McConnel has already demonstrated that he will make it a partisan issue by ramming through a Supreme Court justice and recessing the Senate without even giving the appearance of considering a second round of COVID relief.
> And this is just one example. I'm sure there's more common ground if you look just at policy.
It won't force bad faith actors to cooperate, regardless of any common ground between voters because they, as the GP said, won't hold their politicians to account. Acting as the opposition even when they're in power is built into the party at this point, as demonstrated by the President's many legislative failures starting with the ACA repeal. It's just wishful thinking and I'm hoping enough people are done with the feel good woowoo.
> It won't force bad faith actors to cooperate [..] as the GP said, won't hold their politicians to account.
The only way you can hold this belief, is to also believe that voting behaviour doesn't change over time, and that you don't have a part to play in that. What else could motivate you to speak with such passion if it were only futile?
> It's just wishful thinking and I'm hoping enough people are done with the feel good woowoo.
You miss every shot you don't take. A platitude, maybe, but also a falsifiable proposition, which is clearly true.
For instance, there's nothing magical about taking your vote to any of the independents with much better policies. Sure, their pitch for the white house is impossible, but they might make headway into the senate, and each % point that goes to an independent provides a signal to the established Red/Blue teams that maybe they should adopt some of those policies.
Nothing magical about organising with like-minded people, creating and crowd-funding a lobby group. Or even taking part of one that suits your interests.
There is almost no agreement on the rest of the agenda, though. Democrats and leftists want green initiatives and universal healthcare, which both have zero support from Republicans. The leftist wing of the Democratic Party will be emboldened by their successes this election and will hijack the agenda, forcing America to smack the new administration (and Congress) back into doing nothing by putting in Republicans during the midterms.
Republicans have much more discipline as a party and will work to obstruct, because that's what wins them votes. Why should they cooperate with a party that spent the majority of the past four years trying to impeach a legitimately elected President? In fact, they might start a similar effort, because the saga of Biden's ne'er do well son Hunter has barely begun. Trump is not going away, neither is Steve Bannon. They have a lot more time on their hands to team up again, possibly bringing Donald Trump Jr. into the fold, to build a grassroots opposition campaign to stymie the Democrat agenda. Remember that Trump has already made the Republicans' long-sought wish of a Conservative Supreme Court (for almost a generation) a reality. He has also given the Republican party a good number of wins in the House (+5/6 for Republicans vs +1 for Democrats). So from their perspective, it may make sense to ride the Trump wave some more, because it has delivered for them.
Is any of this good? Of course not. Both sides have been abusing their office in a similar way. I am struggling how people can get comfortable with “when my team does it it’s justified, but how does the other team dare to do it!”.
The opposition research was initialy funded by the RNC.
Didn't Trump actually ask Russia to hack the democrats?
Also, he figuratively didn’t.
You know this isn’t an actual sincere attempt to collude with Russia, right? People can’t seriously believe that’s what this is.
Not to mention, he was talking about Hillary’s lost emails, not hacking the democrats.
"Russia, if you are listening I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing."
https://youtu.be/-b71f2eYdTc?t=20
From https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-asked-russia-to-...
1) How would a hack, initiated after Trump's statement, find those emails - even in principle?
2) Even if we posit that such a hack was requested, how does that transmute into a request to "hack the Democrats"?
2) It's a direct request to hack the Democratic presidential candidate and party standard bearer.
So if someone were to hack Trump's emails, do you think it would be an accurate statement to say that they "hacked the Republicans"?
Does your argument really come down to trying to parse a difference between Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party?
I'd note the "hack the Democrats" was the OPs characterisation of what happened. If you'd prefer to claim that Trump asked Russia to hack Hillary Clinton I'm not going to try to argue that point.
This will be my last post on the topic because it reminds of the "blue dress/green dress" thing someone posted way up thread. I'm sure you're posting in good faith, and I assure you I am too, but it is just not at all obvious to me why someone would say "Donald Trump asked the Russians to hack the Democrats" instead of "Donald Trump asked the Russians to find Hillary Clinton's emails".
Which we do, and was the whole point
> how does that transmute into a request to "hack the Democrats"?
Hillary Clinton (the person under discussion) was the Democratic candidate for president at the time.
You may personally be convinced of the President's wrondoing, but to try a sitting President for what is a grave offense, there are much higher standards of evidence and procedure.
The whole impeachment was an exercise in power from day one, but Democrats made a huge fuss about a similar exercise in power by Trump: appointing a Justice t the Supreme Court in an election year. Both were actions that where the actors were entirely within their rights (The lower house has the right to impeach, and the upper house has the right to try the President; similarly, a President absolutely has the right to appoint a Justice of the Supreme Court for as long as he is President.), but the President made no bones about what the whole thing was, while the Democrats tried hard to couch their act in moral and ethical terms. Judging by the way the election went (razor thin margins at almost every level with 70+ million popular votes for Trump), the public were having none of it.
Some of us remember the good old days when a (Democratic) president almost got impeached for lying about getting oral sex from an intern, so I'm not really convinced about your argument here.
I agree with your point, still.
If Trump had backed down that might have made sense, but instead it emboldened his lawlessness. We're now at the point where his undermining of the voting process is entirely expected and hardly even noteworthy.
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/18/hillary-clinton-tr...
The simple fact is that Hillary simply couldn't believe she was defeated, and did as much or more disputing of results. That doesn't make her an enemy of democracy, and neither does Donald Trump's caterwauling. But if you read the recent news reporting or watched the current President-elect's speeches, you would think that the very foundations of Democracy are shaken. Utter hogwash.
There was always going to be a scramble for one side to change the rules, get a leg up, and pull the ladder up behind them. I suppose that's endemic to a 2-party system, but that's what happens when hard-earned consensus is destroyed. Not blaming Dems/GOP here, I'm just saying this was the inevitable consequence and it's more complicated than you're letting on.
What does the legitimacy of his election have to do with anything?
Because effective government of the country depends on that, or them not having the votes to matter.
Also, the impeachment power presupposes that anyone subjected to it will hold office legitimately but be abusing that office; someone who does not legally hold office doesn't need to be impeached, as their pretense of exercising the authority of the office is a legal nullity.
Please elaborate on what you perceive as 'hijacking the agenda'.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2...
Interestingly, Pew only asked the question of what the public wants, but not how much things cost and how they will be paid for. As always, the devil is in the details: Roughly 53% do not support raising income taxes on incomes above 250,000!
It's clear that when we are asked whether we want something and then also asked if we want to pay for it via higher taxes, we have balked. Ultimately, if folks are not willing to pay for something, they can't have it! And if they are unwilling to pay for something, they're effectively saying they don't want it.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/27/more-americ...
This is some very Fox Newsish spin. Trump was impeached because he commited a crime worthy of impeachment. He actually did about 10.
Some policies, when detached from political partisanship, could be appreciated by voters on both sides.
For instance, for those who believe in human rights and social justice (a supposedly 'left' concern), there's good cause for opposition to China. In terms of jobs and national security, wresting some of China's high-tech manufacturing capability back within US borders would be a boon for employment across 'middle-America' (a supposedly 'right' concern). More importantly, I think both the concerns of human rights, and the employment of your fellow citizens, should not be a partisan issue.
I think most people want the world to be a better place to live, with better human rights, and a wage. Allowing China to gain leverage on the world, despite a track record of human rights abuses, and building a trade deficit with them, isn't really in the general voters interest.
And this is just one example. I'm sure there's more common ground if you look just at policy.