A lawless president won’t be constrained by establishment politics alone.
Long read but worth it. There is a fight between House Democrats over supporting mass demonstrations — just as there was with impeaching Trump.
Democratic Congress members must unite and support large scale #ImpeachmentMarches. Here’s why!
Watergate played out under a party system that was remarkably loose compared to today. Not all conservatives were Republicans, and not all Republicans were conservatives. That arguably set the stage for presidential misconduct to be evaluated as separately from political ideology or orientation as is possible.
American elites rarely seem to do this, but they should consider the lesson that toppled Mariano Rajoy’s corrupt right-wing government in Spain in 2018, Park Geun-hye’s corrupt right-wing government in South Korea in 2017, and Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson’s corrupt right-wing government in Iceland in 2016: Large-scale public protests work.
“it would be extremely foolish to believe that Republican senators and Federalist Society judges are going to come riding out of the woods in order to do the job.”
It’s no great mystery why congressional Democrats turned against popular protest. Some party officials believed that the mobilized progressive base pushed them into a tactically disadvantageous confrontation over Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 that contributed to the defeat of several incumbent red state senators.
Small impeachment rallies have broken out recently in American cities, and that’s great to see, but they’ve been modest in size compared to the demonstrations of 2017.
Pelosi has now embraced impeachment, and just two weeks ago declared that Trump’s actions were “an assault on the Constitution.”
“A lawless government cannot be constrained by the institutions of the law alone. It is popular mass resistance that creates a crisis point and forces action. And if Democrats want to beat Trump’s stonewalling tactics in 2019, they should consider doing it again.”