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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSlate "The Mob Is Still Occupying the Capitol. The GOP Acquits its President"
BY TOM SCOCCA
FEB 13, 20218:27 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/trump-acquittal-mob-still-at-capitol.html
Of all the footage that played in the video-intensive impeachment of the screen-addicted president, the clip that truly mattered was the one in which a group of rioters, ransacking the Senate chamber on Jan. 6, finds a document in Sen. Ted Cruzs desk about his objection to the electoral college certification. At first they are furious, until one of them explains that the objection means that, like them, Cruz is fighting against the election result. Hes with us, hes with us, this one rioter tells the other rioters.
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The managers had to pretend Cruz and McConnell and the other Republicans were not complicit in Trumps abuses, because their goal was to get 17 Republican senators to join the Democrats in convicting him. At trials end, only seven of the 50 members of the minority conference took the managers up on it. The rest of the Republicans didnt care what rhetorical gestures the impeachment managers had made toward separating them from their president, for the sake of granting them independence from the president and his mob. They chose to stay bound to him. They are the mob.
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So led by Mitch McConnellwho said afterward that Trump was practically and morally responsible for the attackthe Republicans chose to pretend that they had no power to do anything. Rubio, whod called the violence around Trump rallies frightening, grotesque, and disturbing during the 2016 primary campaign, cast the 34th vote to acquit, sealing the result. In regretful tones, when it was over, McConnell repeated the same message hed issued in a statement in the morning, preempting the closing arguments, that he read the constitution to mean that impeachment could only apply to current officeholders.
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Yet againone more time, if not one last timethe Trump presidency had demonstrated that the United States Constitution is a failure. Its fundamental mechanisms do not work. A president may not be investigated, if he refuses a congressional subpoena. A president may take bribes and misappropriate funds, if he does it all in the open. Five dead bodies and a Congress put to flight are not enough to convict and disqualify a president from seeking power again, if that presidents party wants to protect him.
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If any doubt had been left, the Senate established what we are, or what this government is. Donald Trump is still in command of one major political party and free to run for president again, in hopes that the next election might be closer, or that his next mob might bring more guns. Immediately after the trial ended, the Louisiana Republican Party voted to censure Sen. Bill Cassidy, who had been one of the seven Republicans to find Trump guilty. To oppose the coup was to oppose the party
Hermit-The-Prog
(33,400 posts)Laelth
(32,017 posts)-Laelth
c-rational
(2,595 posts)I_UndergroundPanther
(12,480 posts)"Yet againone more time, if not one last timethe Trump presidency had demonstrated that the United States Constitution is a failure. Its fundamental mechanisms do not work."
And the republicans want it broken and kept broken . They will vote against anything that will restore it repair it or strengthen it.
And they'll vote against anything that actually helps the people.
They are traitors that have been fucking over the government and people of this country since they lost the civil war.
So fuck over the republicans in every way possible. You cannot be bipartisan with what seeks your destruction.
NRaleighLiberal
(60,018 posts)It is indeed depressing - hard to believe that after more than four years of trump being forced down his throat, his stink will, in many ways, remain.