Stop This

I've managed to be much more productive during Mafia Mulligan's second impeachment trial than I thought I would be. But I have seen a substantial amount of it, especially yesterday (Wednesday).

Like all non-Republicans, I hope the Senate will convict. It's probably pretty unlikely, but at the same time it also seems that — other than sociopaths like Cruz and Hawley or sycophants like Graham — there could possibly be 17 of them who might vote the way they did on certifying the election rather than the way they did on hearing the impeachment case. Because the presentation of facts has been overwhelming.

But I don't expect it, frankly. Dave Roberts wrote it better than I could:

Twitter is so painful to read right now. People want the merits of the impeachment case to matter so badly. They want the anguish and eloquence of those whose lives were threatened to matter. They want TRUTH to matter and decency to finally win a round. But it's not going to happen.

It didn't ultimately matter when they stole the 2000 election, or crammed a bunch of authoritarian policy through in response to a terrorist attack they failed to prevent, or went to war with the wrong country at a cost of billions of dollars and millions of lives or wandered haplessly into a global economic meltdown (hastened by their deregulation), or supported racist conspiracy theories about the first black president, or degraded norms to obstruct everything that president tried to do, or elected an incompetent narcissist or worked systematically to suppress the minority vote, or put asylum-seeing children into border gulags, or failed utterly to prepare for or respond to a pandemic that's killed more Americans than WWII, or turned the federal civil service over to corporate lobbyists so why would it matter when they finally cross over to armed insurrection? The last 4 decades have been about escalating conservative lawlessness and zero accountability. This is America's default. No amount of persuasion will stop it now.

Merit doesn't matter. Simple human decency doesn't matter. Only power matters. Either Democrats pass substantial democracy reform in the next two years or we're very likely to pass a point of no return into authoritarian single-party rule.

Which is why Democrats need to get rid of the Jim Crow filibuster and pass the new Voting Rights Act, among many other changes that the majority of people in this country support. 

It's the only way to stop this.