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In reply to the discussion: Democrats are already preparing Trump investigations if they retake the House [View all]BumRushDaShow
(172,662 posts)This is a "Civics 101" process.
Legislation is crafted how?
By having hearings, including bringing in witnesses to testify as part of an "investigation", to determine if something needs to be fixed or might be created to benefit constituents and the country.
Then with all that information, a bill can be drafted, marked up, and finalized for a final vote in a (or multiple) Committee and eventually sent to the floor of the originating chamber of Congress, for a vote. Then that goes to the other chamber for review/hearings/drafts before their vote.
It has nothing to do with "vengeance" or "retribution". It's how Congress is supposed to work. If there are loopholes in current laws that this criminal administration has exploited, then Congress SHOULD BE finding them and CLOSING THEM.
The problem with the GOP is their MANUFACTURING things to "investigate" and that turns the STANDARD Congressional process, into a joke. It's a tactic that Newt Gingrich had been planning on and deploying for nearly 50 years.
I will post this again as I have done before, about what Gingrich did and you can see how it has fully manifested today -
Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into bloodsport, wrecked Congress, and paved the way for Trumps rise. Now hes reveling in his achievements.
Story by McKay Coppins
November 2018 Issue
Updated on October 17, 2018
[snip]
On June 24, 1978, Gingrich stood to address a gathering of College Republicans at a Holiday Inn near the Atlanta airport. It was a natural audience for him. At 35, he was more youthful-looking than the average congressional candidate, with fashionably robust sideburns and a cool-professor charisma that had made him one of the more popular faculty members at West Georgia College. But Gingrich had not come to deliver an academic lecture to the young activists before himhe had come to foment revolution.
One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we dont encourage you to be nasty, he told the group. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics. For their party to succeed, Gingrich went on, the next generation of Republicans would have to learn to raise hell, to stop being so nice, to realize that politics was, above all, a cutthroat war for powerand to start acting like it.
The speech received little attention at the time. Gingrich was, after all, an obscure, untenured professor whose political experience consisted of two failed congressional bids. But when, a few months later, he was finally elected to the House of Representatives on his third try, he went to Washington a man obsessed with becoming the kind of leader he had described that day in Atlanta. The GOP was then at its lowest point in modern history. Scores of Republican lawmakers had been wiped out in the aftermath of Watergate, and those whod survived seemed, to Gingrich, sadly resigned to a permanent minority mind-set. It was like death, he recalls of the mood in the caucus. They were morally and psychologically shattered.
But Gingrich had a plan. The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along. His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself. His idea, says Norm Ornstein, a political scientist who knew Gingrich at the time, was to build toward a national election where people were so disgusted by Washington and the way it was operating that they would throw the ins out and bring the outs in.
[snip]
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gingrich-says-youre-welcome/570832/