Nancy Pelosi is getting a lot of shyt for saying in the wake of the election that she's not going to pursue impeachment until the Republicans call for it.
I have three thoughts.
First, she's been saying this since the spring. No one paid attention b/c they thought she was trying not to gin up the GOP base. But it's clear she meant it.
Second, I think she's right. On this *one* issue, count me on Team Pelosi.
Third, one of the reasons she's right (there are many) can be gleaned from our old friend Steve Skowronek.
Skowronek's theory, remember, is that to understand how a president governs, you need to keep in mind two questions or factors.
First, how strong or resilient is the governing regime? The New Deal order, for example, was resilient through the late 1960s/early 1970s, then it began to show signs of weakness and challenge, both internally and externally.
Second, is the president and the party he represents constitutively aligned with or opposed to the dominant regime? The Democrats throughout the New Deal era were constitutively aligned with the New Deal, the Republicans were opposed. Yes, Nixon and Eisenhower made their peace with the New Deal, as did Clinton and Obama with Reaganism. But constitutively aligned means something more like true belief in, present at the creation of, firm commitment to and extension of, not resigned accommodation and maintenance.
Now we come to impeachment: as Skowronek argues, you get impeachments when you have a strong regime and a president who represents a party that is opposed to that regime. Nixon and Clinton, both of whom were impeached (or close to impeachment with Nixon) are the classic cases; in Nixon's case, the New Deal was still strong enough; in Clinton's case, Reaganism was very strong. Johnson is the other case: yes, he had been Lincoln's VP, but he was essentially a representative of the white South seeking to maintain white supremacy in the South.
Anyway, Pelosi's gamble is either that the Reagan regime is too strong to launch an impeachment against Trump (that's why no one ever thought about impeaching Reagan over Iran-Contra; he and the regime he had created were too strong) OR that the regime is so weak that the real goal is to repudiate it electorally rather than institutionally.
My hope is that we're in the latter stages, of course, though I'm sure Pelosi doesn't think so. But regardless, from a political point of view, Pelosi's right that impeachment is not the way to go.
What's more, I suspect that in six months' time, once it becomes clear to everyone that she and the Dems won't go for impeachment, we'll see a lot less talk from everyone about impeachment, and more talk about political modes of opposition, whether within the Democratic Party itself or outside of it. Which is all to the good, in my estimation.
That doesn't mean you can't punish Trump for his crimes and misdemeanors. It just means that the best punishment would be a whole wave of legislation, at the federal and state levels, that completely reverses all the elements of Trumpism, including his corruption. We won't get that in the next two years, certainly not at the federal level, but we should be laying the groundwork with all the necessary legislation now.
:trumpj:
If you mean racists Republicans being racist Republicans then there is a parallel, of course back in the day it was racist Democrats in the South, but showing an ID is nowhere near as repugnant as a fuucking literacy test.....please stop. 
You're making a mockery of yourself.
......You need official government ID to do any of those civic activities.
why does conspiracy guy support the government issuing everybody an id card used to track them like sheeple?
.