Democrats Didn’t Even Know What They Were Impeaching Trump Over Until They Asked Focus Groups
Posted by freedomforall 4 years, 5 months ago to Politics
After conducting focus groups, Democrats discovered Americans are skeptical and dismissive of their effort to impeach President Trump with baseless charges of “quid quo pro” and “obstruction of justice.”
In a desperate attempt to galvanize public support of their impeachment sham, Democrats ratcheted up their rhetoric and began repeating the more colloquial term “bribery” in recent days to make the case for why Trump should be removed from office, warned Tom Fitton.
“They are impeaching by polling now,” Fitton explained in an interview with Stephen K. Bannon’s War Room. “They figured out to use the word ‘bribery’ after they went back and polled someone. They didn’t even know what they were impeaching him over until they asked the focus group themselves.”
In a desperate attempt to galvanize public support of their impeachment sham, Democrats ratcheted up their rhetoric and began repeating the more colloquial term “bribery” in recent days to make the case for why Trump should be removed from office, warned Tom Fitton.
“They are impeaching by polling now,” Fitton explained in an interview with Stephen K. Bannon’s War Room. “They figured out to use the word ‘bribery’ after they went back and polled someone. They didn’t even know what they were impeaching him over until they asked the focus group themselves.”
He was not supposed to beat $hillary Killary Cackles The Evil Hag!
That just wasn't fair to the Deep State and to some people who sat on grass where they screamed, "Nooooo! Noooooooo! Noooooooooooooooo!"
"Despite six weeks of witness interviews in the impeachment inquiry and hundreds of hours of testimony, the American people aren’t buying the roulette wheel of legal allegations Democrats are leveling against the president, Fitton argued."
Of course they did not know.
All they knew was from the beginning that they wanted the president removed b/c he was not one of them and refused to play by the rules.
The current frenzy is about the 4th iteration of their attacks, every time for a different "reason".
What the Dems should be doing now is running focus groups on how to backtrack from their war on the president lest they'd hand the election to him next year on a silver plate.
Independents are voting against the charade in droves and many on the left has had enough of it as well.
But to use the actual criminal system would remove the politicians from it and would provide the POTUS with the legal rights of any accused. The moment they do that they have nothing. If it ever got to trial it wouldn’t make it to a jury.
Imagine, for a moment, a murder case where the proclaimed eyewitness all testified they never actually saw the accused shoot the victim. Imagine then their star witness saying that not only didn’t know the victim but wasn’t in the same state - that the charge was based on a presumption the accused shot the victim. The defense would immediately move to dismiss - and any sane judge would agree.
I feel like it would take a large book just to learn the basics of this. I wonder why they created the impeachment process and why they didn't define high crimes and misdemeanors.
I did not understand the part about legal rights. What legal rights does someone accused of a crime have that are not part of the impeachment process?
We can see how this played out with the Hamilton and Burr duel. The states handled the criminal activity of murder. This is why constitutionally speaking what is going on isn’t in my mind what the founders wrote because if you read it the impeachment process isn’t a criminal court but a political one. However the power of impeachment was limited to having been convicted of crimes already - and the congress could thus decide what crimes constituted removal or other activity. While it may initially seem absurd, not even treason was a certain qualifier. Surely it is a high crime, yes?
Absolutely but the constitutional punishment is death. So impeachment is kinda irrelevant at that point.
This separation of powers is where virtually everyone commenting on it, and everyone involved in it, are dead wrong. The congress is actually prohibited from convicting someone of a crime. That is strictly the purview of the states and the judicial branch.
Now as to the rights I referred to, the difference should now be obvious. In a constitutional impeachment the POTUS has already been tried and convicted in a criminal court. I said court the accused shares the same rights all have in a criminal court.
In a constitutional impeachment, there is no funding of fact or trying of fact. It is the congress deciding wether they think those crimes reach the bar for congressional action.
However, even under the farce of political impeachment, with their insistence of a crime still present they’d have to abide by rights of an accused - at least most of them. That would mean not controlling what witnesses are allowedX what questions are allowed, and legal representation to the accused. All of that has been excluded from the “inquiry”.
This is the second impeachment hearing in my life. In both of them legal scholars apparently say that they are consistent with the law. In both of them, they feel like offenses to me that don't lend themselves to removal from office. But I'm glad there's some system to catch the behavior and make it known. In the case of President Trump withholding aid to an ally to get a political favor, it seems like they should implement processes that prevent it from happening again. Removing President Trump from office only helps if he's unusually bad, and most politicians wouldn't do such a thing. I don't believe that at all. I think he's a clown, much less adept at crooked political scheming than the average politician. We need checks and balances. If that means decreasing the power of the executive branch, that sounds fine to me. I don't understand how the office of the president got this powerful. I know it was partly to allow a rapid response to a nuclear threat, but I think there's more to it than that
If you're right and the current impeachment process is unconstitutional, the system is broken. If the legal opinions I read in the papers are right and this is basically how the Constitution provides for dealing with this behavior, the Constitution is broken. The longer I live the more I think they should carefully modify the Constitution to spell out the limitations of government or the new powers we chose to grant gov't and the fed gov't. I used to think increased federal powers/spending would lead to more interest groups fighting for their share of the pie. Instead in my lifetime I've seen factions increasingly fighting over nothing, apparently out of psychological distress. I think when the Founders thought of factions, they were thinking of states or even cities. They didn't have the telegraph. Now we have communication way beyond the telegraph, and we have the amazing power of collaborating with a few people in the world who share narrow interests as Seth Godin describes in Tribes. That communication has brought a weird form of tribalism; I don't think it's factions like Madison was thinking about; I think it's closer to pathological response that comes from decreased in-person communities.
Regardless of all this psychological stuff, there should be legal machinery that tries to keep politicians honest. My non-lawyer impression is what we have isn't that great. I'm interested if you know of any books on the topic.
It is basic centralism encroachment. The came into being in the early 20th century. The secret service, however, was the first and it dates back to the end of the Civil War. Once again the rush to centralism goes back to that period. We see the same effect in the western territories and states where pre-Civil War the fed was just there to deal with interaction between natives and settlers when they got out of control; but post-Civil War the military was basically put in charge until a "proper" government under federal authority was put in. Indeed, until the Civil War the West ("The Old West", as is often called among scholars of that era) was a highly functioning anarcho-capitalist region.
As to seeing that policing was left to the states, read the constitution and look for where it specifically authorizes federal police forces, and what crimes it defines. Then consider that all powers not explicitly granted by the constitution are reserved to the states.
If they had wanted a federal police force, they'd have explicitly listed one.
The creep of centralism is visible even in the reason d 'etre for the Secret Service. It was brought about, officially, to deal with counterfeiting of the federal currency after the civil war. Here is an area where the Constitution specifically authorizes the power to coin money and provide punishments for counterfeiting it - but notably absent is a police force to do it.
Notice how we didn't "need" the Secret Service until after the Civil War. One of the often overlooked aspects is that a big part of the Civil War was the states and confederacy minting their own coin. It is no accident that the crackdown on that - despite being explicitly authorized to the states in the constitution - came after Lincoln enforced the vapid notion that a state was a permanent member of the union whether its people wanted to be or not.
"I think when the Founders thought of factions, they were thinking of states or even cities. They didn't have the telegraph. Now we have communication way beyond the telegraph, and we have the amazing power of collaborating with a few people in the world who share narrow interests as Seth Godin describes in Tribes. That communication has brought a weird form of tribalism; I don't think it's factions like Madison was thinking about; I think it's closer to pathological response that comes from decreased in-person communities. "
You're close to something I've been postulating for a couple years now: we're too "large" as a governing organization and two "small" as a society. Look back to the pre-encroachment era's beginning. People didn't really care who was elected to federal office. Why? It lacked any power or promise to affect their lives. People didn't go around all day thinking of what people a month's journey away were doing, and thus how they could stop them from doing it.
Our ability to talk (though not necessarily communicate, if you catch my drift) instantly to people a continent, or two, away gives us a pair of false beliefs: 1) they're part of "our community" and 2) we can have control over them.
When people are in close quarters, they show a desire for more control over other people. Think farmhouse versus apartment. When the next farmhouse is a few miles away, how interested in defining how loud they can play music are you? Not at all, really. But when they are on the other side of a weak four inch wall? Pretty interested.
The illusion of proximity provided by today's communication technology brings this problem to everyone. However, it works even more poorly because the regions are so different that you can't treat them as the same.
"Regardless of all this psychological stuff, there should be legal machinery that tries to keep politicians honest. "
Frankly, that is to push a heavy boulder up a hill that never ends. All laws will be interpreted by humans who will always try, as a whole, to interpret them to benefit themselves - even if they lie to themselves and us about the why. Fundamentally it is the aggregation of power at hand here. Consider:
"In the case of President Trump withholding aid to an ally to get a political favor, it seems like they should implement processes that prevent it from happening again."
There is one, and only one, way to prevent it. No foreign aid at all. None, zip, zilch, nada. Power obeys the laws of trade just as much as any other currency. The more power and authority you grant a government, the more people will want to control those levers and the more they will use them for their own aid.
It isn't the system that is broken, though it is far from perfect, it is the aggregation of power. In a democracy it is unavoidable - there is no competition to provide alternatives. This is one of the reasons I lay the cause for fueling this fire at the feet of Lincoln. The fire had been there, a smoldering lump of coals, as far back as arguably the Whiskey Rebellion or the Cushing Doctrine, but it was picked up with zeal after the Civil War.
In many ways we are fighting the same problems that they did when they wrote the second constitution - the one we have. Except unlike then, when they recognized states had a right to not be part of the union, the basic belief today is that we have no choice but to be part of the union. That changes many aspects of how you work things and how they play out. Humans are just not wired to be parts of large collectives.
There is no shortage of cases in American history that would make your skin crawl but are so often ignored or simply forgotten. Look into "The Bonus March", for example and what came out of that - when U.S. troops took tanks into D.C. to put down protests by veterans wanting the money the government promised but didn't deliver and the Field Manual discussed ways of shooting into the crowd.
As Heinlein correctly noted: “When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.”
When we forget that, it doesn't matter what the documents say. When we accept the notion that voting is an alternative to violence, rather than violence in a suit, no system will prevent the oncoming atrocities.
👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
“until the Civil War the West ("The Old West", as is often called among scholars of that era) was a highly functioning anarcho-capitalist region.”
It’s too bad some government didn’t restore rule of law without becoming overbearing.
“If they had wanted a federal police force, they'd have explicitly listed one.”
That’s why I find it so baffling that we have so many federal police forces. We’re not on the borderline, say, having some police-like authority limited to counterfeiting violations. It’s hard to understand how the federal gov’t has so much power, given the Constitution as a starting point.
“People didn't really care who was elected to federal office. Why? It lacked any power or promise to affect their lives.“
This is exactly how I understand it was supposed to be. Your idea that a reason for increased federal power is the shrinking world (faster transportation and communication) is interesting. Do all small communities, i.e. villages before the telegraph, have an intrusive government or gov’t-like institution? If not, we could look to what they did to resist the urge to control what people next door did and use that to resist the urge to control people a thousand miles away.
“All laws will be interpreted by humans who will always try, as a whole, to interpret them to benefit themselves”
Yes, but that’s no reason to throw up our hands and stop trying to have a government of laws.
“There is one, and only one, way to prevent [self-dealing in dispensing foreign aid]. No foreign aid at all. The more power and authority you grant a government, the more people will want to control those levers and the more they will use them for their own aid.”
Doesn’t this apply to everything the government spends money on? Is there anything special about foreign military aid?
“Humans are just not wired to be parts of large collectives.”
The world is getting smaller. The nation state and religion gave people tools to relate to one another across vast distances and therefore organize in groups larger than a family. I hope this is just growing pains on the way to a system of capitalism, reason, and law that replaces the role of nations and relgion in providing a framework for large groups of people to work together.
“When we accept the notion that voting is an alternative to violence, rather than violence in a suit, no system will prevent the oncoming atrocities.”
It’s not the voting that’s violence. It’s the mob rule. Couldn’t you have voting in a constitutionally-constrained republic that is not related to violence?
Whoever supports having multiple law enforcement agencies should explain rather than just down-vote.
Reply It is called DUE PROCESS. With an instruction manual called the Constitution.
You know, that document that laid the foundation
for building the greatest Nation on the Planet.
It’s not to be cherry picked.