A SCOTUS Opening

[Dill]

(09-22-2020, 01:52 PM)PhilHos Wrote: Fair enough, but I don't think the argument should be who is worse. The argument should be about STOPPING all the bad things. Not excusing one side's bad things because the other side is worse.

I agree with you on this.  

But I think stopping "bad things" is what the impeachment was about. 

Trump has been a bad president ESPECIALLY because of his willingness to abuse presidential power.

His abuses were certainly comparable to Nixon's, but the Republican party lined up to defend Trump as it did not Nixon. Back then they believed in stopping the bad things. Now they believe in doing what keeps minority power.

So they refused to consider witnesses and material documents which would answer remaining questions about the nature and degree of Trump's "bad things". And invented ad hoc, Nixon-like legal theories that whatever the president did was in the national interest--even if he was using US policy to work partisan political advantage. Just as Barr had previously argued. vis-a-vis the Mueller Report, that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted for crimes when Trump was on the doc--reversing his position from the Clinton era.

And as C-Dawg pointed out, this was three years after they claimed as a precedent that "the voters" should decide who gets the Supreme Court nominee in an election year to deny Obama an appointment; and now they have adopted a new precedent now, ad hoc, to get Trump a 3rd appt. 

We can't stop "bad things" if we can't agree what they are, that they have occurred, that someone did them. And preventing agreement on that seems to have become a tactic.

Someone who wants to stop bad things will just be told s/he is a hypocrite and his/her side is "just as bad" by people who don't really want to stop bad things when their side is in power.