Oh, I definitely want Pelosi to bring this to the Senate. I don't think she's stalling because of concerns of divisiveness or of there not being a fair trial. She's waiting until we get closer to the election. This nonsense doesn't serve her party's interests if people forget about it before the election.
Yeah, some pundits are saying she's doing this so that it hangs over Trump's head during the election, or that there will be a better chance of a fair trial by then people there will be more Democrats in the Senate. I don't know for sure what her reasoning is, but I think waiting is a mistake, as was letting Trump get away with the Russian collusion.
The way it usually works is that things get buried. With Clinton, the Lewinsky scandal was pretty tame. If Clinton was deserving of being removed for something, it had more to do with the rape accusations against him. Of course, all of his accusers were either attacked relentlessly by the media or were simply silenced. So yes, it was never proven that he raped or assaulted anyone, but it was never really allowed to be investigated.
In short, presidents already are largely above the law, which is why little surprises me. People act like what we're seeing with Trump is unprecedented, but it's really not.
Presidents are above the law because we, as the public, are conditioned to believe they have a right to be above the law. Trump breaking the law isn't unprecedented, but what is unprecedented is him getting caught with this one specific crime and the entire Republican party defending him. And if he gets away with it, the public gets taught that this is yet another thing the president can legally do.
I agree that having an extramarital affair is tame in that it's not political and it should have remained the Clintons' private business. But letting Clinton get away with lying under oath is another one of those little things that further lifts the president above the law in the eyes of the public.
What I'm saying is that political enemies are already being killed. They just don't do it as blatantly as gulags. Now, China has no problem with being that blatant, but the media doesn't like to talk about their "black jails" or what they're doing to the Uyghurs.
That being said, we do have a history of using "renditions" against foreign enemies. And the last president set the precedent that the government can make a kill order against a US citizen. So, yeah, you could say we are approaching certain fascist activities.
The same is true for the FISA hop policy I referenced.
So then what we should be doing is trying to move the Overton Window back in the opposite direction. I wish there was severe backlash against Obama for the way he used his drone program.
When it comes to Epstein, we can't really do anything, because we don't know who killed him. I think the memes are really good because at least it calls attention to this, but other than that, we can't do much.
But the fact that we still have whistleblowers and impeachment shows that we still have checks and balances. If a person in power gets caught breaking the law, they could still be held accountable. And we could still hold Trump accountable by voting against him in 2020 in order to say we don't care how rich and powerful you are, we're not going to accept the rigging of elections.
Basically what I'm saying is that sometimes the rich and powerful blatantly break the law and get away with it, but not all the time. And if we can do anything about it, we should. In this case of Trump, we can do something.
I'd compare this to what happened to Bill Cosby. Sure, rich people rape young women all the time and get away with it. But a comedian still called him out, it went viral, his career was ruined, and now he's in jail. This means that rich people, like whoever had Epstein killed, don't always win. It's just a question of if we are going to sit back and let it happen, or if we're going to do something.