This is, honest to god, a real quote from Dave Ball, the chair of the Washington County Republican Party, talking about Senator Pat Toomey:
“We did not send him there to vote his conscience. We did not send him there to do the right thing. We sent him there to represent us, and we feel very strongly that he did not represent us.”
Just when you thought Republicans couldn’t get any dumber
It’s politicians as a whole
YES! A both sides are the same argument!
You know when you’re ashamed of your own side, you gotta bring down the other guys into the pig pen with you.
This is related to the Scoopy Imperative, a model to evaluate the morality of human actions.
1. Republicans commit scandalous actions.
2. Republicans accuse the Democrats of scandalous actions.
3. Therefore, both sides are the same.
It’s important to understand that in the Scoopy weltanschauung, real scandals and fabricated scandals are morally equivalent, as established by every brilliant and respected human thinker from Socrates to Louie Gohmert.
Note that the Imperative bears similarities to, but should not be confused with, Scoop’s Unfinished Syllogism, which states:
1. Republicans always lie
2. Republicans say that Democrats also always lie
3. Therefore …
Guess what? This was only the second-stupidest thing said by a Republican today.
Number one
This guy is a MAYOR, yet he seems completely ignorant of the purpose of human society, let alone the role of government within a society. Or rather, he seems to have some bizarre view of how humans should live. He either kept this carefully concealed, or the people in Colorado City are getting exactly what they wanted, which was to die all alone in any sufficiently serious emergency.
It is also stunning he would say something like this for all to hear. It’s like the crisis is too much for him and he just wants to quit, or at least make up a reason for not doing his job. I hope I would quit if I was in a critical job I couldn’t do, not declare that my job didn’t involve trying to do my job.
He resigned later that day with a typical right-wing non-apology, including the classic “my words were taken out of context”. Ummm, it was your tweet, dumbshit.
Colorado City is a small town that apparently skews very elderly, who didn’t taken kindly to their mayor essentially wanting them to die.
The ex-mayor’s wife also quit or was fired from her job because of the backlash, which well may have been unfair to her. Or maybe she needs to follow her husband’s advice and stop being such a weenie.
I also want to see Billie Eilish’s tits.
That makes me the third to think Billie Eilish’s tits should be laid bare for all to see.
I do not understand how anyone can fail to see what is so laid bare for all to see. There are but two family values to the current Repugnican party, money and power. Nothing else matters. Pretending to care about fetus-life, while ignoring any lives after birth…unless they’re rich lives of course…is just about exercising power. They view themselves as some kind of foghorn leghorn plantation owners who need only maintain their party line to get their rightful inheritance and become the millionaire they are destined to be. Because they were dulled by years of religious nonsense and nurtured into animal-like levels of stupidity by their idiot parents, they are incapable of the level of thinking it takes to realize you’re being brainwashed. They literally impeached Clinton for a blowjob, and acquitted the guy that incited what was quite possibly the worst, saddest, most embarrassing moment in our history. They have no honor, no decency, no courage, no ethics. Appalling liars. Lastly, am I the only one that wants to see Billie Eilish’s tits?
well said…. I would add to the absurdity paraphrasing SNL Update “the hearing was conducted at the scene of the crime and everyone in the room was a witness and they still would not convict him” the GOP has become the party of idolatry
And that’s why politics is so fucked up today. The people have been allowed to think politicians exist to humor their whims instead of lead so they elect spineless pieces of shit who will do exactly that. Someone really needs to chokeslam them back into this reality before it’s even more too late than it already is.
The truth shall set you free … 😛
There was that PA state legislature fool in 2012 that stated flat out Repugs passed a (voter suppression) bill that “assured” mittens was gonna defeat Obama. It was posted on YT for all to see.
Repugs have been saying/stating for 30+ yrs they don’t believe in democracy! 😮 No surprise and now we know what they truly believe in ~ authoritarian, Fascist, nihilistic, ego-maniacal self-serving snake oil salesman demi-god. Win at all costs voters be damned!
Apologies to snake oil salesmen …
Again, as Jon Meacham said a couple yrs ago the founding fathers would probably have been surprised someone like Trump didn’t happen a lot sooner in American history. 😮 H.L. Mencken notwithstanding.
Yielding back the balance of my time.
There have been debates among philosophers for a long time about whether elected legislators are in office to vote the way the majority of voters would want them to vote or whether they are there to vote the way that seems best to them/vote their conscience. I think we know which side of that debate Dave Ball came down on. But it’s also clear what side of that debate the framers came down on given their clear preferences for an educated elite (the electoral college, Senators chosen by state legislatures) to make policy. I think Ball is wrong. Both on the specifics (I think Trump should have been convicted) and the general. The politician who wets his finger to decide which way the wind is blowing before voting is not a favorable stereotype. I think politicians should always do what they think is right, though I suppose it is understandable if they pay attention to public opinion. Perhaps, the best we can really hope for are politicians that vote the way their voters want them to vote, unless they think what the voters want is morally wrong and/or especially foolish. But I think most politicians flunk that test as well.
I guess the part that gets me is not the fact that they wanted him to vote against his own conscience, but rather that they knew what they wanted was not “right,” but wanted it anyway! It’s like they were deliberately rooting against Captain America and for The Red Skull.
Which, in a way, they were.
(OK, maybe the Orange Skull)
In this case it goes beyond “not right” or moral arguments and well into demanding the elected official take a steaming Taco Bell dump on the Constitution and wiping their ass with the oath of office they swore. The fact that so many did tells me all I’ll ever need to know about the integrity of anyone willing wearing the label Republican from here out.
Precisely.
I think Trump should have been convicted. Most of the Senate Republicans said they believed it was unconstitutional to impeach a president after they had left office. That sounds reasonable, but I think most people see that in reality they are afraid of what Trump supporters might do in their future primaries. As a legal matter, I don’t think the impeachment became “moot” because in addition to removal from office a possible result of conviction could be a ban on holding federal office in the future. As a practical matter, I think banning Trump from running in 2024 could only improve the chances of the GOP taking back the White House.
But on the other side, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats could have done more to make it harder for Republicans to vote for acquittal. They could have had a count based on dereliction of duty and called witnesses to testify about how Trump initially refused to call on the rioters to withdraw and refused to authorize the national guard to deploy to the Capitol. That probably wouldn’t have been enough in the end. But
they also could have accepted Minority Leader McCarthy’s request for a censure vote. While obtaining a conviction was always unlikely, a censure vote would have been overwhelmingly bipartisan. Actually, they could still hold a censure vote. But Impeachment 2, Electric Boogaloo while certainly motivated by anger at Trump’s disgraceful conduct, was also designed as a weapon against Republicans. It gives the Dems an issue to use in 2022 and 2024. Allowing a censure vote would lesson it’s effectiveness by giving Republicans a way short of impeachment to condemn Trumps actions and inactions. Trump deserved to be convicted. But a vote of censure would also be appropriate and an additional stain on his legacy. The only reason not to hold such a vote now is because of playing politics.
Censure is pretty much a wank in general, moreso in the case of Trump. It’s just saying “that thing you did, we disapprove”. A natural response would be – what if I do it again, will you disapprove again? Trump would likely think (to the extent that he does think) that it would mean he had owned the libs, drained the swamp, succeeded bigly, etc.
It seems to me the Republicans in Congress pretty much have to pretend that Trump did nothing wrong if they want to run for re-election. They can’t do that by saying “I supported Trump unswervingly for four years, and it turned out he was evil and wanted to end democracy, but vote for me again anyway!”
They are putting their own personal political survival above their sworn duty to their country, and they are betting their constituents will believe Newsmax and their ilk instead of their own eyes and ears. I wish I felt safe saying that that won’t work.
It is a matter for scholars to debate, but as I see it, they can’t argue that they voted to acquit on jurisdictional grounds because:
1. The constitution says “The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments.” In that case, if they determine they have jurisdiction, then they have it, and the courts are frozen out of the process.
2. They had already determined that they had the constitutional authority in an earlier vote.
3. Therefore, they had the authority.
4. Therefore, the conviction vote could only be cast on substance of the case and not on a jurisdictional basis.
Or, to word it another way, that was just a rationalization to allow them to cast a vote that would prevent a Trump-supported primary challenge. It was their only career-saving option, given that he was obviously one guilty mofo, and they all realized it, so they could obviously not declare him innocent on the merits of the case itself.
There is a another argument to consider as well, although nobody has brought it up. The Constitution specifies, “When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.” Since that is all one sentence, it implies that a 2/3 majority is NOT required except in cases where the President is tried and the Chief Justice presides. Since neither of those were true, it is possible to argue that Trump was, in fact, convicted by a 57-43 margin.
Of course that argument is invalidated by precedent. The senate has always interpreted the clause to refer to two separate matters – that the colon is the equivalent of a period in that context, meaning that a 2/3 majority is required to convict in ALL impeachments, not just the ones stipulated in the previous part of the sentence. I’m sure a constitutional scholar would be better able to explain why that is the preferred interpretation. (I assume it must have been covered in the debates during the drafting of the document.)
“I’m old enough to remember a time in this country when if you bought someone off, b’god they stayed bought off!”
Only the best for the GOP