laviont wrote:
Gbaji:
Reasons to impeach/not vote for Trump:
Facts:
"Enforcing" an old immigration law that caused thousands of children to be separated from their parents with no hope of ever finding them again. --immoral, unethical
Huh? The same law that every other president prior to him has enforced. Do you understand that on this issue, you're being told to be "outraged" over something that didn't change with Trump coming into office. Those encouraging this outrage are betting that you wont bother to inform yourself of the actual facts. And it looks like (sadly) they were right.
We separate children from parents when the parents are detained by law enforcement
for any reason, all the time. Every time. We don't put kids in the drunk tank when Dad is pulled over for DUI and they're in the back seat, do we? We don't send the kids to jail with their parents when they are arrested for domestic disturbance, violence, whatever. We find someone related to them, or put them in CPS, and foster care after time if no-one is found. That's normal. That's how we do it. That's how we always handle children in situations like this. There are hundreds of thousands of US citizen children in CPS/foster care right now. Most of them are not actually orphans with no family. They are there because their parents are in jail or prison and we "separated them from their parents".
You might want to ask why there is only outrage at this separation in the case of illegal immigration and not all the other cases where we do it. Might it be for political purposes and not any sort of rational examination of how we treat children when their parents are detained in some way? Yeah, I think so. Maybe engage the brain here for a second and see if what you're being told to think actually make any sense in the broader context. Just a thought.
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Obstructing the Mueller investigation. He tried to make McGahn fire Mueller.
And? Would removing Mueller and replacing him with someone with less obvious conflict of interest issues have prevented the investigation itself? No, it would not have. I'll also point out that a client asking his lawyer to do something, and the lawyer saying "no, we can't do that because it might violate law A, or rule B" is *not* obstruction. And it's certainly not a crime. We retain lawyers specifically because they know the law better than we do, and to prevent us from
actually doing things that would violate the law. Which, in this case, is precisely what happened. Trump asked, his lawyer said "no", and they moved on. You can't claim obstruction because someone wanted to do something, was advised against it, and followed that advice. At the end of the day, Trump did *not* fire Mueller, ergo there's no obstruction.
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His timing of firing Comey was suspicious.
No, it's really not. And since that happened *before* the appointment of a special prosecutor (and arguably was one of the political causes used by the Democrats to demand said prosecution), it's somewhat bizarre to claim that this action could have possibly obstructed said investigation by Mueller itself.
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His twitter comments regarding Sessions recusal were quite telling.
Why? Be specific here. How does expressing an opinion result in obstruction? To obstruct justice, at the risk of being obvious here, he has to actually take an action (arguably, an illegal action) which manifestly obstructs the ability of the investigators to conduct their investigation. Trump did not do that.
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The only reason Mueller didn't indict is because of the DoJ's current (partisan) policy of not indicting a sitting president.
Uh... Why did you put the word "(partisan)" in there? And it's not just policy. It's interpretation of SCOTUS rulings in the past. It's certainly not partisan at all. The belief, which has existed for quite some time, is that the president because he's the head of the executive branch of the government, cannot himself be indicted. That's not "current", and it's not "partisan".
I'll also point out that while Mueller claims this after the fact in the press release he gave, he does *not* actually state this in the report itself. He absolutely could have concluded that the evidence supported indictment of the president, and then left it up to the DOJ to decide whether they actually would (again, based on whether they believe they legally can). Again, his report is supposed to identify criminal acts and report on them. He does not conclude that these actions are criminal. Saying "we also probably couldn't have indicted him anyway" is irrelevant. If he believed that there was sufficient evidence to prove that Trump had committed the crime of obstruction of justice, he should have (and presumably would have) actually said so in the report, since the whole point of the report was to determine exactly that information. It's designed to provide guidance to the DOJ with regards to indictment and prosecution. To *not* make any recommendation at all is strange. Interpreting this to mean that he would have recommended prosecution but didn't, not because of a lack of sufficiently strong evidence, but because of a policy not to indict sitting presidents, is well beyond strange.
It suggests that if he had said such a thing, then normal legal standards could be applied to his findings and they could be judged against those standards of justice. Remember that he's writing an official document and will be held professionally accountable to it. If he says "this is sufficient evidence to prove obstruction", and it quite obviously and demonstrably *isn't*, then he shows himself to be engaged in partisanship. If instead, he leaves that out, and then gives a press release (which isn't an official document) suggesting that it was because of the DOJ policy, then he puts it outside the realm of actual legal proceedings with this pesky thing called "burden of proof", and puts it into the realm of politics, where it's just about rhetoric and public perception.
Which is exactly where we are now.
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The evidence is there if you read the Mueller report, it's up to our ****** Congress to do something about it. --illegal, immoral
Yeah, I've read it. Again, no where does he state that the evidence is sufficient to prove a crime occurred. That's the point. Saying "its up to congress to do something about it", ignores that core fact. Some of us have been saying that this investigation was purely political from the start, and this bit here somewhat proves us right. Note, that there's no actual legal standard being applied here. Just political rhetoric. The idea of using a criminal investigation, not to actually determine whether the president has committed a crime, but simply to give the opposition political language to use to try to impeach him is ridiculous, scary, and something some of us saw as being the whole point of the investigation from the start.
But by all means, fall for it.
I'll also point out that the wording in Mueller's press release is weird, from any legal standing. He actually said something like "If I believed there was no evidence of obstruction of justice, I would have said so in the report". Except that's backwards. We don't hire prosecutors to find evidence of innocence, but to find evidence of guilt. The standard is always whether there is "sufficient evidence of guilt". That is a yes or no question. If the answer is "no", then the target is presumed to be innocent. There is no legal need to determine innocence, and the fact that he didn't declare Trump innocent has no meaning at all. What's does have meaning is that he didn't declare Trump to be guilty, nor even that there was sufficient evidence that he was guilty. That means "he's innocent". Period. At least from a legal perspective. Again, politics doesn't have the same requirements. Which is why I suspect he used the language he used. He could not find sufficient evidence to stand up to any sort of legal standard, so he punted it to the political side of things.
Which is great if you're fighting for "my side", but is terrible if you believe there should actually be a standard to these things, and that we maybe shouldn't be running around impeaching presidents just because the political rhetoric has passed some polling threshold in the public eye that the party in power thinks it might do better going forward with it than not. Doubly so when the media is so biased that it consistently provides those same politicians with massive false positives on issues like this making them
think they've got more support for impeachment than they actually do. IMO, if they go forward with this, they'll only shoot themselves in the foot.
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The Muslim ban: He literally only banned countries that never had a citizen commit a terrorist act in america. And he suspiciously missed countries that he did business in, which oddly enough produced citizens that have commited terrorist acts against the US. Not to mention it's thinly veiled bigotry against brown people. --immoral, unethical
Huh? This has nothing at all to do with anything. Um... The nations he based absolutely were on the list of "state sponsored terrorist countries". If it were about "brown skinned people", why not ban the several hundred other countries that have equally brown skinned citizens? Your argument makes zero sense.
This is certainly not even within the realm of "impeachable offense". You shouldn't impeach a president just because you disagree with his policies. And given that Obama also did a very similar ban on a similar set of countries during his term, the fact that you are so outraged by this, once again, points to how easily manipulated you are by normal things being presented to you as though they are abnormal.
The first question you should be asking whenever someone points to something Trump has done and declares it to be illegal, unethical, etc, is "did a previous president do the same thing in the past?", followed by "did the people declaring to me that this is illegal, unethical, etc, say the same thing when that president did something similar in the past?". When the answer to the first is "yes", and the second is "no", your response should be to ignore those people, since they are obviously reacting in a purely partisan manner and not applying fair and equal assessments to the actions of the president.
Stop being a tool.
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Not enforcing increased sanctions on Russia in light of their assassinations of dissenters. Congress unanimously passed those sanctions. Gross negligence of his job duties. Insubordination. Fire him. -- poor work ethic
Again. The president gets to chose how to implement foreign policy, not congress. In this case, Trump has selected when and whom to apply sanctions, usually based on the impact they would have on our own economic and foreign policy positions *and* based on DOJ findings of whom actually was involved in something nefarious rather than just applying blanket "everyone on this list gets sanctioned".
At the risk of repeating myself, this is precisely within the authority of the president to do. And it's the kind of thing that all past presidents have done. Congress can "authorize sanctions", but it's up to the president to decide when and how to apply them. Congress has zero power to force the president to do so. You know, that whole "separation of powers" bit. You're getting the facts backwards. Normally, it's the executive branch that wants to do something (like sanctions), and they have to go to Congress to get it approved. You're trying to argue it goes the other way around. It does not.
I'll also point out that Obama committed much more questionable executive decisions in this regard. He actually entered the US into a treaty without ever bothering to get congressional approval (Senate specifically). Again, the flow of "must vs may" is backwards from what you are claiming. The president "may" impose sanctions, enter into treaties, etc. Congress "must" approve them before the president can proceed (past certain short term actions the president can do on his own). When Obama signed the Paris accord without getting Senate ratification he was in gross violation of the US constitution.
Funny that I don't recall you demand he be impeached for this. In fact, I'll go out on a limb and guess that you're one of those people who would now insist that Trump was violating the law for not abiding by that accord, despite the fact that it's not a legal treaty in the first place. Funny how the partisan nature of these things will totally change your position. So Trump is violating the law by not taking a foreign policy action congress wants but has no authority to impose, but Obama was not violation the law by taking a foreign policy action which required congressional approval which he didn't bother to get.
Strange, isn't it? Maybe you should take a civics course and learn how the US government actually works? Just a thought.
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Ignoring National Security advisors from our country and many others about election security and the Russian attack on democracy. --hella dumb
So? He gets to choose which advice he follows, and which he doesn't. That's hardly impeachable. That's him doing his job. You're free to disagree with his decision, but he does get to be the one to make it. Funny thing about how we have a process for determining who gets to make said decision and it's not "what we want and not what the election determined". It's almost like you don't want to live in a democratic system of government, but would rather have one where only the folks you agree with ever get to have political power.
That's... foolish, and darned short sighted.
Is that seriously all you have? I'm still not seeing anything beyond "I don't like him and the decisions he makes". Well, tough. I don't like him and some of the decisions he makes either. I didn't like a whole lot of the decisions Obama made. At no point in the entire 8 years of his term did I call for his impeachment, despite far far stronger evidence of things done during his administration which (assuming he knew about them and signed off on them) would absolutely have been impeachable offenses.
And that's before we get into the whole issue of the likelihood of this entire "collusion, no obstruction!" thing just being a political smokescreen to cover for the almost certainly illegal activities that took place between the Clinton campaign, and the Obama DOJ/whitehouse/intelligence agencies during the election to help Clinton win. The 800lb gorilla in the Mueller report isn't the lack of conclusion about Obstruction, but the absolute conclusion that there was no Collusion. Given that the assumption that this had happened, and that the absolute believe that there was plenty of evidence of it, sufficient to launch the investigation in the first place, one has to question how that perception came to be in the first place, so strongly that politicians and pundits insisted that they could see so much "evidence of collusion" that after nearly 2 years and an incredibly exhaustive investigation, Mueller could not find even a hint of.
How did that happen? How did the same lack of actual evidence allow for FISA warrants on folks in the Trump campaign? How is it that at the same time that was happening, Obama's NSA decided to both unmask and increase the distribution of intelligence gained by those warrants? It's almost like folks in the administration were using their power in the executive branch to try to find dirt on Trump and his people to use for political purposes. Wait!? Isn't that... illegal?
Yes. Yes it is. There was a massive amount of criminal activity here, but it wasn't committed by Trump. And maybe, if we can stop being blinded by the smokescreen, we'll be able to actually see what really happened. I'm far less concerned by a foreign power spending $50k or so creating false facebook accounts and spreading BS to try to influence people's minds during an election year, than I am with our own government using its intelligence services to try to influence said election outcome. And it looks like that's exactly what happened here. And the whole "OMG! Russian collusion" thing? Desperate cover for folks who realized that since Trump won despite their efforts, it was only a matter of time before what they had done was discovered.
It's obvious that they're just trying to run out the clock on this. Count on when the investigations finally turn to what the Dems did during the election for the narrative in the media to be "this is old news", and "why are we talking about the 2016 election again?". They're counting on this. Because if this got even a fraction of the media coverage it should have, there would be a large number of folks in the former Obama administration facing significant charges.
What's sad to me is how much our legal process is influence by the political and media processes. It shouldn't be this way, but unfortunately, it is. Maybe I'm hopeless, but I keep thinking that eventually justice will prevail here. Sadly, it seems like far too many people only care about "their side", and not actual justice. We'll see what happens though.
Edited, Jun 10th 2019 5:56pm by gbaji 
CK ABOUT PUTIN. 
CK US OVER NEXT". 
