OrangeBlack said:
Nik Bethune said:
OrangeBlack said:
Nik, what's your opinion.... do you think that a House impeachment will have staying power in the public conscience 4-6 months down the road, or will it go the way of the Mueller report? Certainly, the Mueller report still matters to Democrats all day/every day; however, it's safe to say that they didn't get anywhere near the long term mileage that they hoped from that report.
I really try not to think of the question "Is the President constantly committing crimes and exploiting the office for his own personal financial gain" in terms of what affect it has on opinion polls.
I get what your saying. I guess I'm guilty of looking at this process from a solely political view.
In a way, it *is* being looked at primarily from a political point of view by those involved, too.
I presume that the majority of Repulicans are secretly against their President frequently violating the law, but the party is benefiting greatly (as Nik said) from having the ability to ram through reams of dubious judicial appointments, not to mention enormous tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy and removing just about every environmental protection/regulation possible. They're happily marching the USA back into the white, male-dominated 19th century so if that means ignoring the corrupt guy at the top in order to get 8 years of freedom to do their thing, so be it.
The Democrats were willing to push pretty hard on the Muller portion of things, but not all the way to impeachment. They must know that no matter what crimes Trump is guilty of committing, the DoJ will never charge him while in office (they've made it clear that they're passing the buck and that it has to be done via the impeachment-removal process -- I suspect he could shoot someone in broad daylight with thousands of witnesses and camera footage and they'd still hold to that ruling). and of course the Republicans will block anything in the Senate, which is what they'll be shortly doing with the Ukraine thing.
You stated earlier that doing the impeachment now was for the political reason that it might still be fresh enough in voters' minds when next November rolls around. I think it's more subtle than that. They didn't impeach on Russia/Muller report because in that instance it could quite reasonably be spun as "Russia interfered in the 2016 election and Trump was the innocent and unknowing beneficiary of that." With the current charge, it's "Trump directly abused the powers of his office and personally solicited the aid of a foreign nation to interfere with the [b[]
next[/b] election and then also took actions to cover it up" (and we also have precedent to offer as evidence in the form of the Muller report where Trump also obviously obstructed justice). Yes, Republicans don't appear to care about that, but the undecided middle voters might just see that as enough of a threat to go with the Dems this time around.
So yes, in a way it was a political decision to impeach him this time rather than after the Muller report, but I think more motivated by the nature of the crime rather than the timing. The decision was about which crime the voting public was more likely to swing the next election over: "an indirect action that relates to the last election" or "a direct action that relates to the upcoming election" and they're betting on the latter (plus the timing of the latter does work a bit better, although I'm sure by February there will be some new outrage and everyone will forget all about all of this anyway).
