Archive for 2020

NEO: A history of partisanship in US presidential impeachments.

The Founders were fearful that impeachment would become a partisan endeavor, and they were right to be fearful. It has. That’s why the Founders set the bar so high for a Senate conviction.

If you look back on the history of US presidential impeachments, you will find a great deal of partisanship in the support for impeachment and removal, except for the impeachment that didn’t happen: that of Nixon, whose opposition was so bipartisan that he realized Senate conviction was likely and he stepped down before the impeachment ever occurred.

You will also find that the majority of the bipartisanship and/or crossing of party lines was by Republicans rather than Democrats, and it was Republicans voting against impeachment and/or removal of a Democrat president. This will probably not be a surprise. Democrats tended much more to vote as a bloc for impeachment and/or removal of a Republican president.

Related: Wait… Trump Can Have His Impeachment Expunged?

OKAY, I LINKED THIS POST YESTERDAY, but this bit is worth breaking out:

I enjoyed Trump’s speech because it was a magnificent statement about America becoming a nation that benefits not the 1% but the 99%. In a funny way, Trump is the real “Occupy Movement,” because his policies, by taking the regulatory yoke off American necks, unleashed American energy, innovation, and creativity — and the 99% did the rest. Trump is not a plutocrat or an oligarch; he is the answer to the plutocracy and oligarchy of the Obama era, a time during which we saw an almost fascistic fusion between government and big money.

We really did.

Plus: “As Trump recited one benefit after another that the American people have experienced over the last three years, the Democrats made plain with their unmoving bodies and grim, petulant faces that they hated that stuff, every bit of it. In their quest for power, they want a failing, desolate, divided America. It’s one thing for them to sit stony-faced when Trump boasts about his specific acts or plans; it’s another thing entirely to sit stony-faced as Trump boasts about the country they’re supposed to be working for.”

FLASHBACK: The Case for Rick Perry. “Despite cheer-leading from the likes of Kathryn Jean Lopez and Jennifer Rubin, Mitt Romney has always struck me as a phony without any real core convictions except that he should be in charge; sort of the Republican answer to Bill Clinton, without the charm or adultery. Pick an issue and Romney’s been on both sides of it at one time or another. He seems the most likely of all the major candidates to be praised by The New York Times and The Washington Post for ‘growing’ in office.”

Well, that last bit certainly turned out to be prophetic — and Romney didn’t even have to get elected president first. Although it helped that he sold out the current occupant of the Oval Office.

HOWIE CARR: It’s all bull#*!@.

And that sums it up, in four words, the last of which they used to call a “barnyard epithet.” Donald Trump understands exactly how the Democrats have been trying to frame him, first with the Russian hoax, and then with the bogus Ukrainian “impeachment.”

“We were treated unbelievably unfairly, and you have to understand, we first went through Russia, Russia, Russia. It was all bullshit.”

Yeah, I know, it used to be a proscribed word, and now that the president is using it on live TV they’re having vapors over at MS-13, I mean MSNBC. They’re clutching their pearls at CNN, where not so long ago the Democrat stenographers with press passes couldn’t stop quoting the president as privately employing an eight-letter word beginning with “s” to describe certain Third World countries.

Heh. Read the whole thing.

WHY ARE LEFTIST CAMPAIGNS SUCH CESSPITS OF BIGOTRY? Women of color bolt Warren’s Nevada campaign in frustration. “A half-dozen women of color have departed Elizabeth Warren’s Nevada campaign in the run-up to the state’s caucuses with complaints of a toxic work environment in which minorities felt tokenized and senior leadership was at loggerheads.”

OPEN THREAD: Try to find some newsworthy recent events to discuss, if you can.

WHO DOES HE THINK HE IS, JOE BIDEN? Bloomberg Plagiarized Parts of At Least Eight of His Plans. “Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign plagiarized portions of its plans for maternal health, LGBTQ equality, the economy, tax policy, infrastructure, and mental health from research publications, media outlets, and a number of nonprofit, educational, and policy groups. The Intercept found that exact passages from at least eight Bloomberg plans or accompanying fact sheets were direct copies of material from media outlets including CNN, Time, and CBS, a research center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the American Medical Association, Everytown for Gun Safety, Building America’s Future Educational Fund, and other organizations.”

Of course, under the circumstances, I think the same defense offered for Joe Biden — “at worst, Biden purloined piffle” — applies to this case, too. An entire chapter on plagiarism from the book Peter Morgan and I wrote, The Appearance of Impropriety, can be found here.