Sen. John Fetterman on Republicans trying to impeach Biden: 'Go ahead, do it. I dare you.'

deconstruct@lemm.ee to politics @lemmy.world – 865 points –
Sen. John Fetterman on Republicans trying to impeach Biden: 'Go ahead, do it. I dare you.'
nbcnews.com

Sen. John Fetterman offered a message Wednesday to House Republicans considering impeaching President Joe Biden: “Go ahead, do it. I dare you.”

Speaking to reporters in his Senate office, the Pennsylvania Democrat suggested that the impeachment push by Republicans on the other side of the Capitol was meant to deflect from the mountain of legal problems facing former President Donald Trump.

"Your man has what, three or four indictments now?" Fetterman said. “Trump has a mug shot and he’s been impeached twice.”

"Sometimes you just gotta call their bullshit," he said.

The first-term senator went on to say that a Biden impeachment "would just be like a big circle jerk on the fringe right,” and "would diminish what impeachment really means."

Note: As pointed out by reddig33 in comments, this is an old photo. Here's a couple examples of his new look.

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What impeachment means has been diminishing for a fucking hot minute now... like decades...

One need look no farther than two words to understand this. The words your man.

It's become a stupid junior high finger pointing game to these assholes (ALL of them. I'm not referring to either tribe, I mean government at large). Trumps impeachmet would have been far more effective if it wasn't seen as a "your team did a no-no" politics by republicans in general.

I dare you? Seriously? Come on... Please tell me people understand this is garbage leadership in every single seat...

I do agree with the man about calling out bullshit, but I disagree on the "sometimes". Should be every time :)

This is exactly the GOP’s plan though. They want to delegitimize Trump’s impeachments by impeaching Biden for frivolous reasons. That way it seems like it’s just “both sides” bickering when there are real reasons for Trump’s impeachment

Congrats on falling for it

Trump isn't being impeached... He's a normal person facing normal charges, and I wasn't talking about anything current involving his dumb ass...

The current "both sides" narrative is that anything moderate is a "both sides" defense of trump. The narrative is join the Democrats or you're a diesel truck owning, trump supporting, racist nazi wannabe... it's wholesale virtue signaling tribalist bullshit... Congrats on falling for it.

I'll be wasting my vote on independents until one or both tribes grow the fuck up.

  • Trump isn't being impeached - he's already been impeached... Twice.

  • He's not a normal person - he's a billionaire former US President.

  • He's not facing normal charges - he's been charged with election subversion, racketeering, a string of conspiracy charges, and multiple charges under the espionage act for stealing classified documents to name a few.

  • I'm not sure if you're aware of the crossover in prescriptions between the GOP, their voters, and Nazis as they relate to "sexual deviants", racial minorities, "the Jews", and so on. Also Trump is on record insisting to John Kelly that "Hitler did a lot of good things". On the other hand, how many Nazis do you think vote Democrat?

  • What cars do voters from each party drive? I wonder... I guess we'll never know

Congratulations - you with all your enlightened centrism are undoubtedly the stupidest person I've encountered today...I appreciate that you've chosen to piss away your vote.

Also: Trump could still be impeached and should be. It's within Congress's right to impeach him, and the Senate ban him from holding office.

While this is true, the Dems are highly unlikely to expend the political capital it would take to do so - particularly when the senate has clear intent to block consequences.

I'd rather just see him in prison for the dozens of traitorous, anti-democratic charges he's committed - many openly.

I’m a leftist, so I’m not for either party either, but if you think they’ll do the same amount of damage to the country, you’re wrong. A shit sandwich is always gonna be better than a shit sandwich with glass shards. But unless you’re in a swing state, vote for whoever you like, you can’t harm anyone. I certainly do.

Just remember the first of those impeachment hearings was about the extortion of Ukrainian President Zelenskyy by threatening to withhold military aid in “a perfect phone call” If they didn’t run cover for the election interference allegations in the 2016 election and offer up dirt on Hunter Biden.

There is no timeline where the republicans would have received it any better.

It only took a couple of months after the invasion happened and they realized the withholding aid in the past looked like it created the atmosphere to facilitate the invasion and suddenly all the people who were praising journalists in body armor in the Middle East were criticizing journalists for wearing body armor in Kyiv, and start backing Russia for “reasons” (I still can’t really get any concrete reason from any of them).

The only reason I’ve been given why it was a “ Partisan attack” was that it was revenge for Bill Clinton being impeached for lying about a blow job under oath, as if that diminishes the levity of the situation in the first place.

Clinton out-lawyered the GOP and they were pissed. The legal definition they gave didn't include what he and Monica were doing.

Also, that relationship didn't even start (I don't think they had even met) until after the investigation had started because of a land deal gone bad.

Trying to compare Clinton's impeachment with Trump's is asinine for many reasons.

Trump and Clinton’s impeachments were so very different, absolutely.

What’s funny is that the same Republicans flipped their positions. Old 1990s Lindsey Graham said that it doesn’t have to be a literal crime to impeach a president if they disgraced the office. (Clinton did commit a felony with the lying under oath part, although Republicans cared way more about the sex scandal at the time.) 2020 Lindsey Graham said what Trump did wasn’t a felony and therefore not impeachable. He’s one of the worst slime balls in congress and that’s saying something.

He’s one of the worst slime balls in congress

No, you're mistaken. I can assure you, Lindsey Graham has no balls.

Clinton did commit a felony with the lying under oath part

That's my point though. The legal definition they gave him to work with didn't include what he did with Monica. What he did wasn't ok, and I'm not defending him personally, but it wasn't a lie by the legal definition of "sexual relations." The GOP was just on a fishing expedition to find anything they could on him.

Baloney. What he did counted as sexual relations or “sexual relationship” as he testified to. Then he tried to claim that since he was merely pleasuring her and didn’t orgasm himself, it didn’t count. They had to drag Lewinsky back to testify further that Clinton was still lying.

Clinton tried to split hairs to pretend he didn’t lie. It didn’t work.

since he was merely pleasuring her and didn’t orgasm himself, it didn’t count

That's not what happened at all.

He claimed that she had sexual relations with him but he didn't have sexual relations with her because the special investigator defined it based on who touched whose genitals.

http://www.languageandlaw.org/PERJURY.HTM

That correction doesn’t make it any better. It’s still perjury and she still had to testify that he lied even under that definition.

During the deposition, Clinton was asked "Have you ever had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, as that term is defined in Deposition Exhibit 1?" The judge ordered that Clinton be given an opportunity to review the agreed definition. Afterwards, based on the definition created by the Independent Counsel's Office, Clinton answered, "I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky." Clinton later said, "I thought the definition included any activity by [me], where [I] was the actor and came in contact with those parts of the bodies" which had been explicitly listed (and "with an intent to gratify or arouse the sexual desire of any person").

In other words, Clinton denied that he had ever contacted Lewinsky's "genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks", and effectively claimed that the agreed-upon definition of "sexual relations" included giving oral sex but excluded receiving oral sex.

Well played…

And she testified that under his redefinition he still lied. Don’t forget him pleasuring her with the cigar etc.

I'm not sure Democrats have any chance against the all-encompassing Republican Wall of Stupidity if they don't play the same game, to a certain extent. The fact that politics in the US is polarized like it is depends in a large part on the fact that there is no room for a third option. Not by this "your guy/our guy" kind of attitude which is inevitable.

I've voted for third parties for 30 years with a few exceptions. I might only represent a single digit % of the population in doing so, but that number is growing. Independent voters have grown large enough in number to have had laws written to preserve the binary stupidity, we aren't many, but we're enough to have an impact

You do know voting for a third party in a first-past-the-post electoral system is symbolic, right? It’s a system that just tends to steer in that direction, with or without extra laws around it. If you want a different system, great. But if you vote 3rd party in this one, I just hope you don’t live in a swing state.

Very non-swing state. My electoral representation has voted all red since 1968.

The independent count had been slowly rising since Perot, but trump kinda broke the streak. Lots of support for that clown in my neck of the woods, but it's all trump specific, so if we see a desantis or Abbott on the ticket, there's a good chance there will be a surge in libertarian votes. Could plausibly end up with a few independent electoral votes popping up again maybe.

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Impeachment meant nothing from the beginning of the Clinton mess. You can thank Gringich for this mess.

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