Theme, restatement, and variation

We’re Electing Idiots

Liz Cheney On What’s Wrong With Politics via TMD.

There will always be people whose ambition is greater than their pride and they will always curry favour with anyone closer to power than they are.

Jacob T Levy via DenseDiscovery.

Last week two of Trump’s most slavish cronies in the caucus introduced resolutions that aim to undo his two impeachments. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s legislation, targeting the first one, is short and sweet; Elise Stefanik’s counterpart, targeting the second, is more elaborate. The resolutions don’t purport to “repeal” or “overturn” the House impeachment votes held in 2019 and 2021, notably, but to banish them from official existence entirely. If enacted, each would have the effect of expunging the record “as if such … Articles had never passed the full House of Representatives.”

In theory, at least. Per Charlie Sykes, legal experts find the idea of the House retroactively disappearing an impeachment to be cockamamie, including the normally Trump-friendly Jonathan Turley. “It is not like a constitutional DUI. Once you are impeached, you are impeached,” he told one news outlet. Even if the resolutions pass, there’s nothing stopping a future Democratic House majority from expunging the GOP’s expungement—an un-un-impeachment, as it were.

Of course, a subsequent Republican House majority could expunge that expungement, amounting to an un-un-un-impeachment. And then a later Democratic House majority could—you get the idea.

Perhaps, centuries from now, it’ll be a House tradition whenever the out-party wins control of the chamber that they undertake to un-impeach or re-impeach Donald Trump, as the case may be, on their first day in power.

Nick Cattogio


We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.