Again, I don't particularly have a problem with the Senate declining to remove Trump from office. I have a problem with officials being able to do whatever they want, legal or not, just because they won an election and their party in the legislative doesn't have the guts to stand up to them when appropriate.
"Elections have consequences" B Hussein Obama. If you get elected to an office, you have the right and the obligation to exercise the powers of that office. The reason we elect people to offices instead of agree on a flowchart of government responses to situations, is that discretion is sometimes required. So, yes. Doing whatever he wants.
Not following you there - you're referring to local media in red states which would also attack them if they didn't vote Trump's way? Or what do you mean?
There's all sorts of ways, whether it's just paying the money directly to the end recipient instead of going through foreign governments, or making future aid dependent on various conditions about this year's aid. Though to be clear, I'm talking about foreign aid in general - not so much military aid like what was at stake here. Which in any case tends to be a gift to the donating nations' military-industrial complex as much as to the receiving nation...
And again, it's not that the president has no ways of blocking such aid if he thinks it's going against his foreign policy objectives. But that requires going back to Congress and negotiating about it. If he doesn't do that and simply holds the aid until the deadline runs out without any discussion with Congress, he's acting illegally.
But it's still a technicality where the precedent is to withhold aid for all sorts of reasons, and they're only making a case about the Ukrainian aid instead of all the other aid that was withheld, not to mention by his predecessors. Because they invented a quid pro quo, which is bullshit, because Trump never made the aid contingent, Ukraine didn't know it was being held up and there is no mention of that in the transcript. And the leading Congressman on the impeachment issue lied about that conversation. Tell me that a DA lying to the grand jury about the defendant's words and concealing his main witness wouldn't have the case thrown out in a red hot minute.
In whose mind? You can find some pundit willing to claim anyone is the front-runner. Polls? Why should Donald Trump, of all people, worry about polls? Are we supposed to accept that he acted out of the belief that the same process that said in July 2015 he didn't have a chance of winning the White House was correctly predicting he'd have to face Biden in the general election this time?
Biden certainly did not boast of doing worse.
Yes, he did.
And of course the Russians didn't know it would work. If you view the Russian interference in the US elections in a broader view, considering also their interference in various elections in Europe, you'd have to conclude that the primary goal, ahead of any dreams of swaying the election one way or the other, is simply to set people against each other and delegitimize governments of all stripes. Putin may have preferred Trump over Clinton, but what he really wanted most was to turn Americans against each other, even more than they already were.
You seem kind of confused about what Trump's request for investigations was about in the first place. It was about Hunter Biden and Burisma, not about the firing of Shokin or Joe Biden's role in that. The latter was in any case public knowledge and required no further investigation. And with regard to Hunter Biden, again, there wasn't any known wrongdoing, so Trump wanted to make Ukraine dig until it found some,
Ah, once again, that miraculous telepathic leftwing insight into Trump's innermost thoughts and private motivations...
At the very least when a US official brags about getting an official fired, and it turns out that his son might have benefited from it, an investigation is the least one can do. As with the Valerie Plame exposure, the "smearing" by a GOP administration only occurred because the other side made it public. Hunter Biden and Burisma only became household words because the Democrats decided to make a federal case about Trump asking the Ukrainian president to look into a matter and they have to publicize the actions of the supposed victim so people would understand what they were all het up and bothered about. It's like when Democrats passive-aggressively attack each other in the primaries by saying "But we know the Republicans are vicious, so how is my opponent going to handle their savage attacks on his mother's orgies in Kenya, or his wife's drug problem or his son's no-show job?"
Also, unless you want to claim in the face of all known evidence that the Russian hackers were acting on their own volition without any Kremlin instructions, I have no idea what the point of your first sentence here was.
My point was, if it's impossible to prove, it has no business being part of a criminal proceeding. You can't charge and convict someone on motives that are impossible to prove. It's not up to Trump to prove his motives are pure, it's up to the prosecution to prove they were not. Otherwise, innocent until proven guilty. Foundation of common law justice, etc. If you're not going to respect that, you're worse than anyone you imagine might be putting the squeeze on foreigners to make another politician look bad.
Hell, the participation of multiple Senators who were declared candidates for the Democratic nomination to oppose Trump in the election should have invalidated the whole impeachment process, if embarrassing a political opponent is such a detrimental motive for official action. Booker, Harris, Warren, Sanders... they have explicitly declared an ulterior motive months in advance. The Spanish Inquisition would literally have refused to accept their sworn testimony against Trump on that basis alone, let alone allow them to sit on a jury.
“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.” GK Chesteron
Inde muagdhe Aes Sedai misain ye!
Deus Vult!
*MySmiley*