7 ms·

If you are a Republican and didn’t sign up for this, can you please write your representatives about impeachment? This is getting ridiculous. We’d be much bette

• dekhn 1y ago
  The probability of impeachment succeeding at this time is effectively zero.
  • patagurbon 1y ago
    Impeachment of Kristi Noem could be more likely to succeed though.
  • scoofy 1y ago
    It’s zero if nobody actually says anything. The legislature has the power to reign in the president. They only have to threaten a bipartisan impeachment.
    • fzeroracer 1y ago
      Unfortunately I don't see a route where Republicans vote for impeachment, ever. They're already refusing to listen to constituents, hiding from their elected duties and letting Trump freely crash the economy on a whim.
      • DrillShopper 1y ago
        Republicans will not give up power unless doing so saves their fortunes or saves their lives.
  • anigbrowl 1y ago
    Anything difficult is effectively impossible until you decide to begin working on it.
    • ceejayoz 1y ago
      Sure, but there are "get your kid to eat veggies" levels of "effectively impossible", and then there's "quantum teleport into the bank vault" levels of it. This is more like the latter. There aren't many signs of us hitting the bottom thus far.
    • insane_dreamer 1y ago
      Even if it were possible for Dems to get control of the house and impeach the prez, there is no way that Senate will convict unless the GOP Senate goes back to becoming the GOP instead of the MAGA-GOP, which seems extremely unlikely.
      • lesuorac 1y ago
        Its interesting, you don't have enough republicans united to pass any of the agenda as law instead of executive orders but you also don't have 3 republicans willing to break to impeach for doing stuff they don't want (otherwise they'd pass it as law).
        • InitialLastName 1y ago
          a) You need 2/3 of senators to vote to convict, so you would need ~20 Republicans to get on board. b) Impeachment is a political action; plenty of politicians can disagree with portions of their party's legislature enough to vote against it without saying "I'd like to burn down my party's control of the government (and thereby my career) over this".
        • dragonwriter 1y ago
          > Its interesting, you don't have enough republicans united to pass any of the agenda as law instead of executive orders No, the decision to use executive fiat to normalize dictatorship is not undertaken because of the absence of support for the policy, but because of presence of support for normalizing dictatorship and avoiding the public in-advance debate of the legislative process.
        • insane_dreamer 1y ago
  • msabalau 1y ago
    Even if impeachment is off the cards, is it impossible to imagine that there could be any sort of impact from Republican lawmakers hearing Republican voters that, or other things are not what they voted for or want?
    • dekhn 1y ago
      Not at this time, and I don't see it changing enough in 3 years to make any difference. The fear of being attacked by MAGA is still very high, I think the (older) republican leadership has decided to just wait this out.
  • more_corn 1y ago
    Impeachment is the wrong tactic at this moment. Eroding support of the less hardline members of the party is key. Call your reps and say I didn’t sign up for this: [specific list of things]
• platevoltage 1y ago
  If you are a Republican, you DID sign up for this. None of this has been kept secret.
  • chrisandchris 1y ago
    Sometimes you sign up for things, because the advertisment did look great. But then, at one point, you want to cancel that subscription.
    • Braxton1980 1y ago
      And yet some have held that subscription for years..
    • baggachipz 1y ago
      If that's the case, you're an easily-duped sucker of a customer and deserve to lose your money.
      • intermerda 1y ago
        But you're not allowed to call them low-informed, uneducated, or any slightly negative/offensive qualifier. Otherwise you get the "this is why Trump won" lecture.
      • NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
        [flagged]
        • dijksterhuis 1y ago
          > I would much rather that they be knocked down a peg or three, which if it continues long enough might even result in lower prices for domestic students. When an organization loses a significant portion of it's annual income [0], there's often three main choices on what can be done next [1] * reduce the quality / variety of services provided -- i.e. cut services, keep prices the same, don't admit more students * increase prices for remaining "customers" -- i.e. increase prices, don't cut services, don't admit more students * increase income by getting more paying "customers" -- i.e. don't cut services, don't increase prices, get more domestic students [2] I struggle to see how you believe this could end up reducing prices for US domestic students for the same quality of education as before... unless your point is to degrade the standing of the educational institution/quality of the education provided so it becomes cheaper...? if that's true, why would you want that? -- [0]: close to a third of annual income in this case "Over 6,700 international students were enrolled at the institution last academic year, university data shows, making up 27% of its student body." -- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c05768jmm11o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c05768jmm11o [1]: based on my random experiences and stuff i've read, this is not an exhaustive cite-able statement [2]: could also take out a loan, but that's basically short-term increasing income
• watwut 1y ago
  Republicans signed up for this. Some of them want plausible deniality, but that is about it.
• dragontamer 1y ago
  > We’d be much better off with a president Vance. Vance literally defended the eating cats and dogs lie during the debate. The entire fucking point of this platform is to fuck the immigrants, legal or otherwise. Or is this actually a surprise to anyone with half a brain?
  • scoofy 1y ago
    Donald Trump is genuinely an idiot and deeply and obviously corrupt. I don’t like Vance, I’m still going to be mad at his agenda, but he’s generally intelligent. He’s not going to run the country into the ground because he doesn’t understand how fixed income securities work or give away national security to fly in an obviously bugged luxury plane for funsies. At the end of the day, there are different levels of terrible things that can happen to us, and right now we are staring down multi-generational damage to our country.
    • jasonjayr 1y ago
      Why haven't any of the other intelligent and uncorrupt republicans done anything to prevent the "running the country into the ground"? There has to be more than a few of them, right? They could halt or correct this agenda at any time they choose.
      • scoofy 1y ago
        The Trump administration is a loyalty-based hierarchy. The intelligent advisors know that it is better for there careers do demonstrate loyalty than actual do anything to improve his policies. This is not rationalists paradigm, it’s a survivalist paradigm. In fact the reason why it’s so bad now is that he blames his (more intelligent) advisers in his previous administration for his problems.
    • dkarl 1y ago
      > he’s generally intelligent. He’s not going to run the country into the ground I think you're having a hard time grasping the concept of people who care more about rolling back social and cultural change than they care about the United States being a strong and prosperous country. The tension between those priorities in the Republican party has been resolved. The current leaders in the party, including Vance, rose because they understood that their voters are ready to let go of world leadership, including technological leadership and economic competitiveness, in order to roll back social progress. If you ask them directly, they'll invoke some magical thinking about how this is going to unleash a golden age of prosperity and technology, but they don't care if they believe it or if anyone believes it, because they don't actually care anymore. That's why they don't blink when Trump talks about backwards, impoverished countries with admiration. There's no contradiction for them. They really do look at a country like Russia and think, yes, I want the U.S. to be an American-flavored version of that.
• breakingrules3 1y ago
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• bongoman42 1y ago
  Most Republicans around me are extremely happy with this.
  • scoofy 1y ago
    The politicians that matter most are the marginally elected representatives for their party, and they care about the marginal voter in their district. The median Republican does not matter when it comes to impeachment and removal. What matters is about one standard deviation in views left of the median.
• Workaccount2 1y ago
  The problems at Harvard and other high ed organizations are real. They've become pretty unhinged and concentrated, they really need to work on getting back to "open forum for discussing all ideas" rather than the "Open forum for discussing all correct ideas" that they have drifted into. I can see it first hand through my mother, who works at a major school. That being said, republicans decided to chose an M1 Abrams tank to kill the pesky mice in the system.
  • therouwboat 1y ago
    But Trump adminstration is so much worse here, they ban stuff based on word lists and kick people with wrong ideas out of the country.
    • alaxhn 1y ago
      In the hiring process for these institutions, until recently you had to write a "Diversity Statement" which was evaluated as part of the hiring process. This was an attempt to keep people with the "wrong ideas" out of the hiring pool. Similarly the H1B process asks you a long list of questions that you are required to answer "correctly" in order to be admitted. If you fail, you are kicked out. I think the question is which set of ideas are not ok (e.g. clearly "I want to commit violence" is not an ok idea) which set of ideas are a grey area ("I have attended a major event of a US designated terror organization such as a funeral of a leader from a a terror organization") and which set of ideas are ok ("I want to advocate for peacefully advocate for more bike lanes"). There are very strong party affiliations for what ideas are considered ok vs forbidden (e.g. trans rights in the sports world).
      • twoodfin 1y ago
        I think it’s also reasonable to want to see some assurance that Harvard has reckoned with the frankly racist and discriminatory admissions policy that was well-documented in the filings for Students for Fair Admissions @ SCOTUS.
      • ModernMech 1y ago
• helpful_friend 1y ago
  [flagged]
• intermerda 1y ago
  I used to think that the Republican officials just put on a mask and perform kabuki for their Dear Leader. But the signalgate texts proved otherwise. This kind of thinking has penetrated deep into the party. It's not going away. Not with Vance.
  • marktangotango 1y ago
    The influence and dominance of conservative media is striking. They have sane-washed and explained away things that would have ended 10 other politicians careers. Trump is Asimovs "mule". His appeal to large groups of people is inexplicable. Vance is certainly NOT that. It's open question how much success the Mule's successor would have. Surely momentum and conservative media will carry him far (should that come to pass). https://newrepublic.com/article/128107/classier-two-evils https://newrepublic.com/article/128107/classier-two-evils
    • southernplaces7 1y ago
      A curious thing about the very article you linked to is how it proved to be so wrong about this: "Trump, on the other hand, is so anomalous a figure that the GOP establishment can console themselves with the knowledge that he leads no faction. Even if he wins the nomination, Trump can be safely relegated to the category of a one-off, a freak mutation, never to be repeated. " Now that he's in a second term whose winding course to fruition just about nobody could have easily predicted in early 2016, and totally dominates the Republican party, its base and most of its thinking, the above seems laughable. Trump looks less like "The Mule" than ever today and even if he can't be replaced by anyone quite like him, he's put into motion normalizations of deviance that will reverberate through US politics for many years after he's out, either legally or through natural causes.
  • henrikschroder 1y ago
    If you've ever waded into ragebaity online discussions, for example Europeans taunting Americans about the lack of public healthcare or basic worker rights, there will always be a loud contingent of Americans spouting counter-arguments based in American Exceptionalism, claiming that everyone else somehow, magically, has the US to thank for its standard of living. It was always easy to dismiss those as uninformed morons, but Signalgate showed that at least Vance and Hegseth truly believes it, and who knows how many more of their ilk. Up until 2016, the US was predominantly governed by people who understood the post-WWII world order, who understood the immense benefit of Pax Americana to the US itself. People who understood soft power and diplomacy, people who understood that although the upfront costs of maintaining the military hegemony, of playing world police, the benefits far outweighed the costs. People who understood mutually beneficial trade agreements, and that a trade deficit is a small price to pay to maintain the USD as the world's reserve currency. But now, it's the spoiled grandchildren who are in power, who have been brought up suffused with the exceptionalism such that they take America's position for granted in eternity. And they look at the cost of all of these things, how much it directly benefits other countries, and react with stupid short-sighted greed, thinking that getting rid of the "free-loaders" will make them richer. I remember the TPP trade deal. It took eight years to negotiate and the US strong-armed everyone else into accepting its provisions on IP, which would have allowed the US to maintain its position at the top of the value chain, countering the ascendancy of China. All gone, in the trash, because the people who are once again in power fundamentally do not understand how it would have strengthened the US. So now we're back to some kind of mercantilistic trade-war, that the US will lose.
• deleted 1y ago
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• cmurf 1y ago
  People need to write their representatives. Volume of responses is what Congresscritters respond to. Party doesn't matter. Ds need to inform their R Congresscritters every bit as much as any other combination. For what it's worth, Republican constituents overwhelmingly voted for Trump in the R primary. Any number of candidates would have provided boilerplate Republican policies, but that wasn't what they wanted. What Trump is doing is what these voters want. And there's no limit. It's become an illiberal pro-authoritarian movement. It's in-progress. Pick something you care about and defend it. It can't be everything all at once at all times, no one can do that.
  • rchaud 1y ago
    > People need to write their representatives. Volume of responses is what Congresscritters respond to Maybe in reruns of The West Wing. America is a long way past that now.
• alaxhn 1y ago
  What is the better path forward? Republican voters led by their representative Trump were unhappy about certain policies and events at Ivy league institutions. Voters have the right to feel this way and elect representatives to carry out their views even if this is not how you feel as a feature of democracy. Proxies of the representatives of the voters reached out to a few institutions requesting changes to be made or else face consequences. The institutions said "we are unwilling to make all of the changes that you would like to see because we think they are not reasonable". The administration's response is now to try and hurt these institutions (Harvard for now) by going after their pocketbook. As someone with some "right-leaning" views I am indeed very sad that the US is losing our edge as an international destination for higher education but I do want to see major reforms at elite institutions. I don't see a good way to accomplish these reforms without being willing to go after institutions in the only way they really care about (hurting the budget). I think we would reach a better place if we could agree to compromises where the universities concede on the "less important points" (e.g. make an earnest effort to drop everything the right calls DEI and reduce the administration to student ratio back to ~1980 levels) while the right agrees to leave funding and privileges in place but if we cannot compromise then we unfortunately end up in a position that is worse for everyone. I suspect most of the left will blame the right for being unable to compromise while most of the right will blame the right but this is kind of the same theme for every major party-aligned disagreement.
  • bigbacaloa 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • alaxhn 1y ago
      I really think you should take a step back and think about where this sort of ideology will take us in the long run. If you want to send the supporters of the other party to hell because they have differences of opinion than you, this is a step towards enabling horrible things to be done to people at scale. I don't want a dictatorship. I probably want largely the same things as you. To be safe in and outside of my home. Affordable and quality food healthcare and education. The rule of law. Fundamentally all people have most things in common with each other but our differences can seem magnified and exaggerated especially with things like social media and the 24 hour news hype cycle.
• deleted 1y ago
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• HamsterDan 1y ago
  Harvard is a systematically racist institution. They even went to the Supreme Court to fight for the right to discriminate against white and Asian students. Republicans and Trump-voting independents signed up for this. They want to see Harvard treated the same way it treats others.
• Aurornis 1y ago
  > We’d be much better off with a president Vance. J.D. Vance gave a big speech at the Nationalism Conservatism Conference titled "The Universities are the Enemy": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FR65Cifnhw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FR65Cifnhw Destroying universities has been his schtick since long before he was a VP candidate. He has stated that he believes 4-year degrees make people dumber. I'm constantly amazed by how many people don't know that waging wars on Universities has been Vance's thing for years.
• Slava_Propanei 1y ago
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