Kind of let him wither in the wind

Attorney General William Barr went before the Senate Judiciary Committee (under GOP control). After it was over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused him of lying and a few other Dems calling for his resignation or impeachment. Today Barr was supposed to go before the House Judiciary Committee (under Dem control) and didn’t show up.

That prompted Melissa McEwan of Shakesville to show an exchange between Barr and Senator Amy Klobuchar and then summarize:

In other words, the answer is no. Donald Trump's actions have not been consistent with his oath of office. We didn't need the Attorney General to confirm that, but there it is.

In a separate post McEwan added:

Barr did not fail to show up because he's afraid. To the absolute contrary, he failed to show up because the Republican Party has consolidated power so thoroughly that a Democratic House majority no longer matters, and the Trump Regime will take every opportunity to show that.

Sarah Kendzior tweeted, quoting her Gaslit Nation podcast:

The Trump team can't resist showing off. They love to be caught, they just hate being punished. And that's their weakness: this autocratic flaunting. They need everyone to see that they've pulled one over on them, as a matter of ego.

I’ll expand that just a bit. They love being caught because it is a way of showing how much power they have – see, I can flaunt the law, flaunt any kind of ethics you want to name, and even flaunt common decency because I know you can’t do anything about it. And while they hate being punished, the entire GOP is doing all it can to make sure they aren’t.

I’m convinced the only chance of a way out is impeachment. And I’m very much aware that probably won’t succeed.

Some say wait for the next election. McEwan takes a moment to explain why as a comment to Hillary Clinton warning of threats to democracy.

While everyone else is busily pretending that we're just going to have a normal election — despite the evidence that our elections will be neither free nor fair, owing to some combination of foreign interference, bigotry wielded against marginalized candidates, Republican voter suppression efforts, inaccessibility of voting, gerrymandering, hacking, social media manipulation, vanity candidates and their catastrophic egos, purity leftists, wannabe spoilers, obvious Kremlin agents, bots, trolls, ratfuckers, and everything else that conspires to undermine our democracy — Hillary Clinton is out here warning us that, if we don't get our shit together, our election could become a proxy war for foreign interlopers.

And yet again, we will fail to heed her warning. To our own peril.

So waiting for the next election won’t get us out of this mess. Alas…

Daniel Dale, the Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star, talked to Democratic county chairs around the country about impeachment.

There was a consensus that Trump had committed impeachable offences, but lots of skepticism that it's the right thing to do given Trump's talent for using perceived victimhood. One said impeachment would be obvious in a "fully functioning democracy," but not in the current U.S.

The overriding concern of the skeptics was the possibility of voter backlash, especially from Trump’s base. John Sweda, the party chair in Sandoval County, New Mexico, said it would be “better just to kind of let him wither in the wind and be a diminished figure” than to do something that “would really energize the right a lot.”

Oh, Mr. Sweda … the nasty guy is not going to “wither.” If we don’t oust him he will only grow stronger. In addition, why are you so worried about an energized right base? It’s only about 35% of the country. And the nasty guy is already constantly energizing them. What about the larger progressive base? Impeachment would energize them too, and failing to impeach will turn them completely off.

But don’t rely on my grumbling. Here’s Kendzior, who studies authoritarianism:

Every scholar of authoritarian states I know -- that is, people who've studied dictatorship for decades -- recommends impeachment hearings. Most of the Dems don't grasp the actual dynamics, in terms of both duty and spectacle, and seem to have no interest in learning.

It is also possible to do both, to begin impeachment investigations and to work like crazy to defeat the GOP in the next election.