Board 8 > Politics Containment Topic 408: War Crimes Are Bad

(+) Yeah! (+)

PeaceFrog posted...

... why

I assume because Santos is an easy target and an albatross around the GOPs neck.

that's what i want to know!

If Santos were a "normal" congressperson I could understand voting against expulsion on the basis that he is only indicted, not convicted. But uh... he is very much not a normal congressperson with everything going on around him.

Thorn posted...

31 Dems vote to not expel (15 present)

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/1/19793258.png

What dems voted not to expel? Do we know yet?

why the fuck are dems saving santos? unless it is just to make the gop own him in campaign material, but they could do that anyway and that isn't a good reason to keep a blatant criminal in congress.

obv he wouldn't have been expelled anyway but i can't think of any good reason to vote to save him

Only reason I can think of is they don't want to set a precedent for expelling representatives? In case it turns on them in the future?

Dancedreamer posted...

What dems voted not to expel? Do we know yet?

At the time I posted, we didn't (or at least I didn't) because rather than a call of the roll they voted with the electronic devices.

Since then it appears the House Clerk's site updated (it wasn't there in the 10-15 minutes afterwards where I was poking around to figure out why Gaetz and some others were making requests to be taken off as cosponsors for a bill after the Santos vote - the bill turned out to be naming a post office) so now we do:

https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2023564

You can sort by party and vote so just flip it to Dem and NO to get the list (or any other combo you want)

andel posted...

obv he wouldn't have been expelled anyway but i can't think of any good reason to vote to save him

Because he hadn't been convicted yet. I think that's fair. I believe if he's convicted, then they'll expel him.

ElizeLutus posted...

Because he hadn't been convicted yet. I think that's fair. I believe if he's convicted, then they'll expel him.

the gop is getting ready to nominate trump who was found guilty of rape civilly and is very likely to be convicted of multiple felonies at the federal and state levels. they have no scruples at all

andel posted...

the gop is getting ready to nominate trump who was found guilty of rape civilly and is very likely to be convicted of multiple felonies at the federal and state levels. they have no scruples at all

They don't care about rape charges. Look at how Jim Jordan covered up things at Ohio State. What they do care about though is defrauding their donors. Or at least, doing it without also being the leader of a cult of followers who, when you say "Jump!" everyone says "How high?"

I don't really agree with that line of thought. In any other job you wouldn't need a criminal conviction to be fired for egregious conduct, and George Santos's rights aren't the only ones at issue here; he's making decisions for the whole country despite being a massive fraud (similarly, Bob Menendez should be expelled from the Senate).

(You could punt it to a House investigation, but I don't think there's a single person here who has any doubt that George Santos has committed acts that should disqualify someone from a position of public trust)

ElizeLutus posted...

They don't care about rape charges. Look at how Jim Jordan covered up things at Ohio State. What they do care about though is defrauding their donors. Or at least, doing it without also being the leader of a cult of followers who, when you say "Jump!" everyone says "How high?"

trump has been defrauding their donors the entire time in a blatant way. bannon was convicted of doing the same and went right back to immediately grifting the rubes and giving them their new talking points. there doesn't seem to be anything a person can do outside of being a rational person or believing an obvious truth that can turn the cult against someone in maga world

Republicans aren't happy they helped get a fraud elected to the house and the whole world knows it? Why should the dems bail the Republicans out. The Republicans will NEVER do anything to assist the dems and until that changes the dems need to play just as dirty.

Santos makes the Republicans look bad (not that that is hard). Expelling him does literally nothing for the democrats at this stage of the game.

But he wasn't going to be expelled even of every Dem voted against him.

And now they are on the record saying that his actions don't deserve expulsion.

Well they don't vote in party order so it's not like the dems would know how many votes are or aren't still needed.

However I'm sure those 31 dems have actual reasons for their votes.

I mean, 98 out of a 100 times they know what the vote total is going to be before they vote.

That's why they won't bring things to vote at all sometimes

I just really hate our government and politicians right now. I hate knowing that none of these major issues are going to go away for the next 20 or more years. I miss being 6 in the 1980s.

Obellisk posted...

Well they don't vote in party order so it's not like the dems would know how many votes are or aren't still needed.

However I'm sure those 31 dems have actual reasons for their votes.

I mean if they pull up C-SPAN on their phones they can see the vote count live - that's how I watched it. I'd be pretty shocked if they don't have that same live count available to them in the chamber somewhere. And they can switch their vote while it's open.

Looking at the list of Dems who voted no - obviously I don't recognize every Dem rep and know their voting record/history but I noticed some names I tend to associate with the moderate wing. The only name that I both recognized and was a bit surprised to see voting no was Porter.

There is an ongoing House Ethics Investigation into Santos which I think some Republicans pointed to as cover for voting to keep him, might have been similar logic by those Dems. Though again, for a normal rep I actually would understand voting to not expel on the principle of him being indicted not convicted yet. It's just I feel Santos is such an unusual case where I feel it should have overridden that.

Obellisk posted...

Expelling him does literally nothing for the democrats at this stage of the game.

it'd be good for the country
not that that's ever really been a motivating factor

There may be a scenario where Santos wasn't technically guilty of the specific nuance of certain crimes.

But there are 0 scenarios where he wasn't deliberately deceptive about a ridiculous number of things on the road to being elected that should cross some sort of ethical line.

We don't need to know exactly how guilty he was of illegally receiving unemployment benefits to be able to deem his conduct unbecoming of a member of congress.

Here's my take on things: if the Democrats vote in lock-step to boot Santos, they still lose, because the Republicans won't give the numbers to do it. And the end result is the Republicans being able to say "Look at the Dems making things political. This whole Santos thing is political. The people elected him and Democrats want to subvert the Democratic process for political gains." AND "We voted to expel one of our people over something stupid and minor, so therefore it's okay to do the same to literally ANY Democrat for ANY reason."

The ultimate problem Democrats face is that they catch flak for WHATEVER choice they make in almost every situation, and they're held to a much higher standard than the Republicans will EVER be. And it all comes back to what I've tried to point out in the past: our country is EXTREMELY conservative. I think for all the polling of "x progressive policy is super popular", at the end of the day, a majority of this country's electorate wants lower taxes (regardless of how that negatively impacts us), high policing and military, and lower prices on goods (and will only blame whoever happens to be in power at the time they experience prices they consider too high).

So Democrats, being in opposition to a lot of this, are constantly forced to walk a tightrope where they have to make the argument of "We know you don't like or want a lot of our progressive policies, but at least we're not violent lunatics. We're the mature party that is at least trying our best to govern, even if you hate our entire platform". And any time the Democrats try to play hardball and play politics the way the GOP does, that allows the idiot fence sitters to say "Oh shit, I guess the Democrats are just as bad as the GOP at playing politics, and at least the GOP want to cut my taxes".

Our electorate is fucking stupid and is either incapable of understanding nuance (see the Israel/Palestine debate, where yes, Biden may be taking a hit with Arabic voters for his stance...but if he came out in favor of Palestine in ANY way, he would be immediately attacked by the Democratic base of white suburbanites who think he's "supporting terrorists")...OR they just lack pragmatism and are unwilling to accept incremental change as any sort of positive.

LordoftheMorons posted...

I don't really agree with that line of thought. In any other job you wouldn't need a criminal conviction to be fired for egregious conduct, and George Santos's rights aren't the only ones at issue here; he's making decisions for the whole country despite being a massive fraud (similarly, Bob Menendez should be expelled from the Senate).

(You could punt it to a House investigation, but I don't think there's a single person here who has any doubt that George Santos has committed acts that should disqualify someone from a position of public trust)

It's not his rights that are critical here. It's the rights of his voters. They selected him, and if you expel him you are silencing their voices. Perhaps they believed him, or they thought he was lying and voted for him anyway. Impossible to tell. Most likely, he is not going to win reelection (but if he does, then it's a sign that his district just doesn't care about fraud).

Nah that's BS. Nearly all of his egregious conduct was revealed after he'd been elected, he's an entirely different person publicly at that point than the one who was voted in. He may as well have ripped his human mask off revealed the lizard person underneath.

https://twitter.com/KlasfeldReports/status/1720123501955207528

whoops

(Eric, on the stand, denied having anything to do with the documents at the center of the fraud case. The AG then started reading from emails that suggest otherwise)

Is everyone ready for WW3 to start in 4 hours?

Now what fearmongering is this?

htaeD posted...

Now what fearmongering is this?

Hezbollah is hyping up Nasrallah's speech for a week now
According to some sources he will either give a deadline for Israel attacks to stop or he announce a full-out war against Israel, or just outright announce it during the speech

I feel if Russia invading the largest country in Europe didnt trigger WWIII, Hezbollah wont be the ones to. We could see western countries get stuck in another quagmire though.

Nanis23 posted...

Hezbollah is hyping up Nasrallah's speech for a week now
According to some sources he will either give a deadline for Israel attacks to stop or he announce a full-out war against Israel, or just outright announce it during the speech

Oh well that was a nothingburger of a speech
Waste of my time I literally fell asleep

Meanwhile, in the NY Civil Case - Trump's lawyers decided to just start making attacks against the judge's law clerk (the one Trump got a gag order over that he violated) to bail out Eric who was on the stand and getting cornered by the AG.

Here's a thread reader version of a tweet thread regarding much of it:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1720196817118216313.html

To summarize it, the AG was making a strong argument that Eric's "I can't recall" answers regarding his knowledge of the statement of financial condition (pretty much the documents central to the case) were not credible. They got him particularly cornered regarding a 2021 conference call involving Eric and another person on the call who has testified. Eric didn't contest the testimony but claimed to not recall anything about the call regardless of what the AG showed.

But then the AG noted that this call was only 2 years ago, after the AG investigation began, and two years after Eric gave his first deposition related to this case. In that 2020 deposition Eric pleaded the Fifth hundreds of time and the AG seemed to be about to make the case that obviously Eric realized he was at enough risk to invoke the Fifth then so it wasn't that credible that he simply couldn't remember a later conference call regarding the documents in question.

However, one of Trump's lawyers basically intentionally derailed the court by abruptly deciding to attack the judge's law clerk (again.) Obviously this pissed off the judge, who said if this was going to keep happening he'd expand the gag order regarding his staff beyond Trump and to the lawyers as well. Causing Kise (Trump's lawyer) to start invoking a First Amendment right to attack the law clerk and make insinuations about the notes being passed between the judge and the clerk (prompting the judge to state in exasperation that Trump's legal team doesn't have a right to his notes) and raising the possibility of filing a motion for a mistrial if the law clerk was found to have made certain campaign contributions. That basically became how Thursday ended in court.

It spilled over into today's day in court - with the NYAG pointing out that the defense was clearly doing this to disrupt the presentation of evidence.

Meanwhile, Ivanka appealed the judge's order that she must testify if called - and today she lost her appeal. As for Trump himself - he will be testifying on Monday per the judge today.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/05/biden-trails-trump-five-swing-states-poll

I normally wouldnt post this as its one poll a year out, but the reason I am doing that is this part:

Dr Don Levy, director of Siena College Research Institute, said the states in the poll would be crucial in 2024: While Biden has a narrow three-point lead in Wisconsin, Trump leads by 11 points in Nevada, seven points in Georgia, five points in Arizona and three points in both Michigan and Pennsylvania.

If the 2024 matchup featured a Democrat other than Biden running against Trump, the generic Democrat would be ahead by seven to 12 points in five of the states and ahead by three points in Nevada, Levy said.

Yikes. Although those Nevada numbers are a little eyebrow raising.

these polls are meaningless this far out

Generally I agree (and have even said as much in this very topic!) its the comparison to a generic Democratic candidate I found notable and have a harder time seeing changing. I dont think it means Biden will lose but it does suggest hes a liability rather than an asset to the party.

We've been chatting about the NYT/Siena poll in the discord but aside from some of the results being facially absurd (like Nevada being Trump+10) Nate Cohn (part of NYT Upshot) analyzed the results and quite literally the difference between the poll results and Biden 2020 is that there is a "Kamala holdout" group that if you put them back in Biden's column he leads 5 of the 6 swing states and leads likely voters across the 6 collectively by 2.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/05/upshot/polls-biden-trump-2024.html

There's a lot of breakdown in the article, but to keep on this point - when they polled Kamala against Trump she actually performed a point-and-a-half better against Trump (another result put me down for doubting) and when they followed-up with the Kamala voters found that 11% of them said they did not support Biden - and 2/3s of them were either nonwhite or under 30.

Basically, what the NYT/Siena poll shows is that while Biden has maintained his support with white voters from 2020, the sharp drop in this poll comes from his support from black, Hispanic, and under-30 voters dropping. If you move the Kamala-not-Biden supporters back to Biden he basically runs even (if a hair ahead) with the 2020 election results.

but also polls in 2023

Don't generic candidates pretty much always perform better than actual candidates in polls?

The Kamala stuff is interesting and definitely odd. In which case this is absolutely an outlier, though those arent always wrong. It wouldnt terribly surprise me to learn it was politically active under 30s being overrepresented in the sample and altering the results. Never mind, was interesting to discuss I suppose.

Just gonna say about Georgia, I don't see Biden losing Georgia in 2024. He won 2020 and now the state has the nation's biggest RICO case against Donald since then for how he tried to overwhelm their state. He also didn't concede on losing like Stacy Abrams did't concede, who did worse in her rematch against Brian Kemp partly because of it and partly because of Kemp's new incumbent-advantage -- similar with Biden and Donald here.

If Biden loses Georgia, I'll be surprised and looking for reasons about how that happened.

Trump on the stand in the NY Civil Case (well technically they're in a break)

A little hesitant to provide any commentary because this is live and developing quickly, but Trump has been the stand for a bit now and uh... the courtroom is getting very heated.

To prevent this from becoming a flood of embedded tweets from reporters in the room, it sounds like Trump has elected to somewhat ignore the questions presented to him to ramble on about how the AG and the lawyers are "haters" and repeat lies about what the judge has stated, and make arguments that have already been ruled to not be what he says they are.

At first the judge let it go, then he issued an instruction that Trump is to only answer the questions the AG ask him, then when he still continued on as he was - asked his lawyer to control his client (to which Kise refused/said "that's your job"), then Trump started to continue his rambling by talking over the judge.

And then...

https://twitter.com/eorden/status/1721555315399799249

https://twitter.com/eorden/status/1721556720432869688

https://twitter.com/lawofruby/status/1721556276344238154

https://twitter.com/lawofruby/status/1721556616586182687

He reiterated his statement to Trump's lawyer to control him, adding that if the lawyer won't, he will, and excuse him and draw negative inferences from his answers. Then another one of Trump's lawyers told the judge that "[the judge] is here to listen to what Trump has to say" prompting the judge to shout "I am not here to listen to what he has to say. [...] We are not here to hear what he has to say. We are here to listen to him answer questions" and when Alina reiterates that they are here to hear what Trump wants to say he finally tells her to sit down.

AG said he was willing to take a break here so we're on pause for now, not sure how long until they resume? Probably not more than an hour but idk. (Up: 15 minute recess apparently)

Perhaps they're pushing for an appeals court to declare a mistrial or something?

PeaceFrog posted...

Perhaps they're pushing for an appeals court to declare a mistrial or something?

Yeah, trying to provoke the judge into losing his temper to use on appeal seems to be the play... I guess, if there's even a plan at all.

Is it being recorded? Next judge can just watch the video and say "fair, next"

Imagine anyone other than Trump trying to pull this shit and they'd be in jail for contempt of court.

For public consumption, no. Cameras only allowed when everyone is taking their seats. But aside from the court reporter transcribing everything and the reporters/public in the room I dunno if there's a recording for internal use there.

If anyone pulled 5% of the things Trump has theyd have already been killed via the death penalty. Dude is cancer, his family is largely cancer and the country and world itself will be a better place when theyre gone

If they don't do anything to him, they're only going to enable his supporters to do the exact same things.

We're living in the worst timeline, where Donald Trump has a cult of followers who would defend him even if he ate their child in front of them and then pissed on them while lighting them on fire.

Yep, shame theyre fucking dumb enough to believe things were/are better under Trump. A man so incompetent he was born with a diamond spoon in his mouth and is still one of the biggest losers in history

It seemed like his lawyers maybe got through to him that if the judge followed through on drawing a negative inference if Trump continued to be out of control during the recess because the reporters in the room noted he was a bit more on-topic when the recess ended and got back on track.

...for a couple minutes at least.

Then he went back to making insults at the judge and AG and rambling.

https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/1721576341743587505
https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/1721576563529941410
https://twitter.com/eorden/status/1721577026773999946
https://twitter.com/eorden/status/1721577649368121818

I think the Trump strategy of pushing for a mistrial/reversible error that can be appealed might be working. From media reports, the judge seems to want Trump to answer yes or no questions and not explain his answers, and is even threatening to refuse to listen to his testimony entirely.

Except "explaining his answers" seems to mean "insulting everyone involved and calling the judicial process fraudulent"

How to you give him room to explain without letting him say whatever toxic shit he wants?

Lunch break now. Aside from the moments like the above where he started attacking the judge - some of the answers the AG has extracted from Trump don't seem very good for him!

There was an exchange regarding the valuation and designation of Mar-a-Lago. The AG asked Trump if he still believed it was worth $1 billion. Trump responded "between a billion and a billion-five." When he was confronted with the document Trump signed stating that he intended to forever only use it as a club and nothing else (which came with it significant tax benefits), Trump stated that "'Intend' doesn't mean we will do it." He doubled down on this when pressed and when the AG showed video of him stating it would forever be a club, Trump stated it was simply "bravado" and had no legal impact. When then asked if he received tax benefits from Mar-a-Lago being a club he answered yes.

https://twitter.com/KlasfeldReports/status/1721567876224634940

Also another exchange later where the AG asked him who was responsible for ensuring that the Trump Organization was compliant with the GAAP. Trump deflected with, "Everybody. If anybody sees anything wrong, report it." and followed up that "Anybody sees something going wrong, come see me about it directly." The AG asked if anyone did and Trump said yes.

https://twitter.com/KlasfeldReports/status/1721578942870552638

And also just some outright absurdities like this:

https://twitter.com/JayShams/status/1721572810114367772