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8 Jan, 4 tweets, 1 min read
If I could impart one non-obvious thing to youngs about Congress it’d be that its famed gridlock isn’t obligatory. Its powers are awesome. Starting from scratch, a concerted House can impeach a president over your lunch break. A concerted Senate can remove him before dinner.
The gridlock stems from trying to get large numbers of people to agree to a course of action. But when a majority reaches consensus, as it has over the view that Trump should be impeached, it can move like lightning.
If it doesn’t then the leadership is choosing a slow pace for its own reasons.
Maybe it’s less stupid than this, but if there’s an objection in the caucus to saving the country we should know from whom.

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Brian Beutler Profile picture
8 Jan
I wrote about this in a bit more detail in the newsletter, but legal consequences aside, Trump’s attempt to overthrow the government makes the democratic reform agenda and the Trump accountability agenda a single agenda.

mailchi.mp/crooked.com/bi…
There were obviously points of overlap before, but now it’s just one thing. Joe Manchin can’t kill the former without leaving the government exposed to the next coup attempt: The most unpatriotic thing a senator could do.
DC statehood, voting rights, court reform etc. All require abolishing the filibuster. But they're not such abstract ideas anymore. They're insurance against the next attempt to seize control of government illegitimately, through corruption or force or both.
Read 4 tweets
Brian Beutler Profile picture
8 Jan
Read 4 tweets
Brian Beutler Profile picture
8 Jan
Pretty abundantly clear Trump withheld reinforcements to insure his rioters could do as much harm as they could for as long as possible.
Everyone in the White House with even a passing connection to what happened Wednesday should probably lawyer up.
Now why would Meadows, Miller, McEntee, and Scavino need a pardon all of a sudden...?
Read 5 tweets
Brian Beutler Profile picture
7 Jan
This is true. It’s also true that the mob sacked an institution whose leaders have insisted on pretending, in the face of all indications to the contrary, that everything is normal.
If you know days in advance, as I and everyone with functioning senses did, that the president was trying to incite a violent mob in the nation’s capital to stop the certification of his defeat, it should trigger both a security AND a political response.
When the latter doesn’t materialize, when the people under threat essentially say “what’s we’re witnessing is actually not happening, it’s an illusion” why wouldn’t that bleed down into the operations of the people charged with protecting them. Just another protest.
Read 4 tweets
Brian Beutler Profile picture
6 Jan
My guess: Neither of them will concede. I don’t know if refusing to concede will become the Republican norm or just very commonplace, but it’s not just a Trump thing, and Trump isn’t gonna go quietly anyhow.
Would be shocked if he ever did. People with no grace or integrity don’t tend to find it in defeat.
Same goes for Perdue, already blowing the dog whistle. He will lie about fraud instead of conceding.
Read 4 tweets
Brian Beutler Profile picture
5 Jan
This thread is sorta fatally undermined by the telling omission of race as a factor in the formation of the conservative movement, but I think it's narrowly right in its implication that movement conservatism has presented itself in a series of disguises.
The problem for the argument is the disguises have served to cover the movement's elemental racism and authoritarianism. To that end, reformoconism, tea partyism, etc have been embraced as tools of deception, whereas Trumpism represents a more undisguised form of the movement.
If there's been an attempt to disguise anything the last four years, it’s been from intellectuals trying on one hand to pretty up Trumpism as a respectable form of nationalism, against others attempting to treat Trumpism as a weird, easily ignored hiccup.
Read 4 tweets

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