You've heard about the nuclear option, but let's talk about the supernova option.
If Sen. Mitch McConnell is a gambler, his moves on impeachment are his biggest bluff and his riskiest move ever. He and the entire GOP are trying to get Dems to fold their hand on impeachment when we are holding a royal flush and they have a pair of dueces.
Some Democrats like Senator Tim Kaine already seem prepared to fold and just accept a censure resolution, scared off by the usual Republican outrage dance and hungry for some semblance of unity. Fortunately most of the Dem caucus is set on holding a real trial. Whew, that’s a relief, but they are still being bluffed, and they are still afraid to raise the stakes with their royal flush after being handed the final card they needed by McConnell himself.
How do we know this is all a bluff? Just look for their tell. What is the tell? The outrage dance, of course. They scream bloody murder at the notion of any accountablility at all for the insurrection. Only 5 Republican Senators could be bothered to support even having an impeachment trial, one that Dems have already signaled will be as short as possible and for a single article of impeachment we all know he is guilty of.
Democrats have been very measured and reasonable, but their adversaries are anything but reasonable, and we should know that by now. It took 3 years of pushing to finally impeach Trump for the million high crimes and misdemeanors he was doing in plain sight, and when they did, Speaker Pelosi and House Dems constrained themselves to just 2 articles of impeachment related to 45’s attempt to manipulate the 2020 election by extorting aid from Ukraine and obstruction of justice.
Remember when the House opened the impeachment inquiry, seemingly ages ago? There were dozens of issues that citizens wanted Trump held accountable for…. campaign finance violations with the Stormy Daniels payoffs, blatant Hatch Act violations not enforced by 45 against his advisors, obstruction of various investigations, ignorning subpoenas, dubious firings, policy blunders like kids in cages at the border and family separation, and of course the laundry list of emoluments violations that the Supreme Court has now declared are mute. We had a full house, but only had the House.
Instead of playing their hand, Dems traded down for 2 very targeted articles of impeachment they could get done quickly and before Trump had a chance to manipulate the the upcoming election. He was caught red handed and we had the receipts, so went the thinking, and we wanted to hold him accountable before he could do it again in the 2020 election.
This was an olive branch to Republicans. The Democrats’ bet was that the Ukraine scandal was so blatant, so obvious, that of course reasonable Republicans would have no choice but to agree and remove Trump, to their benefit, before the primaries got underway. Republicans would have time to replace him on the ballot, and we as a nation would make lemonade out of the impeachment lemons… er, maybe that’s peach tea out of impeachment? Anyway....
Sadly, it did not play out the way Democrats hoped. Republicans circled the wagons. Their outrage dance was very well orchestrated and predictable, and guided Democrats away from inundating the good ship Trump with wave after wave of impeachment investigations. They got us to fight the battle on terms they defined.
Pelosi and House managers dutifully put themselves in a box of the reasonable. And bully McConnell ate their lunch by masterfully neutering the Senate impeachment trial, famously not even allowing witnesses. Democrats lost that vote, Republican Party slapped back a genuine olive branch offer to clean up their mess and move the nation forward.
Instead, Republicans doubled down and bought 11 months for the country to forget that the impeachment ever happened. It was barely mentioned during the campaign. Their outrage dance and the acquittal gave Trump a free pass on the multitude of other impeachable offenses he has openly committed. And we all know how that played out.
Now, after 5 people died, more than 100 officers were hurt, and the halls of Congress were violated by a insurrection organized and incited by Donald J Trump and his minions, Democrats are back at the same decision point. We’ve seen the videos and pictures and heard the chants from the mob. The insurrectionists wanted to murder VP Pence and Speaker Pelosi, and probably any of the House members of the so-called Squad, too. An armed insurrection was here to halt the constitutional process and end, once and for all, the American democratic experiment.
The events of the insurrection were undeniable, and despite Democrats again rushing one very tactical and precise article of impeachment, only 10 House Republicans could unite to protect the constitution. Given the urgency, this probably was the *reasonable* thing for Democrats to do, it was another olive branch. Republicans again were offered a chance to clean up their mess, allow the country to heal and move foward… to make the peach tea out of impeachment. But again, they slapped it back, and went right back to their outrage dance.
This is where Republicans and then-Majority Leader McConnell made their biggest mistake: Bluffing and overplaying an even weaker hand now that Senate Republicans would be in the minority.
If they had accepted the reasonable offer of Democrats to immediately move to a trial, conviction and removal of the clear and present danger in the White House, they would have lost their low stakes and had plenty in the bank to keep playing. They would have gotten rid of Trump just a handful of days early. Democrats would have gotten the accountability that they wanted, the bloodletting would have happened, and the nation could start to heal. This was the olive branch that Democrats offered. This was the unity Republicans could have gotten on board for, but they slapped it back like they always do.
Instead, McConnell refused to bring the Senate back to address this threat to national security and Congress. They relied on the electoral voice of voters to remove Trump, a voice that both Republicans and Trump had just spent 2 months delegitimizing. Republicans got EVERYTHING they wanted out of a bad situation. By refusing to play ball with the reasonable single article of impeachment, they made the country live on eggshells for 2 weeks until President Biden was finally inaugurated.
So, that brings us to today. Out there hangs the single article of impeachment, and the incoming Congress and Administration wants deeply to move forward on trivial things like... yah know…. preventing people from dying from COVID, addressing the escalating climate crisis, and defending civil rights under attack, among other things. I totally get it and support that desire. I share it.
Republicans are circling the wagons for the impeachment trial. Republicans are screaming bloody murder about any measure of accountability and barely support the trial. They are demanding unity and comity that they don’t deserve, and breaking out every outrage dance move they can to get Democrats to water down their response to the nightmare we just lived through for 4 years.
It is now speculated, based on a vote where only 5 of 50 Senate Republicans could bring themselves to support the impeachment trial process, that there is no way we will get the 17 Republicans needed to convict Trump.
And let us not forget, there is still a huge chunk of the citizenry that remains in the Cult of Trump. Republican parties across the country are seeking retribution against any Republican who supported impeachment and against elected officials who did not bend to Trump’s demands to rig the vote in his favor. This brainwashed cult has not yet been dealt with, and many/most/all of us are at a loss for how we deprogram the QAnon theorists that are part and parcel of this problem.
By not removing Trump before the end of his term, Republicans have empowered Democrats to move forward with impeachment and any other form of accountability that they see fit without the pressure of the calendar or a threat in the White House. We no longer have the urgency of either an upcoming election or the threat of a continued violent insurrection stoked by the sitting President. That was the box Democrats put themselves in, and McConnell and Republicans had a chance to close that box, nice and neat, and put a bow on top.
Unfortunately Democratic leaders are putting us right back in another box, this one about moving on to the important agenda we all agree must be dealth with swiftly. What’s the rush on impeachment though, when we could instead control the narrative about the Trump administration for the next 2 years?
Republicans are sitting there with a pair of dueces. They have lost the Presidency and both chambers of Congress. They have a disgraced, twice impeached grifter former President and a mob of monsters around him who have already been convicted of various crimes. Trump himself has dozens of possible criminal and civil liabilities, monetary debts and potential exposure as the ultimate fraud that he is. And yet, Senate Republicans seem like they are about to get another acquittal for him! Democrats want to trade in their royal flush for a short trial that allows them to move on quickly to their legislative agenda.
Wake up! Republicans won’t support any of the legislative agenda, so shortening the trial doesn’t gain Democrats a bit of good will. Most Republicans will not support conviction and Trump will again be acquitted. That’s where this is headed folks. We can all read the writing on the wall. We can hope and pray that another 12 Republican Senators will come to the defense of the union and live up to their oaths, but none of us expect that, right? They’re not going to give it to us, at least not without a fight.
So my suggestion is to not listen to what Republicans are screaming for. It’s just the outrage dance, the abuser’s playbook, trying to scare Democrats away from holding both Trump and his enablers (hint… it’s them) accountable. Instead we need to imagine what it is that Republicans would do if they were in this situation.
This is much like the esteemed Rachel Maddow has suggested for years: Don’t get distracted by what they are saying, watch what they are doing. Likewise, we should not listen to the bluster and get scared by their outrage dance, we should imagine instead what Republicans would do if the shoe were on the other foot.
They would get out their semiautomatic shotgun and load one shell after another into it, loudly, ominously, and slowly. And then they wouldn’t just go nuclear, they’d explode into a supernova. They would use their control of both chambers of Congress to set up so many hearings, commissions, committees and investigations that it would make Benghazi look like a delightful dip in the water instead of the witch hunt that it was. They would drag every living former administration official up to the Hill for public hearings. They would completely control the media narrative for the next 2 years, and it would tell the story about just how corrupt their opponents are. They would not be nice. They would not be civil. They would put on a two-year outrage dance.
And maybe, at the end, they would pull the trigger on some articles of impeachment, but they wouldn’t need to! They already won by controlling the narrative, and their dance would give them a huge amount of leverage on legislative changes. As a “compromise” to avoid further articles of impeachment, their investigative committees could demand concessions on reforms to prevent the transgressions from happening again.
Democrats don’t need to take the low road to do something similar. We already have the high road, so we can go high on this, while still achieving true accountability. There are a variety of ways that this could be done, Democrats could create new investigative commissions, they could authorize a new impeachment inquiry and direct multiple committees to delve to all of the hanging chads from four years of the Trump administration. And they could do it all by the book and with a smile.
To use yet another misguided metaphor, we just lived through four long, troubling seasons of a terrible TV program called the Trump Administration that we were forced to watch. Instead of funding a final season to explain all the outlandish plot twists and reveal that the (Republican) heroes were actually the villians all along, Democrats feel forced to cancel the final seasion and wrap it all up in a two hour special that will not explain everything clearly for the audience. Instead of controlling the narrative and deprogramming the cult, the audience will remain split and dissatisfied, and there will be no denouemont.
You cannot unwind four years of conditioning, frankly of brainwashing, in a 1 week Senate trial. The only way to end this long-running television show is to have at least one more full season to wrap up all the loose ends. We cannot do that in one extended episode. We need a full 26 episodes of this series to cover all the ground that was scorched during those first 4 seasons.
If ending the filibuster is the nuclear option, this is the supernova option and at the very least, we should use it as leverage to get a conviction in the upcoming trial. Democrats could gain even more leverage, especially on electoral reform, if they draw this out. And they have a chance to control the media narrative and deprogram some of Trump’s cult. But right now, we’re being boxed in by calls for unity, desire to move on to pressing emergencies, and fear of the continued Republican outrage dance.
We need true accountability to heal the nation, and we are about to settle for egg on our faces.
