Ding Dong.....the US Politics Thread (Part 2)

I assume you saw the pasted Trump post (think i pasted it). The tweet was just the journalist assuring his readers that it was real, saying he would not post a fake screen shot.

Well said. I didn’t mean to be dismissive of Taylor Swift by calling her a pop star. She is, or course, a person of great substance in all the ways you say.

Still, it’s interesting to me that someone outside of the formal political process i.e. not a Senator, Governor, Congress person, Judge etc., can wield so much power that it has Trump deeply worried, possibly more worried than all of his legal jeopardy combined.

asking for forgiveness, rather than permission. seems to be the way to the world, these days.

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Yeah, worth noting that his apology and attempt to distance himself from his super pac creating and airing it hasnt gone as far as removing the post from his timeline :joy:

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https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1757178548043862491

The Congress has impeached the Homeland Secretary. Does that mean Biden has to appoint another, with the approval from the Congress?

No, not even close. It means the GOP have an irresponsible majority in the House, and impeachment is no longer a meaningful process.

The vote means they will at some point send articles of impeachment to the Senate. First, they actually have to pass a motion to send notice to the Senate. The Senate must adopt an order notifying the House it is ready to receive the House impeachment managers. Then the Speaker decides when the articles are actually sent to the Senate. The next day, the trial is supposed to begin, although it may merely be a formal beginning.

I do not believe the Senate has ever declined to adopt the order notifying the House - it is a process that was designed assuming at least the veneer of legislative courtesy, but in this era of tomfuckery, the Democrats in the Senate may decide to put that aside and exploit the procedure.

However, assuming the House sends a couple of clowns over to serve as the prosecutors, the Senate holds a trial. On order to convict, a two-thirds majority is needed, from the membership of 100 less abstentions. The Republicans have 49, and they won’t get all of those.

Some good news for Biden at last. The Dem candidate takes George Santos’ vacated seat quite handily. That’s one more in the bag if the Ukraine bill gets to a vote.

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So an impeachment is like an indictment, not a verdict of a trial in the Senate? Have I got it right?

Yes, that is right. Nothing happens until the verdict. With the GOP being well short of the numbers in the Senate, this is just political gamesmanship. There is no legitimate basis for impeachment in this case, particularly when the same House majority has voted to deny the resources that Myorkas has asked for to address the now unprecedented scale of the claimant problem.

Pretty much.

I think it’s important to note that there is no expectation at all of this achieving a conviction in the senate. I would argue the baselessness of it is actually the point. While for Myorkas specifically it could be seen as a way to keep attacks about the management of the border in the news, he is not being singled out. For the past 4 years pretty much every senior Dem has had the specter of impeachment raised about them by the GOP. Fuck, they’ve even talked about it for Hunter who has no position to impeach him over. The whole point is to make the stain of an impeachment, of which the GOP candidate has 2, into something that comes with the territory of usual politics.

Since Trump was impeached twice - rightly so, the MAGA loons in the Republican Party were always going to pursue frivolous impeachments of their own, in some sort of deluded way to maintain false equivalence. They want to argue that the Dems are just as bad, etc. which is a joke.

For what it is worth, Trump was impeached twice soberly, somberly, and justly. The first one was smothered at the death by William Barr, who put his own spin on it to set the narrative as the findings went public. The second impeachment was shut down by MAGA loons who could not, would not, see fault with their orange master, no matter what.

There were one or two notable exceptions, such as Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney, and while I disagree with their politics, they did at least show some principled backbone in standing against Trump and standing up for what is right.

Regrettably one is going to retire and the other was ousted, which is indicative that their Republican Party has died, and has been replaced by an authoritarian, neo-fascist personality cult.

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Special elections are always difficult to draw too many lessons from, but this is not a seat a Democrat should be winning. Long Island is the heart of MAGA support in NYC (think your typical city cop) and the recent redrawing of the maps in NY carved out a very nice district for them. Even with Santos being a bit of a stain on the GOP in the district, the polls had it as a lean R race and the issue polling indicated that the GOP framing of immigration was the key factor in that. For the Dem to win and win handily indicates something significant was missed in how the race was viewed.

There is lots of analysis already about the comparative strength of the candidates (the Dem ran a good race with a message that seemed well aligned with the characteristics of the district while retaining a core Dem identity while the GOP candidate seemed to be mailing it in), but quality of candidate SHOULD already be factored into what we’re seeing in the polls, so it isnt really an explanation for the polling miss.

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The first impeachment was unrelated to the Mueller report (or at least to the degree that any part of Trump’s presidency can be separated from the influence of Russia) It occurred after a whistleblower reported that he heard Trump threaten to withhold aid to Ukraine unless Zelenskyy announced Biden was being investigated as part of their anti-corruption crackdown. He didnt need the investigation, he just needed it to be reported that it was happening.

Posted without comment

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The idea that there are floods of people coming across the border everyday is fake and even if it was true the Republicans don’t want it to end, they want to be able to run on it every single election.

What happens when a cult takes hold…

Methinks there is some reverse psychology going on here :thinking:

Has the Donald been in touch

Didn’t Suozzi represent them for a few terms before?

He has been in Nassau county politics for a long time and was the representative for a version of this district in the recent past. But the district has changed since he left office in 2022, both in terms of the boundaries of the electoral map and the growing support for the GOP line on immigration.