What we're seeing from Trump and his allies today is an autocratic attempt. It's not a competent one, and it probably won't be an effective one. But that's what it is. And far worse would follow if it succeeded.

So I've been reporting a story about how you'd fix the impeachment process. It doesn't work for removal, as currently designed. Impeachment was built for a political system without parties. It fails in a system with polarized parties.

The one time it functioned as intended, confusingly, was the time it didn't happen: Richard Nixon wasn't impeached! But the impeachment process, which came at the low ebb of party polarization in American history, convinced his party to force him to resign.

Would Republicans force Nixon to resign today?

Oh, you're cute. Thank you. I needed that.

The problem of impeachment is pretty simple: Presidents are leaders of parties. Parties are tied to the political fortunes of presidents. You're asking a party to basically wreck its immediate political future for the good of the system.

This doesn't just have the effect of making impeachment ineffective as a remedy. It's worse than that. It makes impeachment dangerous to the president's party, and gives them a reason to defend him and either normalize or minimize his crimes. As we are seeing right now.

Democrats have a lot of good ideas to help people fast, and visibly. They have good ideas for deepening democracy, like the "For The People Act." But if they let Senate Republicans filibuster everything, they will lose in 2022, and they will deserve it.

A lot of them understand this. “I’m going to do everything I can to bring people together,” Senator @RonWyden, who will chair the powerful Senate Finance Committee, told me. “but I’m not just going to stand around and do nothing while Mitch McConnell ties everyone up in knots.”

“This is a fight not just for the future of the Democratic Party or good policy,” Senator @BernieSanders told me. “It is literally a fight to restore faith in small-d democratic government.”

“I’ve said to the president-elect, ‘reach out across the aisle...But don’t let them stymie your program,’” @WhipClyburn told me. “You can’t allow the search for bipartisanship to ruin the mandate the American people gave you.’”

“It’s not a question of if the filibuster will be gone, but when it’ll be gone,” former Majority Leader Harry Reid said. “You cannot have a democratic body where it takes 60 percent of the vote to get anything done.”

In much of SF, you can’t walk 20 feet without seeing a sign declaring that Black lives matter and no human being is illegal. Those signs sit in yards zoned for single families, in communities that organize against the new housing that would bring those values closer to reality.

Poorer families — disproportionately nonwhite and immigrant — are pushed into long commutes, overcrowded housing and homelessness. Those inequalities have turned deadly during the pandemic.

And it's not just SF:

"What we see at times is people with a Bernie Sanders sign and a ‘Black Lives Matter’ sign in their window, but they’re opposing an affordable housing project or an apartment complex down the street," @Scott_Wiener told me.

There is a danger — not just in California, but everywhere — that politics becomes an aesthetic rather than a program.

It’s a danger on the right, where Donald Trump modeled a presidency that cared more about retweets and owning the libs than passing bills.

It’s also a danger on the left, where the symbols of progressivism are often preferred to the sacrifices and risks those ideals demand.

This is what this means to me: as most of you know, I am British, and always will be. But, in February 2017, we became US citizens, after nearly 18 years here. For me it was bittersweet, I just could not get into it, it all felt wrong; I felt I was selling part of my soul. 1/6

When we came out after the ceremony, there was a cardboard cut-out of President Obama and Michelle Obama by the Democratic party booth, and I had my photo taken next to them as I registered to vote. 2/6

For the next 3.9 years I watched this country get suffocated by a president with no interest in the common good: dividing us all; inciting hate against anyone white, straight and able; totally disregarding science. Literally he assaulted every single one of my values. 3/6

And it really and deeply affected me. And I don't think I realised. But I believed that we could all work together to turn it around. That is why I got so involved with the election, as you've all seen on my timeline over the past few weeks, because everything was at stake. 4/6

Today, 7th November 2020, I now feel proud to be a US citizen, proud to have a president who will do his best to unite the people and heal us, allow us to move forward and make progress in solving many vital issues such as social & racial justice & climate change. 5/6

NEW: @GenFlynn interview w/ @newsmax [on his view of the 2020 Election and what should happen next] "First of all, @realDonaldTrump won on the 3rd of November. The things that he needs to do right now [are]: appoint a Special Counsel, immediately; seize all of these Dominion and

2/ other voting machines that we have across the country; he needs to go ahead and prioritize by state, and probably by county [Fulton County, Maricopa County, as an example]. Exactly what they did up in Antrim County, MI, and what they discovered. I think if he looks

3/ at a random sampling of some of these counties, he's going to find exactly the same problem. These machines are clearly, CLEARLY, there is a foreign influence that is tied to this system, and it goes back to China. It likely goes to Russia. Likely goes to Iran. We know that

4/ Venezuela has participated in the development of these machines. There's been problems all over the country with them. Not only with Dominion, but with this Smartmatic software. He's got a couple of options that he can take, and he needs to take them right now.

5/ The President could, immediately, on his order, seize every single one of these machines around country, on his order. He could also order, within the swing-states [if he wanted to], he could take military capabilities and he could place them in those states & basically re-run

🚨 Thread: It’s Happening!

1. This may be the most important thread I’ve put together, yet. This is truly an exciting time for America. We are about to witness history in the making. It will, in fact, be Biblical. Not just for Us, but for the world.

Alright, I'm going to explain this one more time because I keep getting tweets like "people who vote for politicians who let them die of hypothermia deserve to die of hypothermia."

The people who voted red in Texas are, by and large, relatively fine right now. Yes, the storm has hurt them but the storm was going to hurt everyone.

But. They're either rich enough that *their* power wasn't cut off or rural enough that they have fireplaces and wood and wells.

Those millions without power are in places like Dallas county and Tarrant county and Harris county, I.e., the urban places that have the highest concentration of blue voters.

So it's not "(all/most) people voted for hypothermia and now they will fittingly die of hypothermia".

It's "(certain) people voted for the folks in cities to die of hypothermia, and they are, while the aforementioned voters are safe and dry and relatively comfortable."

Well, gosh, why don't those voters *do something* rather than passively being killed??

Do you know how many people live in Harris county? 4 million. Do you know how many ballot drop-off boxes they were allocated last election? 1.

1 box for 4 million people.

This letter is... something. But, it illustrates two points. First, most Americans don't realize that the majority of of the GOP base thinks this is a religious war for the soul of the nation. They're willing to abandon democracy FTW. 1/n


The other illuminating part is where they insist Trump is a Christian. I agree with @C_Stroop the "real" vs. "fake" Christian debate is unhelpful. However, if someone thinks religion is "b******t", they're not Christian regardless of how you define it 2/n

It always amazes me how strong the cult of personality is. They're completely willing to rearrange their beliefs to support Trump (grab 'em by the pussy). They're willing to ignore the evidence he regards them as rubes, suckers, and morons. 3/n

Of all the awful things he's done, bilking his followers with fake raffles somehow stuck with me as just about the sleaziest. He's already rich. Even Rand Paul, Hannity, Carlson, Cruz, Cotton, and Hawley don't stoop this low. 4/n

On February 26th last year, I predicted that the US would handle the pandemic poorly for a lot of reasons: poor scientific literacy, bad employers, poor laws against endangering employees, lack of hospital beds, lack of preparedness. But, I whiffed badly on one thing... 5/n