Jeez! I am Not looking forward to either possible result, a drawn out drama with nothing changing, or President Pence.
Leetah
It seems to me very possible (but hardly certain) that the Mueller investigation may turn up so many liars and cheaters and illegal dealings and fraud... that the net effect might be bigger and worse than Watergate -- possibly two to ten times as big and nasty as Watergate. It's not just D. Trump who is getting caught up in this net, but possibly dozens of others as well. It's not just that he's (Trump) been desperately hiding things, but when those hidden things get exposed yet other hidden things become unhidden. It's a rats nest of stuff, likely involving a lot of money laundering and other forms of organized crime.
All of this is going to add to the already thick tarnish on "the Republican brand". After all, the Republican party has run with this guy and his associates, and continued to support him even well into Cuckoo-Land.
Thank heaven the Democrats control the House of Representatives! They can probably keep Pence in check for a couple of years, especially with all that Republican tarnish everywhere. Pence would have to just sit on his hands ... except for those special executive powers ... which, admittedly, has gotten way out of hand since 9/11/2001.
If Pence were to continue to harm this country during those two years (or whatever fraction that remains of them) ... on a scale similar or worse than Trump, gawd knows what the people might decide to do to put him in check. But it's not like he's going to begin his tenure with a mandate of the people.
If this goes the way the wind is blowing, I predict that the Democrats will have both branches of Congress and the White House come 2020. Hopefully, the progressive arm of the Democratic party (and especially the Earth-loving part of American progressivism) will be strong around that time. We've only got a few years to make
great strides in creating a sustainable / regenerative world culture, and America needs to be a big part of that process, rather than a drag on it.
If we fail to make such great strides, I'm afraid the future will be very, very bleak, and will involve a far faster and worse mass extinction event than the one already underway.
Edit:
Here's a problem, though!
It’s not clear whether the Constitution allows Mueller to indict a sitting president. But Department of Justice policy forbids it, and Mueller is a rule-follower. If Mueller thinks that the president has committed a federal crime, his remedy is to recommend impeachment in a report to the attorney general. The attorney general, in turn, is supposed to tell Congress the outcome of the special counsel’s investigation and decide whether the report should be made public. Did you catch the problem? The acting attorney general is Matthew Whitaker, Trump’s creature and a vigorous critic of Mueller’s investigation. Mueller has every reason to expect that Whitaker will suppress the report and limit what he shows to Congress.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...able-things-about-michael-cohens-plea/577015/
Seems like a completely broken system! Eeek!
But the good news in the next paragraph in that same article:
A formal report is not, however, Mueller’s only way to tell Congress—and the nation—about his conclusions. The journalist Marcy Wheeler has written extensively about her theory that Mueller will “make his report” through court filings against Trump confederates like Manafort and Cohen. On Monday, Mueller accused Manafort of lying to investigators, breaching his cooperation agreement, and committing further federal crimes; he promised he’d bring the receipts when he filed briefs urging a long sentence. Those sentencing briefs will let Mueller tell the story of how Manafort lied about the Trump campaign—and, by extension, lay out the evidence of what the Trump campaign did.
The third remarkable thing about Cohen’s plea was its substance. The president of the United States’ personal lawyer admitted to lying to Congress about the president’s business activities with a hostile foreign power, in order to support the president’s story. In any rational era, that would be earthshaking. Now it’s barely a blip.