Mark my words: Republicans are purposely shoving the Trial off so that they can just claim that convicting Trump is just a moot point and if he decides to immediately launch a 2024 campaign, they will claim that we are using the impeachment/trial to harass a political opponent. I know that Dems won't blink but Republicans will use this to whip up their voters and show their fealty to Trump.

but I suppose it depends on how much people are paying attention. I think that most people can understand the feeling of having different rules applied arbitrarily to the same situation but OTOH that probably also depends too on whether or not they're on the "winning team" at any given time. You know the Republicans would be howling like wolves if Democrats kept changing the rules whenever it suited them. Of course, too, now that Republicans have set these precedents, it will likely be hard for their successors to not want to follow along with those changes in the future too. But they're probably not thinking that far ahead. In regards to Barrett, they only saw RBG die in office and were excited that Trump would be able to replace a THIRD justice in just one term and forgot about the hypocrisy in preventing Obama will filling Scalia's seat in 2016 when there was much more time available for them to confirm Garland (or even just hold a vote).

We shouldn't even consider them. The thing that makes this event scarier than even something like 9/11 is that the perps had people embedded within the WH, throughout the national government, and even among the people tasked with protecting our leaders HELPING them commit their crimes. That should make everybody scared out of their minds. Not to get too far out there but it almost reminds me of how the Jedi probably felt once they learned Palpatine was the Sith Lord they were looking for and had to figure out how to take him down. Not to mention the fact that the Jedi were, horrifyingly, largely wiped out in fell swoop by their own genetically-programmed troops once Palpatine had survived the Jedi's capture/assassination and activated them.

if a President has so profoundly lost the confidence of his subordinates, how do we, as a country, square that with leaving that person in power, even if only for another two weeks? Doesn't him having less people around him make him potentially more dangerous? What does everybody think? I personally think that the massive turnover in his WH during this single 4-year term should have been more than sufficient evidence of his unfitness for the job, not to mention that it was likely part of a "strategy" to be able to surround him with a bunch of unaccountable lackeys and sycophants

whose voices didn't count because of our election system. The news media spent years doing nothing but covering Trumpers and what they cared about (or didn't, depending on what you're referring to), and now we have an election where Biden won the majority of the PV by millions, as well as the requisite number of Electoral Votes (and then som), and they still feel entitled to more coverage. I have a bad feeling that, even once Trump is gone, we are going to be hearing more about the Trumpists and their feelings over the next 2-4 years and how sad they must be that they lost their "God Emperor" due to a "rigged election".

which begs the question: What happens if we have an election that a Democrat wins but Congress is in control of the GOP? Will they be able to throw the election out and install their own even if, like with this election, it wasn't close and there is no evidence of fraud or malfeasance?

I have a lot of left-wing friends on Facebook/Twitter and lately they've been posting that Biden is backing off initiatives that he supported during the campaign, including cancelling student loans and ending Trump's migrant detention policies. They're not particularly fond of him anyway and I'm not sure exactly where they are getting this information but just interested in hearing from anybody here if this is remotely accurate or true. I feel like it's probably something he might have said that they're miscontruing and/or taking out of context but not sure.

Trump has really gotten all of us to really think and possibly re-think a LOT of the stuff we have always taken for granted as being symbolic and automatic democratic traditions. There never has really been a problem with a lot of this stuff because our leaders have always been (mostly) honorable people whom have implicitly agreed to maintain the norms and traditions that have existed in our country over the years but with people like Trump and, to a lesser extent, George W. Bush, whom are either ignorant or corrupt or uncaring about our political traditions and norms, we have had to re-examine and re-think or assumptions whether or not just having these traditions and norms are sufficient in and of themselves to safeguard our democratic system of government. After the last 4 years, I was genuinely terrified of the possibility that another 4 years of Trump taking a chainsaw to our democracy with the ongoing tacit/implicit support/neglect by a major political party (Republicans) would destroy what we had left of our form of government, which had already been weakened by years and years of Republican destruction of norms in other branches of government, most notably the Senate under Mitch McConnell and SCOTUS by conservative ideologues. It may really be time to start making some major changes to how things like Elections are conducted and/or put into place some actual legal/ethical mechanisms into the functioning of our government to ensure that we don't have another President like Trump come in and exploit all of those loopholes ever again. In that way, we can at least salvage *something* positive from our experience of the past 4 years with Trump and, hopefully, prevent another clusterf**k and threat to our democracy for all time.