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Impeachment is on the menu… — 43 Comments

1. I’m shocked.

2. “And perhaps there are even third and fourth alternatives that haven’t yet occurred to me.”

   Censure. The mealy-mouth way out.

   Anyone have a fourth?

3. Anyone have a fourth?

   Christmas office/bong party?

   Burn down all the House office buildings?

   Take the caucus to the The Greenbriar on retreat by train, have the train go into a tunnel and never emerge?

4. I think they will impeach, and that Pelosi won’t let caucus members vote against it. They had 231 to start the “inquiry.” Losing Democrats to make it look “close” would only make the whole thing look more foolish than it already is.

   I hope I’m wrong.

5. “Take the caucus to the The Greenbriar on retreat by train, have the train go into a tunnel and never emerge?” If only!

6. The problem with letting moderate/vulnerable Trump district Democrats vote against impeachment is that it would make it bipartisan.

   Mike

7. MBunge:

   Not all that much of a problem. The vote to proceed with the “impeachment inquiry” had a bipartisan “no” vote. The vote for Obamacare was bipartisan “no.” All they care about now is passing these things.

8. Here’s a possibility!

9. The Dems probably will impeach, which is conclusive proof they have lost their minds. It’s suicide!

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUHk2RSMCS8

10. Here’s a small variation on Neo’s (1). Make sure the articles of impeachment are very weak (logically & legally), but attuned to issues that afflict the haters and hotheads. Then the whole thing devolves into Kabuki Theater about the emperor’s clothes. There’s nothing there! No, the case is airtight!

    The Dems will pray that McConnell will the dismiss the case outright. See how corrupt those people are. And they’ll have gotten even for the Clinton impeachment.

11. Perhaps the Democrats think the public is just a silly goose. If they force us to swallow enough impeachment foodstuff, the result will be a fine pate´their voters can savor on Election Day.

12. So many alternatives: I will shift to one.

    Hillary proclaims entry into race and announces that voting for her is better than proceeding with impeachment. “Colleagues ‘Let the voters speak’. All of you who support the common good should vote for me.”

13. Kate on December 5, 2019 at 4:44 pm said:
    I think they will impeach, and that Pelosi won’t let caucus members vote against it. They had 231 to start the “inquiry.” Losing Democrats to make it look “close” would only make the whole thing look more foolish than it already is.
    * * *
    That’s … hard to do.

14. I hope Turley has his “Man for All Seasons” insurance paid up.
    Honesty didn’t turn out well for Sir Thomas More, though.

    https://www.redstate.com/nick-arama/2019/12/05/crazy-jonathan-turley-gets-threatened-after-testifying-for-republicans-on-impeachment/

    “My call for greater civility and dialogue may have been the least successful argument I made to the committee. Before I finished my testimony, my home and office were inundated with threatening messages and demands that I be fired from George Washington University for arguing that, while a case for impeachment can be made, it has not been made on this record,” he wrote in his newest column in the Hill on Thursday.

    Brings this to mind, since I just finished reading it.
    https://www.thenewneo.com/2019/12/04/todays-impeachment-theater/#comment-2468996

    rcat on December 5, 2019 at 10:50 am said:
    RE: “Rage has unhinged them. And their base expects it.”
    In Dante’s Inferno, the wrathful punish each other in the swamp of the river Styx. Those consumed by hate are simply brought together, and they torture each other for eternity:

    And I, who was intent on watching it,
    could make out muddied people in that slime,
    all naked and their faces furious.

    These struck each other not with hands alone,
    but with their heads and chests and with their feet,
    and tore each other piecemeal with their teeth.

    The kindly master told me: “Son, now see
    the souls of those whom anger has defeated;

    The Rabid Democrats just can’t deal with anyone who doesn’t line-up 100% with the current party line.
    That they are alienating other Democrats and Independents does not seen to bother them at all.

15. https://www.redstate.com/bonchie/2019/12/05/ig-horowitz-finds-key-information-omitted-carter-page-fisa/

    I suppose it’s not surprising that the bureaucracy would massage itself this way. Just like with his conclusions on the Hillary investigation, Horowitz has set a standard so high in order to charge bad conduct that it’s basically impossible to reach. An FBI official would have to strip naked and shout admissions of guilt in this dude’s yard to get him to conclude wrongdoing occurred. Even then, I’m not sure he would.

    …
    I’ve got to give Democrats credit because they are absolute geniuses. They’ve managed to get much of the conservative media to throw support behind an Obama appointee who refuses to make the tough calls. How is it that such deference is never given to Republican appointees? Yet, the right lines up like suckers every time to proclaim all career bureaucrats are above reproach. Horowitz has proven that he’s going to walk up to the line but never cross it. If that means ultimately excusing deeply biased behavior within the FBI in order to protect the FBI, so be it.

    Nothing matters but the R or the D.

16. https://www.redstate.com/streiff/2019/12/05/president-trump-gives-nancy-pelosi-foretaste-utter-hell-impeachment-trial-will-democrats/

    As the left says, when they aren’t saying something completely different, this is a political, not a judicial process. The imagery of the President’s team claiming that this is all a sham and Democrats’ witnesses refusing to testify will make the case for dismissal in the most epic way possible.

    If this goes to the Senate, neither McConnell or Trump has any interest in not discrediting the Democrats and the process. And it is difficult to see them passing up this opportunity.

17. Trump: Go ahead, Nancy… Make my day.

18. “Whom the gods would destroy… first expressed by Sophocles in his play, Antigone.

    “In American literature, the character of Prometheus speaks the phrase: Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad in the poem “The Masque of Pandora” (1875), by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.”

19. Trump: Go ahead, Nancy… Make my day.

    Indeed, soon to be tweeted just for the lulz: “Nancy!, have you heard of our new Ninja Missile? You should go see one soon.”

20. (stirs chicken entrails…)

    Dems are about to get embarrassed by the Horowitz report. They need something to level the rhetorical playing field and impeachment is their only artifice.

    So, the House will vote to impeach, with significant defections as vulnerable seats are allowed to vote strategically. The matter will go to the Senate for trial.

    The house impeachment hearings were a dog-and-pony show, a sham with the sole purpose of providing raw material for the msm to construct an orangemanbad narrative that cleaves Trump from his supporters.

    The senate trial will be turned into a Ukrainian shit-show staring Joe and Hunter Biden and the Solid Gold deep-state dancers. It will all become grist for the MAGA meme mill.

    The maneuver takes out a very-beatable sleepy Joe and elevates the very-very-beatable Senator Warren.

    The partisan nature of the trial… Cocaine Mitch can now be just as one-sided as was Pelosi and allow the very same kind of procedural irregularities to hamstring the prosecution this time… guarantees a prog loss in a party-line vote.

    Trump wins, holds a press conference and spikes the ball as lefty true-believers drop dead from dehydration due to all of the nonstop crying.

    As he exits the scene and boards the chopper, Trump does the Nixon victory pose… together with a recently-pardoned Roger Stone… to rub shit in the media’s collective unblinking Horus eye.

    Hands shaking with rage and wet with tears, the progs put all of their remaining chips on recapturing the senate.

21. Dems are about to get embarrassed by the Horowitz report.

    People have been counting on Horowitz, Durham, and Barr. My wager is you’ll be disappointed.

22. sdferr and TommyJay mentioned Charlie Martin’s PJMedia column, “Why I Still Don’t Think Trump Will Be Impeached”. The nut of it:

    I still think the risks are too great for the Democrats. Instead, we’ll see this “drafting of articles of impeachment” drag on, “vaster than Empires and more slow,” because they get all the political benefits of keeping IMPEACHMENT IMPEACHMENT IMPEACHMENT in the news, with none of the risks.

    https://pjmedia.com/trending/why-i-still-dont-think-trump-will-be-impeached/

    I agree the risks of a Senate trial to Democrats are considerable. However, I question whether Democrats can slow-walk the articles of impeachment without the ridicule from the right and rage from the left exacting terrible costs as well.

    I think Trump was trying to nail down the Democrats with his recent tweet:

    The Do Nothing Democrats had a historically bad day yesterday in the House. They have no Impeachment case and are demeaning our Country. But nothing matters to them, they have gone crazy. Therefore I say, if you are going to impeach me, do it now, fast, so we can have a fair….

    …..trial in the Senate, and so that our Country can get back to business. We will have Schiff, the Bidens, Pelosi and many more testify, and will reveal, for the first time, how corrupt our system really is. I was elected to “Clean the Swamp,” and that’s what I am doing!

    https://pjmedia.com/trending/trump-if-you-are-going-to-impeach-me-do-it-now-fast-invest-in-popcorn-now-people/

    If Democrats try to let the clock run out, Trump’s will tweet brutally on the subject on daily basis. He will crow “Exoneration!” and it will become a regular feature of the 2020 election. Democrats will look foolish *and* weak.

23. People have been counting on Horowitz, Durham, and Barr. My wager is you’ll be disappointed.

    (shakes magic 8 ball…)

    Reply hazy. Try again later.

    I find your prediction to be potentially true… in a trivial sense.

    Will they find enough evidence to arrest, prosecute and execute Hillary? Uh, probably not. So yeah, I’ll be disappointed.

    You’re not really going out on a limb there (fierce yawn).

    But… there’s nothing embarrassing for the dems in the Horowitz report?

    Pppbbbttt…I doubt *that*.

24. Art Deco…I fear that you are probably right. Anyway, I suspect that true Trump haters will ignore any evidence presented and carry on.

    Democrat congressmen in Trump states vote “no” so they can separate themselves from the democrat party and appear independent so they can get re-elected. Can folks really be so blind? Or maybe silly?

25. They’re going to impeach, very little doubt about it since it’s been a stated objective since the 2016 election. The Democrats are going to impeach and keep digging, thinking that they are going to somehow uncover the mother lode of Trump kryptonite, with Grand Jury information access and time, and paying absolutely no attention to the depth of the hole. They know they’re in it, and they know it’s mortally deep. They are betting on creating enough dirt and obfuscation and continual, low-grade, drip-fed mini-non-scandals over the next few months, so that enough voters will still vote Democrat in 2020. They are the party of rancid hopes.

26. I don’t think the Democrats know what they are doing.

    Pelosi had been talking about impeachment hearings going through Christmas, but now … time to ring up the articles of impeachment.

    If yesterday’s hearing had provided a slam-dunk impeach argument, that would be one thing, but those aren’t the reviews the hearing got. So it looks more like flop sweat.

    BTW, does this mean the hearings are over? Seems logical, but I can’t find a direct answer to the question. Given it’s been Calvinball from day one, who knows.

27. Not over huxley, new one scheduled for Monday. Dunno topic.

28. sdferr: Thanks!

    Porgie: But, Gee, Dad – I still don’t understand how you can be the People’s Prosecutor and my defense lawyer at the same time…

    Dad: Easy, son. That way I can see that you are persecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

    Porgie: That’s my Dad!

    –Firesign Theatre, “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers”

29. Most commenters seem to not know many Democrats. The ones I know really believe they can bring the Senate around, that they will win.

    Their level of inability to understand anything outside the Blue Bubble is a mass hysteria far beyond just policy disagreements.

    A book on the Southern Democrat Elites titled Madness Rules the Hour: Charleston, 1860 and the Mania for War describes a similar mass hysteria.

    What seems most likely is that the House will send it to the Senate. The Senate will not convict. The trial will make the Democrats look like fools but they will claim they won, that the Republicans are corrupt. The Democrats are experiencing psychological Denial and Projection. They are actually unable to see what others see, it is invisible to them.

    A stock market crash is likely in the first half of 2020. Things are going to get a lot noisier but Trump will take both Houses and the popular vote, What I call the Boomer Democrat Party will be destroyed.

30. Most commenters seem to not know many Democrats. The ones I know really believe they can bring the Senate around, that they will win.

    One of the self-centered dingbats on our Facebook list starts out a post the other day about how she sympathizes with Melania Trump because she too was once married to someone ‘everyone despises’. She lives in a red county in a township wherein HRC won all of 35% of the vote. Her own neighbors don’t register with her. She then started unloading about the husband she divorced in 2010. She got one comment after another of ‘support’ (all from women). Most of us have few valuable friends – those who tell you the truth when you need it told. I doubt this woman has any valuable friends. I’d like to think her adult sons (one of whom lives within walking distance of his father) took her aside and told he she had to quit talking smack about their dad on Facebook or there wouldn’t be anyone to change her Depends when the time came, but they seem to dote on her.

31. If one wishes to understand the Democrat POV, Vox offers a decent ‘splainer on “Why Democrats are moving so fast on impeachment.” There’s the usual litany of noble reasons — most amusing was “2. Stand Up for the Rule of Law” — but the last reason was surprisingly frank and just might be the solid ground under all the self-serving fluff:

    5. Just get it over with

    Finally, there’s one other possible purpose for this whole impeachment inquiry effort, which may come off as cynical but arguably explains Democratic leaders’ behavior better than anything else.

    That is: The reason for moving ahead with impeachment now is to at long last dispense with the base’s unceasing demand for impeachment.

    All year, Pelosi’s new majority has been under pressure from activists and certain of its members to move forward with impeaching Trump. All year, she has believed impeachment is a political loser and that Trump’s acquittal is certain. All year, she has been trying to stave this off.

    But the demands kept coming, and once the Ukraine scandal broke, she agreed to move ahead. Now, it’s clear that the only way to get Democratic voters to stop demanding Trump’s impeachment is to actually impeach him. And, in this line of thinking, the sooner the better.

    That will kick things over to the Senate, which will acquit Trump. That is, after all, how this thing was always going to end. And then Democrats can, at long last, move on to something else.

    https://www.vox.com/2019/12/4/20991647/impeachment-schedule-democratic-strategy-trump

32. What an odious crew of malevolent –but very dangerous–clowns the Democrats have so clearly demonstrated themselves to be during their frenzied Impeachment clown show (and P.S.–they’ve had a lot of help in their efforts by the lack of united, universal, and forceful push-back from a lot of weak-kneed, supposed Republicans).

    To me this whole three year plus effort to undo the last election is a very dangerous farce, a Leftist scorched earth campaign that, unless stopped, will succeed in destroying the rule of Law, whatever faith anyone might have had remaining in our system of government, and eventually destroy our Republic and our individual Freedoms.

    It is, indeed, as Neo has pointed out, many times, with her “A Man For all Seasons” clip, a clip that Johnathan Turley references in his Impeachment testimony, a case of mowing down the laws that protect us all to get at the Donald, destroying the Rule of Law, and, in the end, leaving all of us without those absolutely necessary defenses for our individual Rights and our Freedoms.

    Here’s a question–what legal justification, for instance, does Schiff have for reportedly obtaining the phone records of reporter John Solomon, and why did AT & T apparently turn them over, and the NSA reportedly work on them? Does this mean that Schiff, or some two bit Torquemada like him, has the ability to just get the phone records of anyone in the country that he wants?

    Seems like now that might be the case.

    I think the key thing is just how many in the electorate are even paying attention, then, what percentage of them have been so manipulated, mis-educated or not educated at all, and propagandized that they cannot see this Leftist Democrat charade for what it is; what percentage of the electorate is currently under the spell of the Grima Wormtougues of the Left.

33. Have y’all looked at the transcript of Pelosi’s announcement yesterday? She starts like this:

    “Let us begin where our founders began in 1776. ‘When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another.’ “

    Frank Miele writes at RCP: “Speaker Pelosi Declares a Coup Against President Trump”

    https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/12/06/speaker_pelosi_declares_a_coup_against_president_trump_141897.html

    This is either wildly inappropriate or a fundamental clue to the deeper meaning of the necessity of impeachment, as seen by the Democrats. These are not the words of an orderly transfer of power via legal means. They are a confession of the underlying intent of what has long been called “The Resistance” — and that is revolution, rebellion, the overthrow of an executive power that does not conform to the expectations of an aggrieved ruling class.

    What we must ask now is just who are “the people” on both sides of this conflict? Pelosi implied that “one people” are dissolving their political bonds with “another,” so who exactly are Pelosi and her like-minded revolutionaries declaring independence from? President Trump, the 63 million people who voted for him, the Republican Party or the authors of the Constitution itself?

    Pelosi dangled her quote from the Declaration of Independence in front of us, but did not complete it — for good reason. The rest of what Thomas Jefferson wrote about the rebellious Colonists is that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

    Jefferson and the co-signers of the Declaration bravely did just that, but as law professor Jonathan Turley so eloquently established in his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, the Democrats in Congress have done nothing of the same. This has been an impeachment in search of a crime, and even now Pelosi cannot establish any basis for impeachment that is guaranteed to win even one Republican vote.

34. A stock market crash is likely in the first half of 2020. [DickIllyes]

    This market is going to hurt a lot of people. It is especially going to deliver Round 4 — or is it 5, 6? — to the pension funds that couldn’t keep up with requirements after the Federal Reserve suppressed interest rates to near zero for all those years. Forcing investors ever farther out along the risk curve was great while it lasted.

35. This market is going to hurt a lot of people.

    No, it’s going to hurt people who buy on margin, invest in hedge funds, and eat their capital gains. The market goes up, the market goes down and passably prudent investors know that.

36. Protect yourself.

37. Re: Stock market crash. When Trump was elected, the Dow was more or less 18,000 and change. A 20% drop from today would leave it above 22,000. Many of the stocks in our deliberately diversified portfolio will continue to pay dividends. If we were okay retiring @18,000, why would I faint if it goes down to 22,000?

38. What makes you choose the figure of 20%, Kate? A 20% drop is not a crash, of course — it’s a garden-variety correction. The only other times long-term stock earnings multiples (the 10yr p/e’s) were at these heights were 1929 and 2000, following which major averages fell over 80%. In 2000, it was Nasdaq that fell more than 80%; the blue chips went down approximately 50% then. The blue chips were not as overvalued in 2000, inasmuch as the tech-internet bubble was mostly Nasdaq. The extremes around the world that I mentioned in one or two other posts show how unusual the current conditions are. The extremes aren’t limited to any one group or sector this time, either. Profit margins, interest rates, and other factors are not likely to remain perpetually perfect, just to touch on the risk side of the equation here. Here’s a simple question that I was asking myself today — why is healthcare making an all-time high when Trump has been talking about restoring sanity to medical costs since the campaign? The administration just recently required hospitals to post publicly their prices for various procedures. Obviously there will be pressures on hospital profit margins, but at the moment Wall Street is in a what-me-worry mode on that one. Just one of the more obvious current examples of the bliss.

39. Well, Kai Akker, if it drops 80%, yeah, we’ll all be in trouble. I don’t anticipate that, but of course I could be wrong. I hope you’re the one who’s wrong.

40. Kai Akker: I haven’t been tracking stocks except out of the corner of my eye. I have been curious about the remarkable gains — and not trusting them. (The first serious investment book I read was Graham’s “The Intelligent Investor,” which offered a conservative strategy.)

    Is it truly as bad as you say? Checking around the web I notice there are analysts claiming Dow 50,000 is around the corner in 5,10,15 years based on, from what I can tell, compound interest equations. However, if the market gets hit bad again like 2000, those equations get reset to a new base.

    Then there is the debt bomb hanging over all of us and that’s going to come due in my lifetime, I’m sure.

    I’m not that optimistic either.

41. The Market is doing well … at the moment. Buy all means:

    Buy high, sell low.

42. Trailing p/e ratios are currently about 23 to 1. A drop of about 30% brings you back to the median of the period since 1974. It will likely over-correct. Might prefigure an ordinary business recession. The problem you had in 2008 was that the asset declining in price was real estate, which people go into debt to purchase and in regard to which a critical mass of people were expecting to be able to refinance. It’s also quite illiquid in comparison to equities.

    Trailing p/e ratios were 34 to 1 in April 1999. The recession in 2001 was quite mild.

43. Checking around the web I notice there are analysts claiming Dow 50,000 is around the corner in 5,10,15 years based on

    The perpetual bulls are hardly ever absent from our midst. Just the names change. James Glassman is now supervising as small NGO and Abby Joseph Cohen (“this is not your father’s S & P”) is a semi-retired consultant, so a new set of names replace them. The value of capital assets cannot over time grow much faster than your productive base.

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