What does a BIDEN Presidency look like?

[Berkut]

McConnell saying it should not be held at all.

Which goes right along with trying to delay it as long as possible.

It's not like you know what went on behind the scenes. I like how you insist that we all just take poor Mitch at his word - he is SAYS something, why, that MUST be what he actually believes!

Buck keep up with it, you are doing Gods Work.

[alfred russel]

McConnell saying it should not be held at all.

Which goes right along with trying to delay it as long as possible.

It's not like you know what went on behind the scenes. I like how you insist that we all just take poor Mitch at his word - he is SAYS something, why, that MUST be what he actually believes!

Buck keep up with it, you are doing Gods Work.

I criticize an approach taken by Schumer, you allude to me as a Nazi for "parroting" McConnell's line, I point out that McConnell's lines were actually other stuff, and somehow now you are saying I am taking McConnell at his word?

[alfred russel]

Lets be real about the situation. If there were three competing priorities at the start of the Biden administration:
-covid relief
-impeachment trial
-getting the administration officials in place

I don't think covid relief has been in any way held up by scheduling. But getting the administration officials in place is clearly at a historically slow pace.

So was the much abbreviated impeachment trial worth it?

https://nypost.com/2021/02/16/trump-remains-top-2024-choice-with-gop-voters-poll-finds/

Former President Donald Trump's popularity with Republicans has increased in the wake of his impeachment trial, with 59 percent of GOP voters wanting Trump to play a major role in the party going forward, a new poll found.

A Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted in the days after the Senate trial in which he was acquitted Saturday found 59 percent of GOP voters want Trump to be heavily involved in the party's future direction — up 18 percentage points from a poll conducted on Jan. 7, the day after the Capitol siege over which he was impeached and then tried.

The betting odds on Trump getting the GOP nomination in 2024 went from 20% at the start of the trial to currently 34%.

The abbreviated trial actually left Trump in a stronger position than he was prior to the trial.

[Eddie Teach]

Question: which dog lets go of the bone first?

[The Minsky Moment]

So AR do you think a long drawn out trial would have convinced Trump's base and caused his support to wane?
Or the opposite?

[alfred russel]

So AR do you think a long drawn out trial would have convinced Trump's base and caused his support to wane?
Or the opposite?

His base? Probably not. I do think additional evidence can cause his support to wane. If the general public is impervious to facts and reason then why should we keep democracy?

[Eddie Teach]

His base is not 74 million strong.

[The Minsky Moment]

His base is not 74 million strong.

And yet it was sufficient to cause him to win 2 presidential nominations. 

We are nearly 5 years from the time that Trump openly committed a criminal act - asking a foreign power to break into his opponent's computer systems and release the information stolen.  He has since committed multiple criminal acts culminating in an attempted coup against the constitution and a violent insurrection in the nation's capital.  He also demonstrated the most staggering incompetence the US has ever seen in a high public official - admittedly a tough standard and yet one Trump easily surmounted. 

AR's argument is that millions of people who continued to support him after all that would finally turn against him if one of his speechwriters gave unfriendly testimony to the prosecution in the Senate.  I don't find that argument credible.

[alfred russel]

His base is not 74 million strong.

And yet it was sufficient to cause him to win 2 presidential nominations. 

We are nearly 5 years from the time that Trump openly committed a criminal act - asking a foreign power to break into his opponent's computer systems and release the information stolen.  He has since committed multiple criminal acts culminating in an attempted coup against the constitution and a violent insurrection in the nation's capital.  He also demonstrated the most staggering incompetence the US has ever seen in a high public official - admittedly a tough standard and yet one Trump easily surmounted. 

AR's argument is that millions of people who continued to support him after all that would finally turn against him if one of his speechwriters gave unfriendly testimony to the prosecution in the Senate.  I don't find that argument credible.

My argument was that holding a trial in February would be counterproductive because it would sideline other actually pressing priorities and force a short trial due to those pressing priorities.

If your argument is that the trial could not move public opinion in whatever form it was held, and acquittal was a preordained outcome, then why was it so important to hold in February?

[The Minsky Moment]

I think I've answered that a few times in this thread.

A trial had to be held because the rule of law requires such a fundamental assault of the integrity of the nation to be tried, even if it is known that some jurors will turncoat and other will chicken out.  And it is better to get it done soon and quickly.

There are always pressing priorities.  There were pressing priorities in February, there are pressing priorities in March, and there will be pressing priorities in April, May, June and every month beyond.

[alfred russel]

I think I've answered that a few times in this thread.

A trial had to be held because the rule of law requires such a fundamental assault of the integrity of the nation to be tried, even if it is known that some jurors will turncoat and other will chicken out.  And it is better to get it done soon and quickly.

And yet you expressed earlier that there wouldn't be a criminal trial....

There are always pressing priorities.  There were pressing priorities in February, there are pressing priorities in March, and there will be pressing priorities in April, May, June and every month beyond.

Almost all floor time used in the US Senate is dedicated to legislation and nominations.

Yes there will be competing demands in April, May, and June. Holding a trial in those months would cause other priorities to be delayed. However, at the current moment you have demands of approving an entire incoming administration and a $1.6 trillion covid relief bill that needs to be approved by March 14 to prevent benefits from expiring. It is likely there will not be any greater demand for floor time in the US Senate than in February and March of this year until the next administration.

You are acting as though they didn't feel pressure to abridge the trial because of these pressures. You are acting as though you didn't tell me that the Senate could walk and chew gum at the same time before the trial started when I warned that we would end up in this situation, and yet here we are.

[Sheilbh]

I strongly disagree, and find myself agreeing a lot with AR here. (though not because I had placed bets on the outcome) If the only possible result is the verdict, then yes. Justice requires indeterminacy. But that's such a narrow view when it comes to corruption and political matters. If this was a show trial, it was a very poor show.

[...]

It's only a waste of time if politics is only defined by outcome. Cleaning the rot at the heart of the republic will require more than outcome driven process; something easy to miss if anything else is seen as posturing. I think there is a need for pedagogy - which I think people like Katie Porter, or AOC have only begun to understand.

I agree with this but I don't think it works in practice. A longer trial would have been one with witnesses - unlike in the Russia/Ukraine impeachment basically all of the people the Democrats would be calling as witnesses would be hostile. There are no Vindmans or Fiona Hills - it would be the Republican operatives, staffers and politicians around Trump on January 6. Democrats would have little to no idea what they would say and I'm not convinced those witnesses would take the risk of perjury seriously. It would not have the sort of lesson that I think people would want - I think it'd be a shitshow of people like Kevin McCarthy challenging the very basis of the trial and, frankly, probably lying. It's the same challenge that pervades so much of US politics - how does it work when one side stops operating in good faith. And that would just be the Democrats' witnesses.

The Trump legal team would also have the opportunity to bring witnesses and I think that would be entirely designed to muddy the waters and throw other unfounded allegations around.

I think in this case looking at what having witnesses would mean and the outcome would lead to the same conclusion - it's not worth the risk. Instead you make opening and closing statements where you can play the minute-by-minute storming the Capitol plus Trump's speech/Trump's tweets, you get to make the most persuasive case you can.

Corruption is one of the hardest thing to investigate and judge through the ordinary means of justice. If the appropriate judgement of corruption is political, it requires a whole lot of pedagogy to be effective. By expediting the trial, the Democrats just botched the whole thing, and deprived themselves of the resources of explaining why exactly the Trump administration was corrupt and dangerous. Yes, it was one of the things that is "self-evident" to many non-Trumpist, but there is immense value for democracy in rehashing these reasons, and indexing the principles to the mundane matters of how a government is run. So much of Trump's power stemmed from just how opaque, and divorced from principle is can be. Rushing through the whole thing will not have disturbed this impression.

Perhaps - but we see today Sarko being convicted. I believe there have been corruption convictions for Kohl, Chirac, Berlusconi, the King of Spain, multipe British former cabinet ministers, an Israeli President and the current Israeli Prime Minister. There are many countries that have or believe they have similar systems to the US that have managed to investigate former politicians, heads of state or government for corruption or other crimes and has managed to punish them.

I think there are two things going on for me - one is that I don't think corruption should be fundamentally a political judgement and I think it can go through the normal justice process. The issue in the US, it seems to me, is that there is no trust or belief by Republicans - so about 30-40% of the population - that either the criminal justice or the political system is capable of investigating and judging fairly. That's a bigger issue that I'm not sure how you solve, it reflects what we've all talked about with the GOP before. The other point is that I think impeachment is a political not a criminal process and the reason for that is because it's not necessarily linked to crimes and the punishment is political: removing a validly elected President from office or barring someone from running for office. I think that is the right approach in theory - how it works now with US politics as they are I don't know.

I think the only solution is ultimately political and relies on voters - the Republicans need to lose (at state, local, congressional and national levels) and lose so badly that they change. But I'm not sure that's likely.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I frankly think to some degree "we" pick on the Dems too much. A lot of things that get labeled Dem "stupidity" are actually just caused by the Dem being a big (and growing) tent party with lots of internal divisions that can't be easily papered over when it comes to tactics.

The GOP is fracturing off people in a more concrete sense, but those are the people prone to disagreement, so the GOP will only be getting more unified in rhetoric and goals. When people like AOC and myself support the same party now, you have an extremely broad ideological scope which will make lots of situations much more difficult to manage. I know a lot of people don't believe it now, but I do think this is long term a good thing for the Dems. The less tolerant the GOP becomes of any ideological impurity, the harder and harder I think it is for them to find winning coalitions. With gerrymandering and the unequal distribution of voters in the states, the GOP is going to continue to wield far outsize influence for a good while, much longer than most people want. But the fact they are doubling down now (as you can see from CPAC) on pure white nationalism really means they have no long term future. A decade or more being an openly white nationalist party is going to make the GOP brand massively toxic to any voters who grow up in this environment. Someone who comes into politics and sees white nationalism as the brand of the Republican party is going to be far less likely to ever be open to voting Republican throughout the course of their entire lifetime.

This sort of effect is real by the way--the damage done to the Republican brand by Herbert Hoover created a huge crop of voters who aligned with the Dems, but not only that--a huge crop of voters who never considered a Republican (other than Eisenhower) for any office at any level ever again.

[crazy canuck]

I strongly disagree, and find myself agreeing a lot with AR here. (though not because I had placed bets on the outcome) If the only possible result is the verdict, then yes. Justice requires indeterminacy. But that's such a narrow view when it comes to corruption and political matters. If this was a show trial, it was a very poor show.

[...]

It's only a waste of time if politics is only defined by outcome. Cleaning the rot at the heart of the republic will require more than outcome driven process; something easy to miss if anything else is seen as posturing. I think there is a need for pedagogy - which I think people like Katie Porter, or AOC have only begun to understand.

I agree with this but I don't think it works in practice. A longer trial would have been one with witnesses - unlike in the Russia/Ukraine impeachment basically all of the people the Democrats would be calling as witnesses would be hostile. There are no Vindmans or Fiona Hills - it would be the Republican operatives, staffers and politicians around Trump on January 6. Democrats would have little to no idea what they would say and I'm not convinced those witnesses would take the risk of perjury seriously. It would not have the sort of lesson that I think people would want - I think it'd be a shitshow of people like Kevin McCarthy challenging the very basis of the trial and, frankly, probably lying. It's the same challenge that pervades so much of US politics - how does it work when one side stops operating in good faith. And that would just be the Democrats' witnesses.

The Trump legal team would also have the opportunity to bring witnesses and I think that would be entirely designed to muddy the waters and throw other unfounded allegations around.

I think in this case looking at what having witnesses would mean and the outcome would lead to the same conclusion - it's not worth the risk. Instead you make opening and closing statements where you can play the minute-by-minute storming the Capitol plus Trump's speech/Trump's tweets, you get to make the most persuasive case you can.

Corruption is one of the hardest thing to investigate and judge through the ordinary means of justice. If the appropriate judgement of corruption is political, it requires a whole lot of pedagogy to be effective. By expediting the trial, the Democrats just botched the whole thing, and deprived themselves of the resources of explaining why exactly the Trump administration was corrupt and dangerous. Yes, it was one of the things that is "self-evident" to many non-Trumpist, but there is immense value for democracy in rehashing these reasons, and indexing the principles to the mundane matters of how a government is run. So much of Trump's power stemmed from just how opaque, and divorced from principle is can be. Rushing through the whole thing will not have disturbed this impression.

Perhaps - but we see today Sarko being convicted. I believe there have been corruption convictions for Kohl, Chirac, Berlusconi, the King of Spain, multipe British former cabinet ministers, an Israeli President and the current Israeli Prime Minister. There are many countries that have or believe they have similar systems to the US that have managed to investigate former politicians, heads of state or government for corruption or other crimes and has managed to punish them.

I think there are two things going on for me - one is that I don't think corruption should be fundamentally a political judgement and I think it can go through the normal justice process. The issue in the US, it seems to me, is that there is no trust or belief by Republicans - so about 30-40% of the population - that either the criminal justice or the political system is capable of investigating and judging fairly. That's a bigger issue that I'm not sure how you solve, it reflects what we've all talked about with the GOP before. The other point is that I think impeachment is a political not a criminal process and the reason for that is because it's not necessarily linked to crimes and the punishment is political: removing a validly elected President from office or barring someone from running for office. I think that is the right approach in theory - how it works now with US politics as they are I don't know.

I think the only solution is ultimately political and relies on voters - the Republicans need to lose (at state, local, congressional and national levels) and lose so badly that they change. But I'm not sure that's likely.

I think where people are going wrong is they are equating what happens in the Senate with a trial.  It is isn't a trial - show or otherwise.  It is purely a political process. There are speeches, not cross examination of witnesses - even if they are present.  If the Senate had the procedure to hold an actual trial (or something closer to a trial) then I think Oex's argument would be much stronger.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I mean the Senate does have procedures for conducting a form of trial for impeachment, it just chose not to use them. Lawfare blog did a good podcast on "Late Impeachments" that covered some of this, impeachment as per Senate rules is conducted much like a trial. It's not the same form of trial we use in our ordinary criminal or civil courts, but it has counsel for both sides, an adjudicator, rules of procedure, the ability to submit evidence and call witnesses, to mount a defense, etc etc.