Who's Beaumont?
An employee I had to let go
An impeachment is not a legal proceeding, it is a political process. As such, there are none of the protections offered the accused in a criminal or a civil trial. No representation, no probable cause, no due process, no jury, no opportunity to offer a defense, should the Legislative branch decide there not be one.
Most important for our current circumstances—impeachment does not offer protection against double-jeopardy. The same person can be impeached twice (or more) on the same charges.
Impeach him for January 6, 2021 again.
The MAGA margin in the House is smaller than for either of the two prior impeachments (thanks to his move to “protect” the illegal drug-feeding, child sex-trafficking, wannabe-A.G. Matt Gaetz), and now we have pardons issued to cop killers, who Republicans once openly hated.
Just because the Executive has the power to pardon does not mean he is above reproach for his choice of whom he grants them. The pardons protect the convicted, not the issuer.
Congress is going to have to become more aggressive in restraining an Executive who had been granted a presumptive blanket immunity by the Judicial.
The Democrats will not do this, though. They will make excuses for Trump, rather than admit they don’t really want him out. They have solidified their post-election position of: We told you so! Expect nothing more from them, for the next year, at least.
It is not helpful, and not much different than Trump’s revenge against those states that voted for Harris. Just passive-aggressive, in that Democratic party way. Whelp, you did not vote for us, so you are going to suffer. Meanwhile the party’s leader will chortle with Trump at funerals and other state formalities.
And they wonder why, in a good election cycle, they barely break 50% on the popular vote.
The corporate capitalist political parties are done with democracy. Trump seized control of the Republicans almost a decade ago. By comparison, the Democrats seemed functional, but their decay was brought about by the same half-measures and traditional political compromises they used to quell working class dissatisfaction.
During every Republican administration, the Democrats set out to become more like the Republicans, from (Bill) Clinton’s first campaign, launched under Bush the Elder’s one term, to Kamala Harris getting in bed with Liz Cheney. Our key to victory is to become Republicans.
Clinton took away Trickle-down and rebranded it “Neoliberalism,” then he ended “welfare as we know it” and set up NAFTA. He showed the political funding class that Democrats could favor capital accumulation over social supports. The horrible miscalculation was that an abandoned working class—receiving nothing from Republicans in terms of policies—would accept the abuse laying down.
Social class mobility under capitalism has been individually possible in fits and starts—depending largely on technological change and federal policies allowing small enterprise to thrive. The railroads, the automobile, plastic and other petrochemicals, television and the internet—these are the technological platforms upon which the Robber Barons, Industrialists, and Tech Bros built their value-funneling, labor-mobilization groups. It is not a coincidence these four industrial spheres are responsible for the vast amount of physical and social pollution on the planet.
“Pollution” is the socialization of production costs. That’s all it is. More pollution of a type means more profit has been extracted from that labor process than similar others. “Democracy” in America is also a productive process that creates its own pollution. But when pollution cannot be externalized, it will creep back into what is being manufactured—as long as profit is the sole measure of value, the contamination will be ignored. When the products are released to the public, the consumers will bear the costs in cancers and shortened life expectancies.
In 2022, Chinese citizens’ life expectancies began to exceed Americans’. This can be traced to Democrats abandoning the working class, thirty years earlier.