22 thoughts on “Trump Impeachment Trial Day 2: Live Steam, Day 1 Highlights, Open Thread

  1. Sadly/Oddly I agree with Dershowitz in his assessment. The second guy hit hard, but ultimately lost given the vote. Frankly if they couldn’t keep Cassidy in the fold – who is not exactly a flaming liberal – they have a more uphill battle then they expected.Report

    1. The formula for this is the same as it is with everything related to holding Trump accountable. It will happen if the Repulican establishment decides to do it and won’t if they don’t. They’re the ones with real agency here, but there’s a collective fiction that its what the Democrats decide to do that matters.Report

        1. I think McConnell was ready to knife Trump and assert control over the GOP, but he lost that battle internally. The Turtle doesn’t do open battles he won’t win.Report

  2. I haven’t seen it, but from what I hear the only way Trump’s lawyers could have beclowned themselves any more, would be to have shown up in cat filters.Report

  3. Are they bringing in any of the Rioters who have been charged and who are now saying they feel ‘betrayed’ and ‘lied to’ by Trump?

    Not that I expect the needle to move much among Republican Senators who haven’t committed to impeachment… but if the needle is gonna move it’s gonna move by Trump supporters talking about the betrayal to other Trump supporters.

    Again, not that it will create a massive change… but if there’s any chance of giving the R’s a pathway, its through Trumpville not around it.Report

    1. I concur on this. Cocaine Mitch would throw Trump under the bus faster than you could say “impeachable” -IF- he was certain it’d help the GOP’s prospects next election more than it’d hurt. And if he was certain of the reverse then nothing on the planet would make him permit Trump to be impeached.Report

      1. That’s really the rub with all of this. The GOP is betting Trump keeps them competitive in parts of the rust belt where their establishment’s prospects are otherwise quite bad. They’ll take that even at the expense of letting some of their safe seats in other parts of the country go full nutball for as long as it keeps working.Report

          1. My guess is that they don’t believe they have full control of the bus anymore. One of the most important but little remarked upon distinctions between the parties: Team D disdains its base; Team GOP on the other hand is terrified of theirs.Report

              1. Concur. Nothing has changed the forces that put him in office. I’m pretty sure absent covid and maybe even with covid but against any other D primary candidate he’d have been re-elected.Report

            1. I would object slightly to your analysis. Team D has two bases: the extremely left-wing liberals who the media and republicans push as not just the base but the entirety of the Democratic Party; and the professional class folks, often women and especially minority women, who are much more numerous, more pragmatic and enormously less doctrinaire liberal.

              The party disdains the former; has only recently really started realizing the latter exists and views them with a kind of confused gratitude.Report

          2. As others have pointed out, Trump came within 45,000 votes in three states of winning. The obvious Y is “make it harder for poor and minority people to vote.”

            The AZ and GA Republicans seem to have chosen that. I can’t speak to the legal situation in GA. In AZ, any such laws that are passed are subject to forced referendum if enough signatures are collected, and some of the proposals are going to be unpopular. I’m not sure that any of the AZ bills will get that far. There seem to still be a few sane suburban Republican state legislators, and Gov. Ducey may take exception to being sanctioned for following the law.Report

            1. I actually look at this as part of the conventional wisdom the GOP sticks with to their detriment. Higher turn out was good for the Republicans this cycle. The schizophrenia on the subject is what lost them the Senate seats in Georgia.Report

          3. There’s no upside on anyone of real standing to do one, because that’ll put a target on you. They’ve learned what happened to the people who post-mortemed 2012.Report

          4. To do a port-mortem they first have to acknowledge they lost. They’re still publicly in the “pining for the fjords” stage regarding their victory in 2020.Report

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