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You're asking the wrong question. Pence would be a more competent and generic Republican than Trump, which is bad in some ways and possibly good in others. But the real issue would be to what's left of the American governments perceived legitimacy. The long-term political impact of removing Trump through impeachment is impossible to anticipate but it would probably make the political atmosphere of the last decade look like a hippy drum circle by comparison. And it would really emphasize who is the servant and who the master in the relationship between the President and the unelected Washington security bureaucracy. No decent person would mourn the end of the Trump presidency but removing him creates a new set of challenges that the American government and political class is in a terrible position to address. Don't be surprised if people start dying at protests and some of those twitter doxxings start turning into targeted killings if the political temperatures rises past where it already is.
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Feb 16, 2017 03:02
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mobby_6kl posted:preserving democratic institutions Senate and House of Representatives both have incumbent re-election rates of 80% to 90%. Empirical research shows that the opinions of Americans at the 50th income percentile have virtually no impact on government policy whereas the preference of lobby groups and Americans in the 90th percentile do. Elected officials spend most of their time in office fundraising for re-election. Nobody trusts the media. Barely a third of US citizens can name all three branches of government, and a third of American citizens cannot name a single branch. Oh, and the National Security bureaucracy established by President Truman to fight in the Cold War in the late 1940s now has significantly greater impact on policy than the decisions of elected officials. You are delusional if you think there's anything left to preserve or that the conflict over Trump is about national security, democratic legitimacy or anything other than a factional struggle over who gets the spoils.
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Feb 19, 2017 20:37
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Some of the things people are saying in this thread are so stupid that they remind me of that ancient D&D thread from 2002 or 2003 where people were encouraged to write their predictions about how the Iraq War would turn out.
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Feb 20, 2017 19:04
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themrguy posted:Yeah I don't think you guys get how much of a big-loving deal impeachment would be. It's literally never happened before. The GOP/Pence would be forced to govern more towards the center because any scenario where impeachment happens is one where Dem's are likely poised to make/ have already made significant congressional gains and have an incredibly fired up base that just watched history happen and feel that it was in part due to their actions (protesting, activism, etc. Whether or not this would be true, people would sure as hell feel like it was), as well as a more engaged public generally. Meanwhile the GOP base is either depressed or in full-on civil war mode or both. "This is a totally unprecedented situation, therefore I can predict the outcome of this situation with total certainty" 
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Feb 21, 2017 20:45
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Trump reminds me a lot of Rob Ford, a mayor who was despised by the elite of his own city not based on his policies but based specifically on how much he embarrassed them. I think a lot of people are sublimating their embarrassment about Trump by concocting implausible story-lines about how Pence wouldn't be as bad. xeria posted:I think it's less "this has never happened before, who knows what will happen!?" and more "BECAUSE this has never happened before (if an actual conviction happens), probably poo poo will be so hosed up in general coming out of the impeachment/conviction/removal from office that Pence isn't going to be in a position to freely impose his dominionist will on the American people. If the government reaches the point where even the GOP is generally like, poo poo we gotta get Trump out of here before he does something even worse, all the stuff up to that 'even worse' threshold would probably need to be cleaned up before Pence could start swinging for the gay conversion camp fences, if he wanted to, and by that point it's probably election season again anyway. Thinking you know exactly how a totally unprecedented and inherently chaotic situation will turn out is really stupid.
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Feb 22, 2017 22:06
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sean10mm posted:If the fallout from Nixon is any indication, an impeachment or resignation would horribly harm the Republicans in Congress for 7 years give or take. Carter of course won entirely on "gently caress Nixon" sentiment. The same ugly backlash tendencies that had been harnessed at the national level by Nixon propelled Reagan into the Presidency and transformed the entire country less than a decade after his impeachment. I don't think it's a particularly hopeful precedent. If anything it's a lesson in how opposition to Trump needs to be grounded in something more substantial than a critique of his individual personality and behavior. The Hilary campaign already hosed this up once by trying to portray Trump as an alien force far removed from the GOP mainstream rather than the logical culmination of the Southern Strategy and Fox News. If the Democrats cannot offer some kind of convincing and popular alternative to right-wing populism and white nationalism then removing Trump would be a minor and possibly Pyrrhic victory in the grand scheme of things.
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May 20, 2017 13:29
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