an asylum.
Apologies, because my mind is off topic these days….
While we’re all sitting around trying to think of “sticks” the Democrats can use to raise the political price for centrist Republicans of voting the party line, I hope Chuck Schumer and company are also thinking about “carrots” too. For example, Mitt Romney is an ideologically flexible politician, so what about offering him a “coalition” government in which he’s Senate majority leader, Susan Collins chairs Appropriations, Lisa Murkowski chairs Energy, and Robert Portman chairs Finance, in exchange for them 1) caucusing with the Democrats, and 2) voting to end the filibuster.
Thoughts?
That only makes sense in the instance where Romney or one of the other two actually cross lines and caucus independent or with the Dems and providing that the GA election does not go our way. Otherwise, there is no way the Dems should give up all of those leadership positions if we have 50 votes.
Fuck no I’m not signing up to the republican party.
Agreed. The basic deal is (would be): chair your favorite committee in exchange for caucusing with Dems and voting to the end the filibuster.
I’d argue Dems should at least *consider* a deal like this even if Warnock and Ossoff both win. Even in that scenario, Dems can’t do anything in the Senate (other than pass the budget) without at least 10 Republican votes. (Go ahead, take a look at the incoming Republican caucus and tell me where you think Dems can find 10 Republicans who’ll break party lines on filibuster votes. I’ll wait…. Yeah, I couldn’t find them either.)
Point being, I don’t see any way congressional Democrats get anything done in the next two years without some wildly unprincipled playing of politics: trading earmarks for votes, trading committee power for chamber power, etc.
ADDING: Same for Biden. Any Republican senator from a Democratic state who wants an ambassadorship, or a Cabinet seat should at least receive *very* serious consideration.
Can’t we do away with the filibuster if we win those two seats?
Ask Joe Manchin.
I suppose that crazy fuck could screw up anything. Maybe Joe can talk to him nicely/
Thanks for the question. In theory, yes. All it would require is a straight party-line vote, with VP Kamala Harris breaking the tie. As n1cholas indicated, that appears unlikely right now because Sen. Manchin, among others, has said he’s opposed to ending the filibuster.
That still leaves the challenge of needing all 50 Democratic votes to pass anything (including judicial and executive nominations). Not insurmountable, but a challenge.
General Flynn and Rudy scare the shit out of me. Powell is riding close behind spinning out Qanon conspiracies as she rides along. Yeah I agree this is a long shit show all the way to Jan 20. The Proud Boys and friends might even start shooting .Barr knew it was time to get out. The man is insane I agree.