Draining The Swamp
POSTED BY: SHINYGOODGUY
UPDATED: Friday, June 13, 2025 02:56
VIEWED: 32850
PAGE 8 of 29
A close, personal relative says,
"He certainly deserves to be impeached, but then
a president Mike Pence would be just as bad."
I don't know Pence.
... oooOO}{OOooo ...
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Quote:A close, personal relative?
Originally posted by Oonjerah:
A close, personal relative says,
"He certainly deserves to be impeached, but then
a president Mike Pence would be just as bad."
I don't know Pence.
OONJ, does your "close personal relative" understand the grounds for impeachment? Because this person can't possibly know whether or not anyone "deserves" impeachment unless they know the standards against which the office-holder is being judged.
Quote:
The Constitution sets specific grounds for impeachment. They are “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.” To be impeached and removed from office, the House and Senate must find that the official committed one of these acts.
The Constitution defines treason in Article 3, Section 3, Clause 1:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
The Constitution does not define bribery. It is a crime that has long existed in English and American common law. It takes place when a person gives an official money or gifts to influence the official’s behavior in office. For example, if defendant Smith pays federal Judge Jones $10,000 to find Smith not guilty, the crime of bribery has occurred.
... In all the articles of impeachment that the House has drawn, no official has been charged with treason. (The closest to a charge of treason was one federal judge who was impeached and convicted for siding with the South and taking a position as a Confederate judge during the Civil War.) Two officials have been charged with bribery. The remaining charges against all the other officials fall under the category of “high crimes and misdemeanors [against the State].”
... The convention adopted “high crimes and misdemeanors” with little discussion. Most of the framers knew the phrase well. Since 1386, the English parliament had used “high crimes and misdemeanors” as one of the grounds to impeach officials of the crown. Officials accused of “high crimes and misdemeanors” were accused of offenses as varied as misappropriating government funds, appointing unfit subordinates, not prosecuting cases, not spending money allocated by Parliament, promoting themselves ahead of more deserving candidates, threatening a grand jury, disobeying an order from Parliament, arresting a man to keep him from running for Parliament, losing a ship by neglecting to moor it, helping “suppress petitions to the King to call a Parliament,” granting warrants without cause, and bribery. Some of these charges were crimes. Others were not. The one common denominator in all these accusations was that the official had somehow abused the power of his office and was unfit to serve.
... In Federalist No. 65, Hamilton explained impeachment. He defined impeachable offenses as “those offences which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or in other words from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”
For the more than 200 years since the Constitution was adopted, Congress has seriously considered impeachment only 18 times. Thirteen of these cases involved federal judges. The “high crimes and misdemeanors” that the House charged against these judges included being habitually drunk, showing favoritism on the bench, using judicial power unlawfully, using the office for financial gain, unlawfully punishing people for contempt of court, submitting false expense accounts, getting special deals from parties appearing before the court, bullying people in open court, filing false income tax returns, making false statements while under oath, and disclosing confidential information.
Only three of the 18 impeachment cases haNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
There are alternative views to Signym’s burn the swamp and then the internationalists will leave America, with Trump’s role as flame-thrower and assassin.
www.nytimes.com/2017/10/21/opinion/sunday/democrats-alabama-doug-jones
.html
Some voters pulled the lever twice for Obama, and then voted Trump in part because of anxieties about recent immigration. So are the Democrats trying to dispel the impression that their party favors open borders? No, quite the opposite: As Vox’s Dara Lind pointed out this week, in the Trump era, no less than the Obama era, the Democrats are rejecting enforcement proposals many of them would have championed a decade ago.
A clear majority of Americans, women as well as men, favor banning abortion after 20 weeks. It might behoove liberals to try to imagine voters believe that at least some abortions are tantamount to baby-killing. And I mean really make the imaginative leap: Imagine that whenever a Democratic politician says, “There shouldn’t be any restrictions on the right to choose,” you hear, “I think infanticide should be legal in America.”
Would you vote for a candidate who said that? I submit that you probably would not — and you might not even if his Republican opponent were also terrible in various ways. At the very least you would be weighing evils, and that weighing process — “bigot or infanticide advocate? bigot or infanticide advocate?” — might plausibly induce you to put a bigot in the Senate.
Democrats claiming to be standing alone against Trump’s existential threat to the republic should be willing to move somewhat, to compromise somehow, to bring into the Democratic fold a few of the voters who have lifted the G.O.P. to its largely undeserved political successes.
Instead, the Democrats are still relying on arc-of-history beliefs and long-term demographic trends. But those trends do them no political good if they move left faster than does a leftward-moving country. In 2004 they had an agenda well-suited to the American electorate of 2016; having moved leftward since, they now have an agenda well-suited to the American electorate of 2030.
As much as the country needs a conservatism with some idea of what it’s doing, some theory of the common good, it needs a liberalism that stops marinating in its own self-righteousness long enough to compete effectively for rural, Southern and Midwestern votes.
I see that the Democrats, Saturday, are charging down the self-destructive and self-righteous path: The Democratic National Committee voted Saturday to ban donations from certain corporate political action committees — including those tied to tobacco companies, gun makers and payday lenders — that “conflict” with the party’s platform.
The move is an effort to bridge the gap between committee members who want to ban all (yes, that's correct, all) corporate and lobbyist contributions to the committee, and those who believe the party can’t unilaterally disarm its fundraising efforts as Republicans collect millions of dollars from corporations and lobbyists.
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-21/democratic-committee-to-ban
-funds-from-donors-that-conflict
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original NYTimes article without SECOND's editing
|The Democrats in Their Labyrinth
Ross Douthat OCT. 21, 2017
America has two political parties, but only one of them has a reasonably coherent political vision, a leadership that isn’t under the thumb of an erratic reality television star, and a worldview that implies a policy agenda rather than just a litany of grievances.
Unfortunately for the Democrats, their vision and leaders and agenda also sometimes leave the impression that they never want to win another tossup Senate seat, and that they would prefer Donald Trump be re-elected if the alternative requires wooing Americans who voted for him.
Consider recent developments in the state of Alabama, where the Republican Party has nominated a Senate candidate manifestly unfit for office, a bigot hostile to the rule of law and entranced with authoritarianism.
And who have the Democrats put up against him? An accomplished former prosecutor, the very model of a mainstream Democrat — and a man who told an interviewer after his nomination that he favors legal abortion, without restriction, right up until the baby emerges blue and flailing from the womb.
I know that certain of my readers may not consider this an extreme position, and imagine that people who do consider it extreme are also fitting out their wives with the lovely blue dresses from Hulu’s adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Continue reading the main story
But given that a clear majority of Americans, women as well as men, favor banning abortion after 20 weeks, it might behoove liberals to bracket the Gilead scenario for a moment, and try to imagine what it’s like to believe that at least some abortions are tantamount to baby-killing. And I mean really make the imaginative leap: Imagine that whenever a politician says, “There shouldn’t be any restrictions on the right to choose,” you hear, “I think infanticide should be legal in America.”
Would you vote for a candidate who said that? I submit that you probably would not — and you might not even if his opponent were also terrible in various ways. At the very least you would be weighing evils, and that weighing process — “bigot or infanticide advocate? bigot or infanticide advocate?” — might plausibly induce you to put a bigot in the Senate.
If the Democratic Party intends to be competitive again in the South, a region where many of its own partisans call themselves pro-life, it needs to take the imaginative leap on abortion more often — as it did in recruiting candidates who helped build its last House majority way back in the misty years of 2006-2008.
But maybe Democrats do not want to be competitive in the Bible Belt. No retreat on feticide, no compromise with Gilead! Fair enough. Then presumably they should want to make up ground with more secular voters somewhere else — among all the lapsed Catholics and former Mainline Protestants scattered around the Midwest, for instance.
Some of these voters pulled the lever not once but twice for Barack Obama, and then voted Trump in part because of anxieties about recent immigration. So are the Democrats trying to dispel the impression that their party favors open borders? No, quite the opposite: As Vox’s Dara Lind pointed out this week, in the Trump era, no less than the Obama era, the Democrats are rejecting enforcement proposals many of them would have championed a decade ago — again, not coincidentally, the last period when they had control of Congress. Wooing immigration-wary Midwestern voters, like doing outreach to pro-life moderates in Alabama, is apparently not worth the compromises required.
Now I am a cultural conservative, so naturally issues like abortion and immigration are the places where I would like the Democratic Party to move closer to the center. One could argue instead that Democrats should stick with progressive orthodoxy on social issues and choose Bill-Clintonian economics over single-payer flirtations, to expand their recent gains among the culturally libertarian and fiscally conservative.
But th
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original Bloomberg article without SECOND's editing
Ban Funds From Donors That ‘Conflict’
By
Jennifer Epstein
Sat 21 Oct 2017 03:06:47 PM PDT
Tobacco, guns, payday lenders among PACs to be shunned
Proposal opposed by those who say Democrats need the money
The Democratic National Committee voted to ban donations from certain corporate political action committees -- including those tied to tobacco companies, gun makers and payday lenders -- that “conflict” with the party’s platform.
DNC members approved the measure on Saturday in a voice vote at their meeting in Las Vegas. The committee’s leadership “will implement it going forward,” said DNC spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa. It’s not legally binding, though, giving the DNC some leeway on how to put it in place.
The move is an effort to bridge the gap between DNC members who want to ban all corporate and lobbyist contributions to the committee, and those who believe the party can’t unilaterally disarm its fund-raising efforts as Republicans rake in millions of dollars from corporate and lobbyist sources.
“The American people are looking to Democrats to promote people-powered politics in this era of resistance, revival, and reform,” reads the measure, authored by California DNC member Christine Pelosi, daughter of House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and a long-time advocate for reducing the corporate and lobbyist influence on the party. The DNC, she said, should “walk our talk.”
Screening Donors
As the Democratic nominee in 2008, Barack Obama put in place a complete ban on the DNC accepting donations from lobbyists and corporate PACs. DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz ended that policy in early 2016 as the committee determined it needed money from those sources so it would “have the resources and infrastructure in place to bes support whoever emerges as our eventual nominee,” a spokesman said at the time. Hillary Clinton hadn’t yet become the party’s nominee, but it was seen as the approach she favored on corporate money.
Pelosi said she hopes the new ban will be executed by the DNC in the same manner as the previous one, with the DNC’s finance team evaluating contributions as they come in to determine if they originated with appropriate donors.
The resolution also includes language encouraging state Democratic parties and candidates to draw clear lines around the money they will and won’t accept. “It’s just taking two or three steps to make sure there’s internal consistency,” Pelosi said. “You try to do what you can and I think that matters to voters.”
At its February meeting, at which former U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez was elected party chair, the DNC considered a measure that would have been slightly narrower than the Obama ban, barring donations from corporate PACs. “It is not something new. We operated this way for seven years,” Stuart Appelbaum, a New York DNC member who co-sponsored the resolution, said then. The proposal failed after other DNC members argued that the party needed the money.
Trump is not the problem. He set himself against the Deep State's agenda. And the Deep State's been heading for WWIII for years.
As for you, you're just a Deep State useful idiot, furthering its agenda. So I hope you enjoy cesium in your coffee. You've earned it.
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Quote:You failed to include the quotes at the each of those original articles saying that 1kiki and Signym's international conspiracy theories are big bags of make-believe shit. Shame on you. It is as if you don't want the people to know.
Originally posted by 1kiki:
original NYTimes article without SECOND's editing
|The Democrats in Their Labyrinth
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:No such quote appears in my pageview. So SECONDRATE, why don't you BRING THAT QUOTE HERE so that we can ALL see it? Unless, of course, you're lying again.
You failed to include the quotes at the each of those original articles saying that 1kiki and Signym's international conspiracy theories are big bags of make-believe shit. Shame on you. It is as if you don't want the people to know. =SECONDRATE
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
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Quote:Signym, you're every bit as smart and attentive to details as Trump. Analyze this for errors that only exist inside your head:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
No such quote appears in my pageview. So SECONDRATE, why don't you BRING THAT QUOTE HERE so that we can ALL see it? Unless, of course, you're lying again.
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/23/16522456/trump-bartiromo-tr
anscript
Over the course of the interview, Trump also claims to be working on a major infrastructure bill, a major welfare reform bill, and an unspecified economic development bill of some kind.
Under almost any other past president, that kind of thing would be considered a huge news-making get for an interviewer. But even Fox didn’t tout Bartiromo’s big scoops on Trump’s legislative agenda, because 10 months into the Trump presidency, nobody is so foolish as to believe that him saying, “We’re doing a big infrastructure bill,” means that the Trump administration is, in fact, doing a big infrastructure bill. The president just mouths off at turns ignorantly and dishonestly, and nobody pays much attention to it unless he says something unusually inflammatory.
On some level, it’s a little bit funny.
Perhaps it will all work out for the best, and someday we’ll look back and chuckle about the time when we had a president who didn’t know anything about anything that was happening and could never be counted on to make coherent, factual statements on any subject. But traditionally, we haven’t elected presidents like that — for what have always seemed like pretty good reasons — and the risks of compounding disaster are still very much out there.
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So, you admit you lied about articles you linked.
Again.
No surprise there.
Trump is not the problem. He set himself against the Deep State's agenda. And the Deep State's been heading for WWIII for years.
As for you, you're just a Deep State useful idiot, furthering its agenda. So I hope you enjoy cesium in your coffee. You've earned it.
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This brings me to the problems with the ironically-named 'democratic' party.
If it wants to be a viable alternative, it needs to stop the insane blather about stoopid things, as exemplified by SECOND. It needs to make its case against Trump relevant, vital, and more importantly, provable - unless it wants to look like the party of impotent whiny children.
The OTHER thing it needs to do is make itself a viable majority alternative, and not a party of special-victimhood.
One of the ways it can do that is to make itself the party of economic justice. That means not only promising economic equality - because what the fuck good is equally if it means we're all in the Roman arena equally, fighting for our lives by killing the others - but economic prosperity.
And yet, the ironically-named 'democratic' party and its dingleberry apologists like SECOND can't seem to go there. THEY'RE banking on prejudice. THEY'RE banking on the idea that people will disavow economic opportunity and security for themselves just to spite others.
It's the ironically-named 'democratic' party and its dingleberry apologists who are the racists, who believe that the way to win is to pit one side against the other, and, not coincidentally, benefit the corporations.
HAS IT NOT OCCURRED TO YOU BY NOW THAT IF YOU HAVE TO RESORT TO LOGICAL FALLACIES AND TROLLING YOUR SO-CALLED ARGUMENTS ARE LIES?
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