It’s a bit off-topic, but here is my latest in PJ Media:
There has been a great deal of speculation as to why Nancy Pelosi was so anxious to rush her impeachment Schiff Show through Congress, but is now demanding that Mitch McConnell make the Senate’s process as unfair as hers was before she allows him to get the ball rolling. Many have even speculated that she is embarrassed by the whole thing and just wants it to go away before it completely kills the reelection hopes of too many Congressional Democrats. It is more probable, however, that she is demanding certainty that the Senate trial be “fair,” by which she means “viciously biased against the President,” because she knows that the Republicans are likely to give her everything she wants.
Pelosi has good reason to think that she can intimidate McConnell and other Senate Republican leaders into folding and transforming their impeachment proceedings into a Stalinist show trial that will suppress evidence exonerating the President, highlight the tendentious version of events that the House offered, and maybe even result in Trump’s removal from office. The Republicans have a pattern going back well over half a century of caving in to Democrat demands and doing their bidding. Pelosi has witnessed a great deal of this firsthand as she grew to be a multimillionaire on her modest Congresswoman’s salary. Why should she think it will be any different this time?
Republican kowtowing to Democrats goes back to the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt. After Democrats successfully blamed Republicans for the Great Depression and initiated the massive expansion of federal power that was the New Deal, the Republicans nominated for president not critics of Roosevelt’s big government measures, but me-too candidates who praised what FDR was doing: Alf Landon, Wendell Willkie, and Thomas E. Dewey. Not surprisingly, each of these pale copies of the great New Dealer were trounced by the real thing.
Republicans who didn’t think a huge increase of federal control over the daily lives of Americans was a terrific idea had their best chance in 1952, when Republicans won the trifecta of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives for the first time since 1930. However, the new president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, would not hear of this. He declared: “Should any party attempt to abolish social security and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things….Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
There is much more. Read the rest here.
Ray Jarman says
Robert Spencer,
You could have added that Johnson stole funds from the Social Security revenues that had been obtained from the stock market and then used the money to enslave the black community to the Dem handout policies. President Trump and Ben Carlson are working hard to break this cycle of breaking up black families and encouraging single mothers who can raise children dependent upon hand outs. This has fostered nothing except high crime, drug dependency, murder and a myriad of other problems. Speaking of Social Security, just think how wealthy the retired population would be if Barry Goldwater had been elected as he pledged to provide the option of allowing one to put their SS into a 401 type of system.
I have wondered what would have happened if Robert A. Taft had won the GOP nomination in 1952 as he was a true conservative. Nixon was no conservative as his handing out free money to the cities to use as the crooks saw fit helped no one but the crooks themselves.
As much as I think of Ronald Reagan, he did not keep his campaign promise to abolish the Dept. of Education that the idiot peanut farmer created. The American education system has declined ever since and when people talk about the increase in spending, they don’t understand (or don’t care) that a huge chunk of the money goes to useless administrators that school districts have been forced to hire. One could add that the unions have done but destroy the education of American children.
The fact that McConnel with Lynsey Graham pushing him has remained behind the President and the ushering in of federal judges that believe in the constitution as it is written will prove beneficial to the American people in the future.
Wellington says
“I have often wondered what would have happened if Robert A. Taft had won the GOP nomination in 1952 as he was a true conservative.”
Assuming Taft had gotten the nomination and beaten Adlai Stevenson in the general election, Taft’s influence would have still been negligible for a very important reason, i.e., he died in the Summer of 1953. So, one must focus on whom Taft would have taken for his Vice-President because that man only half a year after Taft would have been inaugurated would have become Chief Executive.
Ray Jarman says
Thanks, I had forgotten that he died that soon.
gravenimage says
Why Shouldn’t Pelosi Try to Strong-Arm the Republicans? It Has Worked for Decades.
……………………
Unfortunately true.
Infidel says
Excepting that Republicans are starting to learn how to fight back from Trump. Already, House Republicans like Matt Gaetz have leart this, and hopefully, Senators will too. As it is, the Senators have an inflated opinion of their institution, and so they – at least the GOP ones – should sneer at a mere Speaker trying to tell them how to do their job
J D.S says
The guts in the republican party are stretched too much and now are very thin because they have been taking too much democrat laxative for too long.
gravenimage says
Republicans don’t tend to fight as dirty.
mortimer says
This is a risky chess game by Pelosi. She may regret starting it when she didn’t have to. I predict it will end in shame for the Dems. They have a lot of skeletons that are coming out of the closet. The gross corruption and nepotism of Biden will upset a lot of voters. The pointless, slanderous persecution of an elected politician has wasted time and money. It’s hysterical.
Biden’s son was given directorships and other benefits not only by Ukraine but communist China as well. Biden engaged in corrupt quid pro quo deals to benefit his family with kickbacks.
Sleezy Joe.
gravenimage says
Mortimer, Pelosi actually *was* loathe to try and impeach the president–even noting that it could backfire. But she was under so much pressure from the hard Left in the Democratic party that she went ahead anyway. Let’s hope she was right the first time.
mortimer says
The Senate can disagree and make its own policy. That’s the purpose of the Senate. The Senate critiques and sometimes overrules Congress.
tgusa says
Strong arm? That was before people began to realize that democrat reps don’t care about the districts that they were sent to DC to represent. Feces, needles and garbage in the streets, rampant homelessness, crime and violence, these are now the trademarks of democrat leadership. Oh and lets not forget the graft, a tsunami of graft. What person in their right mind would go along with anything those reps proposed? As I have said before, sending a cardboard cut out to DC to represent dem districts would be just as effective.
Nasty deserves to have a strong arm rub her nose in what you will find on the sidewalks in dem districts.
CogitoErgoSum says
It’s really scary to think that Pelosi is second in the line of succession to the Presidency. If the Dems find a way to get rid of Pence and then are somehow able to remove Trump before a new VP is approved by Congress, this demented woman would become President. Maybe that is why she is holding on to the impeachment documents for now. The Dems are after both Trump and Pence in one fell swoop in order to give us President Pelosi. What a nightmare scenario that would be.
gravenimage says
Also note that Pelosi is not unhinged *enough* for many Leftists, who condemned her for not starting impeachment hearings as soon as President Trump was elected.
tgusa says
The one thing I have learned from dems is rules/laws are only what I want them to be at any given time. That makes everything so much easier.
Scott Carlson says
If They were to unconditionally impeach Trump, couldn’t Pence Vice President which would become President pardon Trump, then make Trump Vice, then pence stepping down making Trump
President again?
CogitoErgoSum says
Pence could pardon Trump but Congress would need to approve Pence’s choice of VP. It’s very unlikely that Congress would approve Trump for VP after just having removed him for “high crimes and misdemeanors” as President. But in this world I suppose anything is possible. In fact, if the Senate were to remove Trump from office and not specifically forbid him from ever serving as President again, he could run for a second term and the people could choose to re-elect him.
gravenimage says
There is no way statistically that President Trump can be removed from office, unless a significant number of Republicans decided to jump the aisle, which seems pretty damn unlikely. This impeachment is all just kabuki theater.
Infidel says
The truth is that they wanna do multiple, concurrent impeachments of both Trump and Pence, so that Pelosi becomes president, and can then unite all of us by praying for us ?
CORRINE HANSON says
That would be a nightmare and probably the end of free America, Our only hope is to get a republican president, house and senate. It scares me for my grandchildren to live in a Pelosi world.
Wellington says
On a related matter, it seems to me that Pelosi who often slurs her speech and regularly makes silly statements (e.g., back in 2010 saying Congress had to pass ObamaCare so the public could read what was in the bill) is either an alcoholic or suffering early dementia or both. Of course, just sheer terminal foolishness should be thrown into the mix here too to help explain her often wacky behavior and statements.
Infidel says
She’s really stupid if she thinks that anybody takes seriously her claim (to James Rosen, among others) that she regularly prays for the president, and is a devout Catholic (never mind her views on abortion)
Scott Carlson says
It’s because they only way they can impeach and convict an innocent man is to do it unconstitutionally.
Yohanan Weininger says
How now “stalinist show trial”? Is not an open trial in the Senate mandated by the impeachment rules in the U.S. Constitution? How does that differ from Clinton’s impeachment? Pres. Trump has made good and bad decisions. But behaving like a king — breaking rules, norms, laws — may make him unfit for the office…
Naildriver says
What is clear the USA suffered under Obama. He was not just unqualified and unfit, he was a traitor.
I simply do not see in any Democrat candidate a person fit to serve as POTUS, let alone any who wouldn’t hasten a bloody civil war.
If Pence steps in, the country may suffer a similar fate.
We live in a corporately governed country, and replacing that with the mob rule of resentful, and immigrant minded masses will spell the end to this republic – at least as we’ve known it.
gravenimage says
Yohanan, the Dems have been trying to impeach Trump since before he ever took office.
Scott in PA says
While I yield to no one in my mistrust of wavering Republicans, let’s remember that McConnell held the Scalia seat open for an entire year – a pure power play and a gutsy, ballsy move on his part. So, there is hope he will do the right thing.
BTW, what is the right thing? The GOP should dismiss the impeachment on the first day, or vote a resolution stating that the impeachment proceedings were so irregular as to be devoid of constitutionality and that no trial will be entertained.
Billy Chickens says
Somewhere I read that one of Pelosi’s daughters said that her mother was ruthless. Totally ruthless. Republicans need to respond in kind by not giving an inch. Or hire the Bloods to teach them how to stand up against bullies, Democrats and Muslims.
abad says
The one thing nobody in MSM will divulge to the rest of the USA is the following (I will keep this one extremely brief as it will cover 90 + years of this century and the 20th century):
Ever since the 1950’s and 1960’s when the Civil Rights movement eventually resulted in legislation to allow blacks in America equal opportunity, one of the Democrat party’s goals was to see America have a black president (Barack Hussein Obama). Since the 1960’s, the modern feminist movement went through the same exercise, so that American women could have equal opportunities to those that men have. As usual the Democrat’s party desire was to see a woman president of the USA follow that black president.
But guess what. That did not happen.
Nancy Pelosi is living a delusion that Hillary Clinton would and will be our next president. However, considering just how dangerous Hillary is, that will never happen. Elizabeth Warren? I don’t think so. She is not presidential material. Tulsi Gabbard? She is much too young, much too inexperienced.
Would a chessboard square get jumped instead and a gay President (Pete Buttigieg) get elected? Not likely.
It would do if Pelosi would get out of La-la land, out of that ivory tower, return to reality somehow and accept the fact that Donald Trump is President and most likely to be re-elected, with what the Democrat party is offering, which is nothing more than frufru “identity politics”.
Lastly – we need term limits for Congress and House Speakers. 2 terms maximum, then they need to learn how to flip hamburgers.
gravenimage says
Not sure how much term limits would help–sure, you wouldn’t have “lifers” in Congress, but then almost everything would just be run by the parties, which in the case of the Democrats might be worse.