Moscow Mitch. The guy who brought us the Orange Hate-Monkey. He did more than any other US citizen to make sure that President Trump remained free to enact crimes in our names.
I don’t know what the hurry is. Why do we have to have this all done by the end of the year? now? Why not investigate side by side with the police efforts to uncover the depths of crime involved in the attempted coup? Let’s be sure to get every single gory detail on the record for the Republican party to wear to the end of its days.
Republicans were happy to pretend nothing was worth worrying about for two five years while Trump stole the nation blind and Moscow Mitch shoehorned every judicial nominee he stole from Barack Obama through an otherwise catatonic Senate. Republicans were happy to talk about #Benghazi for three years. What’s the rush? I say we keep the impeachment hearings January 6th inquest going until November 3rd, 2020 November 8, 2022. I suggest they hold hearings on election day, even. Draw it out. Reveal the crimes of all of Trump’s yes-men as well as all of his 40 years of financial and real estate crimes. and his instigations to riot in the streets of Washington D.C. after telling black people they couldn’t riot in the same city streets six months earlier.
Paint it all in glorious technicolor detail, for all the world to see. The damage has been done already, anyway. No one will trust the United States again. Not for a generation. I have now given Moscow Mitch’s dismissal of the bill all the thought that it deserves.
One hundred and seventy-five Republicans voted against the January 6th investigation bill. Those seditionists (to use Stonekettle’s term for them) should never have been allowed to sit in congress. Anyone that wasn’t willing to state in advance that the election that put them there was a valid election should not have been seated. This action was permitted by the rules of the House and the Senate and should have been enforced:
If the election that put you here is in question then you shouldn’t be in a body that represents the people. Plain and simple. Congress chose to go this route instead, seating representatives that declared their intentions to muck up the works as much as possible. Now we have seditionists in Congress. I don’t see how this scenario is better than the outrage that would have been engendered when the 175 seditionists were not seated in the first place. This may be complex political maneuvering, but I don’t see how the Democratic strategy is going to win the next election for them.
…which is the only point that matters on this subject. Making sure the Republicans never see power again on the national level. They have made themselves the enemy of democracy. They should be declared a terrorist organization if they don’t change their tune.
It’s 1804. Aaron Burr kills Alexander Hamilton but he’s still the vice president, runs out of town. Back, 1805, he’s in the chamber. He’s still dispensing advice in the Senate. And Burr says, you’re a great deliberative body but a really great chamber has a very clean rulebook and yours is a mess. And he singles out that previous question motion. They get rid of it in 1806, not because they wanted to create filibusters, right, not because they saw the great deliberative body of the Senate and they needed a right way to protect the rights of minorities. That rule was gone because Aaron Burr told them to get rid of it and it hadn’t been used yet.
This was originally published as a quote from this episode of On the Media, near the date when the episode released. Since this is a problem that we are still talking about four years later, I have moved it forward to today and added more of my thoughts on the subject, like I had originally intended to do when I set the quote aside to be published later, and then published even later after my thoughts evaporated.
This is the thing that started the thoughts back up again:
The filibuster is a Senate rule requiring a 60 vote supermajority to pass legislation, which means a minority of Senators can often block legislation that the vast majority of Americans want and need.
It’s not in the Constitution. In fact, it is arguably unconstitutional. Alexander Hamilton considered a supermajority rule as “A Poison” that would lead to “Contemptible Compromises of the public good.”
Even without the filibuster Senate Republicans already have an outsized influence. The 50 of them represent 41.5 million fewer Americans than the 50 Senate Democrats.
The Senate isn’t a democratic body. It is a body created to ensure that states had a voice in the federal government. That is its reason for existing and that is why it is made up the way that it is. But that doesn’t mean that the rules that govern the Senate should be broken in such a way that it can’t get business done because the minority wants to roll around on the floor like a temperamental child that doesn’t get what it wants (Yes, Ted Cruz. I’m imagining you with chocolate smeared on your face and wearing an OshKosh jumper rolling on the Senate floor right now, destroying my fond memories of Green Eggs and Ham. Petulant. Small. Child. Ted Cruz) The Senate simply needs to restore the motion to call the previous question that still exists in the House rules and in the basic parliamentary rules that govern most legislative bodies (Robert’s Rules of Order) Striking that rule in the Senate is what has lead to the impasse of the filibuster.
It is amusing to me that the rule was originally struck because it was thought that Senators were too civilized to need to end debate with a vote since no Senator had ever refused to stop talking when it was clear that he was not convincing anyone. Had the original Senators known the future, known that John C. Calhoun would use the filibuster in defense of slavery to bring the United States to the brink of Civil War, that Mitch McConnell and his Republicans would use it to stop the Senate from being able to get anything done, they would have left the ability to call the previous question in place. If we could talk to them today they would probably marvel at our inability to simply set the filibuster aside as a bad idea that has long outlived its usefulness. They had just voted themselves as no longer subject to the King of England a few decades earlier. Don’t like the rules? Change the rules.
I know, I know. I seem to contradict myself on the subject of the filibuster when it comes to Wendy Davis and her filibuster in the Texas Senate. Not really. I’m all for using the rules to get your way. I have done this myself at Libertarian Party meetings. I would do it again if I had to. This is the point in having rules in the first place and learning the rules as part of the process. How to use the rules to your advantage is what Mitch McConnell was always good at. It got him a six seat majority on the SCOTUS. Congratulations Mitch you bastard.
The filibuster can be used for both good and bad reasons. I happen to think that Wendy Davis was making the good fight back in 2013. I also happen to think that Ted Cruz is a moron for reading Green Eggs and Ham on the U.S. Senate floor protesting against the Affordable Care Act. Wendy Davis had to stand up for less than a day and defend her filibuster, which resulted in the legislation she opposed being left unpassed and required the Governor to call a special session in order to pass later. Legislation that was later gutted by the courts. Ted Cruz rolled around like a spoiled child knowing that he would never succeed at what he wanted to do because he’d have to stop sometime, and the Senate would simply gavel through the measure anyway. Which they promptly did as soon as he wiped the snot off his face and left the Senate floor.
The broken U.S. Senate rules could be fixed at any time and should probably have been fixed decades ago. The same goes for the Texas Senate, another legislative body that borrowed the rules it utilizes from the broken U.S. Senate. If they leave those loopholes in the rules they will be used, and they will be used by minorities to impede the will of the majority. The majority in Texas is simply wrong on the subject of women’s health. A whole state full of misogynists, but that is a story for another article.
Texas still requires the talking filibuster, unlike the U.S Senate. That is the difference between Wendy Davis’ principled stand and Ted Cruz’s phlegm-flaked tantrum.
Another consequential change in the mid-1970s was adoption of the “two-track” policy, which functionally eliminated the “talking filibuster.” Before this rule change, senators were required to hold the floor to execute a filibuster, blocking all Senate business until a cloture vote could be held. To better utilize time, the new rule established the dual-tracking system, allowing the Senate to work on multiple bills at once. Any bill being filibustered would move to a “back burner” until a cloture vote could be held, while the Senate focused on other bills instead. This change made it easier for a minority to kill a bill by simply indicating a desire to filibuster, thus blocking it before it ever can reach the Senate floor.
The only thing Ted Cruz proved was that removing the two-track system is probably not going to be enough to fix the problem, it’s going to be necessary to replace the previous question motion and make the Senate more of the democratic body that Aaron Burr and his peers merely pretended that it was.
For every Senate race in 2022 2024, the Democratic candidate should be running on ending the filibuster. “If you vote for me I will vote with the Democratic caucus to put an end to the filibuster.” It seems crazy that we would have to vote on ending this BS that Aaron Burr started, but that is life in the modern United States.
This article will be updated and moved forward when the news puts it back on the front page.
A Caudillo is more murderous. I’m thankful that the Orange Hate-Monkey (OHM) isn’t a Caudillo. He’s a tiny little wannabe Caudillo. He’s a Caudito. My apologies to Spanish speakers for murdering their language.
I only bring this up because Robert Reich says that,
A dictator is on trial in his home country. Over half the jury is in his pocket, the foreman is openly coordinating with him to make sure he goes free, and despite public outcry the foreman is refusing to conduct a fair trial.
The word for strongman leader, colloquially, in the language that is spoken South of the United States border, is caudillo. I have this on the good authority of Maria Hinojosa and this episode of Latino USA. If Trump was a dictator in the fashion of third world countries, countries that used to be South of our border here in the States, then he would be a Caudillo. Since he is a little short of the mark, I will from this point onward refer to him as a Caudito. The Caudito, Mr. Orange Hate-Monkey if I want to address him formally.
I thought Trump was a dictator in waiting when he first asked to be given the job of president. I still think he is a dictator in waiting, I just don’t think his mental makeup is vicious enough for him to be able to be a Stalin or a Mao. This is a good thing.
[We] enter an age of Democracy in that you must appeal to the people. You can either do so by going to the ballot box and be elected; or, if you are a dictator, you can pretend somehow that the people really, truly love you, even though they never voted for you. But this is surely the paradox of dictatorship in the twentieth century, that even dictators ultimately wish to portray themselves as democratic figures.
That author specifically rules out Donald Trump as a dictator because the structures of the United States government have so far kept him in check. I think the professor overestimates the fondness that Stormtrumpers feel for the United States government. I think they’d happily live under a dictatorship that governed according to the rules they felt were important enough to kill over. Things like abortion, which isn’t murder, but I digress.
The former president of Mexico, Vincite Fox, thought Donald Trump was a dictator back in 2016,
Just like the rest of us did. However. If Donald Trump, the OHM, really had the metal it takes to be a Stalin or a Mao, he’d have cut a bloody swath across the country already with the power that the presidency controls. Luckily for us (so far) he is too incompetent to do the job he was sent to do by his Stormtrumpers. It isn’t too late for one of them to step up and be the Stalin or the Mao, and it won’t be too late for that to happen for quite some time. Not until he is safely removed from office and cannot be brought back to power by some group or other in violation of the law of the United States.
…for now he remains Caudito Trump. But for how much longer?
Robert Reich goes on to suggest that Mitch McConnell is going to orchestrate the acquittal of his Trump card. However, Mitch McConnell isn’t in charge of the Senate during an impeachment trial. Mitch McConnell is nothing more than another senator for as long as this trial lasts. What needs to happen is for someone to point out to the actual leader of the Senate during trial, Chief Justice John Roberts, that Mitch McConnell is claiming more authority than is his due. Even the Chief Justice refers to Mitch McConnell as Leader McConnell, so the chances that pointing out his error will change his behavior is slim. But Mitch McConnell isn’t leader anything during an impeachment trial. He is senator McConnell, and the word disgraced should preface even that since he should have been removed from office already for his unwillingness to do his job properly.
The rest of the video is informative, as far as it goes. The yield curve inverted. That was a bad thing. Tariffs are bad for trade and the OHM loves tariffs. This is also a bad thing. The economy is weakening. Also bad. If we allow Trump to continue in office, he will drive the economy into the ditch all the while blaming everyone around him for the problems that he doesn’t know how to fix because he is a caudito. A caudillo would have executed a dozen people already and blamed them. Be thankful Trump isn’t one of those.
Anyone who doubts that Trump doesn’t want to be a dictator need only look at what he said to Representative Schiff via Twitter. Trump threatens his prosecutors. That is what that Tweet was, and no lying press secretary can change the text in the OHM’s tweets. It was a threat, and it wasn’t even the first one issued against someone who didn’t act like one of his toadies does. Jokes are funny. That was not a joke. Remove the Cadito.
This should be the question that every pundit asks every Republican who won an office in the election on November 6, 2018, since every one of them swore fealty to King Trump in order to win their elections. The question should be asked every time they hold a presser. It should be asked every time they are seen in public. It should be asked in front of their wives. Their children. Their families. Everyone needs to have the blatant corruption at the heart of every Republican victory last night spelled out in the most graphic, disgusting terms possible. Trump can get away with the shit he says every day? Ask that fucking question every fucking day until they crack.
“what does Trump’s cock taste like, Mr. Senator? Mr. Representative? Mr. Secretary?”
Maybe, just maybe, they’ll fucking wake up then. But I doubt it.
In the meantime. The weasel will try to squirm out of harm’s way. Trump has already signaled that he’ll play ball with the Democrats. Nothing doing. Not unless he turns states evidence on all his Russian contacts, fires all his children, divests from all his businesses. And when I say divest I mean sell every one of his properties to the highest bidder with all proceeds going to pay off the design and construction professionals he’s screwed over the last forty years. He has to agree to replace his entire cabinet with people who will not attempt to undermine their departments. Essentially he has to agree to congressional oversight of everything in the presidential administration, and he loses control of the military. He has to rubber-stamp everything the congress sends to him and he has to tell all his supporters how much they’ll love it.
Oh, and he also will have to insist on IRS prosecutions for the entire DeVos family.
If. If he does all of that, he can stay president for two more years. No running for re-election either. Take your pension, sit down and shut up after January 20th, 2021. If he doesn’t go for all of that, the anal probes start moving in on January 20th, 2019. Or he could just quit now and take his chances. It’s all up to him now. Let’s see which way the weasel runs.
…I spoke too soon post-election. Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh scared Trump into demanding congress do his bidding instead of trying to do something that made sense, like bow to the will of the majority of US citizens. He said (paraphrasing):
Build my wall with your money since Mexico won’t pay for it!
He, the president, the man charged with keeping the government running, turned the government off. This is probably the most impeachable act we’ve seen a president do, ever. Another history-breaking action from this, the most corrupt, the most fraudulent, the most ridiculous president in the history of this country.
The standoff cannot last, and Trump will not be getting money for his wall from the Democratically lead house. They know what kind of thief he is already:
If the shutdown doesn’t end in less than a month, I predict impeachment hearings will begin to be discussed seriously. The only thing standing in the way of the government reopening is the idiot sitting in the White House not doing the job he was elected to do.
The government stayed shut down from December 22, 2018 until January 25, 2019. 35 days. For more than a month, there was no United States government. Let that sink in. There was no capacity to do anything that required the federal government to operate for almost the entire month of January, 2019. The president turned the government back on at that point. The house passed some meaningless legislation so that Trump could save face, and he grudgingly allowed the United States to continue to exist, until he changes his mind again.
…and the outrage rolled on through the year of 2019. Trump’s new flunky, AG William Barr, ensured that the Mueller investigation ended. AG Barr then lied about what was in the report, and refused to re-characterize his assessment of the report even after Bobby-Three-Sticks testified before the House. Mueller said in very precise terms (paraphrasing)
Weirdly, people keep telling me Mueller didn’t find anything. That isn’t what I heard in his testimony. What I heard him say was he found a lot of stuff, he just couldn’t prove any of it as a prosecutor tasked with building a case against Donald J. Trump; because that guy is the president and a president has to be impeached. That is the prosecutorial remedy for bad presidents.
On January 14, 2020, the new P.M. of the United Kingdom (soon to be just the Kingdom of England and Wales once again. After Brexit that is. AB? –ed.) the infamous Bojo is also on his knees sucking Donald Trump’s cock. I wonder if he has an opinion about the flavor? The BBC reports that Bojo wants to Replace Iran nuclear plan with the Trump deal. That’s rich. Like there will be a Trump deal with Iran short of full-out war. Yeah, that will happen.
I’m watching the case being put before the Senate as I write this (January 22, 2020, 6:30 pm, day three according to C-SPAN) I moved this article forward to the date of the impeachment trial in the Senate while watching the opening arguments yesterday (01/21/2020) seemingly endless arguments over the rules that the Senate would follow during the trial. I have now updated the article with links to some of the Trumpismo articles that I’ve written since the 2018 elections. It is now time to get busy watching this rare political event unfold.
Make no mistake here. If the Senate acquits Donald John Trump without calling witnesses, every Republican Senator who votes to acquit will have taken their turn at sucking the President’s cock. Every single one of them. This act of theirs will make them complicit with Trump’s official crimes when they finally come to light.
More importantly, every one of them should be investigated by the next president who takes control of the office, and that investigation could very well be conducted by foreign governments interested in seeking favor with the president of the United States. They should probably think pretty hard about acquitting Donald John Trump. You never know who the next person who holds an office might be. Just ask Barack Obama if he’s happy about his current predicament. Ask him if he thinks the future turned out the way he wanted.
Was the phrase that we needed to understand the most in the time of Trump, this is pretty much where I saw us ending up. I didn’t know when and I didn’t know exactly how, but I knew that impeachment and ignominy were in the GOP’s and Trump’s future.
The basis of the conflict in question left us no wiggle room. This is where we were heading as soon as the political system allowed Trump to hold the office of President. We were heading for the kind of crisis that this country hasn’t seen since the lead-up to and then resolution of the Civil War, no matter what the actual events that transpired in the then future were. It has been 3 years, 2 days, 13 hours and 22 minutes since Donald Trump should have been removed from office, basically the day after he was sworn in. It will have been a bit longer by the time you read this.
Postscript
I wrote the beginning segments of this article after the 2018 Democratic midterm victories while still under the delusion that we would see a change in President Trump’s behavior. Would see him modulate after the drubbing he suffered in that election. Once again, I was wrong. Against all the evidence of history, the Republicans and their president continued on their merry way pretending that they didn’t have anything to worry about.
The government shutdown also derailed my train of thought and I forgot about this article until I went back over the year’s articles trying to decide what I would use to anchor that first day of testimony that so many of us had been waiting for, for over a year. Finally that day had come. Not that it amounted to much.
…and still the GOP sucks on that tiny little cock of his. None of the treasonous acts that Donald Trump has committed since the Republican party made itself the party of Trump, irrevocably welded itself to Trump and his crimes when they acquitted him that January; none of it has made any difference in the calculations of the drivers of Republican thought and the Republican party as a political entity. They still slog on in service of Trump, his corrupt businesses and their own continued unbridled desire for power.
This is why we cannot accept a Republican victory in the next set of federal elections (2022, 2024) even if it seems like they were a real result. We can’t accept it because the Republican party is a criminal enterprise attempting to take over our government and we can’t allow this to happen. I don’t know what comes after the vote that puts them back in power but I know that the US probably stops existing not too long after that point.
They’re still kicking out perfectly good Republicans just because Caudito Trump, the Orange Hate-Monkey, doesn’t like the way they talk about him. He still thinks he’s president even though he ran away to hide at Mar-a-Lago rather than die behind the resolute desk in the same way that a respectable captain should go down with his ship. I hate to break it to him; he held the office but he never was and never will be president.
The presidency is more than an office, it is a frame of mind. A frame of mind that Donald Trump simply can’t achieve. He hasn’t got the balls to do the job necessary. His daddy took them away and never gave them back.
I solemnly swear (or affirm, as the case may be) that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald John Trump, President of the United States, now pending, I will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws: So help me God.
But the rules he laid out earlier today (Monday January 20th, 2020) show that he has every intention to go ahead with flushing the entire process.
It would also allow an option for a motion to dismiss the case outright immediately after the resolution is adopted, a senior Republican leadership aide said. It’s unlikely, however, that such a motion would have the Republican votes needed to pass it.
I wrote my Senators and my House representative back in July, letting them know my thoughts on the Orange Hate-Monkey (OHM) and his accomplices in the Senate.
Two of his Senate accomplices are the two Senators from Texas, my two Senators, so I didn’t imagine much would come of the effort. But I felt I needed to say something about the bullshit that has been flooding the airwaves since the OHM took office, and McConnell’s complicity in allowing the bullshit to continue.
McConnell’s actions today have proven that my contention of last July was right on the money. This is the naked worship of power as an entity in itself. By McConnell. By the Stormtrumpers. McConnell has to be removed from his Senate office now, so that the Stormtrumpers who refuse to give up on Donald Trump will understand just how far outside of the law their leadership is now operating.
This isn’t a fringe opinion. Just a few weeks ago Christianity Today ran an Op-Ed by a prominent voice in the evangelical christian community. A story that was featured on Robert Reich’s Facebook wall the day it ran.
“We have reserved judgment on Mr. Trump for years now. Some have criticized us for our reserve. But when it comes to condemning the behavior of another, patient charity must come first. [But] to use an old cliché, it’s time to call a spade a spade, to say that no matter how many hands we win in this political poker game, we are playing with a stacked deck of gross immorality and ethical incompetence.”
Evangelical christians are giving up on Donald Trump. I don’t know how many, and I don’t know if it will be enough of a movement to make a difference. But Donald Trump’s core base of support is starting to erode, and those people also think that he should be removed from office.
So why doesn’t Moscow Mitch McConnell think this should happen? Could it be that he loves having power so much that he’d rather be the destroyer of the great experiment than give it up? Was he always a traitor?
To: Senator John Cornyn 517 Hart Senate Office Building Washington DC 20510 (202) 224-2934 Contact: www.cornyn.senate.gov/contact
To: Senator Ted Cruz 127A Russell Senate Office Building Washington DC 20510 (202) 224-5922 Contact: www.cruz.senate.gov/?p=form&id=16
I’m writing you concerning your dereliction of duty, and what I see as your one chance to save yourselves from the coming storm that is rising against Donald Trump and the Republican party that he has remade in his image. Your one chance to save yourselves from the fate that awaits both him and his accomplices in the high crimes and misdemeanors that he will soon be accused of. His accomplice in the Senate, Mitch McConnell will also be charged, and the Senators are in a position to either be charged with him, or to finally do the right thing by the citizens of the state of Texas whom they claim to represent.
In 2010, Mitch McConnell informed Republican contributors that he intended to not do his job for the next two years in order to make Barack Obama a one term president. When President Obama was reelected in 2012, Mitch McConnell proceeded to not do his job, and to encourage his fellow Senators to not do their jobs, including both of you, for the next four years, for the entire time that Senator Cruz had been in office. As a result of his and your efforts to derail the US government under Barack Obama, the migrant crisis on the Southern border was never adequately addressed. Because of his and your negligence, the opioid epidemic was never addressed at all. Because of his and your negligence, the student debt crisis has continued to spiral into a catastrophe. Because of his and your negligence, thousands and millions of Americans, thousands of Texans, have suffered and died without adequate healthcare. Continue to suffer and die to this very day. Not satisfied to see them suffer and die at the current rates, your caucus in the Senate has attempted to throw more people off of the ACA at the behest of your corporate and wealthy funders. Because of his and your negligence, the impacts of climate change have never been acknowledged and no attempts to offset CO2 emissions have even been begun at the federal level.
I could continue this litany of negligence, disrespect and outright lies on his and your parts, but I would be here all day writing this if I was to attempt to enumerate every single issue that McConnell is derelict in dealing with. His encouragement to you to be derelict in your official duties to serve and protect the constitution of the United States, and through that document the people you represent. I don’t consider any of you to be worth that kind of time. All three of you are generally beneath my notice, past experience being a good educator. I have written to all of you in years past, taking you to task for things you said and did both before and after you entered office. I know you are wholly owned by your corporate donors and wealthy benefactors. I know that none of you care about the suffering of average Texans. I know that none of you care about anything but being re-elected and being able to continue to take sweet campaign contributions from dark money sources. Therein lies the heart of your problem. I will spell this dilemma out for you.
You will lose your next elections. All of you. It’s true, I won’t and never have voted for any of you. So there is no need to try to prove to me that you aren’t the things I describe above. I know that I will get no return correspondence that will address any of the points that I make in this letter. You will dismiss this letter, as you have all the other letters I have sent you, as being from someone who does not represent the majority of Texans. Your current problem is larger than me, larger than Austin where I live, a place on the map that won’t vote for you either.
Austin, a city you Republicans have sought to punish for our unwillingness to support your previous pro-corporate agendas, along with most of the metropolitan areas across the state of Texas. We will not swear allegiance to you and your corporate owners, we see ourselves as citizens of the city we live in, not the state of Texas that our cities are unable to escape the control of. Your governor and the Republican controlled Texas legislature have all shown how much disdain they hold city dwellers in by forcing us to abandon rules that we deemed necessary for city life. Forcing us to abide by the whims of your corporate masters. We do not forget your disregard for our desire to go our own way, make our own rules. But your problem only starts in the cities that will not vote for you.
The average Texan will not support your leadership’s current white supremacist agenda. The targeting of racial and religious minorities. The demands that the US establish a legal preference for the christian religion and its god. These are all contrary to the constitution of the United States and all of the founding documents that have come down to us modified through the ages. It is there in black and white for anyone to discover. The racism that lies at the center of the Confederacy that your schools lie to our children about. The Jim Crow laws that your white supremacist forebears forced the federal government to accept in violation of the spirit of the fourteenth amendment. All of it, there for anyone to stumble across if they simply have the curiosity to go look.
Your problem is that all of Texas can see that you serve Mitch McConnell and Republican corporate funders. You do not serve the state of Texas, the state you were sent to Washington DC to represent. This can be seen in your willingness to watch Texans suffer and die without healthcare, as I mentioned previously. No, you don’t serve Texas; you serve Mitch McConnell, a man who violated his oath of office most recently in 2015 by not at least holding a vote for or against Merrick Garland, an act that was required by law, by the very constitution you swore to uphold. Mitch McConnell who is personally profiting from his wife’s job in the cabinet, also in violation of the constitution. You serve this man, and this man is not worthy of being a member of the Senate.
Mitch McConnell serves Donald Trump. Not the office of the president, an office that has sat essentially vacant since Barack Obama left office three years ago. No, he serves the man Donald Trump, a man who has never obeyed the law, a man who lied when he took his oath of office and even now openly conspires with our enemies in an attempt to retain political power. He serves Donald Trump, a man who is doing his dead level best to start a war with Iran that isn’t necessary. Donald Trump, the man that is starving and killing climate refugees on our Southern border in an attempt to prove that we in the US are even more heartless than the MS-13 gang members that he scares his voting block with. Donald Trump, and through him Mitch McConnell, wants to be more cruel than the gang members that are killing these people in the places they escaped from.
Now, all of this might not be a problem for you if only you could control the press like dictators do in places that Donald Trump loves. Places like Russia and North Korea. But this isn’t one of those poor, information starved places. This is the United States, where anyone can get on the internet almost anywhere and find out what the truth is by simply looking for it. By reading a newspaper or going to a library or just turning on their TV sets. And they are finding out about the things that I describe above. They know of your negligence. They know of your dereliction of duty. They, the majority of Texans who can and will vote, will not be voting for you in 2020 or 2024 because they will have a choice other than you to vote for. You may not be worried about this. You may think you have a fix in that will make sure you appear to win your elections anyway. The people who know what I know? Those people will not be fooled by your chicanery.
You have one chance and one chance only now to save your hides and your good standing, if not your offices. Begin hearings today to have Mitch McConnell removed from the Senate. Join with the leadership of the House of Representatives in their attempts to find out just how much criminality that Donald Trump has conducted under the guise of being president of the United States. Call for impeachment hearings for Donald Trump, a man who was never worthy of the office of the President in the first place based on his own rhetoric and his own lawless business practices. Do these things and we will not be forced to convict you along with your leadership when we finally take power from you again. The choice is yours. The writing is on the wall for anyone to see now. Choose.
When the framers were debating impeachment at the Constitutional Convention, George Mason asked: “Shall any man be above justice?”
The same question faces us now: Can a president use the power of his office to hold himself above the law? Trump is unlikely to face impeachment anytime soon, or perhaps anytime at all. But it’s time for all of us — voters, members of Congress, Trump’s own staff — to be honest about what he’s done. He has obstructed justice.
This was in my Facebook memories for today. On this day, one year ago, you posted this link from your Tumblr account. A dead link to my now deleted Tumblr account. As I was reading over the list of charges in the article I realized the list is longer than 10 points now, a full year later. Some of these points have been enumerated on this blog over the last two years. This article is the latest in a series of articles that carry the tag #ImpeachTrump but even that list of articles is hardly exhaustive or even current. I’ve grown tired over the past two years. Tired of attempting to categorize the many, many impeachable offenses of the sitting president. But the offenses continue unabated, whether I’m paying attention or not.
The appointment of Matthew Whitaker to the job of Attorney General after firing Jeff Sessions would figure highly in the expanded list of charges. Appointing someone who was not Senate approved to the job of Attorney General is itself an extra-constitutional act, let alone naming someone who explicitly applied for the job by stating he would end the Mueller investigation.
…and yet Matthew Whitaker hasn’t done the one thing he was sent to do. Have you seen the video of the guy sweating in front of television cameras? That is the look of a man with his balls in a vice. Caudillo Trump gave him a job to do, and then Bobby three sticks explained to the idiot what would happen to him if he did the job that His Excellency sent him to do. Now Matthew Whitaker’s balls are in a vice. He can’t do what he was appointed to do and he can’t answer questions about the thing that he was sent to end because Mueller will throw him to the wolves along with Trump if he does. Clearly, Matthew Whitaker can’t wait to be out of the hot seat so that he can let the next guy take over.
Which brings me to the next point on the list of impeachable acts. The nominee for the Attorney General’s job currently being reviewed by the Senate. He too applied for the job by stating he would end the Mueller investigation. If he gets the nod from the Senate (and why hasn’t he already gotten that?) Bobby three sticks will explain to him, in pretty much the same detail he explained to Whitaker, exactly what will happen to him if he interferes with the investigation of Caudillo Trump. In short order he will be seen sweating in front of the cameras refusing to answer questions about the Mueller investigation, while it continues unimpeded.
Caudillo Trump just can’t seem to figure out that he’s digging his own grave with each thing he does to attempt to hinder the investigation. Each act, another example of his willingness to subvert justice. Why would an innocent man feel the need to keep trying to subvert justice in this way? Could it be he is as guilty as I argued he was two years ago? Caveat Emptor?
The Democratic party now runs the U.S. House of Representatives. Speaker Pelosi holds the gavel, and articles of impeachment would pass the house if they were proposed and seconded, and the trial were to be held today. But the Senate is still held by Republicans, and we need two-thirds of the Senate to convict the current occupant of the Office of the President and remove him from the office that he has repeatedly demonstrated he is not fit to hold. That number is sixty-six. Sixty-six Senators to vote to convict, and only 49 firm votes are currently available for that conviction. We need seventeen Republicans that want to get re-elected next year to step forward and call for the removal of Caudillo Trump. Who will those brave souls be?
First they’ll have to oust McConnell as leader of the Republicans in the Senate. I wish them luck in that endeavor. We could take that hard road, or we could hold out a little longer and then cheer President Pelosi as she accepts the nomination of the Democratic party for the office of President of the United States in 2020, an office she inherited due to the crimes committed by the previous president and his vice president. And then cheer her election that November, and her swearing in the following January. Pick one.
Editor’s note. William Barr became A.G. Barr, making the entire Republican caucus of the Senate complicit in Donald Trump’s crimes since they voted to approve A.G. Barr’s appointment to the Justice Department, where he promptly set about sabotaging everything that the Justice Department was doing that was impeding Trump’s unconstitutional agenda. Mueller Time was a bit of a dud when it occurred because of A.G. Barr’s lies concerning the findings of Robert Mueller, lies that Mueller did not explicitly call out during his testimony before congress.
William Barr should be under investigation now, just as his boss is currently under investigation for impeachment. There are hundreds of public servants appointed by Trump and approved by the Republican Senate that should similarly be under investigation, given what is now known about Trump’s reckless corruption schemes.
I didn’t watch the witch hunt that was televised today (Thursday September 28th, 2018) although I have seen several stories in the media telling me how everyone else did watch. That would be their time to waste in watching the execution of a good woman’s reputation. I didn’t watch just like I didn’t watch debates that included Donald Trump. Brett Kavanaugh is lying now, just like Trump was lying then and every other time he spoke. Everyone knows Kavanaugh is lying. They know he is lying because he refused to ask for an FBI investigation when prompted. Repeatedly. So everyone in that Judiciary Committee hearing knew he was lying, but they all have to stick to their scripts.
Do you know how we know that Mueller’s investigation isn’t a witch hunt? There are no women accused. There are no women accused and Donald Trump is still in office two years later. If Donald Trump had been a woman, if Hillary Clinton had won the election in 2016, there would already be a high rise built on the spot where her body was burnt eighteen months ago. Because witch hunts come to a speedy conclusion and they inevitably convict innocent people.
I started to watch the debates between Beto O’Rourke and Ted Cruz last week. Ted Cruz was lying before he even got out of his opening comments. What’s the point of listening to defacto, demonstrable liars? People who start off lying and never stop lying, playing dirty, blaming others for their behavior? Save yourself some time, spare yourself and the furniture the wear and tear of torment like that. They’re lying, they’re going to keep lying, so let’s get on to the next thing. What is the next thing, you ask? filling the streets of Washington DC with enough people that normal life comes to a standstill until this travesty of a Presidency comes to an end. That has been the next thing that needs doing since January 20, 2017.
Illness got in the way of my documenting the travesty of the Kavanaugh confirmation (as mentioned here) I’m going to append the material I intended to include in the further documentation to this post in a largely unedited format.
I’ve shared that post widely. Many people who don’t follow Stonekettle Station expressed agreement with the words. It hadn’t occurred to me to think what might have happened had Kavanaugh not channeled Donald Trump’s Orange Hate-Monkey behavior into his Red Hate Monkey impersonation, until I read that post. Then it struck me. He was right. Kavanaugh’d be on the court already, if he had simply done the standard wring your hands I’m sorry bullshit. If he had done that instead of blow his top, they would have held the full Senate vote that day. Trump inspired him to destroy his own career by telling him to go hard. Whatever it is he’s hiding will come to light now, just as Trump’s dirty laundry airs on a nearly nightly basis these days.
…tell me again, why do people think Donald Trump knows anything about politics? Because I don’t think he knows thing one about the subject.
…also, I’m hoping the FBI does what the interrogator did to Kavanaugh at the hearing. Probed in sensitive spots in such a way that the skeletons fall out of the closet. “Oops, we didn’t mean to do that!” But you are probably right. The White House is going to try to orchestrate the investigation.
However, there was a ton of pushback that Jim got from elsewhere on Facebook, leading him to write an even longer post on the subject two days later.
I was NOT suggesting Kavanaugh cop to rape. Again, you MUST have seen enough of this to know how it works. There’s a list a couple hundred deep on Wikipedia of American politicians caught with their pants down.
I mean, you guys read the paper right? You watch the news? You know this is NOT the first guy with a shady sexual history nominated for office, right?
Lawyers write non-apology apologies for politicians all of the time without admitting anything. Kavanaugh IS a lawyer. The Senate committee confirming him are almost all lawyers. The SENATE is mostly lawyers. You people HAVE to know how this game is played? Right? You’ve seen it often enough.
There’s a formula for this: The guy makes some sort of vague tearful apology written by a lawyer without admitting anything. The powers-that-be use that to justify their approval AND their dismissal of the victims and any public protest. Confirmation. Business as usual.
Now before you start misinterpreting THAT statement, I didn’t say it was right. This formula. I said it IS. Call it the Patriarchy. Call it White Privilege. Call it Politics As Usual or the Swamp or whatever.”
It literally blew my mind that people did not understand what the first post was getting at. That he had to write a post three times longer than the first one just to get the key points across. As if this was grade school and you have to lead these people by the hands to get them to understand. I write, too. I get that narratives are hard to construct. But seriously, some people should stick to watching children’s cartoons rather than trying to master big words and hard concepts.
Reviewing the evidence revealed by the talking heads I listened to, talking heads endlessly discussing the hearings, I came away with the fact that Christine Blasey Ford, the prosecutor that the Senate Judiciary Committee had hired to cross-examine now Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh, got him to reveal his character by making him lose his cool. He had secrets he was hiding, and he wasn’t going to reveal them willingly. He probably should have played with himself before going into that hearing. It might have made him less of a raging asshole, but I doubt it.
After this groundbreaking revelation, that Kavanaugh was lying on the stand, an impeachable error for a sitting justice, the Republican leadership of the committee fired Christine Blasey Ford, burning another witch. They had two witch burnings in one Senate hearing, and they counted that as a success. I know that Lindsey Graham saw it that way. The Senate Republicans burned the witches and pretended none of that bad stuff that Justice Kavanaugh was accused of ever happened. Just as they did with Justice Thomas. #IBelieveHer and That Still Isn’t Enough People. The outcome of the hearings was preordained by the Republican leadership of the Senate. Holding the hearings were just a sham.
On top of that, justice Kavanaugh was drunk on the witness stand. Pull up the video of his Senate hearing. Look at the flush on his nose and cheeks. That man is one angry drunk. I pity his wife and children.
Only stupid people like Caudito Trump and his MAGA supporters fell for the charade that the Senate performed that day. Now we have two people accused of sexual assault sitting on the SCOTUS and the stage is set for the drama that conservatives have been waiting breathlessly for ever since Roe was decided, convinced that they’ll be able to put women back in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant as often as they can put them there. They’ve got their pandering Trump card stacking the federal courts in conservative favor. A task that was made possible by a Senate Majority Leader who should have been removed from office for dereliction of duty in 2010 when he stated his plans to do nothing for Obama while he was president.
It is not my job to decide if Brett Kavanaugh is guilty. It’s impossible for me to do so with incomplete information, and with no process for testing competing facts. But it’s certainly not my job to exonerate him because it’s good for his career, or for mine, or for the future of an independent judiciary. Picking up an oar to help America get over its sins without allowing for truth, apology, or reconciliation has not generally been good for the pursuit of justice.
A woman has accused a Supreme Court nominee of drunkenly pinning her to a bed, groping her and covering her mouth when she screamed. She has provided therapist notes from well before the nominee was a public figure. She has taken a polygraph test. She is willing to undergo an FBI investigation and testify under oath before the Senate. The man in question has been nominated to a lifetime appointment on the highest court in the land, where he will be interpreting the Constitution, and is likely to be the key vote for overturning a woman’s right to choose.
Yet at today’s conference for social conservatives, the Senate’s Majority Leader said none of this matters: “In the very near future, Judge Kavanaugh will be on the U.S. Supreme Court. So, my friends, keep the faith. Don’t get rattled by all this. We’re going to plow right through it and do our job.”
McConnell should be convicted for his crimes, his breaches of professional ethics. In 2008 when he set the Republicans to oppose everything Obama proposed, he should have been censured, right then and there. But instead of punishing him for his malfeasance, the Republicans doubled down and doubled down again, and then again, until we get to this impasse we are in now.
After all of their racism directed at Barack Obama. After all of their hypocrisy decrying programs they supported before Obama, and Clinton before him, proposed and passed the exact same programs. After all the Republican backstabbing and double-dealing to get their way. Denying Merrick Garland, President Obama’s SCOTUS nominee, any hearing for a year. Forcing the entire nation to wait a year with an evenly divided Supreme Court, just so that they could use the 2016 general election as a referendum. The Republicans are now caught in their last act of criminality, if not their last act of hypocrisy. They have someone they want on the Supreme Court. Someone that they know is their last chance. Their last chance to get a conservative on the court before the tide turns against them, and they won’t give up this guy no matter how much loathsome activity is dug up about him. None of it matters to them.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) blocked legislation on Wednesday that would reopen most of the government currently closed during the partial shutdown.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) went to the Senate floor to ask for consent to take up the House-passed bill that would fund every agency and department impacted by the partial shutdown, except the Department of Homeland Security, through Sept. 30.
McConnell, however, objected. It’s the fourth time he’s blocked the bill to reopen most of government. He has also blocked, as recently as Tuesday, a House-passed bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security through Feb. 8.
Take this man’s job away from him. Mitch McConnell should not still be in the Senate, much less leader of the Senate majority. Why have we not taken his job away from him yet? Oh, right, because Republicans still own the Senate and Republicans love power more than country. They love power more than truth. They reward loyalty to party over loyalty to the American people. Republicans have become the party of authoritarians and corporate fealty. They would be beneath notice if they didn’t still hold such high office. Time to alleviate that problem. It’s up to you, Senate Republicans.
Only Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans could manipulate something as benign and well intentioned as making Election Day a holiday into a vast left-wing conspiracy. It really shows how scared to death they are of the American people actually having a say in our democracy.
This just proves my long time assertion, an assertion laughed at by many. The Republicans are only in it for the power. They are only in it for themselves and their party. They no longer care about the great experiment that is the United States and they don’t care about democracy or the rule of law unless it is law they dictate from above.
If Republicans cared, they would be on the same side as the Democrats, promoting participation and a level playing field across the board. They haven’t been for any of these things for quite some time, at least since the day that Mitch McConnell declared that Barack Obama should be a one term president even though Obama won the office by greater margin than any President in recent memory. Mitch McConnell should spend the rest of his life in an orange jumpsuit. At the very least, he should be kicked out of the Senate and denied the pension and healthcare benefits that former members of the Senate enjoy. He is a prominent stain on the party of Lincoln. Maybe not the worst, but he’s been there longer than most. Time for him to go, and his party will have to do this themselves, if we are going to save this country.
Facebook comments embroidered and backdated to the blog. Virtually the same comment all three times for all three instances.This is the depth that the GOP has sunk to. To have a Senate delegation lead by a Trump toadie like McConnell has proven to be. He should be put on trial with Trump.
It was then that Mitch McConnell’s irredeemable hypocrisy also became undeniable hypocrisy. He took it upon himself to do exactly the thing that he said shouldn’t be done just four years previously and forced through the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court of the United States. There isn’t a prison cell small enough for creatures as evil as Mitch McConnell has proven himself to be. Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump have finally proven to me that evil people do exist. Congratulations?
My friends, this is a dark hour. Intolerance, cruelty, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and environmental destruction have been let loose across the land.
So what are we – the majority — to do?
First and most importantly, do not give up. That’s what they want us to do. Then they’d have no opposition at all.
Second, in the short term, if you are represented by a Republican senator, do whatever you can to get him or her to reject Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, or, at the least, postpone consideration until after the midterm elections. Urge others to join with you. 202-224-3121
Third, make a ruckus. Demonstrate. Engage in non-violent civil disobedience. Fight lies with truth. Join the resistance. Participate in www.indivisible.org and https://swingleft.org/
Fourth, vote this November 6 for people who will stand up to all this outrage. Mobilize and organize others to do so. Contact friends and relations in “red” states, and urge them to do the same.
Fifth, help lay the groundwork for the 2020 presidential election, so that even if Trump survives Mueller and impeachment he will not be reelected.
Finally, know that this fight will be long and hard. It will require our patience, our courage, and our resolve. The stakes could not be higher.
#ImpeachTrump needs to be a rallying cry among all resistors. First and foremost we must achieve a successful impeachment of Trump, a destruction of his administration, a refutation of the mandate that the GOP currently operates under. Vote Democratic, a blue wave will send this message loud and clear.
If your state has not had a primary yet, vote in the primary so that your candidates are the people you want to vote for. Make a point to attend precinct meetings. State conventions. Let the Democratic establishment know that we want a total revocation of the Orange Hate-Monkey (OHM) and his agenda as well as his entire administration. We will not be the pawns of any other nation on Earth, and we have no use at all for the Russian stooge that the OHM is known to be. It is time to send a clear message. We are not Trump’s America. We will write a different future than the one he has in mind for us.
I have a few thoughts for the sitting Senators. Senators who will have to decide the fate of the OHM’s Supreme Court nominee. Follow the McConnell rule or be marked as hypocrites and traitors. This is the bed that you representatives of the Republican party have made for yourselves. You will now lay in that bed, willingly or unwillingly, I really don’t care, although I hope you find it comfortable because you are liable to be in it for a very, very long time.
Senator Cory Booker: "The president of the United States is a subject of an ongoing criminal investigation…that could end up before the Supreme Court," so any Trump SCOTUS nomination should be "delayed until the Mueller investigation is concluded." pic.twitter.com/0WwvwNJMYz
“Should we be confirming a justice that’s going to be coming from a person, frankly, that there’s a conflict of interest there, that this judge could end up having to preside over cases relevant to this criminal investigation? … I say no,” Booker said Thursday evening on MSNBC.
We have to stop the people who would railroad through a second Supreme Court nomination. This is the part that I can’t seem to get across to people, and I can’t do it by myself. This has to be done en masse. We the people have to bring Washington DC to a standstill until something is done about the OHM, and we have to start doing that now.
Another notification from Countable. When I hear news from Countable first I’m frequently forced to go looking for sources. This time I heard the same facts from other sources on the same day. Cross checking no longer necessary then.
Should Republicans delay Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote until all the documents are in? Are you interested in seeing details about Kavanaugh’s time with the George W. Bush administration?
The answer to this question is apparent on the surface. Any move to approve Kavanaugh before a full accounting is available to the people of the United States will be and should be counted as a betrayal of the people of the United States by their representatives in congress. How could it be deemed anything else considering the history of Supreme Court nominees and this President, this Congress?
I will be voting accordingly, if this happens. working to see you impeached right along with your president if you move to install the traitors appointee before you are unseated in November. You have now been informed, Senators.
