The Vote is Our Only Hope

Every time somebody says "impeachment" to you, ask them if they're going to vote Nov. 6. Tell them to vote early, vote often.  Take your family, take your friends, take your neighbors, take your dogs.

 

Everybody votes, or we're fucking done.

 

Political Animal:

George Packer documents how all of that is different from the days of Richard Nixon and Watergate.

The institutional clout that ended the Presidency of Richard Nixon no longer exists. The honest press, for all its success in exposing daily scandals, won’t persuade the unpersuadable or shame the shameless, while the dishonest press is Trump’s personal amplifier. The federal courts, including the Supreme Court, are rapidly becoming instruments of partisan advocacy, as reliably conservative as elected legislatures. It’s impossible to imagine the Roberts Court voting unanimously against the President, as the Burger Court, including five Republican appointees, did in forcing Nixon to turn over his tapes. (Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s nominee to succeed Anthony Kennedy, has even suggested that the decision was wrong.) Congress has readily submitted to the President’s will, as if legislation and oversight were burdens to be relinquished. And, when the independent counsel finally releases his report, it will have only the potency that the guardians of the law and the Constitution give it.

That is why the title of Packard’s article is “All That’s Left is the Vote.” He opens by making a deeply disturbing, but perhaps accurate, prediction.

…three months from now, American democracy will be on the line. The midterm elections in November are the last remaining obstacle to President Trump’s consolidation of power.