I can’t even with the latest round of pardons. I actually think the pardon power should be more widely used in general, but not for this.
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I have a bit mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, every president issues lots of pardons at the end of their term. On the other hand, no other president has bypassed standard procedures and issued so many self-serving pardons before.
Okay, belay that, my feelings are not mixed at all.
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A lot of time spent when a new President comes into office is trying to undo what was done in the past. Joe Biden’s already laying out quite a bit he wants to complete in his first 100 days. Here’s an easy one that would take a little bit of time: look at every executive order Trump has issued since November 3 and tear up any that are clearly time- and money-wasters.
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Let’s say you’re the President of the United States. There’s many things you have to deal with. People dying from a pandemic, people out of a job, people scared they don’t have enough money to live on day to day and worried about the back rent and mortgages coming due very quickly, an RV explodes in Nashville that destroys buildings and injuries people. That sort of thing.
So where should your priority be?
Why, playing golf and complaining that your wife hasn’t appeared on a cover of a magazine since you took office, of course.
Yes, he totally should have flown to Nashville and done something. Or maybe he should have flown to Chicago to mourn the 4 shot on Christmas Evening, 2 dead 2 wounded.
Maybe he could have flown to New York and yelled at Cuomo for breaking his own rules and also start an investigation into the Nursing Home deaths this Spring.
Presidents always get shit for this. And I’m always wondering what it is people expect them to do. He literally can do nothing other than issue a statement, which he did.
In one way you’re correct. He’s responded to that particular event. There will probably never be a time that there isn’t a big problem for a President to handle.
As to what people expect them to do, how about this? Before Trump posts something on Twitter, he takes time to consider:
- Will it appear self-serving?
- Will it appear selfish?
- Will it show a lack of compassion?
- Will it show a lack of empathy?
- Will it show a lack of concern about what other people are going through?
- Does it really need to be said?
- Will it demonstrate integrity?
- Will it demonstrate honesty?
Of course, he never will. That’s not in his nature. He’s proven that time and time again. And now that I write that, I wonder if his complaint about his wife not being on the cover of a fashion magazine as First Lady is really about her not being on the cover, or if it’s one of these two things:
- That his wife hasn’t been on the cover. Not Melania as a person, but as his wife, so some of the prestige of the photo is reflected back upon him.
- It’s related to his obsession with Barack Obama and the fact that Michelle Obama was on the cover of 12 magazines while First Lady.
He hasn’t issued a statement. I checked. Twenty-three tweets since yesterday morning, when this happened, and nothing except whinging and moaning about “election fraud”. The WH deputy press secretary issued a two sentence statement as follows:
“President Trump has been briefed on the explosion in Nashville, Tennessee, and will continue to receive regular updates,” White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere said. “The President is grateful for the incredible first responders and praying for those who were injured.” That’s a pretty stock statement.
Mrs Ford was im magazine covers. Both Mrs Bushs were on magazine covers. Hillary was.
It is odd that there is an actual model in the White House and she hasn’t been on a single one as first lady.
Actually its not odd. It is petty and small. And it is the 7,362nd sign that the media is biased. Part of the reason these media companies are falling apart is they are designed to run by appealing to everyone in their niche, but only really appeal to about half the people.
I firmly believe that this president must comment on everything is one of the worst legacies of the Obama presidency. A bomb went off and two cops and someone else was injured. Sure, maybe bring out a medal of freedom or something for the cops there later, that thankfully weren’t defunded yet, but what else is there to say at that point?
And I hope the next presidents don’t have a twitter account. Or at least that someone takes it away at night.
Twitter said about a week ago that it wasn’t going to transfer the official accounts like POTUS and VP to the new administration. Biden’s team got those freed up. POTUS under Trump will become POTUS45 and frozen as part of the national records of Presidential communications. A new POTUS account for Biden will become active, and it will become POTUS46 later on. We’ll see how much gets deleted before the changeover.
All of the activity on the POTUS account going back several months is retweets. I’m not going to take time to see if it’s all four years. Almost all of what I did see are retweets of Donald Trump’s personal account. There’s a few miscellaneous items in there from other people so it’s not like the POTUS account is set to auto-retweet everything from him. However, it means Trump is using his personal account to conduct official government business.
Was it that way for Obama, or did he use his personal account for personal messages and POTUS for official messages? I know separating the person from the job can be difficult. Many times it’s legally required. The company I work for has a public media policy that if you’re going to make any statements about the company, besides getting it approved first, it has to be clearly identified as you representing the company.
Regardless, Trump will still have his personal account on January 20th. Once Biden is sworn in, Trump becomes a private citizen again and his personal account becomes subject to the same rules about abuses, which include having it shut down. Politicians get leeway over what they say, but isn’t that while they’re still in office?
The President wasn't just playing golf over the holiday. He decided also play "will he, won't he?" with the second economic relief bill. Prior to Christmas is was "everything's looking good, we'll get it done". Then it was him saying, "Why are you giving everyone so little? Make it $2000." Then it was, "I'm not signing this. I'm busy fighting the election." Last night, he signed it, after existing unemployment aid expired and just over a day before the government would have been forced to shut down.
People will get relief checks starting in January. Some people may not get theirs until February or later and I think the end of January is when the ban on evictions ends. It will also very likely delay when we file taxes for 2020. The existing tax forms have to be updated and reprinted with the new changes, an additional expense for the government. Another expense that Donald Trump will no longer be responsible for 23 days from now.
Of course congress could have sent a bill two months ago with 1200 checks and unemployment relief and would have been with it.
This current monstrosity is a mess. But all spending bills appear to be anymore. That’s why we don’t do budgets anymkre.
I’m starting to feel sorry for Mike Pence. Not only does he have a boss who is trying to get him to not accept the Electoral College vote, he’s being sued by Rep. Louie Gohmert of Tyler of Texas to force him to throw out votes on January 6th. In other words, make it possible for the Vice President to decide who will be President.
Right now, the Vice President’s role is to be a tie-breaker. He only votes when it’s required. If this succeeds, it sets the precedent that not just the Electoral College can be overridden, but the entire US voting system itself, because one person will be able to make the decision for the entire nation. And if you’ve got precedent for this process, how long before that precedent gets expanded to other areas where the VP can walk in and say “That one” to override other votes?
If the Twelfth Amendment worked the way the lawsuit is claiming it’s supposed to work, somebody should have figured that out at some point during the 196 years it’s been in effect.
Here’s a short list of previous times a VP could have overridden a contested election:
- 1981: VP Walter Mondale awards a second term to Jimmy Carter
- 1993: VP Dan Quayle awards a second term to George H. W. Bush
- 2001: VP Al Gore picks himself to become the U.S. President
- 2017: VP Joe Biden picks Hillary Clinton to become the U.S. President
Remind me again. Who was it that Hillary ran against? Oh, that’s right. It was Donald Trump. According to this law suit, Donald Trump should never have been a U.S. President at all because the Vice President should be able to throw out votes.
I honestly can’t find any reading of the Twelfth Amendment that would even justify the claim being made here. According to the Twelfth, if nobody got a majority of the Electoral votes, the House would choose the President, and likewise the Senate the VP. There’s nothing in there about the VP (even acting as President of the Senate) doing anything more than opening the Electoral ballots. Nothing about “certifying” or “verifying” that could involve them getting thrown out. Any certification is handled by the Electors/states before they’re sent to Congress.
The law suit against Mike Pence has been thrown out so we don’t have that to worry about that. What we do have to worry about is Thursday is shaping up to be yet another loyalty test to Donald Trump. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley announced he’s going to file an objection on January 6th.
Here’s what happens on the 6th: The electoral votes are read and counted. The President of the Senate (VP Pence) adds them up and listens for objections. If there are objections, the House and Senate consider them separately to decide how to count the votes being objected to. Once they’ve decided, the count goes in and it’s another check to see if a candidate reaches 270 votes. If there isn’t, the House decides and the weird way it is right now, even though there’s a Democrat majority in the House, Republicans control more state delegations, so it’s possible the House could pick Donald Trump as the President.
As of yesterday, Hawley hadn’t decided how much of an objection it was going to be. Let’s just pick a simple number that he’s going to object to the votes from five states. I though I had seen something about there’s two hours allocated for addressing objections, so maybe a total of ten hours will be spent on Hawley’s objections?
But it isn’t going to be just for him. Over 140 Republicans have announced they will also object. If we use that same measure, are we talking about over 700 hours of debates (29.2 days), or will it be just two hours per state that’s objected to?
The deadline is noon on January 20th. If nobody can decide who should be President, the Vice President is selected (or whomever is next in line for presidential succession should Pence suddenly croak or whatnot).
I didn't understand this before. Now I see why there's been so many fights to prevent what should be a matter that's already settled. Donald Trump is obsessed with staying as President, but if he got Mike Pence installed through all these delays and legal maneuverings, he could still effectively be President by exerting influence and control over Pence. Unless Pence displayed backbone and said, "I'm President now, not you."
I can also see this backfiring. If the people who will be doing the debate/recount get fed up about being forced into doing it, especially if it’s multiple times, they could just as easily go, “Nope, no more”, and say “The vote stands as originally counted.”
Update: About a dozen senators and senators-elect are going to raise objections so they can get an “emergency 10-day audit” of the votes in the disputed states. There’s voter fraud, you know. Of course, the voter fraud didn’t affect them winning their Senate races. It was only the part of each ballot with the Trump and Biden spots on it. Funny how that works, isn’t it.
I said this was yet another loyalty test because that's what it is. It isn't about objecting to flaw(s) in the election process, despite what Hawley claims. It's about appeasing Donald Trump and his supporters. As said by GOP Senator Ben Sass, "When we talk in private, I haven't heard a single Congressional Republican allege that the election results were fraudulent–not one. Instead, I hear them talk about their worries about how they will 'look' to President Trump's most ardent supporters."
The vote is about whether each person will be loyal to Donald Trump. Not to the nation. Not to the people of the United States. Not to the things they believe in. It is to show loyalty to one person.
But they should not make the mistake of thinking this test is a two-way street. It is only about their loyalty to The Donald, not a test of his loyalty to them. If they think that, they should ask Senator John Thune how much his loyalty to Trump is worth.
John Thune is the Senate majority whip and is apparently very loyal to Donald Trump, but he isn't loyal enough. He said "you have to face the music" and "it's time for everybody to move on" regarding Joe Biden getting more than 270 electoral college votes.
In response, Trump is calling Thune a RINO, which means “Republican in name only”. In other words, because Thune doesn’t support everything that Trump does, Thune isn’t a “real” Republican. Trump is already trying to get South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to run against Thune in 2022, or anyone else because “others are already lining up”. Trump has also said Thune should resign.
Trump operates on “friend or enemy” basis and he needs to continually verify if someone is his friend. What it takes for a friend to become his enemy can be very small. The loyalty test on Wednesday is also an indicator of whether each person is trying to avoid becoming Trump’s enemy. To make it easy on them, they should just recite the new Pledge of Allegiance:
I pledge allegiance to Donald Trump of the Empire of Mar-a-lago, and to his legacy for which he’s striving, one Nation under The Donald, divided among his enemies and his friends, with conspiracies and voter fraud forever.
The last thing we need in the Senate is COVID Kristi.
A common scam that’s used by con artists is dangling the promise of a big payout in front of the mark to entice them to give up money, property or the like. A skilled con artist will be successful in coming up with little hiccups or glitches and saying “If you give me just a little more, I can get this cleared up.” The longer they can string the mark along, the more money they get and the more the mark becomes invested in sticking it out because the payout’s within reach. Really good con artists can make it look like the mark’s fault that there’s delays or do the blow-off where something suddenly comes up where they all have to scatter to avoid getting caught.
The claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election have a lot of similarities with that kind of scam. For months, we’ve been told there’s voter fraud, they’ve got the proof and they’ll show us the proof real soon now, promise. We’ll see that the voter fraud only targeted the Presidential race and somehow didn’t target any other political races. And yet, they somehow never get around to showing the proof even as they keep saying there’s voter fraud, they’ve got the proof and they’ll show us the proof real soon now, promise.
If you view the voter fraud claims in terms of a scam, money is still a goal for them. They’re still doing political fundraising while this is going on. But there are also other items of value that they can obtain by doing this.
One of them is the value of belief. Belief in what can’t be proved. Belief that they’re a part of the side that’s right, fighting the injustice of a stolen election. Belief that says anything else can’t be right.
That’s an item of value that the mark gives them. The voter fraud claims are also taking another item of value: the belief in the integrity of the voting system. For years, we’ve been taught that while it’s not perfect, the U.S. voting system is something that can be trusted and is good enough that other countries should strive to have those same kinds of elections. Now we’re being told, “Don’t trust it. The election was stolen. There’s corruption, fraud and incompetence everywhere. We’ll prove it to you real soon now, promise.”
Let's say for the sake of argument that they're right. Let's say there is voter fraud, they do have proof and when they show it to us, everybody will see they're right. The right person, Donald Trump, will be sworn back in as President.
The two questions that come up from that are:
- Why are they waiting to show us the proof?
- What benefit do they get by waiting to show us?
Are they waiting until 11:59 a.m. on January 20th to drop a bombshell on the nation at the last second to play spoilsport for Joe Biden’s inauguration? Are they hoping that by appearing to be all talk and no action that the conspirators will let their guard down? Are they hoping to lure the conspirators into a false sense of security so they can expose all of them at one time?
Very simply, if they have the proof, why wait to show everyone that they’ve been right all along?
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I’ve heard exactly the opposite for years. Ask Stacey Abrams. Ask Hillary Clinton. Ask ManBearPig. Ask the press that has been saying Trump stole this election or that Bush stole his.
Don’t spend 20 years making me question elections and then ask me to not question this one.
Look at All Franken’s election. Or the Republican that got caught ballot harvesting in one of the Carolinas. We don’t audit elections, we don’t vet them, we simply take it for granted that where people will chest on literally everything else in the world that elections are just fine.
Question from a clueless Canadian here. What happens to all the bills that Mitch McConnell refused to bring to the floor now that there’s a new Senate session? Do they continue from one session to another, or do they all go away? If they continue from one session to the next does this mean that, since it looks like the Democrats will control the Senate this session, Chuck Schumacher can start bringing them to the floor?
IIRC they have to be reintroduced in the new Congress. Which should not be too difficult now that the turtle is no longer Majority Leader. However, passing laws isn’t a given because the Republicans can still use the filibuster in many cases.
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The person responsible for the riots in the capital should be charged with criminal offences. I don’t care that he is the president, it was obvious to anyone with a brain that he was inciting his supporters to violence, and that’s exactly what happened.
It’s way too late to call for peace after the violence has happened.
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Is it a coup yet?