Slate - important read "There Can Be No Resistance Without Obstruction and Impeachment"
There Can Be No Resistance Without Obstruction and Impeachment
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/the-debate-over-what-to-do-about-kennedy-misses-the-forest-for-the-trees.html
There’s a debate taking place among Democrats and liberal commentators about whether Senate Democrats should attempt to block the confirmation of whomever Trump nominates to fill Anthony Kennedy’s seat on the Supreme Court. Proponents of obstruction cite not only the Republican Party’s treatment of Merrick Garland, frozen out of a Supreme Court seat in the waning days of the Obama administration by Senate Republicans, but the impact a solidly conservative court will have on jurisprudence and public policy for many years to come, as well as the impropriety of the president nominating a justice who could impact the outcome of the Russia investigation at some point down the line.
The only real option the Democrats have before them to stop or slow a nomination is denying the Republicans a quorum in the Senate. They should do it. It’s a move Republicans would likely be able to procedurally overcome without much trouble, but it would also be an opportunity for Democrats to animate voters against the conservative movement’s aims, Senate Republicans, and the Trump administration in advance of November’s midterm elections with a bit of political theater. These are the very same reasons, actually, why the Democrats should’ve denied the Senate a quorum some time ago—not in opposition to this or any specific Republican priority, but in protest of the Trump administration, as a whole, and the party that brought it into being.
The mood among Democrats immediately after the 2016 election is an increasingly distant memory. Much more was made then than now of Trump’s inherent unfitness for the presidency—that he was a liar, a boor, and a racist, a man credibly accused of assault or harassment by more than a dozen women and surreally ignorant of public policy who routinely attacked the press and undermined faith in the voting process. He is not the president the American people wanted, and he took office as a consequence of an electoral system created to protect the institution of slavery more than two centuries ago. The accumulated ire over all this inspired two of the largest days of civil demonstrations in the history of the United States.
Yet, the Democratic Party has never seriously challenged Trump’s legitimacy as the leader of this country. It was clear from the outset, as Democrats attended his inauguration and offered support for many of his nominees in the very first days of the administration, that we would drift further and further away from the rhetorical premise that Donald Trump should not be running the American government. Most Democrats are now unwilling even to say—out of a very possibly misguided attempt to mollify voters that already think poorly of Democrats—that Trump should be impeached, pinning the question to the outcome of an investigation that has yet to, and may never, directly implicate the president in wrongdoing. Meanwhile, Trump has racked up a vast array of clear conflicts of interest and is the financial beneficiary of obvious efforts to curry favor by foreign governments that patronize his businesses.
snip - read the rest
have to add this sentence
Beyond this, impeaching Trump is simply the right thing to do. He is the head of an immoral administration and our political system offers very few options for immediate formal recourse.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Excellent article, and I agree with all of it
But the current leadership is...uh, somewhat old-fashioned (?) and seem more comfortable with letting the opposing party's diving poll numbers do the work for them
I don't think they 'get' what's happening here, or how to respond
