ChiGoose

That is not sufficient for even an indictment, nonetheless a conviction.

Democratic Party: bad at policy Republican Party: what is a policy?

The Democratic Party is absolutely terrible at messaging. It's so frustrating.

You ok?

I think Garland is concerned about the DoJ's image after the abuses during the previous administration. While I would want a "return to normalcy" meaning going after criminals, I do not get the impression he wants to launch the department headfirst into what would be an incredibly messy and political fight. He may roll up people who get pretty close to Trump, but I am skeptical he would go after Trump himself. Would love to be wrong, though.

I would wager not.

I agree that they are hoping Garland is watching, but also if Garland needs this committee to bring him information, then that speaks very poorly of his DoJ. While there may be some additional details through the testimony, the DoJ should be able to investigate this stuff on its own. Personally, I also think it's good to get this information on the public record. Millions of Americans still wrongly believe the election was stolen and while I don't think this convinces all of them, maybe some people will begin to reconsider their position. At the very least, we can point to Trump's people, who were working to get him re-elected, testifying under oath that he lost. As to the security, I agree that I hope they go into it and given that they have a team specifically for that, we should expect that they do and call them out if they don't. I have seen a lot of speculation that they won't because it would make Nancy Pelosi look bad but as far as I can tell, the Speaker of the House does not manage or deploy the Capitol Police. They have a board for oversight (https://www.uscp.gov/the-department/oversight) and an executive team (https://www.uscp.gov/the-department/executive-team), and while the legislature appoints the board, I cannot find any info about the legislature having day-to-day management of the Capitol Police. I'll admit I could be completely wrong on this, I had no knowledge of how the Capitol Police are managed before looking into this so I definitely could be missing something. Just doing a quick Wikipedia check, here is who was on the board on Jan 6th: Paul D Irving - House Sergeant at Arms (Jan 17, 2012 - Jan 7, 2021) Michael C Stenger - Senate Sergeant at Arms (April 16, 2018 - Jan 7, 2021) Brett Blanton - Architect of the Capitol (Since Jan 16, 2020) I find it telling that the Sergeants at Arms left their positions the next day, which seems to imply that at least some blame was placed on them.

When we have sworn testimony from Trump’s inner circle that they knew he lost the election and told him constantly that the claims he made were false, I think it’s fair to draw the conclusion that those events did happen. These were people who were invested in Trump winning and they are testifying under oath. As to someone’s actual guilt, that’s something left to the judicial system. I try to be careful to state this in terms of “if it went to trial, a prosecutor would argue that…” or that something “might” satisfy the elements of a crime. I don’t think we have a smoking gun here that Trump organized a coup attempt yet. There is a lot of damning evidence about a lot of people, including Trump, but as I’ve stated, this isn’t a trial.

They are presenting evidence at the hearing, they cannot indict anyone for anything even if they believe someone to be responsible for a crime. So far, their referrals to the DoJ have been for contempt of Congress for people refusing the testify and not for any actions before or during Jan 6th. Chairman Benny Thompson said the other day that they were done sending referrals but Vice Chair Liz Cheney says she doesn’t think they are. So who knows? The committee is divided into several teams. One of those teams has a specific remit to assess the law enforcement failures and why they happened (See Blue Team) So far, we have had two hearings: one to give an overview of what we should expect and one that focused primarily on the election itself. Given that there are still several hearings to go and that one of the five teams is dedicated to figuring out why the security was not prepared, I would expect that they address that at some point.

Much like the Jan 6th committee is not a trial or judicial proceeding, it is also not an impeachment trial. The committee exists with the purpose to figure out how and why the events of Jan 6th happened and to potentially recommend legislation to prevent such incidents from happening in the future. The committee cannot indict Trump. It cannot impeach him. It cannot, in any way, shape, or form, hold him accountable. Its remit actually isn’t targeted at Trump at all, except that as they investigate, he ends up being the central figure. So as far as he bears any responsibility at all, the only thing the committee can actually do is to expose that and hope that the DoJ takes action.

This is a straw man argument and can be disregarded. To @Buffalo Timmy’s point: we’ve had two hearings of many. We did learn some new things in the hearing this week, but I would wait until it all plays out before jumping to any conclusions one way or the other.

Huh. Seems bad. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna33755

I'll do my best to answer your points, just bear in mind that my answers are based on how things *do* work and not necessarily how they *should* work. 1. House Select Committees House select committees are created by a resolution. There are no requirements that all select committees must meet certain requirements. They are defined by their resolutions. The original plan was to hold a bipartisan Joint Committee (which is a committee with members from both the Senate and the House) that was negotiated between Bennie Thompson (D) and John Katko (R), but that ended up being filibustered in the Senate. The Jan 6th committee resolution vested the appointment of members in the Speaker of the House, but 5 would be appointed after consultation with the minority leader. Kevin McCarthy announced the 5 members he wanted, but Pelosi told him she would reject Jim Jordan and Jim Banks. However, she would approve the other three. McCarthy then withdrew all of his nominations. We can quibble about the specifics of the qualifications of who was appointed and what "after consultation" requires, but those are the facts of how the committee was established. 2. House Subpoenas People subpoenaed by the committee could challenge the subpoena in court (and some have) but it would be an uphill battle to argue that "after consultation with the Minority leader" means that the minority leader gets to pick the people. As far as I am aware, nobody has successfully challenged a subpoena from the committee. 3. One Side of the Story / Perjury We need to be careful about comparisons to a trial. This is not a trial or even a judicial proceeding. Trump is not on trial here, and neither are people like Rudy Giuliani. They do not face a loss of liberty through the committee and are not entitled to the due process they would be entitled to at a trial or judicial proceeding. That being said, the witnesses are testifying under oath, so they are subject to perjury charges should they lie. When we are hearing differing arguments, those being made in the hearings and those being made in the media, it is important to note that people can lie in the media with little recourse whereas people lying to the committee give themselves legal exposure. It's not perfect by any means, but it is interesting to see at least one person reject a request to testify under oath and then say in the media that they were lied about. If the story the committee is getting is wrong, maybe they should have testified to that. 4. Outsider vs. Establishment This skirts close to the whole "deep state is after Trump" thing but I want to avoid that discussion because I don't think that was the intention of your point. Washington is a bureaucratic mess but part of that is because it would be impossible for one person to manage something the size of the US federal government. This definitely makes it hard for an outsider to succeed. On the other hand, someone with little to no experience in government would likely lack the skills and experience to be effective (which is why I did not support Obama - he had so little experience when he ran). Ultimately, this one probably comes down to opinion, but going by Occam's Razor, I just feel like it is more likely that Trump was looking for any excuse to declare that he won (putting his staff into a difficult position) than there was a web of people across his own campaign and the government invested in bringing him down. Many of the people who testified would benefit greatly from Trump winning, but when they were sworn in to tell the truth, they said that he lost.

It’s the classic plan of the last ~30 years: 1. Supply side tax cuts to benefit the rich explodes the deficit. 2. Scream about the deficit to justify cutting programs for the poor and middle class. 3. Rinse and repeat.

Remember that the committee was originally designed to be bipartisan until the GOP tanked that and the House had to do a select committee instead. Also, the founding rules of a committee have no bearing on the authority of Congressional subpoenas. To believe all of this is just a made-up witch hunt means you believe that the witnesses all perjured themselves. If that’s true, then the Pro-Trump people should provide proof of that. And finally, this whole “establishment hates Trump” thing in regards to this hearing means you must think that Trump is an absolute moron at hiring people. Basically every person who testified was either hired by Trump or appointed by him. He must truly be incompetent if he managed to hire dozens of people who were actually working to bring him down.

Honestly, I find all of this pretty fascinating and was going to watch the hearing anyway. But, there are so many people on this forum who espouse the debunked conspiracies and they would never sit through the hearing, so I figured I would type up some notes while watching it. Since the hearing was a solidly thorough debunking of the conspiracies, I was hoping that maybe seeing that Trump’s inner circle knew the claims were false might change a mind or two. Apparently, that was very naïve of me. I expect there will be little change here at PPP from people still claiming the election was stolen.

Ok, I don’t want to be mean because maybe English isn’t your first language or something, but this isn’t a criminal trial and it isn’t a civil trial. It’s not a trial, there isn’t a court, there’s no prosecution, there is no jury and there is no defense. This is a congressional fact finding committee with sworn testimony from witnesses speaking under the penalty of perjury. Please, take a moment and try to recognize that. I know not everybody is familiar with these nuances but it’s not *that* hard to understand.

Well, we now have sworn testimony from Trump’s inner circle that he lost the election, it wasn’t stolen and all of the theories being thrown out on PPP everyday are baseless conspiracies. That counts for something.

For maybe the hundredth time, this is not a judicial proceeding. There is no prosecution and there is no defense. It is a congressional fact-finding committee. I honestly don’t know why this is so difficult for people to grasp.

The main reason Congress doesn't work is because there is a significant political movement to ensure that it does not work and those that oppose this movement are wholly incompetent. Congress doesn't really *do* anything because doing anything meaningful would require satisfying the filibuster in the Senate. Since we have a two-party system, doing something bipartisan is bad and therefore, anything proposed by one party will generally be opposed by the other, regardless of the merits. One of the many exceptions to the filibuster is the reconciliation rule, which allows a majority threshold for bills that are only about money. This works because McConnell does not care about anything except power and the transfer of wealth to corporations and the donor class. He can accomplish his entire agenda through reconciliation and the party is fine with that. The Dems want to do things that they believe will make things better for people (give them healthcare, prevent businesses from taking advantage of them, etc). They can't do these things because they'll never have enough votes to beat the filibuster, so they torture the hell out of the language of the bills to try to make them qualify for reconciliation. And sometimes even that doesn't work. This is how you end up with a Congress that really doesn't do much legislating, which means a lot of the responsibility is thrown to the judicial system. This is the other part of the plan, and it's why McConnell blocked as many Obama judges as he could so there were a ton of vacancies for Trump to fill in when he won. It's also dramatically heated up any SCOTUS appointments because now much of our governance has to run through SCOTUS due to the complete dysfunction of Congress. And despite Chevron deference originally being a Reagan-era conservative thing, the current plan of having SCOTUS water it down or eliminate it means that even Executive Agencies will not have the power to carry out their mandate. That is, of course, exactly McConnell's plan. The Dems are too scared, lazy, or incompetent to do anything to fix this. So in the meantime, we have plenty of time for hearings and naming post offices.

At this point, I don't think the Dems could handle solving a 100 piece puzzle.

Pretty much, except the destination of all of the $250 million hasn't been made public as far as I'm aware. The hearing showed where about $7 million went. We know that there was no defense fund, so it'd be nice to learn where the remaining $243 million went. I would hazard a guess that the lifetime grifter and conman managed to siphon a good amount of that into his own pockets but we'll have to wait and see. Only $200K was revealed yesterday to go to a Trump property specifically.

Anyone who saw yesterday's testimony would know that the election wasn't stolen. Trump's people, under oath, said it wasn't. I would wager most of the GOP members of Congress cannot stand Trump (definitely in the Senate), but they will toe the line so long as it is profitable for them. I'm glad that at least Cheney isn't caving to the lunacy, even if it likely costs her her seat.

The Slack channel is called #social-watercooler. Really seems unlikely that's where policy decisions are made...

...and? The GOP does the same. Any candidate the Dems nominate will be decried as an anti-American socialist who wants to open the borders and destroy the police. In a two-party system, everything about elections is zero-sum and incentivizes our worst tendencies.