Cont: House Impeachment Inquiry - part 3

“I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” Trump declared last year, citing Article II of the Constitution. “It gives me all of these rights at a level nobody has ever seen before.”

Not since Richard Nixon told the interviewer David Frost, “When a president does it, it means it’s not illegal,” has a president come close to making an assertion of power as sweeping as Trump’s.

But no other president to appears to have declared that he was personally invested with such unlimited powers, according to database searches of The American Presidency Project and the University of Virginia’s Presidential Recordings Program, which also includes transcripts of the secretly recorded conversations of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon.
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https://apnews.com/b2d16168986dd61accd475143c544665
 
I watched the proceedings in snippets.

Each time I tuned in, it was the same points and evidence being presented again and again. And again, ad nauseum. It quickly be came tedious and nearly unwatchable, which was a shame because as history unfolding I felt an obligation to watch.

Again, I think the Democrats have played this poorly.

1) The repetition was numbing. I don’t think they were under any obligation to fill every minute of their allotted time. I think their case would have been stronger had it been condensed to the major points in the opening arguments. Easily done in a day, maybe two.

2) Imagine the same opening arguments, but covered thusly:

Day 1: The whole Ukraine quid pro quo presented succinctly, and beginning the obstruction case.

Day 2: Finishing the obstruction case, but to include ALL the times Trump attempted to obstruct justice, including the Comey firing, the fabrication about the Trump Tower meeting, asking McGahn to provide false testimony, etc. Even if some cases from Mueller were problematic, they would help show a pattern of behavior.

Day 3: Emoluments day and wrapping up with a concise summary.

All of the above might not have swayed a single Republican vote. But it would have made clear that by voting against removal, they were signaling that they were saying such behavior was OK, as long as the perpetrator was of their own party. Something the electorate could weigh in upcoming elections.

Anyway, that’s the opening of the trial I would have loved to see. I think such narrow charges will allow Republicans shade as they vote against removal.
 
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“I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” Trump declared last year, citing Article II of the Constitution. “It gives me all of these rights at a level nobody has ever seen before.”
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There is nothing in Article II of the Constitution that grants the president absolute power. I find it troubling that Trump would even say it does. He is a chief executive not a king. When he says the Constitution gives him powers that "nobody has ever seen before," what the hell is he talking about? Nobody has ever seen before?

We've certainly never seen a president that was even remotely like Trump before, I'll agree to that.
 
newyorkguy said:
There is nothing in Article II of the Constitution that grants the president absolute power. I find it troubling that Trump would even say it does. He is a chief executive not a king. When he says the Constitution gives him powers that "nobody has ever seen before," what the hell is he talking about? Nobody has ever seen before?

We've certainly never seen a president that was even remotely like Trump before, I'll agree to that.
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The Constitution kinda does...It vests ALL executive power in the president. It doesn't even say it is limited like the legislative power given to Congress. As executive power goes, the Constitutional grant is absolute.
 
Clocked in at work just now and overheard Sekulow quoting the "did not establish" line from the Mueller report.

So he's misrepresenting the findings of a report that doesn't address the matter the impeachment concerns.
 
I'm not watching, but I understand Republicans, who have total control of the trial schedule, are whining about having to do their presentation on Saturday when nobody will be watching.
My wife, unlike me, is watching everything. She periodically flips over to Fox News. They consistently have the trial playing in a small window with no sound. At least when the Dems were talking.
 
I think of it as the President having absolute power, within the boundaries of the office laid out by the Constitution.

So there's a *lot* the President flatly cannot do. But the stuff he *can* do, he can do absolutely, answering ultimately and only to Congress (in the form of impeachment) and the voters.

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There's also a few things the President absolutely must do, whether he likes it or not (e.g., report to Congress on the state of the Union).
 
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1221079753760833536?s=20

Our case against lyin’, cheatin’, liddle’ Adam “Shifty” Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, Nervous Nancy Pelosi, their leader, dumb as a rock AOC, & the entire Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrat Party, starts today at 10:00 A.M. on @FoxNews, @OANN or Fake News @CNN or Fake News MSDNC!
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https://twitter.com/KevinMKruse/status/1221082841817272322?s=20

The incredible childishness of this aside, note that he’s not calling it a defense of himself but rather a case against the Democrats.

His only response to quid pro quo is tu quoque.
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Update on the Pompeo interview. The State Department has released a statement (image in link). In it, Pompeo implies that Mary Louise Kelly misidentified Bangladesh as Ukraine.

This is very clearly a bad lie. Kelly has a masters in European studies. She definitely did not think that Ukraine was just off the Southern border of China.

It is also worth noting that this is not a statement from Mike Pompeo himself. It is a statement from The State Department, with the official seal and everything. This is how bad the White House has been corrupted under this administration. Make sure you're registered to vote.
 
Fast Eddie B said:
I watched the proceedings in snippets.

Each time I tuned in, it was the same points and evidence being presented again and again. And again, ad nauseum. It quickly be came tedious and nearly unwatchable, which was a shame because as history unfolding I felt an obligation to watch.

Again, I think the Democrats have played this poorly.

1) The repetition was numbing. I don’t think they were under any obligation to fill every minute of their allotted time. I think their case would have been stronger had it been condensed to the major points in the opening arguments. Easily done in a day, maybe two.
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I wonder if that might have been done for the benefit of the occasional viewer... i.e. someone who may only tune in to the impeachment proceedings for a few minutes at a time. Or for Trump supporters who have very little mental capacity and will claim "Oh the Democrats didn't talk about X" (when they did) so they have to repeat it to get their point across.
 
Trebuchet said:
I'm not watching, but I understand Republicans, who have total control of the trial schedule, are whining about having to do their presentation on Saturday when nobody will be watching.
My wife, unlike me, is watching everything. She periodically flips over to Fox News. They consistently have the trial playing in a small window with no sound. At least when the Dems were talking.
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I am very curious how their strategy of muting and not broadcasting the ongoing Dems arguments will now change with the Republican rebuttals. Or is their strategy to minimize the importance of the whole trial by hiding all of it?

The advent of Fox as a heavily funded private propaganda apparatus is both scary and fascinating to me. I cannot recall any real equivalent in USA history. Many newspapers were heavily partisan at times in the past, and Hearst established one of the first chains of newspapers with somewhat shared editorial perspectives. But I do not recall a large television network expressing such highly directed propaganda coupled to chains of co-owned newspapers with similar views. In some ways it is amusing: the propaganda machinery in most dictatorships is owned and run by the state; in the USA we believe in capitalism and private enterprise even in our propaganda.
 
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Tero said:
The Democrat just needs to repeat "but Trump was impeached." That is enough to smear his character.
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What fools these mortals be.


Before this trial is over, that will be a smear on the Democrats, not the Republicans.


If they say something along the lines of "He sold out the country" it might work.
 
I Am The Scum said:
Update on the Pompeo interview. The State Department has released a statement (image in link). In it, Pompeo implies that Mary Louise Kelly misidentified Bangladesh as Ukraine...
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Mr. secretary, Mary Louise Kelly's 'agenda' as you call it, is to hold public officials accountable for the actions they take while in public office. Read the 4th Amendment.
 

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Meadmaker said:
What fools these mortals be.


Before this trial is over, that will be a smear on the Democrats, not the Republicans.


If they say something along the lines of "He sold out the country" it might work.
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You're whistling past the graveyard.

The American electorate may not be the brightest, but they don't think kindly to being treated stupidly. The Republicans are going to acquit Trump. No question. But that doesn't mean it's not obvious that the public knows Trump is guilty as sin.
 
Giordano said:
I am very curious how their strategy of muting and not broadcasting the ongoing Dems arguments will now change with the Republican rebuttals. Or is their strategy to minimize the importance of the whole trial by hiding all of it?
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Probably, the strategy is the usual - to give just enough misleading or outright false information to get the viewers to self-reinforce their pre-existing pro-GOP propaganda bias as much as possible. That and the underlying strategy of getting them angry (which impairs rationality), then make them feel like their tribe was triumphant.

Giordano said:
The advent of Fox as a heavily funded private propaganda apparatus is both scary and fascinating to me. I cannot recall any real equivalent in USA history.
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There isn't. Going further, the Fairness Doctrine was put into place to prevent exactly the sort of thing that Fox was created to do. It's no surprise that it was created not long after the right got that rule removed.
 
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acbytesla said:
You're whistling past the graveyard.

The American electorate may not be the brightest, but they don't think kindly to being treated stupidly. The Republicans are going to acquit Trump. No question. But that doesn't mean it's not obvious that the public knows Trump is guilty as sin.
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The news coming out of your country over the past 4 years does nothing to support that.
 
Steve said:
The news coming out of your country over the past 4 years does nothing to support that.
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I beg to differ.

More people voted for the other candidate in the last Presidential election.
The House of Representatives flipped. The Democrats achieved gains almost nationwide in the midterms.
 
Lennart Hyland said:
Saw some snippets of the trial and the interviews with republicans. They seem to keep on arguing that the Bidens are corrupt in some way and should be looked into but for this case that doesnt matter right? Even if they are corrupt and Donald Trump wants Ukraine to look into that he shouldnt use his power to blackmail the Ukraines with the army supply deal they had?
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Of course. And it wouldn't have been up to Trump anyway.
 
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