Mark this time and date and mark it well, friends, the afternoon of December 13, 2023. It’s not a Friday the 13th but it might as well be, for the bad karma and problems that the Republican party just drove its own way. A short while ago the House voted 221-212 along straight party lines to formalize an impeachment investigation into President Joe Biden.
Even Ken Buck (R-CO) voted for it and he was was initially against the vote because he knew it was groundless but that doesn’t matter anymore. The House decided to embrace “the farcical Biden proceedings, built on a foundation of debunked conspiracy theories and loan repayments from relatives when he was a private citizen, [and] turn the constitutional equivalent of a political death penalty into a tool of political retribution.” That’s on one side of the coin. On the other side, we have a GOP presidential candidate accused of 91 felonies and that’s fine, just fine. Let’s let that massive, indisputable body of evidence go unrecognized and unaddressed, while the big Biden nothing-burger commands a sham impeachment. I would say it was unbelievable but unfortunately, this is the level to which politics has sunk in this country. This is normal. This is who we are nowadays.
The upshot is this: When lawmakers come back from their holiday recess next year, the impeachment inquiry will be in full force alongside the first presidential primaries, Biden’s pivot to reelection and potentially former President Donald Trump’s first criminal trial.
The timeline: How long it will take for House Republicans to move toward an actual impeachment of Biden is unclear. The Oversight and Judiciary committees are planning additional depositions and could schedule future public hearings.
Investigators are hoping to make a decision about whether or not to pursue and draft articles of impeachment by late January. That roughly corresponds to the 48 days it took for House Democrats to move to a final impeachment vote against Trump in 2019 after voting to formalize their own inquiry.
What’s mind-boggling about this impeachment is that with respect to Trump’s two impeachments and Bill Clinton’s impeachment, at least the factual underpinning was sound. Things occurred as they were described as having occurred. Now, all of that is gone. Impeachment may now become something that every president ends up experiencing, simply because it’s now been trivialized as a partisan weapon of revenge, and not as the political Fail Safe that it was intended as. The Bulwark:
THE QUADRUPLY INDICTED, twice-impeached and twice-acquitted 45th president of the United States is trying to delay four criminal trials until after the 2024 election, which he plans to win in order to stay out of jail and ultimately kill or bury those indictments. He lives to fight another day because, in a disaster for America, he beat the system while he was president. Let’s look at the record.
Trump’s first impeachment was over his self-described “perfect” July 2019 phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump regurgitated conspiracy theories about Ukraine and the 2016 election, trashed special counsel Robert Mueller, and tried to extort dirt on Biden (“I would like you to do us a favor, though”) in exchange for releasing congressionally approved military aid to help Ukraine fend off Russian incursions.
A day after the House voted to impeach Trump, the General Accounting Office determined that withholding the aid was illegal. But except for Utah’s Mitt Romney, Senate Republicans did not help Democrats convict Trump, oust him and bar him from future office. Trump was acquitted. Vladimir Putin escalated last year from regional provocations to all-out war to reclaim Ukraine for Mother Russia. And Zelensky was in Washington this week imploring resistant congressional Republicans to approve more aid.
The second impeachment was over Trump’s central role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, including the deadly January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection, an unprecedented abuse of power. But again Trump escaped conviction in the Senate, and the GOP declined to consider a freestanding bill to ban him from future office. This was not because Republicans approved of his election denialism and the attack he encouraged, which had endangered their lives as they tried to finalize Biden’s 2020 win. As Romney told his biographer, McKay Coppins, some considered voting to impeach or convict, but decided the safety of their families was paramount.
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who voted to acquit, angrily warned Trump on the Senate floor that the courts would deliver justice. That may prove true. But it has yet to happen in the four pending criminal cases against him, and Trump—who declared himself a 2024 presidential candidate the week after the 2022 elections—is doing his utmost to make sure it never happens.
We only have a corrupt, immature, lunatic in line for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024 because we have a Republican party which fits that description. The Republicans are not there to uphold democracy or protect the Constitution, as they swore an oath to do. All bets are now off.
There is, realistically, a fascist takeover afoot in this country right now. The GOP is hanging on by a thread and they will do anything in their power to stay in power. Power is the only thing that is important now.
May God help us. I don’t know if the Founding Fathers foresaw a day where there would be such widespread corruption in our government such that our institutions could not stand and that the Constitution would in effect be nullified. But we are there now.
That’s the takeaway from the House impeachment vote this December 13, 2023.
They just lost The House. They won’t be missed.
They are doing this to play-act their own bullshit that Trump was impeached twice for purely political reasons. So if the Democrats did it to Trump, the Republicans can do it to Biden. Of course, there’s a bit of a gap in their reasoning, and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see what it is. This will not impress anyone outside of their stupid MAGA cult, which already believes anything and everything Trump says. To everyone else, it’s just another nail in the MAGA coffin. I’m just sorry President Biden and the United States of America has to be subjected to such utterly obvious crap.
He’s GUILTY, becauae:
1:- he got more votes than our lord and master
2:- he reduced inflation
3:- he reduced unemployment
4:- he started to improve infrastructure
5:- he wouldn’t waste money on a wall thaty is breached within days
6:- in short – he’s better for the people
Now you can’t allow this to heppen and anyone who disagrees is on the list for re-housing in a tented encampment either in the Arctic or Death Valley (so sayeth the Donald)
Rethugs these days cannot vote out of lockstep these days. I have no doubt that that old Slimy toad McConnell had something to hold over the heads of every rethug senator, other than, perhaps, Mitt Romney, who also generally voted with the rest of the right in 99 percent of cases. And, if course, we know that when he voted with Democrats, as in the second impeachment of the DUMPF, he knew his vote would be cancelled out, and so he could afford to be the token voter. Same goes for all those in Congress, like Ken Buck, who talk the talk sometimes, but simply ignore walking the walk. In one of the several biographies of Harry Truman, when talking about Richard Nixon,
he is quoted as saying, “Richard Nixon is a no good, lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in.”
These days that sentiment could be applied to the whole party, it seems.