1. The argument from some Dems that there's no point investigating/prosecuting/impeaching Trump because Congressional Rs will always protect him & thus it won't hurt him or remove him from office ... seems off base to me.
(Oh fuck numbering.) One of the most important acts of resistance to an aspiring authoritarian strongman who is trying to degrade your institutions & reduce public life to a lawless struggle of faction against faction is to *act like the rules still matter*.
Even if, at the moment, the rules have no purchase & there's no way of enforcing them, we should act like they are real. After all, rules are a social construct; they have only the reality/power people believe they have. The response to Rs behaving as if rules don't exist ...
... can't be to just say, "eh, I guess they don't then." Trump is campaigning at official government events, urging federal troops sent to cities that don't want them to commit violence on civilians, & deliberately sabotaging the USPS to fuck up the coming election.
These are grotesque violations of longstanding norms, rules, & laws -- impeachable behavior by any sane standard. And there are probably a dozen charges you could add to the list. If Dems just throw up their hands & hope for the best in Nov, all those behaviors are ratified.
CW in Dem circles is that the public didn't like impeachment, they'll view a repeat as petty partisan politics, & it will activate the F out of the right. There's lots of polling to back that up. Maybe it's right! WTF do I know. All I'd say is that Dems exercising oversight ...
... is about more than just the end result, whether or not it hurts Trump. It's about behaving as though we live in a law-bound constitutional democracy -- a thing that only exists to the extent people believe it exists. Democracy is composed of our shared trust & faith in it.
My entire adult life has seen a rise in the lawlessness of the powerful, abetted by a total lack of accountability. Powerful people pay no price for lies, wars, recessions, or incompetence. And so we get Trump. If Dems agree accountability is gone, then it is finally, fully gone.
Biden might win the election, but the next Trump will already have learned the lesson. </fin>
