Quote of the Week...from Mark Mellman

A future president need only consider whether he has 35 partisan defenders in the Senate to embark on whatever course he or she deems fit, regardless of its democratic propriety.     ---Mark Mellman

The above quote by Mark Mellman, head of the Mellman Group...a business and political consulting organization, appeared in The Hill recently and made it to my computer's MSN newsfeed.  It directly refers to last month's Senate impeachment vote about former president Donald Trump and the fact that 43 of the 50 seated Republicans from his own party voted for acquittal, despite the enormous amount of evidence pointing to conviction and that the senators themselves were directly threatened by the January 6th invasion of the Capitol building...where they were convened to count and confirmed the electoral college votes for the 2020 presidential election...by fascist thugs spurred on by Trump's encouragement.  I think he should have been convicted, but sadly a large swath of the American population seems to be under his spell, having made him into an idol and believing and acting on every lying word coming from his mouth.  And since they have the numbers within the Republican party to "primary" any sitting politician of theirs out of office with a candidate more to their cult leader's liking, senators and representatives...within some remarkable exceptions...are too scared to openly defy Herr Trump in anything.  The situation is so extreme that Republican caucuses of different state legislatures are routinely holding censure votes against national legislators voting against their fascist supreme leader.  So I get what Mellman is saying here.  But as I like to say about politics, what goes around comes around.  And the "flaw" in our system that allows only 34 senators to protect a president who has seriously abused his or her office against our Constitution also protects a sitting, possibly controversial president who has done nothing wrong but has a vengeful opposition party with a majority in Congress.  The Republicans while Obama was president were adept at turning anything hinting of controversy into a scandal requiring extensive hearings and the fascist-leaning talk radio and TV hosts have been there to whip up the loyal extremist sector of the population into pressuring them to take the most punitive actions possible.  So if you're a Democrat and wish impeachment convictions were attainable with only a majority Senate vote instead of the two-thirds as the U.S. Constitution mandates, think again and thank your lucky stars that it is this difficult...