Thread by @dcpetterson

"Live televised impeachment hearings will finally lay the facts before the American public and will sway public opinion."

There's so much false, misleading and downright silly in this assertion, it will take a thread to unpack. We also need to consider the alternatives.

1/21

1. Live televised hearings are Good Things. An impeachment hearing isn't the only way to get them. When any big-name witness appears before one of the dozen or so House committees currently investigating Trump, we'll have live televised hearings.

2/21

2. Live televised hearings won't happen without witnesses. An impeachment hearing won't magically make witnesses appear. All Trump Regime witnesses are ignoring subpoenas. The House is already in court to enforce those subpoenas.

3/21

3. There is nothing magical about "impeachment subpoenas." Compliance with a Congressional subpoena is never optional, even if it's not an "impeachment subpoena." The same court process will be needed to compel testimony no matter what "kind" of hearing it is.

4/21

4. Congress does have the power of Inherent Contempt, which would allow Congress to imprison or fine witnesses, but Congress will exhaust all possible judicial remedies first, whether for impeachment hearings or not. So let's do that.

5/21

5. As for laying out the facts, yes that's what any Congressional hearing is for. BUT -- Have you seen Jim Jordan, Devin Nunes, Louie Gohmert, or Matt Gaetz? They're all on the Judiciary Committee, where impeachment hearings would happen...

6/21

Imagine those four guys screaming accusations at witnesses throughout a hearing. THAT would be the sound bites--attempts to discredit and slime anyone called to testify. Any "facts" we wanted to present would be drowned out by the Screaming Caucus.

7/21

This would leave us in the same situation we're in now--knowing enough to convince you and me of Trump's crimes, but unable to penetrate the shells of the people we need to convince. The Screaming Caucus will see to that.

This leaves my last point:

8/21

6. Impeachment hearings won't convince anyone. Trump supporters live in an alternate world. They won't watch impeachment hearings, and if they do it will be to cheer on the antics of child molester enthusiast Jim Jordan, who would become a right-wing superstar.

9/21

This is all ignoring what happens when the House is done with hearings and either does or doesn't turn impeachment over to the Senate. If it does, the Senate will return a Not Guilty verdict (it would take 20 Republican/Fascist Senators to convict, and that won't happen).

10/21

So if the House does give the case to the Senate, the media starts announcing "Total exoneration!".

And if the House doesn't give it to the Senate, the media proclaims "insufficient evidence!"

Neither is true, but that IS what will be reported.

11/21

The alternative to all that is to continue the 20 or so investigations the House is doing right now. As I explained above, these won't happen any faster or likely be any more effective if we call them "impeachment hearings."

12/21

Sally Albright created a simple and wonderful chart that summarizes the possible strategies and scenarios.

13/21

https://twitter.com/SallyAlbright/status/1140084980791599106

If the ongoing investigations produce enough evidence and noise to begin to affect public opinion, then the above calculus might well change. But as of now, this is where we stand.

"They why," you may ask, "is impeachment even in the Constitution if we can't use it?"

14/21

Impeachment is included PRECISELY for the kind of corrupt president we have right now.

But the Framers didn't anticipate also having, at the same moment, an equally corrupt political party supporting that president, and controlling the Senate and much of the Judiciary.

15/21

The terrifying truth is that our current political structures may be insufficient to handle the fascist coup America has suffered. It may be we have one (1) peaceful option left. It may or may not work, because even that option may have become compromised as well.

16/21

The one (1) option we may have left is to win EVERYTHING at the ballot box in 2020.

In America, We the People are supposed to run the government. We got into this horror because not enough people voted to prevent it in 2010 and 2014 and 2016.

We warned you.

17/21

The massive Blue Wave of 2018 proved democracy is not yet utterly dead. We have to build on that and kick the fascists out in 2020.

Congress won't do it for us, because we were stupid enough to let too many Republicans get elected to Congress. Only we can fix that.

18/21

"But we can't afford to wait!" you may say. "There are children in baby cages!"

Yes, that despicable horror (and too many more horrors like that) is happening RIGHT NOW.

Impeachment won't change any of that. Those horrors will continue until Jan 2021 no matter what.

18/21

Impeachment hearings won't stop baby cages.

Sending Articles of Impeachment to the Senate won't stop baby cages.

The Senate won't convict, so a Senate trial won't stop baby cages.

Even if the Senate does convict, we'd have President Pence, and he won't stop baby cages.

19/21

Read this dreadful truth and absorb it:

The ONLY way to stop baby cages is to unelect Trump and Republican Senators in November 2020 and to replace them with Democrats. Baby cages CANNOT be stopped before then.

20/21

Stop praying for Congress to save you. It can't. Only you can do that, and #November2020 is our last chance.

This is a hard truth. Voters created this horror. Only voters can stop it.

21/21

Final thought:

Demanding impeachment now is like calling the fire department to stop your house from burning down when more than half the firemen are a cabal of arsonists who set the fire in the first place.

It may be the right thing to do but it won't have the effect you want.

Need another reason we can't start impeachment hearings yet?

Doing so would destroy the idea of Congressional oversight of the Executive Branch.

https://twitter.com/dcpetterson/status/1143660184465760257

In 12/ above, I had a graphic listing some of the House investigations. It was an older graphic. Here's a list from May, and it's enormous.
nbcnews.com/politics/donal…