Republicans march over the impeachment cliff - taking their self-respect with them

[nitpicker]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/31/republicans-impeachment-trump-richard-wolffe

Republicans march over the impeachment cliff – taking their self-respect with them

Richard Wolffe

Fri 31 Jan 2020 23.07 GMT Last modified on Fri 31 Jan 2020 23.08 GMT

Jared Kushner is a genius. It’s all too easy to overlook the sheer brilliance of Donald Trump’s son-in-law, not least when he rolls out a Middle East peace plan that destroys the concepts of both the Israeli and Palestinian states.

But for his rapier-like ability to capture the zeitgeist, there’s no one quite like the young slumlord to tell it like it really is. Speaking to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Kushner talked dramatically about this week as a time for leaders to step up.

“What we’ve done is create an opportunity for their leadership to either seize or not,” he explained. “If they screw up this opportunity – which again, they have a perfect track record of missing opportunities – if they screw this up, I think they will have a very hard time looking the international community in the face, saying they are the victims, saying they have rights.”

Kushner thought he was talking about the Palestinians, in a gloriously brazen blend of racism and gold-leafed ignorance.

But he was in fact describing perfectly the entire caucus of Senate Republicans as they screwed up their last golden opportunity for personal redemption and liberal democracy in the impeachment trial of Donald J Trump.

How will the nation’s Republican senators look anyone in the face and say they have any rights to keep in check a corrupt and criminal president? How can they pretend to be Trump’s victims when they marched themselves off a constitutional cliff?

And how on earth can they pretend to the world that their vision of America – where a president can happily use military aid to coerce a foreign government to smear his political rival in an election – is the model for democracy?

Let’s be honest. There was little drama or suspense in Trump’s impeachment trial, save for the bat-excrement quality of crazy that tumbled out of Alan Dershowitz’s mouth. According to Harvard’s emeritus law professor, presidents are unimpeachable as long as they think they are acting in the national interest when they use their power to corrupt their own election.
(snip)

[Karadeniz]

1. I HAVE A QUESTION...Who thinks it would be appropriate for Democrats to boycott the

Wednesday acquittal vote? I think their absence would be noted in history books and insure this GOP perfidy becomes part of what everyone learns about how the constitution was betrayed.

Personally, I am mad enough to also wish that Democratic representatives and senators boycott the state of the union speech. Why in the world would they think it is appropriate to attend, countenancing a counterfeit president? Trump should have been convicted, but escaped via a kangaroo court which withheld such judicial necessities as witnesses, documents and a white house lawyer who withheld his knowledge of facts in order to lie for the president.

[czarjak]

2. Take our country backTake our country over

Thanks Vlad.