Weather joined the news cycle heavily today, bouncing some shit off the radar for awhile — snow storms, atmospheric rivers on the West Coast, and heavy snow again just about everywhere else. Life keeps moving, though.
News out of DC — beyond Joe Biden’s quick work — is the T-Rump might slip-pass conviction in his up coming Senate impeachment trial.
Shitty, but we knew Republicans are way-hypocritical and treacherous creatures, but still — via Axios this afternoon:
Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) are forging ahead with a draft proposal to censure former President Trump, and are considering introducing the resolution on the Senate floor next week.
Why it matters: Senators are looking for a way to condemn Trump on the record as it becomes increasingly unlikely Democrats will obtain the 17 Republican votes needed to gain a conviction, Axios Alayna Treene writes.
“I think it’s important for the Senate’s leadership to understand that there are alternatives,” Kaine told CNN on Wednesday.…The censure resolution will declare that the attack on the Jan. 6 Capitol was an insurrection against the Constitution — an effort to stop Congress from “undertaking its constitutional duty to count electoral votes,” according to Kaine.
It finds that Trump “gave aid and comfort” to the insurrectionists by “repeatedly lying about the election, slandering election officials, pressuring others to come to Washington for a wild event and encouraging them to come up to Congress.”
…
Kaine said if Trump is found to have violated the amendment, he could be barred from holding office again.
However it remains unclear whether that is enforceable.
“This is an alternative that would impose, in my view, a similar consequence but it does not require a trial and it does not require a two-thirds vote,” the Virginia senator added.
Even this censure scheme is a long-shot effort to pass the Senate:
Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine is working on a resolution to censure former President Donald Trump for his actions on January 6, a method Kaine thinks would be faster way to hold Trump accountable than an impeachment trial https://t.co/XSoOwTRQJk pic.twitter.com/33bE9gTwjl
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) January 27, 2021
Creepy, sad and depressing, too, when an obvious psychopath won’t be held accountable for at the way-minimum crime of inciting an insurrection — he’s skating on a shitload of other transgressions, not the least is purposely choking response to a vicious pandemic, causing the death of hundreds of thousands of Americans, or illegally attempting to overturn a fully-certified election.
And all that’s in just less than a year!
Republicans are going to be remembered by history as a shit-show bunch of nasty psychopaths — yesterday only five GOP senators — the usual bunch, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse and Pat Toomey — voted against Rand Paul’s nitpick, nit-twit, co-called Constitutional objection to T-Rump’s upcoming impeachment trial since the asshole is already out of office.
Hence, now the appearance of T-Rump skating again. Democrats need 17 senators to switch sides and they’re just noth there. Creepy, sad and depressing.
Anyway, censure is petty punishment, though, ‘punishment‘ might nowhere-be the right word here — a way-quick tutorial on Congressional ‘punishment‘ via Josh Chafetz, law professor at Georgetown University, at WUSA9, CBS affiliate in DC, and from earlier this month:
“Impeachment is only available against judges and executive officers, and it requires impeachment by the House and conviction by 2/3 in the Senate. It comes with automatic loss of office,” Chafetz says.
“Expulsion is the way both chambers of Congress keep their own houses in order, and it only applies to their own members. It requires a 2/3 vote of the member’s own chamber.”
Unlike expulsion and impeachment, the guidelines of censure are not outlined in the Constitution or in any congressional rules.Consequentially, it’s basically a public slap on the wrist, and the censured member remains in office. A simple majority of a chamber can successfully censure a member.
Conviction of insurrection in the face of the planet dodging a bullet with the T-Rump out of office is a minimum retribution — as witnessed by the infamous Doomsday Clock:
Doomsday clock panel at @BulletinAtomic welcomes Biden win as possible step to "safer and saner world" but keeps hands at '100 seconds to midnight'https://t.co/XOjaHySk8P
— Julian Borger (@julianborger) January 27, 2021
Worldwide mandate, with few exceptions, is that the T-Rump was a menace — details at the Guardian this morning:
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that the hands of its “Doomsday Clock”, a measure of the “world’s vulnerability to catastrophe”, had not moved since last year.
“The pandemic revealed just how unprepared and unwilling countries and the international system are to handle global emergencies properly,” the Bulletin, co-founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein, said in a statement.
It added that the worsening spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories was acting as a multiplier to the worsening threats of nuclear conflict and the climate emergency. The statement did not mention Donald Trump by name, but pointed to the 6 January storming of the US Capitol, which was incited by the former president, saying it renewed “legitimate concerns about national leaders who have sole control of the use of nuclear weapons”.
“In 2020, online lying literally killed,” it added.
…
“Donald Trump was an accelerant for existential risk. We got lucky — and you’d be forgiven for breathing a sigh of relief now that he’s gone,” said Derek Johnson, head of Global Zero, a nuclear disarmament advocacy group.
“But ‘safer’ isn’t ‘safe’. The Doomsday Clock was within striking distance of catastrophe long before a reality TV host was handed the nuclear codes. It will stay that way until nuclear weapons are taken off the board entirely.”
Well, will I sleep better tonight? If and when T-Rump is history…
(Illustration: ‘A Break in Reality’ by Xetobyte, found here).