#i can never find the right words to use but something something charlie's substance abuse and ocd

[gayclubsoap]

charlie kelly is so Never Let Me Down Again by Depeche Mode and Just by Radiohead coded

[simtrospective]

SCRAPPED STORY CHALLENGE by @bugsims

01. Post a few screenshots from a scrapped scene / edit / story! 02. Share why you scrapped this specific thing. 03. Tag five friends, and watch the fun play out!

Thank you to @gilded-ghosts for the tag.

Because I wrote so much that you might prefer to skip, let me do 03. outside the cut. I tag...

@ladykendalsims - @jet-plane-sims - @boogey-studios - @pinkmonsimblr - @dynastiasimss

The above pictures (plus the related tray files) are all I have left of an idea that was half-formed to begin with and which never got off the ground at all.

01.

Depending on if you’re a follower of mine + how long you’ve been following me, you may have seen a few of these shots before but I’ll explain them anyway:

Set 1: The characters Charlie, Hick, and Craig, in their original states on the left and their enhanced, final states on the right;

Set 2: A few WIP pictures of the performance space/club/thing I built;

Set 3: A bunch of test shots I took to see how the characters looked interacting, what they did naturally, and how they looked when I ~directed them. I used these pics to try and find my editing style for the story. I didn’t find the style I wanted. Clearly.

02.

I scrapped this idea because it never came together; I didn’t connect with the characters; I didn’t care about the storyline; I’m not done with my new save so I couldn’t ~comfortably start telling this story when the rest of the world was/is disordered; and on and on. The point is, I wasn’t feeling any of this. Oh! And I hate the whole vibe and time period and aesthetic irl; what on earth was I thinking writing about it?!

So. What was this going to be?

[[Under the cut because this is... so, so long. So long.]]

Charlie, Hick, and Craig were

going

to live in Del Sol Valley in my new save, in the Pinnacles neighborhood, which I was

going

to turn into a Laurel Canyon-style neighborhood. An entire community of would-be songwriters/musicians were

going

to live in the two smaller lots and commune with one another and be the New Guard colliding with the Old Guard; the huge mansion lot was

going

to house an aging former film-current soap actor confronting his mortality and also hating the living shit out of these hippies whose existence he took as a personal affront--I digress. Back to the “story.”

Charlie, Hick, and Craig met after each arrived in DSV separately and they vibed and they moved in together, all in a matter of, like, a week’s time. Charlie and Hick vibed especially. So much in common! Such poor little rich [kids]! Both came from pampered environments in which their family money and respective fathers’ connections allowed them to skate through life and to play at being musicians because--despite crying oppression at the hands of upper class WASP-dom--they'll always have safety nets to ensure they’ll always be okay. Charlotte Grant graduated from her all-girls prep school and put on a floppy hat and became Charlie Grant; Richard Hickey (lololol) ripped up his acceptance letter to Britechester and grew his hair out and hitchhiked and told people to call him “Hick.” They’ve lived parallel lives and “recognize” one another as soon as they meet. They have an electric connection, but neither will verbalize that. Above all, they... really want to sleep together.

Craig grew up working class and has no safety net; he just wants a little adventure before he gets a real job/grows up/gets married (his gf back home is off to college; they’re long-distance; it’s... not going to work). He’s a good guitar player and he’s a good songwriter and that’s it but maybe it’ll be more? What do they say about the lottery? Can’t win if you don’t play? Charlie and Hick want to be famous ~rule the world. Hick plays guitar well and tries to write songs but they’re shitty. Charlie is passively learning the keyboard and writes songs that are not... bad...? Some are... good?

Charlie and Hick--can you tell they eclipse Craig, yet?--have weird sexual chemistry and tension: they tease, they flirt, they taunt, they enjoy one another’s attention but they never so much as hug. They both have cruel streaks as only disconnected, spoiled, emotionally stunted bluebloods can: the torture of their relationship/non-relationship gets them off more than anything else could and that thrill drives much of their behaviors: bringing wanton strangers home for one night stands, each hoping the other is watching/overhearing, fighting about little things, acting like inappropriately close siblings, acting like strangers. Craig suffers their whims; Charlie and Hick aren’t just united in their toxicity and their dreams of fame, but in how they make Craig into a third wheel or a--well, punching bag is too strong a term. Charlie and Hick think they’re teasing their bff but you know how it is to be teased allllll the tiiiiiiime and how it can make your head spin when people who can’t get along with one another join forces--without even having to discuss it--to turn on you. Their relationship gets patched up, you’re hurting, they insist it’s not a big deal and even that you even liked it. We’re all friends. We’re all best friends omg.

But sometimes they have fun together. They have a lot of fun together. Sometimes it all is everything each dreamed it would be. DSV is a wonderland and their careers are happening and life is happening and they’re best friends. They’re soulmates for life.

The three work on music, perform at clubs. Craig is starting to come into his own as a man. I hate the term coming-of-age but in the background of the Charlie & Hick Show, Craig is maturing. He has to, because C&H are fuck-ups. They jeopardize scheduled performances. They don’t know how to talk to club owners. They’re not interested in paying their dues. They are unable (or unwilling) to promote themselves without being obnoxious attention whores. They don’t practice or help write songs. They don’t take care of the house. Hick is late with his rent. Charlie thinks she can flirt her way out of everything. Craig is also the only one of them who works; he has a day job at a print shop, gives guitar lessons on the side, and makes sure the three get gigs and don’t get evicted. The only thing C&H put consistent effort toward is making the social scene or finding a party or scoring drugs or getting laid. As the group’s local star(s) rise, their fates start to change course which increases the interpersonal tension. Hick’s fun-loving nature is starting to turn into a legit substance abuse problem and he’s picking fights with the wrong people and socially devolving, his arrogance and issues and general laziness rendering him unable to relate to others; Charlie is getting a lot of attention from older men In the Business, who have the money and connections to make her a solo star, which she is shrewdly considering; and Craig’s resentment toward his “friends” and disillusionment with the superficiality of DSV is making him rethink his motivation for coming west in the first place.

Oh, and Charlie and Hick--again, as their paths change and as their weird tension remains unresolved--continue to take their bullshit out on Craig and now it’s not funny anymore, it’s not cute, it’s not exciting, and neither is it when Hick ruins a show by being too stoned to perform and neither is it when Charlie brings unsavory characters home who trash the three’s equipment and neither is it when C&H steal Craig’s songs and perform without him at a gig they didn’t tell him about.

What I intended was that the story would at first seem to be The Charlie and Hick Show, all about them, as if we’re supposed to root for them, but ideally, through my ~deft hand 🙄 the reader 🙄🙄 was supposed to be like, Um... hold on-- until it eventually was quite obvious that these two--though human; though in situations we could understand and empathize with--were captured at a point in their lives when they were Super Toxic Assholes, and what you were watching all along was Craig as Hero.

So I had ideas, but I didn’t know how to fit them together and I didn’t want a really long story and I couldn’t--I just couldn’t figure it out. I do know that the end was going to be Craig screwing them like they’d been screwing him, a final middle finger with consequences. I know that he and Hick were going to have words and Hick was going to try and fight him (such a loser) and Charlie was going to throw a Hail Mary of like... trying to seduce (lol) Craig into staying omg I always had a thing for you/we’d be such a great team/I always thought we could ~be something ~together uwu bullshit like that. Was this true? Was this true in her own mind? I think I was going to set the story up so that if you reread, yeah, it could be true, but she’s so flirty and manipulative and socially savvy and used to getting what she wants that who knows what her real feelings ever are? Ultimately that would’ve been irrelevant bc Craig never looked at her that way and hates her and Hick now; good going guys. It’s worth noting, I guess, that when I put the group on a test lot, Charlie was super into Craig immediately, went right to him, stood close to him, was eager to make romantic overtures; she went 0 to 60 in an instant and as so far as is possible in this game they had chemistry, but Craig was not feeling the romance. And no one was feeling Hick.

Anyway, Craig was going to move on with his life and Charlie and Hick were going to learn nothing and blame him, ~the end.

And then, as I continued to play my save and maybe tell more stories, there would be Easter eggs, references to Charlie, Hick, and Craig older/in the future and where they went in life in the background of other, unrelated stories: Hick’s substance abuse problems and rehab stints and going by Richard again and his eventual moderate fame and eventual sobriety and attempted comeback and his bad relationships with his exes and children; Charlie’s legit fame + marriage to a producer + eventual fade away + moderate comeback + solid second or third marriage and bff relationship with her children 🙄🙄🙄 and her palatial house on the coast and now she exclusively wears white and ivory and pampers her dogs and eats raw (but drinks wine) because it “cured” her undiagnosed, unnamed “autoimmune disorder,” which she wrote a book about resulting in a semi-comeback but as a Famous Person and not a musician. Craig going to college and becoming a high school English teacher who plays in a local band on the weekends and who has a good marriage (not to the long distance gf) and nice kids, one of whom would eventually have her own story where she pursued musicianship with her dad, which got him back into his first passion but it was a qt father-daughter project and not An Attempt to Be Famous.

So. Idk. That’s what this all would’ve been. But it wasn’t, and it won’t be!

[judgement-free-sideblog]

Blood, tears and sea breeze

Warnings: ANGST, mental health issues, graphic depictions of violence, blood, cursing, mentions of sexual assault, mentions of sex, substance abuse.

Summary: The not so peaceful town of Broadchurch face dead again, while Alec Hardy continues his journey to redemption will this school teacher be the key to solve the mystery or just another victim of the ever watching evilness that seems to reside in the town.

Hi!!! Long time without posting, work has been crazy, so many painful things, but I have a tiny space of time and I wanted to think about something else for a change, new chapter, more questions and so close to the end. I hope everyone is safe and healthy. Please take care of yourselves, mental health is so important, specially in times like this. We will get out of this, until then I send you a lot of love and hugs from here.

Atte: a still tired but more hopeful doctor

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Chapter 18: Reality

The stinging pain across your cheek somehow brought you back to reality, a reality that you had comfortably numbed away the moment the handcuffs closed around your wrists.

But reality could be tricky sometimes, because the brief stolen kisses on his livingroom, the innocent way he touched your face, and the hunger look on his eyes every night you escape to sleep alone in his room were part of reality, even when now they feel ages away, and numbing all the pain, all the desperation even those perfect moments was the best solution you could find, because the way the kindness evaporate from his eyes when he told you "Miss Y/L/N, you are under arrest for the murder of Jonathan Norbury" and was replaced for an empty void and disappointment in his voice, was enough to keep you from wanting to be in this reality.

But you were back, the echo of Ash words were hurting you, because she was wrong, you love them too, and you would have never wanted any of that trouble for them, she was wrong for believing that you wanted any of this, but she was right to call you all thos hurtful things, even when you were not sure of what you did you felt like you deserved it.

And what did you do? Did you really slept with Charlie? Charlie who was more like an awkward little brother that anything to you, did you really order him to ... kill Jonathan? Even thinking about it was to hard to process, you tried search for your bracelet again knowing to well it wasn't there, but your hands were handcuffed to the table and the more you pull from them the more they hurt, and the cold steel started to mark your wrists.

And somehow that pain kept you from blacking out, the thought of Alec angry and sad because of you alone in his house again, Ashley's words, and Jonathan's body on the floor, and you started crying, letting the pain wash out from your eyes, and then as your wrist started to bleed from the handcuffs clarity followed, you were not screaming as last time, because there was something you could not shake off your mind, something that was almost ridiculous, like the idea of even touching Charlie, and the sudden realization make you wanted to laugh, but you keep it quiet, because the pretty officer that had brought you in returned with a laptop and you didn't want to appear more disturbed than they already thought you were.

***************************************************

"Sugar?" Miller said offering a small bowl to Ashley Langford, she seemed stressed and there were a few wrinkles around her eyes and her hair looked less shiny than usual, somehow Miller thought, she looked more human.

"Oh no, it's fine thank you" she said and kept looking at the door. " I'm sorry for the way I acted, is just that my parents are very old and having the police coming and trash the place was..." she put the tea aside and covered her face with her hands before starting to cry. "How did this happened? My brother is an asswhole but he would never... oh god what did he do?" She cried again and Miller offered her a paper tissue.

"Miss Langford I'm so sorry for the inconvenience that this process is causing you, but I can't tell you any details about the investigation, we are going to need you to cooperate with us and told us everything about your brother relationship with Y/N" she said and the woman rise her look puzzled.

"I'm sorry, but I already know, everybody knows" she said and Miller was shocked to hear that. "It's all on the internet, a friend of mine send it to me this morning, I called Charlie and he gave me a very confusing response and I run to my parents house to question him about them, but they had already arrested him" she said and took her phone out of her purse to show her.

They were not the explicit videos that Ramos had found, but they left clear that Y/N and Charlie were together and they had killed Jonathan.

"What did your brother said?" Miller asked when a quick search on her social media let her know that maybe all of Broadchurch had seen Y/N confession.

"I don't know, he sounded confused, angry, he said That count thinks that because that old jock is shagging her now she can dump me she is crazier than I thought, we'll see how much he likes her after this" she was convinced he meant some of the girls he often meet at bars, but the truth was clear to Ellie.

A couple nights before, in the middle of the night Alec had texted her to meet on the piers, on their usual spot. And after some crafted lie to Brian she was there, ready to fight whatever demon was torturing his mind, however what she found was different, he had a quiet smile, looking at the waves, and enjoying the sound of the ocean in the night, if she didn't knew him any better she would have swear that he was humming a song.

"Having a good night sir?" She asked and sited next to him.

"Miller, do you think I'm bad at my job?" He asked and she kept trying to guess his train of thought, a sixth sense told her she already knew what was happening, but she didn't want it to be truth.

"Yes, you are a nightmare, what is happening?" She said humoring him and he became all serious.

"Just answer the bloody question Ellie" the use of her name let her know it was serious so she looked at the ocean for a a long moment before speaking.

"You are not, you are capable, witted, yes you are a nightmare, but you are quite good at your job" She said honestly.

"Do you trust my judgment?" He asked then almost in a whisper.

"Without a doubt sir" she said, and before he could reply and make her part of something that was clearly against the rules she stoped him. "I trust you would never jeopardize an active investigation, and that whatever choice you make on your... personal... life, would be after a deep and conscious consideration" she said looking deeply into his eyes.

"Ellie..." He started but he knew he should keep it quiet, this was for the best. "Thank you detective Miller"

"You are welcome sir, and if I may... I hope you are happy, and have a good night" she said, meaning every word, even when the pain was pushing to make her cry. "I will change the patrol on your house tomorrow, to someone more trustworthy, you know for safety" she said and walked away from the piers, leaving him with that stupid smile on his face.

And now all she could think off was him alone in his house angry at himself and she had the need to run to his side, but no, there was only one way out of this for him, without damaging his image more, and that was with a conviction on Y/N, so she took Ashley Langford declaration and it was now certain for her that Charles had posted those videos, the how he found out Y/N was involved with a certain scottish man was still a mystery but she was determined to find out.

***************************************************

But I like you and your cock better than Jonathan's, Charlie the sound of your voice coming from the laptop saying those things almost made you throw up, but you kept watching You should kill him already and we can leave this place, don't you think big boy? It was you, there was no doubt about it, it was you in a very ordinary and nasty room, acting like a drunk idiot, rubbing your almost naked body on Charles, who had the creepiest smug on his face and you wanted to slap that dump expression out of him, this was degrading and humiliating, but you were focused, as you had been the last few days, everything was more clear than it had been in the last year and your mind was running fast trying to focus on one sole detail.

You have seen at least four different videos of yourself and the dates on them click on your head with dumb fights with Jonathan, headaches or days that everything seemed blurry, and for a solid minute your mind start deviating and consider the idea that maybe you were actually guilty, that maybe this semi naked idiot was actually you, but before that ridiculous idea could consume you another stupid phrase out of Charlie's mouth made DC Ramos blush and made you remember something as DC Harford looked careful at you.

The last time you had blushed was a few days ago in Alec's couch, once you came back from the cliff and he turned up the heat since the both of you were wet from the rain that had made you run inside, kissing him had been a childish decision, and he kissing you back was just as bad, but now you were sitting on the couch covered with a blanket and holding a cup of tea, glad that Daze was god knows where and you could talk like adults.

"We shouldn't" you started, "I want to, I really do, but you are still leading the case, and I can't lie, and if someone asks me are you sleeping with detective Hardy I will say yes, and ..." You blush at the look he gave you and quickly hide your face away from his smile.

"Fine, you should lock your door tonight then" he said jokingly with a playful grin and for a moment you wonder were have this man been all this time.

"Sure detective, let's make dinner, I'm starving" you said and kissed him again, thinking at the moment that everything was alright, but now as agent Ramos looked uncomfortable away from you the little bubble of happiness was finally burst, and once again that anger make your memories come back to you the image of the night club cleared, the toothy grin of the man in the red shirt, finally had a name, and things became more and more focused and you looked up to DC Harford.

"Enough" You said a little more aggressive than expected, but they stopped looking at you with petty on their eyes if just for a moment. "I seen enough, what do you want to know?"

***************************************************

"Look everyone in Broadchurch is talking about you" Miller started showing Charles her phone with the edited videos "Are you going to keep pretending that you had nothing to do with this or are you finally going to talk?" She said and the authority on her voice irritated him.

"Where is the guy?" He asked looking at the empty chair next to her, but he had abandoned the erratic tone, and was talking quietly.

"In the other room talking to your girlfriend here" she said pointing at the pictures. "Whom I think will say everything so I will recomend you to start talking"

"No the little eye candy, the other one, the old one" he said and smiled when she change her stoic look. "I liked the guy, seems tough" he said with honesty and she repressed the impulse to sigh in relief.

"He is not working today" she said and tried to regain her pose. "He is loosing all the fun".

"Oh sad, because this is so entertaining" he said sarcastically "What do you expect me to say? I post them, she is suppose to be mourning, and sad, but no, the little cunt is so happy walking holding hands with some arse, well what can I expect right? She cheated on Jonathan, why wouldn't she cheat on me too" he said it upset at the thought of the woman seeing another men, and the whole situation became ridiculous to Miller, and at the same time something was not coming together.

"Did you saw her with someone else?" She asked cautiously, knowing too well that until the las four hours she had been enclosed in Hardy's house and if she ever leave his place was with him.

"I did, a couple days ago, acting like Jonathan was nothing to her, like I was nothing" He said, and she desperately needed to know if he was lying, because if he meant Alec he would have said it since the beginning, but if he meant someone else, who? Unless... maybe he was fabricating the whole thing.

"How was him?" She asked and without hesitation she add "I mean she has a type, Jonathan, you... another how did you call agent Ramos? Eye candy"

"Yeah" he said smiling sardonically "Some bloke, you know tall, black hair, I could take him down" it sounded rehearsed, and it became clear he was lying when he nervously add "Clean shaved bastard"

She was about to say something else when the door was opened and a nervous Harford came inside.

"I'm sorry to bother you, but we need you" she said and Miller followed her outside leaving a puzzled Charlie behind.

"What happened?" She asked and Katie looked at her feet uncomfortable "She still hasn't talked?"

"No, that's the problem, she talks but she says she doesn't remember anything..." she started

"Well she make this idiot kill her fiance I'm not surprised she wants to pretend it didn't happen" Miller say spiteful.

"No that's not the problem, she says she will confess, but only to you" she said and Miller was surprised to hear that.

"Absolutely no" she said calmly.

"I say that and she went silent again" I try everything, we even show her how those videos are running through all the town, by the way how the fuck that happened?" She said and show her a link send to her by her dad. "But she keeps asking for you"

Ellie remembered the last time she walked inside that particular interrogation room, a part of her wanted answers, but she feared she would act up against her, and ruin the case as she have done all those years ago, but no, Haedy needed her to fix this, so she make up her mind an asked Katie to leave her alone inside.

***************************************************

"Ellie" you said once she was sitted in front of you, "it may be in our best interest if you gave me 5 minutes before turning on that thing" you said looking at the tape recorder that Harford had turned off.

"Is Detective Miller, and why would I listen to you?" She said and her tone was not only dry and professional but also rude at some point.

"Because if you care about Alec as much as I do you may want to hear what I have to say first" you said and she raised her hand and you prepared to feel the pain in your face again but she only put the pictures of Jonathan's body and screenshots from the filthy videos in front of you.

"This is caring for him?" She said and this time was no longer any professionalism on her voice. "You have five minutes" she said finally.

"I didn't sleep with him" you said and she gave you an incredulous look "Alec," you said exasperated "I thought is better to let that out in the open, nothing happened, so he is safe on that end... and I have no intention of talking to a lawyer so you can rest" you said and her expression softened a little "where is he?" You couldn't help but ask.

"Alone in his house, probably wondering why did he trusted you" she spat at you "4 and a half minutes"

"Fine, I don't remember anything of this, ok? Completely blank, but I'm not an idiot I know how that sounds, and I won't play the victim, I will confess, to what is here to whatever agent Harford needs to put Charlie on jail, and me if I have to"

"And how are you so sure about Langford being guilty?" She asked.

"Because I remember now, the day I found him like this" you said pointing at the picture, I took the bus home and Charles was there, he put him there" you said since the images were flowing back to your mind, and you remembered, "I start screaming for help when I saw him, he said something about this being what I wanted, what I asked him to do all the time, and I fight him to run away and then I just remember his hand in my neck and the taste of something bitter he force down my throat and before everything went black again I saw him put my ring on his hand" you said and Ellie's eyes opened up drastically.

"The broken ring?" She said quietly.

"Yes, the next thing I remember was being in the front door reading Jonathan's letter, getting inside and freaking out over his body" you said very aware of how unrealistic all that sounded but she had to listen to you "He posted all this crap, but nothing about the parking lot, and I'm sure I fight that time, and this person that I don't remember is willing, drunk or drugged with a split personality or whatever, but she appeared to be ok with what is happening, then why will I need to scream, and run and fight on that car? What was different then, why did he needed to make a show out of Jonathan's dead, if he was so sure I wanted this, why did he have to make it all this big?" you said aware of the way that sounded but for some reason something on her eyes said she might believe you.

"I have no interest in understanding the train of thought of a lunatic" She Miller said trying to hide her own concerns "What is your point?"

"You are bsolutely right, but this was post right after we..." start dating? That sounded childish, we kiss? Sure Y/N rub it on her face "All I can think is that this is not over, and I can't let whatever else is coming affect Alec, so I'll confess so this ends quickly, but I need you to make sure he doesn't get dragged into this, I can't have that on me"

"Your time is up" she said and put out the note pad where you should write the declaration, completely ignoring your words.

"Ok, where should I start?" You said resigned.

"You are really going to confess?" She asked surprised and didn't turn the device on yet "why? If you really think there is more to it than the evidence, then why?"

"No matter how, I'm responsible for his dead, I might as well start paying, also this way I can make sure Alec's reputation and Ashley's life doesn't get more damaged for my mistakes" you said firmly.

"You really care about him huh?" She said and gave you a half smile. "I think I know exactly where you should start" she said and started writing instructions on the notepad, before you start speaking.

Tag list:

@allonsymexgirl @laciesaito @tf18unipups @dazedkrosupreme @timey-wimey-lovi @coffees-and-constellations @ladyaziraphale @acid-gurkerl @moonuvert @tennantious

[wroughtbetwixtfanfic]

Stamped Into Memory, Ch 5.

Fandom: The Society.

Summary: Campbell’s just trying to survive in the new world. He knows he can make it– it’s everyone else he’s worried about.

Rating: Mature.

Tags: Major Character Death, Canon Divergence, Mental Health Issues, Family Issues, Substance Abuse, Slow Burn, Dubcon Kissing, Romantic Friendship, Mild Sexual Content, Hurt/Comfort, Unhealthy Relationships, Canonical Character Death, Fix-It, implied animal death, the dog lives, Antisocial Personality Disorder, ASPD, Campbell has mild ASPD and is actively trying to not be awful

Word Count: 5835

Ch 1 || Ch 2 || CH3 || Ch 4 || AO3

The door was open when Campbell arrived home. He rushed in, adrenaline surging through him for a split second as he imagined all sorts of terrible things, but then he heard Elle's voice coming from the kitchen. Calm. Happy, even. Campbell slowed down, rounding the corner with curiosity instead of that ready-to-fight reaction.

Elle was sitting on the floor with the dog. Not just any dog, but that dog from the night Cassandra died. The dog looked at him with intense amber eyes as Elle ruffled his fur. "Let's get you all fixed up, okay?" "Hey," Campbell said as he came into the room. He tried to keep his tone casual, more for Elle's sake than the sake of the dog, but he couldn't help but stare back. "Who's this?" "Uhm, he's a stray. He showed up in our yard." "I've seen him around town." "Yeah, you mentioned hearing a dog that night, right?" "I did." Peeking up at him, Elle frowned. Campbell had tried hard to keep his expression blank, but either that had tipped her off, or he hadn't tried hard enough; she suddenly seemed nervous. "I don't think anybody's been looking after him. His paw is hurt. I was thinking, maybe..." She looked back at the dog. "I'm sorry, I know this is your house, and I should have asked before bringing him in." Campbell shook his head and went to the fridge to get some cold water. "No, it's okay. It's just strange he showed up here." "I can take him to someone else." "You don't have to do that, really." He knew how hard things had been on her lately, and that she still didn't have many people she was close to in town. The dog was just a dog, right? It's not like they were some omen of doom or anything. "Maybe it's good for you to have a friend around." "He seems like a really good dog. He's super sweet." "What are you gonna name him?" "He doesn't have a collar, but I mean, he kinda looks like a Charlie. Don't you think?" Elle leaned against Campbell as he came over and kissed her hair. "Is that silly?" "It's whatever you want. Hi, Charlie." He bent down and offered his hand to the dog. Charlie sniffed his fingers, then gave a tailwag. Campbell scritched the dog behind the ears, glancing at the dog's paw; it was bloodied, and definitely painful, like maybe another animal got a hold of it. Or, maybe, like Charlie had gotten tangled in something sharp. Poor thing. "Do you wanna be my dog?" Elle cooed at Charlie. "Let's get that paw fixed up." "Do you need help?" "Oh, maybe. I just wanted to wash him." The dog followed them upstairs and hopped into the tub, easy as pie. Campbell brought up the dishsoap and some towels; he'd have to go find Allie at dinner and see if she knew where they could get some pet supplies. Charlie held still while Elle washed him, and Campbell helped hold him still while Elle wrapped the dog's paw. "I've always wanted a dog," Elle sighed as she cooked some rice and frozen meat scraps to feed Charlie. The dog was laying at her feet. Cute. "Did you ever have any pets growing up?" Campbell winced at the memory of Oliver. "No. Sam had a bird, but I never had any pets of my own. Dogs are cool, though." "Mm. Looks like Charlie's being a good boy." "He is. I wonder where he came from, though. Cassandra told me everyone's pets were gone. It's kind of weird he's just... here." "Yeah, it is a little weird. Maybe someone will recognize him." "Maybe." Doubtfully. Campbell had never seen the dog before they'd arrived at West Ham 2.0, and when Campbell woke in the middle of the night, Charlie had his front paws on the windowsill. He was staring out the window and into the night, his body and tail stiff. A soft, low growl issues from his throat. When Campbell got up and went to the window, there was no one outside. No one that Campbell could see. A cold feeling went up Campbell's spine, and he never quite got back to sleep. His phone pinged softly around seven, a few hours after dawn. Elle was already gone for work, and Charlie was laying across his leg, grumbling as Campbell wiggled free. Campbell read the text on his phone over and over before getting up and throwing on pants. He tripped down the stairs and went into Harry's room, prodding him awake. "You need to get dressed." "Hnngh? Why?" "They're holding a meeting at the church. Greg Dewey was arrested for Cassandra's murder." Campbell felt the world spin slightly as Harry's expression immediately fell in shame. "You knew." "Since yesterday." "How did you know? How did Allie find out?" "Because he told me. Bragged about it." Harry sunk into his blankets as Campbell began to curse. "I went and told Kelly. She told Allie and the others." "And you didn't think I deserved to know this?" "Cam, I was worried that if I told you, you'd have gone and killed him yourself. I wanted to go to someone less homicidal." It was the truth. That didn't mean Campbell wanted to hear it. "Goddamn it." "Hey." Harry slipped out of bed and lightly curled his arms around Campbell as Campbell began to pace. "Hey. I'll go with you, okay? We'll meet Elle there. It's going to be okay." They shouldn't have been that close, but Campbell held still, slowing his breathing; Harry's scent, day old Axe deodorant and coffee, sapped away all the poison pooling on Campbell's tongue. This wasn't some threat he needed to attack. This was Harry. Fucked up Harry, who loved Campbell and was struggling with his own shit. Campbell sighed and pulled away, going back to his room to get ready. A quick text to Elle confirmed that she got the news, too, and would save them a seat. By the time they got there, though, the church was packed. Elle was sitting next to Helena. She gave Campbell a helpless look; Helena was talking to her about something, but there was definitely no room left anywhere else for three people. They were lucky enough to find a spot where he and Harry could sit together. Campbell put a hand lightly on Harry's hip, directing him to the small open spot; he quickly yanked his hand back when Harry shot him a questioning glance. Right. Little shit like that could start rumors. Not that anyone was looking at them. Allie stood at the front of the church, her face shuttered and her body drawn in on itself. Once it seemed like everyone was seated, she cleared her throat. A silence fell over the church. "Hey, everyone. I just... I'll keep it brief. I just wanna give you an update on everything. Uhm, everything that's happened." She glanced around the church, shifting her weight. Nervous. "There was an arrest this morning. Greg Dewey. We're keeping him in an undisclosed location for now, until we can figure out what happened, and if there was anyone else involved." The gathered mass erupted into chatter. Allie left the church fast, before Campbell could even try to speak to her. Not taking any questions, then. It wasn't any wonder. Even on her way out, people were clamoring for more information. Gossipers. Campbell rolled his eyes and went to find Elle; she headed back to work, and they headed back home to get ready for their own shifts. Grizz, luckily, managed to convince Luke and Clark to let Campbell into the store for dog food. It's not like anyone else was using it. Like Campbell had thought, the only dog in town was their strange new roommate. At least Charlie had stopped hovering at the window in the dead of night. It made it easier to live with him, and not suspect he was some sort of inter-dimensional being sent to destroy them all. Harry, on the other hand, was a wreck that night. After they'd come home from dinner and their work shift, when Elle was in the shower, he came begging for some of Campbell's stash. "I haven't asked you for anything in a long time," Harry reasoned. "Can't I just get something for tonight?" Campbell raised an eyebrow. "Because you've been trying to get clean, or because you've been working through your private hoard?" "You know I'm not clean. But I need something after all this shit with Dewey. Something stronger. I just... I just need to sleep." "You need to get off the drugs and onto something useful." "Look, we can have an intervention tomorrow, if that's what you want to do." "Ugh." Campbell went and fished out a decent sized does of a pill that would, or should, knock Harry out for a while. "Here. Go get some sleep." "Campbell, this is one pill. I might as well just go to the fucking pharmacy myself." Resting his chin on his hand, Campbell smiled the smile of a fox that had raided the henhouse. "I think you'll find the cupboards a little bare. Look. You need to sleep? This will help you sleep." "I know how much I need, this isn't enough." "It'll have to be." "Cam--" "We need to be smart," Campbell cut in. He could see that Harry was freaking out. He was starting to go into withdrawal, like Campbell knew he would, because the supplies wouldn't last forever no matter how careful people were. "Harry, you need to be smarter than this." Harry growled. "I'm not a fucking child." "Then don't act like one. This isn't going to fix what's going on up in your head, okay? Coke, all those painkillers, alcohol. It's a band aid. You need help." Taking the pill, Harry slumped his shoulders in defeat. "It's not like this is how I imagined my life going, you know. I was gonna do things. Be somebody." "Depression is a bitch." "I'm not depressed." Harry bit his lip when Campbell stared at him. "Well, I mean... I just assumed it was my own fault." "Because that's what all our champagne and caviar parents say to sweep shit under the rug, so they don't have to deal with it. Take your pill and go to bed. We'll figure something out in the morning." Harry hummed a little sound of agreement and shuffled off downstairs. Campbell flopped back on the bed, his head full of too many thoughts. How could he not have seen it in Dewey? Why did he do it? And now, he was back to worrying about Harry, along with everything else. How was he supposed to keep Harry from crashing? Elle came in soon after, with Charlie at her heels; she seemed distracted, but weren't they all? It had been a long, strange sort of day. Campbell was brushing his teeth while Elle tidied up her side of the bathroom. "Fuck, I can't believe that little shit had it in him. Can you? I mean I, I..." He trailed off for a moment and fluttered his hands in the air. It didn't make sense. "I didn't see it coming, out of all the people Harry had at that party." "Harry's party?" "Harry said some shit about Cassandra before prom at his party, and we gave a list of the suspects to Gordie, but nothing came of it until now." "Did he ever tell you what he said?" "I don't think he even knows what he said. Drunk fucking rambling. Maybe people will finally stop whispering and giving me those fucking 'you killed Cassandra' looks." "It's not like there's any evidence tying you to it now." Now. Campbell rinsed off his toothbrush and turned, trying to read the expression on Elle's face. She was brushing her hair and didn't seem aware of any sort of offense, but Campbell knew what he'd heard. "Do you still think I'm involved?" "No, of course not." "Are you sure?" "Why would I?" Elle looked over at him. "I just meant, in case anyone got suspicious. They can't possibly pin it on you." Campbell knew there was little point in pressing the matter. If Elle didn't believe him, why would she be sleeping with him? Or even living there still? At some point, paranoia was just that. Paranoia. He was just being jumpy because of the arrest. Once things were settled, maybe they could all just move on. But how would things even be settled? He went to sleep that night, imagining all the ways he would end that little bastard, if he could. Was Allie dreaming of the same things? The next morning, they all headed out to see the new work list. Elle, morning inventory check. Campbell, morning clean-up after breakfast. Harry, evening clean-up after dinner... again. They all sighed and headed out, Elle towards the stores and Campbell to the cafeteria, while Harry headed home. Campbell was used to working with Harry. If Harry was home alone, Campbell couldn't keep an eye on him-- not that Campbell ever stopped Harry from his bad habits, but Harry had been having a rougher time. What if he did something foolish, when no one was home to stop him? But Harry was alive when they got home that night, and the night after. The only ones who seemed to have done something foolish were Allie and her cronies; when everyone was called back to the church for Dewey's trial, the first thing Campbell noticed was that Dewey had been bruised up. Oh, that wouldn't go over well at all. Who had done it? Surely not Grizz. Probably not Luke. But Clark, who sat right behind Dewey and was practically breathing down his neck? Yeah, that guy was capable. Campbell wasn't upset. He was jealous. What he wouldn't give to be able to wrap his hands around that scrawny fucking neck and-- "Sorry I'm late," Harry mumbled as he slid into the booth behind Campbell and Elle. He leaned forward to whisper to them. "What's going on?" Elle shrugged. "You haven't missed much. We're just waiting for Allie." "Are you okay?" Campbell asked, turning to look at Harry. "Yeah, just a little slow this morning." Harry looked haggard, washed out, and his hands were shaking. But before Campbell could question him, a hush fell over the room. Allie was sitting at a table at the front of the room, and a group of people were sitting off to the side-- a jury, but who selected them? Through what process? Allie hadn't said anything about what was happening or how, not to him or anyone he knew. Gordie, of course, was on the prosecution's side. Helena was sitting next to Dewey. It all seemed so contrived. Like some sort of play. Either they had enough evidence or they didn't. Pretending to be a fair, balanced court was laughable. Courts weren't even fair and balanced in the real world, with trained adults. Allie offered a sort of smile, but it wasn't comforting in any way. "A week before my sister died, uhm, I was complaining about how wild it was that we had to take care of everything. You know, everything was our decision. And she was like, really? Alexander the Great conquered the whole world when he was our age." She sniffled. "Which was kind of annoying of her." Campbell couldn't help but sneer. Of course. Had to have one last dig, right? "Well," Allie continued, "we own it all now. The good and the bad." And that much was the truth. Campbell leaned back in the pew as Gordie presented his evidence-- the bullets they pulled from Cassandra's body, and the gun they had found in Dewey's possession. The gun used the same bullets. Helena threw some bullshit at Gordie-- oh, but could they be sure it was the same gun-- but Gordie held his ground. The jury passed the bullets around among them, murmuring things Campbell couldn't hear. "Another thing," Helena said as she went to sit back down. "Dewey has bruises all over him." Dewey whined before Allie could reply. "Yeah, they fucking beat me." The crowd began to buzz, and Allie raised her voice to drown them all out. "We had a problem guarding him. It won't happen again." "You arrest him, you beat him up." "It's not relevant." Helena raised her eyebrows. The noise of the crowd increased, becoming angry; Campbell could hear some teens whispering questioning remarks. Wrong move, Allie, and Helena could tell. "It's not relevant how the people in charge of this prosecution behaved?" "It was a mistake. It has nothing to do with whether he's guilty or not." Allie's tone went steely. "Move on." Glancing around the church, Helena shrugged. "We'd like to call Harry Bingham to the stand," she called out. Harry inhaled sharply behind Campbell, but stood and headed up to the front of the room without prompting. He'd barely sat down in the empty chair provided when Helena launched into him. "According to witnesses, you said that Dewey confessed to you. Can you clarify?" "We were at the coffee shop, on break." Harry glanced at Campbell, who tipped his chin up just a little. Say it. "We were just talking, talking shit. Whatever. And he basically just came out and said it, that he killed her." Dewey jumped up from his chair. "You fucking asshole!" Helena paused as Clark and Allie began to shout at Dewey, who was eventually subdued and put back in his chair. Frowning, she turned back to Harry. "You were saying?" Harry looked down at his hands. "He had this creepy smile, like he was proud of himself. He said that someone had to show her who was boss, and that whoever did it was a hero." "Is that when he confessed?" "Basically, yeah." "Basically?" Helena asked, crossing her arms. "Yeah." "Did he actually say he'd killed her? In those exact words?" "Not those exact words, but that's what he fucking meant." "Why? Why would he tell you? Why would he confess to you?" For a long time, Harry didn't respond. He opened his mouth and closed it again, biting his lip and blinking fast. He looked guilty. There was no way around that. "He thought it'd make me happy." "Happy?" "That Cassandra was dead." "Why would he think that?" "Because we were rivals in high school. And because I was talking shit about her," Harry admitted, causing a ripple of hushed conversation to rise among the jury. Allie looked furious. "I know it was a dick move, but I was drunk and pissed off because Kelly had dumped me. I didn't mean it." Helena gestured to Harry as she stepped closer to the jury. "Let's be clear about this. Harry Bingham confessed that he made disparaging remarks about Cassandra Pressman, and that night, she was dead." Harry stood up. "Don't put this on me! Look, he told me that he got me the peace and quiet that I wanted, and that he deserved a thank you. I might be a piece of shit, but he's the killer." "Did anyone else hear this?" "No, but--" Helena cut Harry off. "So, it's your word against his. Someone with no history of violence, against someone who hated her." Shrugging, she returned to her seat next to Dewey. "Maybe you put the gun in his house. Maybe you set him up." "That's not what happened." "Maybe you're lying." "Yeah, because I look so much better right now," Harry scoffed. "I didn't want to do this, you know. I didn't want to be here. I came here because I wanted to try and do the right thing." After a few more questions, Harry was dismissed; he darted back to his seat, and when Allie allowed everyone to leave, he was one of the first people out the door. The walk home was quiet. Elle kept glancing between them, and Campbell knew she had something on her mind, but he was too tired to ask. If she couldn't be bothered to just ask, well, that was her problem. Campbell was more worried about Harry, who was shaking by the time they got home; he didn't talk for a long time, and he silently left to go to work, but he curled up next to Campbell on the sofa that night while Elle was taking Charlie for a walk. "You know I didn't do anything, right?" Campbell pursed his lips. "I know you didn't do anything to Cassandra, but it's not me you have to convince. I don't see how they could suspect anyone but Dewey, considering they have the actual goddamn gun." "If they try and pin this on me..." "I won't let them. I promise." Harry burrowed his face into one of the sofa pillows. "This is all so fucked up." He dragged himself off the sofa and slugged his way towards his room. "I'm gonna clean the kitchen and go to bed. Maybe things will be less shit in the morning." It was unlikely. Campbell kept his opinion to himself, though, and went to help. They worked in silence, both of them lost in their own thoughts; Harry wandered off to take a shower once they were almost done, and Campbell stayed to sweep the floors. He'd just finished when Elle and the dog came home. Elle wiped off Charlie's paws, taking her shoes off at the door. "Getting in some stress relief?" "Yeah. Kinda worried about Helena and her bullshit interrogation." "I mean, she's a nice person. I'm sure she's just doing her job." "Really doubt her job is trying to pawn a murder off on my best friend," Campbell muttered. "The jury better not fall for that shit. Harry doesn't even like guns." Elle busied herself with Charlie, eyebrows furrowed. "What do you think they're gonna do? Once they decide who did it?" "I don't know. Lock them up, I guess. Either that, or kill them." "I'm going to take a bath," Elle said suddenly. She  came over and gave Campbell a quick kiss on the cheek. "Is it okay if Charlie's on the bed?" Campbell ruffled the fur on the dog's head. "Sure. I don't care about a little dog fur." Nodding, Elle grabbed Charlie's collar and took him upstairs with her. Campbell sighed, going back to cleaning the spots Harry had missed. Helena was the last person he expected Elle to befriend; Helena was smart, but religious, conservative, and more than a little judgmental. It seemed an odd choice. She also pointedly went after Harry. Was there something going on with Elle and Harry that he'd missed? Of course, Campbell had never told Elle about the kiss, because it had been a one time thing and Harry knew better than to try again. Was it wrong? Probably, but Campbell didn't want to cause worry over nothing, though... Did she somehow know? Was that why she seemed unconcerned about Helena's behavior? Campbell looked up from scrubbing the sink as Charlie trotted down the stairs and stopped at the back door. "Hey, boy. What's up? Didn't you just go out?" Charlie let out a long, low whine, staring at the doorknob. Campbell shrugged and went to the door. Maybe the dog had tanked up on too much water, or something. He slipped on his shoes, opened the door, and stepped out onto the porch. Charlie stood at his side, looking out into the woods. Campbell tensed as Charlie let out a growl. "Charlie? What is it?" Campbell asked. The dog bristled. Something in the air felt wrong. Cold. "Charlie? Hey, let's go back inside." But Charlie surged forward, taking off before Campbell could grab his collar. The dog charged into the woods, barking and snarling. Campbell grabbed a flashlight off the kitchen counter and went after Charlie; he wasn't going to let the dog face whatever was out there on his own. Campbell heard barking, but he didn't see Charlie anywhere in the thick trees. Fuck. He tried to follow the sound. He didn't call out Charlie's name. The dog wasn't going to mind him, and it'd just announce his presence. For some reason, that seemed like a bad, bad idea. A yelp came from up ahead, close by, and the barking stopped. Campbell jogged a few paces and swung his light around, but there was nothing. Campbell put his hand down on a large rock as he caught his breath. He yanked his hand back as he felt something hot, wet; the flashlight revealed a thick red liquid, and a lot of it. Blood. Campbell felt his stomach heave, but he didn't have time to process what was happening. He heard a twig snap up ahead, and something moved in the beam of the flashlight. Campbell bolted back towards the house, running fast enough that his lungs and legs felt like they were on fire. He didn't stop until he was inside, and had the doors and windows locked. He rubbed his hands on his pants without thinking, then cursed. He couldn't tell Elle about finding blood. She would be devastated. And besides, maybe Charlie had caught a rabbit, and it was the damn dog he'd heard moving out there in the trees. Campbell figured they could wait a couple days. If Charlie didn't show back up, then he could tell Elle about the blood. At least it'd give Charlie a chance to show back up. Upstairs, he stripped out of his clothes and shoved them a ways under his bed. He'd deal with that later. Campbell put on new clothes, sucking in slow breaths and trying to stop himself from thinking about it all too much. He went back downstairs, peering out the windows. Nothing, dog or otherwise. He sighed and turned on the hot water, squeezing soap on his hands and scrubbing the little bit of dried blood left on them. As much as he tried to forget about it, he kept replaying that yelp in his mind, and the shadow that had darted in front of the flashlight. What could it have been? A coyote? Wolf? Bear? Elle came down the stairs a few minutes later, just as Campbell had finished getting the blood off of his hands. "Where's Charlie? I can't find him anywhere." "I don't know." Campbell met her gaze. God, she was already worried. He had to give her some sort of truth. "I took him out because he was crying at the door, and he just took off into the woods." "What happened?" "It looked like he spotted a rabbit or something." "I need to go--" Campbell grabbed Elle by the shoulders as she began to reach for her jacket. "Hey, no. It's super dark out there right now, and we won't be able to see snakes or anything. I'll put some food out, see if that'll work. If not, I'll go look for him in the morning. He won't go far." Elle looked out the window and frowned. "Yeah, I guess you're right." "I'm sorry." Campbell kissed her hair. "I know how much you love Charlie. I'll see if I can get some people to come out to the woods with me and help me look." Neither of them slept well that night. Elle tossed and turned, and Campbell kept waking up at every little creak and groan of the house. Not because he was afraid-- he wasn't scared, so much as hyperaware of the reality that there could be other people or animals out there that they hadn't seen before. And if it was a person, well, no one ever hides in the woods for a good reason. Charlie wasn't back by morning. There wasn't any sign of him. Harry, Sam, and Grizz all agreed to help him look for the dog, but after a couple hours of combing the woods and calling for him, there was nothing. Campbell couldn't even find the area where there had been blood. It was like it had never even happened. The search was cut even shorter by a text buzzing all their phones. Allie, summoning the town to the church. The jury had apparently reached it's verdict already. "We could keep looking after," Sam offered. "Or even put up posters around town. Someone must know where he is." Campbell sighed. "Yeah. Thanks." Sam rested a hand on Campbell's back, and Campbell let him. It was a heavy day for them both, and Allie. Sam hadn't really offered his opinion of Dewey and the accusations against him, but then whey got to the church, Campbell could see the smallest spark of hatred in Sam's eyes. Campbell gave Sam's shoulder a little squeeze of encouragement, before they separated and went to sit with their own groups. Harry and Elle were already sitting, and he squeezed into the aisle seat next to them just as Allie began to speak. "Do you have a verdict?" she asked the jury. One of the girls nodded. "You want to...?" The girl stood, clasping her hands tightly in front of her and looking down on the ground. Her voice trembled as she spoke. "Guilty. We find him guilty." A chorus of cheers went up through the church. Allie smiled, ever so briefly before she dropped the mask back down over her face. "Thank you to the jury for doing its job. Now it's up for me to decide his sentence." Allie stood. "It could take a while. Guards, will you take him back to his cell?" Clark grabbed Dewey, and they were dragging him off when Dewey began to shout. Allie held up her hand, stopping them. "Everyone, can you come back and sit? Dewey has something to say." Dewey was brought back, and he faced his audience. For a moment, he didn't say anything, but then he spat on the floor and grinned. "Cassandra was a fucking bitch. So is her sister and her black boyfriend that makes all the rules." People began to shout him down, but Dewey just yelled back louder. "So are all the women here. Fucking bitches who won't give us the time of day, who think we owe them everything? I killed Cassandra for everyone because she had it coming." Campbell began to stand. "Piece of fucking--" Harry grabbed Campbell's waist and tugged him back down, whispering. "Don't. Not like this." He glared at Dewey. "Even if the little fuckstain deserves it." Dewey must have heard, somehow, because his gaze landed directly on Harry. "On the night of prom, we were all at Harry's house, and he said he wished she was dead." "Fuck you!" Harry growled as the crowd turned to stare at them. "I told you all I said things I didn't mean. I was drunk, I barely remember what I said." Laughing, Dewey pointed at Harry. "You know what you did. Everyone there knows what you said." His grin sharpened as he turned his finger to Campbell. "And Campbell helped me plan it. He was there, he planned the whole thing." "What?" Campbell felt his blood drain from his face. He planned the whole thing. Surely no one would believe Dewey? But everyone was giving him that terrible look, that one that said I knew it. Campbell stood and this time, Harry didn't try to stop him when he began to move towards Dewey. "He's a fucking liar, and a murderer. I don't have to sit here and take this." Allie barked out an order. "Get back to your seat." Grizz stepped between him and the scumbag, his voice low. "Don't, Campbell." "Get the fuck out of my way." "Stand. Down." Campbell wanted to punch Grizz, but he kept his hands at his side, curled into fists but still. "Allie," he called out as he looked to his cousin. She knew how close they'd been. She must have known. "You know I didn't do it. I wouldn't have." "What do you want us to do?" Clark asked, suddenly behind Campbell. Allie looked Campbell up and down, her face completely blank. Empty. Campbell could read just about any face, but not this time. Her tone was just as distant. "Arrest him." Campbell gaped at Allie as the crowd erupted into jeers and hollered insults. They'd had their difference, but throwing him to the wolves? "You can't be serious." Allie just stared him down, silent as the guard grabbed him and began hauling him out of the church. He could hear Harry's voice in the crowd, protesting, and caught a brief glimpse of Elle-- pale, shocked-- before Allie's cronies dragged him out the doors. Campbell struggled at first, mostly from instinct, but then Grizz grasped his shoulder and leaned closer. "Settle down. We'll figure this out." And Campbell grit his teeth, forcing himself to relax. Grizz snapped something at Jason and Clark, who each had one of Campbell's arms; they eased their grip and stopped, giving Campbell time to get his feet under him and walk instead of being keelhauled like a traitorous sailor at sea. They headed towards a black SUV, and Jason shoved Campbell in the back between him and Grizz. Clark and Luke took the front seat. "I didn't do it," Campbell said to Grizz. "The little dickweed is setting me up." Grizz shook his head. "I know, but this is how it has to be until we can figure out what's going on. Just take it easy. Once we talk to Allie, we can get this cleared up." "She hates me, and you know it." "Yeah, but I don't. Sam doesn't. We can make a case." Campbell leaned his head back against the seat. Fuck. He took long, slow breaths as they drove to Allie's house; he didn't understand why they weren't using the cells in the police station on the outside of town, where the cop car they used for Fugitive came from, but he wouldn't ask. Best to not give them ideas. He didn't even complain when they tossed him in the upstairs bedroom, handcuffing him to the radiator. Patience, Cassandra's voice murmured in his mind. Patience. Grizz, more than anything, looked disturbed. He ran his hand through his hair and looked around the room, as if the answer would be there somewhere. "If you need anything, I'll be in the hall outside, okay?" "Yeah, whatever." The door clicked shut as Grizz left, and Campbell closed his eyes. He was innocent. There was no evidence tying him to anything. He'd had Cassandra's blood on his clothes from checking her pulse, but Elle had gotten rid of those. No one had seen him. He didn't have any guns of any sort, his prints weren't on anything. Campbell was many things, but he wasn't a murderer, and surely Allie would come to her senses and realize that. All he had to do was wait.

[monstaxvibes]

Nicotine (2)

pairing: changkyun x reader

genre: teenage angst, bad boy au, drama

count: 1.6K

warnings: underage substance abuse, slight addiction, toxic relationship, violence, ADULT LANGUAGE

Inspired by the lyrics to the song Nicotine by Panic! At The Disco, Attention by Charlie Puth and the UK tv show, Skins.

******TRIGGER WARNING******

Includes drug abuse, underage intoxication, addiction, violence, and cursing. If you are triggered or not comfortable with these subjects, please DO NOT READ!

Also includes toxic relationships! If you or anyone you know is in a dangerous and toxic relationship, please reach out for professional help!

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In the smokey and strobe light haze, Changkyun watches her from across the room. Surrounding him is a crowd of girls who are trying way too hard to get his attention. Dancing sexily, rubbing up against each other, and whispering for him to pay attention to them instead. But it's useless. His eyes are only set on Y/N.

Set on her gorgeous smile and the way her tight skirt hugs her curves so nicely. On the sway of her hips and the sexy movements she makes as the DJ drops the bass. And on the way her face scrunches up as she laughs with the girls she calls her friends.

Little did she know that all of those slutty girls have tried to get with Changkyun behind her back. But he will never tell her that. He knows that he breaks her heart more than enough times by just being the guy he is. But he would rather die than ever tell her that the last bit of loyalty she thinks she has is indeed fake.

He adores her big heart and would kill anyone who would try to break or taint it. But her beautiful heart is not as it was the day he met her. Her heart is slowly becoming black, lifeless, and cold as stone. Most of it is his own doing. Surprisingly enough, she still has a little bit of her pure and beautiful heart left. The last thing Changkyun wants is for her heart to turn completely cold due to her so-called friends. Lying to the girl he loves to avoid hurting her is okay, right?

He doesn't know how long he can fake ignorance, but for now, it will do. Y/N is the first and only girl he will ever love. And Changkyun thought if he turned her more like him, that he might be able to keep her by his side forever. To fight this fucked up world together. But she’s not like the other girls. She has feelings, and she cares and loves way too much, and he’s never experienced someone like that before.

No one has ever cared about him. No one except, Jooheon. He’s like Changkyun’s brother. But the way Jooheon shows that he cares is unconventional. He uses any means to put Changkyun in his place, and it’s been like that for years.

They were both orphans and have been in and out of foster homes since they were little kids. One day, they both decided to run away and be strays since it’s easier than getting beat up by foster parents and other kids in the system. School was the small light at the end of the dark tunnel. They hoped that getting an education will get them out of the streets. But it turns out the educational system is just as fucked up as the foster system. It turned a blind eye to mental instability and was made to have kids like Changkyun and Jooheon fail.

When Changkyun found this out, he hated the world, and every stupid piece of hope even given to him. He turned to drugs to numb the pain but still desperately wanted to get out of the streets. He ended up dealing to get some money in his pocket and worked under a drug lord that expected the dealers to make a certain amount each week.

When Joo found out, he beat Changkyun up pretty severely, but he never said a word about it. Instead, he followed his best friend into that dark world and started dealing under the same drug lord. Changkyun now knows that Jooheon’s beating was just a way of showing him a taste of what was in store for the drug-dealing life.

Jooheon was always better than Changkyun in school and was extremely talented in music. Maybe he would have made it. But he left it all behind, just for Changkyun. They made a promise as kids that no matter where they go or what they do, they will do it together. They have no one else in the world but each other.

Jooheon is now an underground rapper when he’s not dealing at his raves. Changkyun sometimes joins him in the underground rap scene, but all the money is in dealing, and he would rather make money. Yet, he still finds himself writing raps in his free time. Maybe Changkyun would have made it too.....

Jooheon suddenly interrupts Changkyun’s private pity party.

“Bro . . . Why don't you tell her the truth?”

Jooheon knows everything between Changkyun and Y/N. He knows Changkyun’s true feelings. He also knows Changkyun’s been in love with her since grade school, long before he won her over in junior year.

“What’s the point of treating her like shit? I can't watch you ruin yourself and Y/N anymore!”

“Joo, you don’t understand. You can change for the girl you love. I mean, look at you now. You are leaving me behind, and you are becoming a better person for Alison. You stopped doing drugs, barely throw raves anymore, and you sent all your buyers to me. I can’t do that shit. I’m not smart or talented like you. I never was. I’m too bad of a person. I’m also bad for her. I cheated on her once to try to lose feelings, but that never worked. Now when I try to be with other girls, I think of her and how much I’m hurting her, and I can’t do it. I can’t touch them. After they try to kiss me and pull me closer, I shove them away and leave. And I always end up in front of her house. I always end up wanting her. Needing her. But I’m too fucked up to be good enough for her. But at the same time, I can’t let her go. Trust me; I want her to leave me. I want her to break my heart. But she won’t, and it angers me. She’s too kind, and that makes me want to keep her even more.”

Jooheon smacks Changkyun’s beer right out of his hands.

“Get your shit together, Changkyun! Stop with your drunk, whiny, dramatic bullshit and man the fuck up! Do you think it was easy to tell Alison I would do ANYTHING to become a better man for her?! Hell no! You and I are so deep into this drug business that leaving it will leave me broke and homeless again. But I’m doing it because I love her. Only her! I would do anything for her. Even if it means getting the shit beat out of me for telling the boss I want to leave. But it doesn’t matter because it’s for her. It’s for our future together. So man the fuck up and stop being so selfish. Cause if you don’t, someone's gonna take her right from you, bro.”

“No one would dare,” Changkyun scoffs.

“Well, it seems like it’s happening right now,” Jooheon says, nodding his head towards Y/N.

Changkyun snaps his head towards Y/N and witnesses his worst fear. The one thing he gets nightmares from.

With that beautiful smile of hers, Y/N slurs pure seduction to the guy whose hands are burning to touch her body. The body that Changkyun claims as his. The dark room and marijuana smoke make it difficult to see everyone's face, but he knows exactly who this guy is.

And he fucking hates him.

This wolf of a boy has had his eyes on Y/N ever since the friendship between Changkyun and him was destroyed. He wants her attention. He doesn’t want her heart. He hates the thought of her choosing Changkyun over everyone else.

The tall boy is wearing the grey and green school sweatshirt. His black hair flops over a thick, green bandana that covers his forehead. His malice grin is shining from afar. A smile clearly aimed towards Changkyun.

He is the one person who makes Changkyun burn with fury. The only person Changkyun would go to hell for so that he could drag him down into the fiery pits as well. The devil himself disguised in that fucking perfect, pretty-boy face.

Im Jaebum.

Changkyun rips himself off the couch, and his vision starts to go red. Jooheon holds him back and forces Changkyun to look at him.

“Do you know what you’re getting yourself into?! There’s no coming back from this Kyun,” he yells sternly.

All Changkyun does is glare in response, and Jooheon knows exactly what he’s chosen to do. He lets Changkyun go and whistles towards their crew. They all follow Changkyun from behind, preparing to face JB’s fucking pack of wolves he dragged along with him to the rave.

Everything happens so quickly, yet Changkyun sees it all in slow motion. When y/n hears Changkyun yell out her name, her eyes widen in fear as she stumbles over her words of explanation. Jaebum stands there, grinning with an evil, toothy smile. Fucking bastard.

Without a second thought, Changkyun watches Jaebum’s face momentarily scrunch up in shock before he takes a swing. Jaebum stumbles backward and spits out the blood that flooded into his mouth.

JB’s friends flinch to jump in, but Jooheon and his crew threaten them to stay back. It will be a fair fight, or the crew wouldn’t hesitate to take them all.

Despite Y/N’s screams, Changkyun grabs Jaebum and shove him into the glass table. JB groans and heaves in pain.

“WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING WITH HER, HUH?!” Changkyun screams.

Jaebum smiles with bloody teeth and starts to cackle like a maniac. Changkyun feels himself shaking with rage and swings again until he feels the other boy’s skin on his fist. Again and again and again until Jaebum shoves him away and throws his punches.

It makes Changkyun fall back, but he can’t help but smile. The stinging pain is finally something he can feel despite his constant numbness. The pain is tangible, and he can’t help but love it. He laughs and shrugs off his leather jacket.

“I’m just getting started, asshole.”

[newsfundastuff]

This excerpt is from episode 182 of The Editors.Rich: All right, so, Jim Geraghty, we got history. We had a historic vote last night on the floor of the House. Two articles of impeachment charging President Trump with abuse of power and obstruction passed handily, with just a couple Democrats flaking off, two on abuse of power, three on obstruction, and Tulsi Gabbard taking the statesmanlike posture of voting present. What do you make of it?Jim: I’m sorry, I’ve got to stretch there and just get a—Rich: That’s a really good theatrical yawn. Did you work on that or—Jim: Yeah, a little bit extra.Rich: . . . did you just come up with that?Jim: A little. Yeah, well, I’m saving up my energy for the utterly exciting Democratic presidential debate tonight, because that’s well-scheduled. Yeah, six days before Christmas, opening night of Star Wars, good timing, DNC. Good job.Look, this was long predicted. The only part of this process that was the least bit surprising was I guess most people didn’t see Jeff Van Drew changing parties. As of this taping, that appears to be all systems go. And most of the purple and red district Democrats falling in line. I wonder if these two are related, that once Van Drew switched parties, that maybe Pelosi started arm-twisting on this.Rich: No, I think they’re related a different way. I think what happened to Van Drew, he voted against the inquiry, and he has a catastrophic drop of support in the party. He has like 20 percent approval, so he’s not getting nominated. He’s not winning that seat again as a Democrat. I am open to the idea a lot of these Democrats are genuinely outraged by Trump’s conduct, but I think they also saw that there’s no way out of this for them except for through. So if you voted against these articles, unless you’re in a real special very Trumpy district, like Collin Peterson is from Minnesota, that you just have to vote for it and grin and bear it and hope you can win over any swing voters and Republican voters you need in November down the line.Jim: Yeah, and I think also this may reveal that there probably weren’t that many Democrats in districts where this vote was going to make or break. The Joe Cunninghams of the world in South Carolina’s First District, that’s got where my parents live down in Hilton Head and all that quick-growing southern corner of the state, he’s probably toast anyway, so might as well vote his conscience. Why defy the party? All that kind of stuff.That was somewhat surprising and interesting, but I think the biggest number you heard tossed around for Democrats voting no was six to ten. Nobody expected this to really be that much of a close vote. Either due to whipping or the sense that most people said, “Well, no, might as well. In for a penny, in for a pound. Might as well vote for impeach and hope that our voters agree with us,” that was somewhat interesting. I’m sure we’ll talk a bit about the weird situation that Nancy Pelosi and the advocates for impeachment find themselves in now.Today’s Morning Jolt, I wrote a bunch about, was there a moment where you could’ve gotten a fairly bipartisan majority for a resolution of censure or some other sense of saying, “Mr. President, you shouldn’t have done this. You can’t do this. You don’t have this kind of authority. If you think there’s some sort of corruption going on with Joe Biden or something, we have a Department of Justice. This has to be done through official channels”? I went through and I found nine House Republicans who’d made various comments kind of in that vein, and maybe you could’ve gotten them onboard.Whatever Democrats and impeachment advocates think should be the case, you were just never going to get any House Republicans voting for this. Maybe you had a shot at one or two, like Rooney down in Florida, but really, it was always going to be a party-line vote. I don’t think Trump, to the extent Trump is capable of feeling shame, which is measured on the molecular scale, he’d probably be more annoyed by a bipartisan resolution of censure, I think, than by this then.He’s going to walk around with this as a badge of pride. He’s going to say, “This was a partisan vendetta. This was a witch hunt,” yadda yadda yadda. Whereas if you’d gotten a decent number of House Republicans to vote on something that didn’t call for impeachment, just said the president shouldn’t have done this, maybe it would’ve been a little more consequential. This was ultimately about making the base of the Democratic party happy, and I hope Democrats are happy now. You got what you want. I hope you walked around with a sad, somber spring in your step, as Nancy Pelosi said this morning.Rich: On censure, I thought that would be a better way for them to go. It would’ve become just as partisan as impeachment largely. Maybe, Jim, your nine, probably fewer than that. Maybe you get like five House Republicans. Better than zero and losing a couple cats and dogs on your own side. But I do think you’d get a real shot, and not a real shot, likelier than not to get over 50 votes for a censure in the Senate. That’d be a more bipartisan rebuke. It doesn’t live in history in quite the same way.Michael, obviously, address anything you’ve heard from Jim, but what do you make of the case substantively that the Democrats ended up landing on, which is, by and large, he’s a threat to the election, which has the backdrop that he somehow welcomed foreign interference into the last election, which they, incredibly enough, base on, when they talk about it in more detail, on Trump saying at that press conference, “If you can hack Hillary’s emails, find her old emails. Russians, if you’re listening, do it.” So they say he just can’t be trusted to run this next election because he welcomed Ukrainian interference this time around, and also that he endangered national security through this scheme.Michael: I don’t think a lot of the case. I do take the point that if you believe as I do . . . I believe the case can be made that the president abused his power, that there’s good-enough evidence at least to look into whether he asked for a sham investigation or just an announcement of an investigation for political benefit. I do take Luke’s constantly repeated point, though, that the United States has an interest in knowing what Joe and Hunter Biden were up to.On the obstruction, I think that’s just a joke at this point. Nancy Pelosi basically couldn’t even finish the sentence of asking for transcripts before the White House just released them, and there was nothing in the additional testimony that indicated that there was anything beyond the transcript that was really incriminating or that really added to the case. If anything, they should be passing a motion congratulating him for helping the case of impeachment, not obstructing it.It’s an odd thing. It’s funny, I was reading Alexander Hamilton on impeachment again, refreshing my memory once more, and he talks about it in these terms of that you have to construct it in this way because the Senate trial . . . What other body of men would have the confidence to sit between the president and the representatives of the people as his accuser? What’s interesting about it is it shows you in reality . . . And he worries that partisan passions would corrupt this. Well, that was very prescient, because partisan allegiance has totally eclipsed the sense of these three separate branches of government operating independently of one another. Legally, they operate independently, but practically speaking, the two parties are the motor running underneath our politics.I think in our lifetimes, impeachment has almost been destroyed as a constitutional provision because it’s been launched twice in the absence of a two-thirds majority sentiment for impeaching and removing the president, and so this thing has become defanged almost totally and looks partisan. Now it’s like our expectation is that you only launch impeachment because the base of one faction demands it, and that’s probably a tragedy for the American people.Also, it’s probably just bad politics long term for Democrats in the sense of he’s going to survive this. They knew he was going to survive this. Maybe they hoped they would put some Senate seats in play through this process. I don’t know if that’s . . . I don’t know if impeachment adds to the Trump effect on certain senatorial candidates that might be weak on the Republican side. But now they would have a very difficult time if Trump does something else, something that excites more outrage among a larger share of the public. This bomb has already gone off and already failed to remove him. It will fail to remove him from office.I don’t know. I thought it was just a very odd event. I thought the drama of it was kind of funny, with the Democrats wearing black and Nancy Pelosi trying to shush her—Rich: That was a very good shush move. Clearly, a grandmother with a lot of experience in shushing.Michael: Listen, Nancy Pelosi is fierce. The daughter of a Baltimore mayor is going to have some just natural authority. But it did give what Jim said, the somber spring in their step. It was bizarre. That’s all I can say about it. This was bizarre. This whole thing has been bizarre from beginning to end.Rich: Charlie, where are you on the substance? Because you’ve been excoriating about Trump’s conduct, but haven’t really . . . I don’t want to put words in your mouth . . . had a strong view one way or the other on impeachment or removal. It seems to me there are a couple different ways to look at it just within our own house.Andy McCarthy and myself tend to make the consequentialist argument, “Well, nothing came of this. They delayed the funding for two months. They get the funding. There’s no announcement of investigations.” I would even argue that even if they announced an investigation of Burisma, it would have zero effect on our election or, really, interfere in our election.But Ramesh, who favors impeachment, says, “Well, it doesn’t really matter what the consequence was, that the core impropriety here of being willing to leverage public resources for what was clearly something that had a political motive at bottom related to the election and mixing his official duties with that motive in this way is just intolerable. It didn’t matter whether it was stopped or not. It doesn’t matter whether it was a little thing or a big thing. It’s just that motive itself is disqualifying.”Charlie: I don’t buy the consequentialist case at all. Imagine if we had learned that President Obama had instructed Lois Lerner to go after Tea Party groups. Would we have said, “Well, she didn’t do it,” or, “Well, it was caught before tax season was over,” or, “In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t affect much.” No, of course not.Trump did this. The fact that it didn’t come to much is neither here nor there for me.That doesn’t mean, though, that I’m thrilled about what happened yesterday. In fact, when it happened, I felt irritated. I instantly thought just how close to the Clinton impeachment this has been. In both cases, the president did what he’d been accused of, and in both cases he was let off -- Trump’s case will be let off -- by his party.In both cases, critics of impeachment pretended that the president was being impeached for something innocuous. In neither case was that true.The language is similar. Representative Loudermilk -- there’s a name! -- compared the House of Representatives to Pontius Pilate yesterday, and the president, implicitly, to Jesus. Well, so did Steny Hoyer in 1998.Both impeachments settled on behavior that was, arguably, impeachable, but in both cases that was not really why the impeachment drive had begun. You go back to Clinton’s: Clinton’s impeachment came after years of Republicans saying that the guy was a philanderer, maybe a rapist, that he was dishonest, he was corrupt. It came after Whitewater and the cattle futures scandal and the travel agency scandal. By the point that the Republican House impeached Bill Clinton, it just knew that he was worse than the articles of impeachment themselves suggested.I think the same is true of Trump. Democrats have said for a long time now that he’s a philanderer, maybe a rapist, that he’s dishonest, that he’s corrupt. The impeachment has come after Mueller and the emoluments cases and watching Trump berate the media and tweet like an idiot. So by the point that they impeached him yesterday, they just knew that he was worse than the articles of impeachment suggested.I think I would’ve voted for neither. In fact, I think I would’ve opposed all three of the impeachments that we’ve seen in American history. I’ve said this before, but it is odd, given some of the terrible things presidents have done, including in my lifetime, that all three of the impeachments that we’ve seen seem so small, so partisan, so contingent upon the surrounding politics, rather than a break from it. And all three seemed so unlikely to prevail. It seems to me that, throughout their history, Americans have not breathed a great deal of seriousness into the Impeachment Clause of the Constitution, and this latest impeachment is no exception.I am -- what was the word you used? -- excoriating when it comes to Trump, including on this, and when it comes to the Republicans and the way that they have fallen in line with him and pretended his call was “perfect” and there’s nothing to see here. But I feel sad in general because I don’t think that anyone has taken this seriously from the beginning, including yesterday. Donald Trump certainly didn’t. The Republicans haven’t -- and aren’t -- and nor are the Democrats. Nancy Pelosi is not sad. She’s not somber. She doesn’t think this is grave. She’s not praying for the president. She’s not protecting or saving the Constitution. And the people who ultimately pushed Nancy Pelosi into this, because she didn’t want to do it, do not give two hoots about the Constitution. In fact, they generally loathe the Constitution, and they’re happy to say so.I find it odd that impeachment has come in America’s history when it has, on the topics that it has. It was said earlier that maybe a censure would have been a better option. Perhaps. But that’s what this is. That’s what this was for Clinton, and it’s what this is for Trump. When you know full well that the Senate is not going to convict and you push an impeachment through the House anyhow, you are effectively censuring the president. You’re using a different mechanism to do it, but you are effectively censuring the president. I think that that is a tactical mistake, even if you believe that the underlying high crimes and misdemeanors would warrant such a measure in a vacuum.Rich: On Pelosi, I actually may be naïve. I don’t doubt that she prays for Trump. I think the appropriate reaction when anyone says they’re praying for you, the appropriate reaction is “Thank you.” It’s not like, “No, there’s no way you’re doing that. Stop lying.” MBD, pick up on anything you heard from Charlie. I just think the norm . . . There’s a tendency to think, to Charlie’s point, the Nixon impeachment, that’s the model; that’s the norm. But now we have a different norm, where it’s inflamed partisan majorities in the House that do this with, at least, the recent example is no chance of convicting. They came within one vote of convicting Johnson.Michael: I really relate to Charlie’s feeling of almost being alienated from the process, because on the one hand what the president did was worth condemning, and on one level if you’re saying, “What are your standards, MBD, for impeachment?” this qualifies. But thank God we don’t go by my standards for public office. Duncan Hunter Jr. would’ve been horsewhipped in public. Several Congress members that were parading around yesterday would be tarred and feathered. It’s a great mercy to me and to all of my colleagues that my standards do not prevail in our country—Rich: What would you do to your colleagues?Michael: . . . in many ways.Rich: What punishments would they have? What chastisement would they suffer?Michael: But I agree with Charlie that—Rich: Maybe we could get some serious enforcement of deadlines here for once, Michael, if we put you in charge.Michael: I know. But I agree with . . . Except my own. But I agree with Charlie. Iran-Contra was a more serious offense than this. The Lincoln bedroom scandal was a more serious offense than this. The—Charlie: Invasion of Libya.Michael: The bombing of Sudan ahead of impeachment was a more serious offense than this. The invasion of Libya. Undeclared drone warfare in several countries. Attempts at regime change in Syria without congressional approval, actually even against congressional approval. Johnson siccing the intel community on Goldwater. There was so many offenses presidents of both parties have conducted in my lifetime that seem so much more serious than this idiotic phone call, which was wrong, that I find it hard. My sense is that the motive for impeachment isn’t actually the offense. The offense was just the usable excuse for impeachment.Rich: I think Charlie is right, though. In both cases, it had built up and went to a deeper issue than what the impeachment itself was about.Michael: Right, but fundamentally I think this is . . . In both the Clinton and the Trump impeachment, you have an opposition party in Congress that is shell-shocked by the political defeats the president has been inflicting on their party, and a party that is angry that the country doesn’t see the president as the fraud they see the president as. I think the Charlie’s comparison is very apt.Charlie: But also that believed that it was destined to rule now. If you look at the Republican party, it was shocked in 1992 that Bill Clinton, this draft-dodging, weed-smoking womanizer, had beaten George H. W. Bush after the corner—Michael: A war hero.Charlie: . . . that the Reagan Revolution had supposedly turned, and it was especially shocked when he won reelection fairly easily, and began to wonder, “Well, are we now going in a different direction?” I think the same thing happened with Trump. Although, it was far more appalling to progressives that Trump won, not only because he represents everything they hate -- and he is hateable in some ways -- but also because they are more prone than others to believe in the coming of the Age of Aquarius and the bending of the arc of history and so on. To replace Barack Obama with Donald Trump was a shock to the system.Rich: Jim, let’s dive a little bit. You touched on this earlier. The current Pelosi gambit, I cannot believe that this gambit will last much past the weekend, because it seems so pointlessly self-destructive. But the idea, and this is not a great credit to this idea, that apparently it originated with Laurence Tribe, of holding the articles, I think Tribe just wanted to hold them indefinitely so he wouldn’t get acquitted, but the idea is to hold them, and this is going to make Mitch McConnell so upset, he’s going to be so desperate to have the articles thrown over in his lap, that he’s going to say, “Okay, let’s have a trial the way Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer want it.”The problem here is Mitch McConnell isn’t going to feel that way, obviously. It contradicts the claim over the last month that Democrats can’t go get witnesses, more witnesses, firsthand witnesses, because it would take time, and this is an urgent priority. The nation is at risk every day that the president isn’t impeached and removed. Then, finally, it’s just obviously like a game. It makes it seem even more partisan and political than it has to this point.Jim: Yeah. The general gist is Trump is an authoritarian—Rich: Sorry, Jim. Go ahead. I’ll silence my phone.Jim: Okay.Michael: You should break out the blues version of this.Jim: Things are so bad for impeachment. In short, the message from the Democrats is Trump is an authoritarian, he has no regard for the Constitution, he is a threat, we cannot wait until the next election, he must be removed as quickly as possible, and it could wait until after the holidays. No contradiction there. By the way, the only way this could go any better . . . I know McConnell has already given his initial statement in scoffing about this, but if he had just gone out there and said, “Please don’t throw me in that briar patch. Oh, no, it would be terrible if my caucus couldn’t vote on Trump’s impeachment. We’d be broken up.”You could see Wednesday the thinking of Democrats, both in office and the activist left on Twitter, having this recognition. For a long time, they’d been trying to answer the question, “How can we impeach Trump?” and all of a sudden, around the middle of the week, it became the question of “Wait, how can we stop the Senate from acquitting Trump?” which is a very different question. This idea of “Well, the Constitution says the Senate holds the trial, but it doesn’t say when it has to hold the trial,” it’s an entire miscalculation of the orders and priorities and interests of Senate Republicans.Is it conceivable that four Senate Republicans would say, Mitt Romney at some point is going to say, “By golly, Nancy Pelosi is right. These rules are unfair. We do need to call a lot more witnesses and we do need to take a lot more time on this, so I will take a stance with the 47 Democrats to insist that Mitch McConnell take a fairer set of rules”?We’re all certain, by the way, that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar and Michael Bennet all want as long a trial as possible, right? Everybody is on board for this whole thing where they’d hear from every witness, and this would drag on through January into February, and they wouldn’t be able to campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire. Everybody is on board? Okay, just wanted to make sure on that.It’s really bizarre. I now find myself thinking that this is the ridiculous cherry on top on what has been a largely bad-faith process since the beginning, that, in a way, for the House to impeach Trump and then to never send it to the Senate in order to have a trial . . . By the way, Democrats may well look at this and say, “Hey, you know what, that may violate the Constitution,” but as Charlie pointed out, they never really worried about that very much before.Trump getting acquitted would be worse for the country than us never sending it over to the Senate. We can all do math, right? You’re going to get most of the 47 Democrats voting for this, maybe not Joe Manchin. I think Doug Jones probably says in for a penny, in for a pound. Maybe you lose one or two other Democrats. Then you’d end up with maybe Romney would vote for it, maybe Murkowski, maybe one or two others. You’re not going to get the twelve that publications like The Bulwark were throwing around there. So you end up with a situation where it’s a vote that’s 49-51 or something, and you know Trump is going to go out onto the White House lawn and twerk in victory and see it as a complete exoneration because they couldn’t get the two-thirds of votes. If you really see Trump as this-Rich: Now I oppose his impeachment even more than I did at the start of the podcast.Jim: That’s why at the beginning I was saying, “Okay, would a bipartisan resolution of censure have done more, have actually sent the clearer signal to the president you shouldn’t do this?” I don’t know. But we all know where this is going, and we could see where this was going from the beginning. And it’s midday on Wednesday, Democrats suddenly realize, “Hey, wait a minute, we’re not going to get close to 67 votes. What are we going to do here?”Keeping the impeachment in limbo, taking the two articles of impeachment and freezing them in carbonite until they can work out the rules for weeks or months, it sounds like a great idea to me. I love this idea, just for the sheer ridiculousness of it.Michael: This is why partisan impeachment is such a disaster, because in a sense the way impeachment is set up is supposed to be the House, the elected representatives of the people, accuse the president, an impartial Senate tries the president. Without Republicans taking this seriously, the guilt that Democrats want to heap upon Trump for being okay with election interference, etc., inevitably spreads to all the Republican Party in their minds. The Senate become collaborators, and Mitch McConnell becomes Moscow Mitch again, and Vice President Pence because he’s not resigning in protest. Well, even if you impeach Trump, he is also in some way connected to this guilt. In a sense, it reveals itself as just a tool of partisanship and not some kind of solemn, sad duty that the Constitution imposes on Nancy Pelosi and her peers. It doesn’t work this way.Rich: Charlie, last question on impeachment. Do you care one way or the other whether the Senate trial has witnesses?Charlie: Well, I think it’s up to the Senate.I’m not sure that Jim presented the best argument from the Democratic side. The argument, as I see it, is that the Democrats believe, or at least their position is, that what Donald Trump demonstrated with his Ukraine phone call is that he’s prepared to cheat in the next election, and that, as a result, he needs to be removed before the next election. So it doesn’t matter if you wait until after Christmas because the key is getting him out before he can run again and, in their eyes, cheat again. From their perspective, it’s worth waiting because the Senate is not going to be fair, is not going to consider this seriously, and is therefore going to exonerate Trump, which will mean he will run in the next election.Now, I think this is a bad argument, not least because the House could have done everything that it wants the Senate to do. It could’ve brought in any other witness that it wanted to bring in. That it did not is not the leadership of the Senate’s problem, and the leadership in the Senate is in no way obliged to make up for the House’s mistakes or oversights.It’s also an extraordinarily silly idea because there is no leverage here. The Senate does not want to be sent these articles. The Republican Party doesn’t want to deal with it. It doesn’t want to vote on it. Susan Collins doesn’t want to vote on it. Cory Gardner doesn’t want to vote on it. McConnell doesn’t want to have those meetings, and he doesn’t want to be accused of being Moscow Mitch or a collaborator or any of the other things that Michael says.It’s a very silly plan that is built upon a misreading of what this would do. I don’t think that McConnell and Trump would sit there and say, “I can’t believe I’ve been left in limbo.” I think that McConnell would breathe a sigh of relief that he doesn’t have to deal with it, and Trump would run around the country saying, “They’re so weak, their case was so flimsy, it was such a stunt that they didn’t even transmit the articles to the Senate. These people wasted time, they wasted money, they sullied my good name, and they weren’t prepared to follow through.” We have all seen a Donald Trump rally. We’ve all seen how Donald Trump tweets.Taking advice from Laurence Tribe at this stage is perhaps not a good idea. In fact, this is such a bad idea that I wonder at one level whether it’s a pretext for essentially rendering the impeachment a censure vote and drawing a line under it.Rich: I think she’s transmitting them—Charlie: No, she will do it. I’m just saying that this argument, which has caught on in some quarters, makes no sense whatsoever, and so you have to assume Nancy Pelosi, who is not stupid and is not politically ignorant, will know that.But the specific question you asked: I don’t think the House should have any say over what the Senate does. The House had its turn. It could’ve lasted a year, this investigation, if it had wanted it to. It didn’t. Now it’s on to the next chamber.Rich: MBD, exit question to you, a special, historic, double-barreled exit question. The number of Republican senators voting to convict in the Senate will be what; and yes or no, will there be witnesses during a Senate trial?Michael: There will be witnesses, and zero Republicans will vote to convict.Rich: Jim Geraghty?Jim: Two. Minimal witnesses, if any. Basically, it’s going to be the McConnell plan of rules. Maybe he’ll throw them a bone here and there just to get this thing going, and it will be done by the end of January.Rich: But you say there are going to be two Republican votes to convict?Jim: Yeah, Romney and Murkowski probably.Rich: Wow. Charlie Cooke?Charlie: I don’t think there will be any votes to convict on the Republican side, and I think there will be a few Democratic defections, and no witnesses.Rich: That’s the correct answer. It’ll be zero and zero, no Republican votes to convict. Dan McLaughlin pointed out the other day there actually . . . Obviously, a really small sample size, but in the two prior Senate trials, no member of the president’s party has ever voted to convict. That was only nine, I believe, Democratic senators during the Johnson impeachment, but no Democratic senators during the Clinton impeachment. I think that will hold up here. I think if you’re just doing pure politics, it is a debacle for you if you’re Susan Collins or . . . Mitt Romney is different. He has a degree of independence. But you’re just going to lose your own party. Susan Collins, her career would be over if she votes to convict, in my estimation.Then on witnesses, I think that’s a closer call. If they’re going to flake on something, Romney, Murkowski, Collins, it would clearly be witnesses, in my view, not the ultimate question. But I think McConnell, he knows what he’s doing. He is going to . . . We’ll know more soon, but he’s trying to get a similar process to the Clinton impeachment, where you do the real basic ground rules first and you hear the basic case first and then you vote on witnesses. His calculation is just, after two weeks of this, and it would take about two weeks, there’s just going to be zero appetite for continuing.I think the default rule, as I understand it, someone was mentioning it to me, they go Monday through Saturday, which is unheard of for the Senate to not be able to run home on Thursday. You’ve got to sit there and you can’t say anything, and you’re going to hear these things over and over again we’ve already gotten sick of because we’ve heard it repeatedly over the last two months, and then you ask questions on a note card. By the time you’re in the second week of this, going up against a holiday weekend coming up early the next week after that, and I know that shouldn’t matter in the fifth great historic Senate trial, but it will, that probably Republicans will just be ready to vote and to end it. But as I said, we’ll know more soon.

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This excerpt is from episode 182 of The Editors.Rich: All right, so, Jim Geraghty, we got history. We had a historic vote last night on the floor of the House. Two articles of impeachment charging President Trump with abuse of power and obstruction passed handily, with just a couple Democrats flaking off, two on abuse of power, three on obstruction, and Tulsi Gabbard taking the statesmanlike posture of voting present. What do you make of it?Jim: I’m sorry, I’ve got to stretch there and just get a—Rich: That’s a really good theatrical yawn. Did you work on that or—Jim: Yeah, a little bit extra.Rich: . . . did you just come up with that?Jim: A little. Yeah, well, I’m saving up my energy for the utterly exciting Democratic presidential debate tonight, because that’s well-scheduled. Yeah, six days before Christmas, opening night of Star Wars, good timing, DNC. Good job.Look, this was long predicted. The only part of this process that was the least bit surprising was I guess most people didn’t see Jeff Van Drew changing parties. As of this taping, that appears to be all systems go. And most of the purple and red district Democrats falling in line. I wonder if these two are related, that once Van Drew switched parties, that maybe Pelosi started arm-twisting on this.Rich: No, I think they’re related a different way. I think what happened to Van Drew, he voted against the inquiry, and he has a catastrophic drop of support in the party. He has like 20 percent approval, so he’s not getting nominated. He’s not winning that seat again as a Democrat. I am open to the idea a lot of these Democrats are genuinely outraged by Trump’s conduct, but I think they also saw that there’s no way out of this for them except for through. So if you voted against these articles, unless you’re in a real special very Trumpy district, like Collin Peterson is from Minnesota, that you just have to vote for it and grin and bear it and hope you can win over any swing voters and Republican voters you need in November down the line.Jim: Yeah, and I think also this may reveal that there probably weren’t that many Democrats in districts where this vote was going to make or break. The Joe Cunninghams of the world in South Carolina’s First District, that’s got where my parents live down in Hilton Head and all that quick-growing southern corner of the state, he’s probably toast anyway, so might as well vote his conscience. Why defy the party? All that kind of stuff.That was somewhat surprising and interesting, but I think the biggest number you heard tossed around for Democrats voting no was six to ten. Nobody expected this to really be that much of a close vote. Either due to whipping or the sense that most people said, “Well, no, might as well. In for a penny, in for a pound. Might as well vote for impeach and hope that our voters agree with us,” that was somewhat interesting. I’m sure we’ll talk a bit about the weird situation that Nancy Pelosi and the advocates for impeachment find themselves in now.Today’s Morning Jolt, I wrote a bunch about, was there a moment where you could’ve gotten a fairly bipartisan majority for a resolution of censure or some other sense of saying, “Mr. President, you shouldn’t have done this. You can’t do this. You don’t have this kind of authority. If you think there’s some sort of corruption going on with Joe Biden or something, we have a Department of Justice. This has to be done through official channels”? I went through and I found nine House Republicans who’d made various comments kind of in that vein, and maybe you could’ve gotten them onboard.Whatever Democrats and impeachment advocates think should be the case, you were just never going to get any House Republicans voting for this. Maybe you had a shot at one or two, like Rooney down in Florida, but really, it was always going to be a party-line vote. I don’t think Trump, to the extent Trump is capable of feeling shame, which is measured on the molecular scale, he’d probably be more annoyed by a bipartisan resolution of censure, I think, than by this then.He’s going to walk around with this as a badge of pride. He’s going to say, “This was a partisan vendetta. This was a witch hunt,” yadda yadda yadda. Whereas if you’d gotten a decent number of House Republicans to vote on something that didn’t call for impeachment, just said the president shouldn’t have done this, maybe it would’ve been a little more consequential. This was ultimately about making the base of the Democratic party happy, and I hope Democrats are happy now. You got what you want. I hope you walked around with a sad, somber spring in your step, as Nancy Pelosi said this morning.Rich: On censure, I thought that would be a better way for them to go. It would’ve become just as partisan as impeachment largely. Maybe, Jim, your nine, probably fewer than that. Maybe you get like five House Republicans. Better than zero and losing a couple cats and dogs on your own side. But I do think you’d get a real shot, and not a real shot, likelier than not to get over 50 votes for a censure in the Senate. That’d be a more bipartisan rebuke. It doesn’t live in history in quite the same way.Michael, obviously, address anything you’ve heard from Jim, but what do you make of the case substantively that the Democrats ended up landing on, which is, by and large, he’s a threat to the election, which has the backdrop that he somehow welcomed foreign interference into the last election, which they, incredibly enough, base on, when they talk about it in more detail, on Trump saying at that press conference, “If you can hack Hillary’s emails, find her old emails. Russians, if you’re listening, do it.” So they say he just can’t be trusted to run this next election because he welcomed Ukrainian interference this time around, and also that he endangered national security through this scheme.Michael: I don’t think a lot of the case. I do take the point that if you believe as I do . . . I believe the case can be made that the president abused his power, that there’s good-enough evidence at least to look into whether he asked for a sham investigation or just an announcement of an investigation for political benefit. I do take Luke’s constantly repeated point, though, that the United States has an interest in knowing what Joe and Hunter Biden were up to.On the obstruction, I think that’s just a joke at this point. Nancy Pelosi basically couldn’t even finish the sentence of asking for transcripts before the White House just released them, and there was nothing in the additional testimony that indicated that there was anything beyond the transcript that was really incriminating or that really added to the case. If anything, they should be passing a motion congratulating him for helping the case of impeachment, not obstructing it.It’s an odd thing. It’s funny, I was reading Alexander Hamilton on impeachment again, refreshing my memory once more, and he talks about it in these terms of that you have to construct it in this way because the Senate trial . . . What other body of men would have the confidence to sit between the president and the representatives of the people as his accuser? What’s interesting about it is it shows you in reality . . . And he worries that partisan passions would corrupt this. Well, that was very prescient, because partisan allegiance has totally eclipsed the sense of these three separate branches of government operating independently of one another. Legally, they operate independently, but practically speaking, the two parties are the motor running underneath our politics.I think in our lifetimes, impeachment has almost been destroyed as a constitutional provision because it’s been launched twice in the absence of a two-thirds majority sentiment for impeaching and removing the president, and so this thing has become defanged almost totally and looks partisan. Now it’s like our expectation is that you only launch impeachment because the base of one faction demands it, and that’s probably a tragedy for the American people.Also, it’s probably just bad politics long term for Democrats in the sense of he’s going to survive this. They knew he was going to survive this. Maybe they hoped they would put some Senate seats in play through this process. I don’t know if that’s . . . I don’t know if impeachment adds to the Trump effect on certain senatorial candidates that might be weak on the Republican side. But now they would have a very difficult time if Trump does something else, something that excites more outrage among a larger share of the public. This bomb has already gone off and already failed to remove him. It will fail to remove him from office.I don’t know. I thought it was just a very odd event. I thought the drama of it was kind of funny, with the Democrats wearing black and Nancy Pelosi trying to shush her—Rich: That was a very good shush move. Clearly, a grandmother with a lot of experience in shushing.Michael: Listen, Nancy Pelosi is fierce. The daughter of a Baltimore mayor is going to have some just natural authority. But it did give what Jim said, the somber spring in their step. It was bizarre. That’s all I can say about it. This was bizarre. This whole thing has been bizarre from beginning to end.Rich: Charlie, where are you on the substance? Because you’ve been excoriating about Trump’s conduct, but haven’t really . . . I don’t want to put words in your mouth . . . had a strong view one way or the other on impeachment or removal. It seems to me there are a couple different ways to look at it just within our own house.Andy McCarthy and myself tend to make the consequentialist argument, “Well, nothing came of this. They delayed the funding for two months. They get the funding. There’s no announcement of investigations.” I would even argue that even if they announced an investigation of Burisma, it would have zero effect on our election or, really, interfere in our election.But Ramesh, who favors impeachment, says, “Well, it doesn’t really matter what the consequence was, that the core impropriety here of being willing to leverage public resources for what was clearly something that had a political motive at bottom related to the election and mixing his official duties with that motive in this way is just intolerable. It didn’t matter whether it was stopped or not. It doesn’t matter whether it was a little thing or a big thing. It’s just that motive itself is disqualifying.”Charlie: I don’t buy the consequentialist case at all. Imagine if we had learned that President Obama had instructed Lois Lerner to go after Tea Party groups. Would we have said, “Well, she didn’t do it,” or, “Well, it was caught before tax season was over,” or, “In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t affect much.” No, of course not.Trump did this. The fact that it didn’t come to much is neither here nor there for me.That doesn’t mean, though, that I’m thrilled about what happened yesterday. In fact, when it happened, I felt irritated. I instantly thought just how close to the Clinton impeachment this has been. In both cases, the president did what he’d been accused of, and in both cases he was let off -- Trump’s case will be let off -- by his party.In both cases, critics of impeachment pretended that the president was being impeached for something innocuous. In neither case was that true.The language is similar. Representative Loudermilk -- there’s a name! -- compared the House of Representatives to Pontius Pilate yesterday, and the president, implicitly, to Jesus. Well, so did Steny Hoyer in 1998.Both impeachments settled on behavior that was, arguably, impeachable, but in both cases that was not really why the impeachment drive had begun. You go back to Clinton’s: Clinton’s impeachment came after years of Republicans saying that the guy was a philanderer, maybe a rapist, that he was dishonest, he was corrupt. It came after Whitewater and the cattle futures scandal and the travel agency scandal. By the point that the Republican House impeached Bill Clinton, it just knew that he was worse than the articles of impeachment themselves suggested.I think the same is true of Trump. Democrats have said for a long time now that he’s a philanderer, maybe a rapist, that he’s dishonest, that he’s corrupt. The impeachment has come after Mueller and the emoluments cases and watching Trump berate the media and tweet like an idiot. So by the point that they impeached him yesterday, they just knew that he was worse than the articles of impeachment suggested.I think I would’ve voted for neither. In fact, I think I would’ve opposed all three of the impeachments that we’ve seen in American history. I’ve said this before, but it is odd, given some of the terrible things presidents have done, including in my lifetime, that all three of the impeachments that we’ve seen seem so small, so partisan, so contingent upon the surrounding politics, rather than a break from it. And all three seemed so unlikely to prevail. It seems to me that, throughout their history, Americans have not breathed a great deal of seriousness into the Impeachment Clause of the Constitution, and this latest impeachment is no exception.I am -- what was the word you used? -- excoriating when it comes to Trump, including on this, and when it comes to the Republicans and the way that they have fallen in line with him and pretended his call was “perfect” and there’s nothing to see here. But I feel sad in general because I don’t think that anyone has taken this seriously from the beginning, including yesterday. Donald Trump certainly didn’t. The Republicans haven’t -- and aren’t -- and nor are the Democrats. Nancy Pelosi is not sad. She’s not somber. She doesn’t think this is grave. She’s not praying for the president. She’s not protecting or saving the Constitution. And the people who ultimately pushed Nancy Pelosi into this, because she didn’t want to do it, do not give two hoots about the Constitution. In fact, they generally loathe the Constitution, and they’re happy to say so.I find it odd that impeachment has come in America’s history when it has, on the topics that it has. It was said earlier that maybe a censure would have been a better option. Perhaps. But that’s what this is. That’s what this was for Clinton, and it’s what this is for Trump. When you know full well that the Senate is not going to convict and you push an impeachment through the House anyhow, you are effectively censuring the president. You’re using a different mechanism to do it, but you are effectively censuring the president. I think that that is a tactical mistake, even if you believe that the underlying high crimes and misdemeanors would warrant such a measure in a vacuum.Rich: On Pelosi, I actually may be naïve. I don’t doubt that she prays for Trump. I think the appropriate reaction when anyone says they’re praying for you, the appropriate reaction is “Thank you.” It’s not like, “No, there’s no way you’re doing that. Stop lying.” MBD, pick up on anything you heard from Charlie. I just think the norm . . . There’s a tendency to think, to Charlie’s point, the Nixon impeachment, that’s the model; that’s the norm. But now we have a different norm, where it’s inflamed partisan majorities in the House that do this with, at least, the recent example is no chance of convicting. They came within one vote of convicting Johnson.Michael: I really relate to Charlie’s feeling of almost being alienated from the process, because on the one hand what the president did was worth condemning, and on one level if you’re saying, “What are your standards, MBD, for impeachment?” this qualifies. But thank God we don’t go by my standards for public office. Duncan Hunter Jr. would’ve been horsewhipped in public. Several Congress members that were parading around yesterday would be tarred and feathered. It’s a great mercy to me and to all of my colleagues that my standards do not prevail in our country—Rich: What would you do to your colleagues?Michael: . . . in many ways.Rich: What punishments would they have? What chastisement would they suffer?Michael: But I agree with Charlie that—Rich: Maybe we could get some serious enforcement of deadlines here for once, Michael, if we put you in charge.Michael: I know. But I agree with . . . Except my own. But I agree with Charlie. Iran-Contra was a more serious offense than this. The Lincoln bedroom scandal was a more serious offense than this. The—Charlie: Invasion of Libya.Michael: The bombing of Sudan ahead of impeachment was a more serious offense than this. The invasion of Libya. Undeclared drone warfare in several countries. Attempts at regime change in Syria without congressional approval, actually even against congressional approval. Johnson siccing the intel community on Goldwater. There was so many offenses presidents of both parties have conducted in my lifetime that seem so much more serious than this idiotic phone call, which was wrong, that I find it hard. My sense is that the motive for impeachment isn’t actually the offense. The offense was just the usable excuse for impeachment.Rich: I think Charlie is right, though. In both cases, it had built up and went to a deeper issue than what the impeachment itself was about.Michael: Right, but fundamentally I think this is . . . In both the Clinton and the Trump impeachment, you have an opposition party in Congress that is shell-shocked by the political defeats the president has been inflicting on their party, and a party that is angry that the country doesn’t see the president as the fraud they see the president as. I think the Charlie’s comparison is very apt.Charlie: But also that believed that it was destined to rule now. If you look at the Republican party, it was shocked in 1992 that Bill Clinton, this draft-dodging, weed-smoking womanizer, had beaten George H. W. Bush after the corner—Michael: A war hero.Charlie: . . . that the Reagan Revolution had supposedly turned, and it was especially shocked when he won reelection fairly easily, and began to wonder, “Well, are we now going in a different direction?” I think the same thing happened with Trump. Although, it was far more appalling to progressives that Trump won, not only because he represents everything they hate -- and he is hateable in some ways -- but also because they are more prone than others to believe in the coming of the Age of Aquarius and the bending of the arc of history and so on. To replace Barack Obama with Donald Trump was a shock to the system.Rich: Jim, let’s dive a little bit. You touched on this earlier. The current Pelosi gambit, I cannot believe that this gambit will last much past the weekend, because it seems so pointlessly self-destructive. But the idea, and this is not a great credit to this idea, that apparently it originated with Laurence Tribe, of holding the articles, I think Tribe just wanted to hold them indefinitely so he wouldn’t get acquitted, but the idea is to hold them, and this is going to make Mitch McConnell so upset, he’s going to be so desperate to have the articles thrown over in his lap, that he’s going to say, “Okay, let’s have a trial the way Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer want it.”The problem here is Mitch McConnell isn’t going to feel that way, obviously. It contradicts the claim over the last month that Democrats can’t go get witnesses, more witnesses, firsthand witnesses, because it would take time, and this is an urgent priority. The nation is at risk every day that the president isn’t impeached and removed. Then, finally, it’s just obviously like a game. It makes it seem even more partisan and political than it has to this point.Jim: Yeah. The general gist is Trump is an authoritarian—Rich: Sorry, Jim. Go ahead. I’ll silence my phone.Jim: Okay.Michael: You should break out the blues version of this.Jim: Things are so bad for impeachment. In short, the message from the Democrats is Trump is an authoritarian, he has no regard for the Constitution, he is a threat, we cannot wait until the next election, he must be removed as quickly as possible, and it could wait until after the holidays. No contradiction there. By the way, the only way this could go any better . . . I know McConnell has already given his initial statement in scoffing about this, but if he had just gone out there and said, “Please don’t throw me in that briar patch. Oh, no, it would be terrible if my caucus couldn’t vote on Trump’s impeachment. We’d be broken up.”You could see Wednesday the thinking of Democrats, both in office and the activist left on Twitter, having this recognition. For a long time, they’d been trying to answer the question, “How can we impeach Trump?” and all of a sudden, around the middle of the week, it became the question of “Wait, how can we stop the Senate from acquitting Trump?” which is a very different question. This idea of “Well, the Constitution says the Senate holds the trial, but it doesn’t say when it has to hold the trial,” it’s an entire miscalculation of the orders and priorities and interests of Senate Republicans.Is it conceivable that four Senate Republicans would say, Mitt Romney at some point is going to say, “By golly, Nancy Pelosi is right. These rules are unfair. We do need to call a lot more witnesses and we do need to take a lot more time on this, so I will take a stance with the 47 Democrats to insist that Mitch McConnell take a fairer set of rules”?We’re all certain, by the way, that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar and Michael Bennet all want as long a trial as possible, right? Everybody is on board for this whole thing where they’d hear from every witness, and this would drag on through January into February, and they wouldn’t be able to campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire. Everybody is on board? Okay, just wanted to make sure on that.It’s really bizarre. I now find myself thinking that this is the ridiculous cherry on top on what has been a largely bad-faith process since the beginning, that, in a way, for the House to impeach Trump and then to never send it to the Senate in order to have a trial . . . By the way, Democrats may well look at this and say, “Hey, you know what, that may violate the Constitution,” but as Charlie pointed out, they never really worried about that very much before.Trump getting acquitted would be worse for the country than us never sending it over to the Senate. We can all do math, right? You’re going to get most of the 47 Democrats voting for this, maybe not Joe Manchin. I think Doug Jones probably says in for a penny, in for a pound. Maybe you lose one or two other Democrats. Then you’d end up with maybe Romney would vote for it, maybe Murkowski, maybe one or two others. You’re not going to get the twelve that publications like The Bulwark were throwing around there. So you end up with a situation where it’s a vote that’s 49-51 or something, and you know Trump is going to go out onto the White House lawn and twerk in victory and see it as a complete exoneration because they couldn’t get the two-thirds of votes. If you really see Trump as this-Rich: Now I oppose his impeachment even more than I did at the start of the podcast.Jim: That’s why at the beginning I was saying, “Okay, would a bipartisan resolution of censure have done more, have actually sent the clearer signal to the president you shouldn’t do this?” I don’t know. But we all know where this is going, and we could see where this was going from the beginning. And it’s midday on Wednesday, Democrats suddenly realize, “Hey, wait a minute, we’re not going to get close to 67 votes. What are we going to do here?”Keeping the impeachment in limbo, taking the two articles of impeachment and freezing them in carbonite until they can work out the rules for weeks or months, it sounds like a great idea to me. I love this idea, just for the sheer ridiculousness of it.Michael: This is why partisan impeachment is such a disaster, because in a sense the way impeachment is set up is supposed to be the House, the elected representatives of the people, accuse the president, an impartial Senate tries the president. Without Republicans taking this seriously, the guilt that Democrats want to heap upon Trump for being okay with election interference, etc., inevitably spreads to all the Republican Party in their minds. The Senate become collaborators, and Mitch McConnell becomes Moscow Mitch again, and Vice President Pence because he’s not resigning in protest. Well, even if you impeach Trump, he is also in some way connected to this guilt. In a sense, it reveals itself as just a tool of partisanship and not some kind of solemn, sad duty that the Constitution imposes on Nancy Pelosi and her peers. It doesn’t work this way.Rich: Charlie, last question on impeachment. Do you care one way or the other whether the Senate trial has witnesses?Charlie: Well, I think it’s up to the Senate.I’m not sure that Jim presented the best argument from the Democratic side. The argument, as I see it, is that the Democrats believe, or at least their position is, that what Donald Trump demonstrated with his Ukraine phone call is that he’s prepared to cheat in the next election, and that, as a result, he needs to be removed before the next election. So it doesn’t matter if you wait until after Christmas because the key is getting him out before he can run again and, in their eyes, cheat again. From their perspective, it’s worth waiting because the Senate is not going to be fair, is not going to consider this seriously, and is therefore going to exonerate Trump, which will mean he will run in the next election.Now, I think this is a bad argument, not least because the House could have done everything that it wants the Senate to do. It could’ve brought in any other witness that it wanted to bring in. That it did not is not the leadership of the Senate’s problem, and the leadership in the Senate is in no way obliged to make up for the House’s mistakes or oversights.It’s also an extraordinarily silly idea because there is no leverage here. The Senate does not want to be sent these articles. The Republican Party doesn’t want to deal with it. It doesn’t want to vote on it. Susan Collins doesn’t want to vote on it. Cory Gardner doesn’t want to vote on it. McConnell doesn’t want to have those meetings, and he doesn’t want to be accused of being Moscow Mitch or a collaborator or any of the other things that Michael says.It’s a very silly plan that is built upon a misreading of what this would do. I don’t think that McConnell and Trump would sit there and say, “I can’t believe I’ve been left in limbo.” I think that McConnell would breathe a sigh of relief that he doesn’t have to deal with it, and Trump would run around the country saying, “They’re so weak, their case was so flimsy, it was such a stunt that they didn’t even transmit the articles to the Senate. These people wasted time, they wasted money, they sullied my good name, and they weren’t prepared to follow through.” We have all seen a Donald Trump rally. We’ve all seen how Donald Trump tweets.Taking advice from Laurence Tribe at this stage is perhaps not a good idea. In fact, this is such a bad idea that I wonder at one level whether it’s a pretext for essentially rendering the impeachment a censure vote and drawing a line under it.Rich: I think she’s transmitting them—Charlie: No, she will do it. I’m just saying that this argument, which has caught on in some quarters, makes no sense whatsoever, and so you have to assume Nancy Pelosi, who is not stupid and is not politically ignorant, will know that.But the specific question you asked: I don’t think the House should have any say over what the Senate does. The House had its turn. It could’ve lasted a year, this investigation, if it had wanted it to. It didn’t. Now it’s on to the next chamber.Rich: MBD, exit question to you, a special, historic, double-barreled exit question. The number of Republican senators voting to convict in the Senate will be what; and yes or no, will there be witnesses during a Senate trial?Michael: There will be witnesses, and zero Republicans will vote to convict.Rich: Jim Geraghty?Jim: Two. Minimal witnesses, if any. Basically, it’s going to be the McConnell plan of rules. Maybe he’ll throw them a bone here and there just to get this thing going, and it will be done by the end of January.Rich: But you say there are going to be two Republican votes to convict?Jim: Yeah, Romney and Murkowski probably.Rich: Wow. Charlie Cooke?Charlie: I don’t think there will be any votes to convict on the Republican side, and I think there will be a few Democratic defections, and no witnesses.Rich: That’s the correct answer. It’ll be zero and zero, no Republican votes to convict. Dan McLaughlin pointed out the other day there actually . . . Obviously, a really small sample size, but in the two prior Senate trials, no member of the president’s party has ever voted to convict. That was only nine, I believe, Democratic senators during the Johnson impeachment, but no Democratic senators during the Clinton impeachment. I think that will hold up here. I think if you’re just doing pure politics, it is a debacle for you if you’re Susan Collins or . . . Mitt Romney is different. He has a degree of independence. But you’re just going to lose your own party. Susan Collins, her career would be over if she votes to convict, in my estimation.Then on witnesses, I think that’s a closer call. If they’re going to flake on something, Romney, Murkowski, Collins, it would clearly be witnesses, in my view, not the ultimate question. But I think McConnell, he knows what he’s doing. He is going to . . . We’ll know more soon, but he’s trying to get a similar process to the Clinton impeachment, where you do the real basic ground rules first and you hear the basic case first and then you vote on witnesses. His calculation is just, after two weeks of this, and it would take about two weeks, there’s just going to be zero appetite for continuing.I think the default rule, as I understand it, someone was mentioning it to me, they go Monday through Saturday, which is unheard of for the Senate to not be able to run home on Thursday. You’ve got to sit there and you can’t say anything, and you’re going to hear these things over and over again we’ve already gotten sick of because we’ve heard it repeatedly over the last two months, and then you ask questions on a note card. By the time you’re in the second week of this, going up against a holiday weekend coming up early the next week after that, and I know that shouldn’t matter in the fifth great historic Senate trial, but it will, that probably Republicans will just be ready to vote and to end it. But as I said, we’ll know more soon.

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[tendance-news]

This excerpt is from episode 182 of The Editors.Rich: All right, so, Jim Geraghty, we got history. We had a historic vote last night on the floor of the House. Two articles of impeachment charging President Trump with abuse of power and obstruction passed handily, with just a couple Democrats flaking off, two on abuse of power, three on obstruction, and Tulsi Gabbard taking the statesmanlike posture of voting present. What do you make of it?Jim: I’m sorry, I’ve got to stretch there and just get a—Rich: That’s a really good theatrical yawn. Did you work on that or—Jim: Yeah, a little bit extra.Rich: . . . did you just come up with that?Jim: A little. Yeah, well, I’m saving up my energy for the utterly exciting Democratic presidential debate tonight, because that’s well-scheduled. Yeah, six days before Christmas, opening night of Star Wars, good timing, DNC. Good job.Look, this was long predicted. The only part of this process that was the least bit surprising was I guess most people didn’t see Jeff Van Drew changing parties. As of this taping, that appears to be all systems go. And most of the purple and red district Democrats falling in line. I wonder if these two are related, that once Van Drew switched parties, that maybe Pelosi started arm-twisting on this.Rich: No, I think they’re related a different way. I think what happened to Van Drew, he voted against the inquiry, and he has a catastrophic drop of support in the party. He has like 20 percent approval, so he’s not getting nominated. He’s not winning that seat again as a Democrat. I am open to the idea a lot of these Democrats are genuinely outraged by Trump’s conduct, but I think they also saw that there’s no way out of this for them except for through. So if you voted against these articles, unless you’re in a real special very Trumpy district, like Collin Peterson is from Minnesota, that you just have to vote for it and grin and bear it and hope you can win over any swing voters and Republican voters you need in November down the line.Jim: Yeah, and I think also this may reveal that there probably weren’t that many Democrats in districts where this vote was going to make or break. The Joe Cunninghams of the world in South Carolina’s First District, that’s got where my parents live down in Hilton Head and all that quick-growing southern corner of the state, he’s probably toast anyway, so might as well vote his conscience. Why defy the party? All that kind of stuff.That was somewhat surprising and interesting, but I think the biggest number you heard tossed around for Democrats voting no was six to ten. Nobody expected this to really be that much of a close vote. Either due to whipping or the sense that most people said, “Well, no, might as well. In for a penny, in for a pound. Might as well vote for impeach and hope that our voters agree with us,” that was somewhat interesting. I’m sure we’ll talk a bit about the weird situation that Nancy Pelosi and the advocates for impeachment find themselves in now.Today’s Morning Jolt, I wrote a bunch about, was there a moment where you could’ve gotten a fairly bipartisan majority for a resolution of censure or some other sense of saying, “Mr. President, you shouldn’t have done this. You can’t do this. You don’t have this kind of authority. If you think there’s some sort of corruption going on with Joe Biden or something, we have a Department of Justice. This has to be done through official channels”? I went through and I found nine House Republicans who’d made various comments kind of in that vein, and maybe you could’ve gotten them onboard.Whatever Democrats and impeachment advocates think should be the case, you were just never going to get any House Republicans voting for this. Maybe you had a shot at one or two, like Rooney down in Florida, but really, it was always going to be a party-line vote. I don’t think Trump, to the extent Trump is capable of feeling shame, which is measured on the molecular scale, he’d probably be more annoyed by a bipartisan resolution of censure, I think, than by this then.He’s going to walk around with this as a badge of pride. He’s going to say, “This was a partisan vendetta. This was a witch hunt,” yadda yadda yadda. Whereas if you’d gotten a decent number of House Republicans to vote on something that didn’t call for impeachment, just said the president shouldn’t have done this, maybe it would’ve been a little more consequential. This was ultimately about making the base of the Democratic party happy, and I hope Democrats are happy now. You got what you want. I hope you walked around with a sad, somber spring in your step, as Nancy Pelosi said this morning.Rich: On censure, I thought that would be a better way for them to go. It would’ve become just as partisan as impeachment largely. Maybe, Jim, your nine, probably fewer than that. Maybe you get like five House Republicans. Better than zero and losing a couple cats and dogs on your own side. But I do think you’d get a real shot, and not a real shot, likelier than not to get over 50 votes for a censure in the Senate. That’d be a more bipartisan rebuke. It doesn’t live in history in quite the same way.Michael, obviously, address anything you’ve heard from Jim, but what do you make of the case substantively that the Democrats ended up landing on, which is, by and large, he’s a threat to the election, which has the backdrop that he somehow welcomed foreign interference into the last election, which they, incredibly enough, base on, when they talk about it in more detail, on Trump saying at that press conference, “If you can hack Hillary’s emails, find her old emails. Russians, if you’re listening, do it.” So they say he just can’t be trusted to run this next election because he welcomed Ukrainian interference this time around, and also that he endangered national security through this scheme.Michael: I don’t think a lot of the case. I do take the point that if you believe as I do . . . I believe the case can be made that the president abused his power, that there’s good-enough evidence at least to look into whether he asked for a sham investigation or just an announcement of an investigation for political benefit. I do take Luke’s constantly repeated point, though, that the United States has an interest in knowing what Joe and Hunter Biden were up to.On the obstruction, I think that’s just a joke at this point. Nancy Pelosi basically couldn’t even finish the sentence of asking for transcripts before the White House just released them, and there was nothing in the additional testimony that indicated that there was anything beyond the transcript that was really incriminating or that really added to the case. If anything, they should be passing a motion congratulating him for helping the case of impeachment, not obstructing it.It’s an odd thing. It’s funny, I was reading Alexander Hamilton on impeachment again, refreshing my memory once more, and he talks about it in these terms of that you have to construct it in this way because the Senate trial . . . What other body of men would have the confidence to sit between the president and the representatives of the people as his accuser? What’s interesting about it is it shows you in reality . . . And he worries that partisan passions would corrupt this. Well, that was very prescient, because partisan allegiance has totally eclipsed the sense of these three separate branches of government operating independently of one another. Legally, they operate independently, but practically speaking, the two parties are the motor running underneath our politics.I think in our lifetimes, impeachment has almost been destroyed as a constitutional provision because it’s been launched twice in the absence of a two-thirds majority sentiment for impeaching and removing the president, and so this thing has become defanged almost totally and looks partisan. Now it’s like our expectation is that you only launch impeachment because the base of one faction demands it, and that’s probably a tragedy for the American people.Also, it’s probably just bad politics long term for Democrats in the sense of he’s going to survive this. They knew he was going to survive this. Maybe they hoped they would put some Senate seats in play through this process. I don’t know if that’s . . . I don’t know if impeachment adds to the Trump effect on certain senatorial candidates that might be weak on the Republican side. But now they would have a very difficult time if Trump does something else, something that excites more outrage among a larger share of the public. This bomb has already gone off and already failed to remove him. It will fail to remove him from office.I don’t know. I thought it was just a very odd event. I thought the drama of it was kind of funny, with the Democrats wearing black and Nancy Pelosi trying to shush her—Rich: That was a very good shush move. Clearly, a grandmother with a lot of experience in shushing.Michael: Listen, Nancy Pelosi is fierce. The daughter of a Baltimore mayor is going to have some just natural authority. But it did give what Jim said, the somber spring in their step. It was bizarre. That’s all I can say about it. This was bizarre. This whole thing has been bizarre from beginning to end.Rich: Charlie, where are you on the substance? Because you’ve been excoriating about Trump’s conduct, but haven’t really . . . I don’t want to put words in your mouth . . . had a strong view one way or the other on impeachment or removal. It seems to me there are a couple different ways to look at it just within our own house.Andy McCarthy and myself tend to make the consequentialist argument, “Well, nothing came of this. They delayed the funding for two months. They get the funding. There’s no announcement of investigations.” I would even argue that even if they announced an investigation of Burisma, it would have zero effect on our election or, really, interfere in our election.But Ramesh, who favors impeachment, says, “Well, it doesn’t really matter what the consequence was, that the core impropriety here of being willing to leverage public resources for what was clearly something that had a political motive at bottom related to the election and mixing his official duties with that motive in this way is just intolerable. It didn’t matter whether it was stopped or not. It doesn’t matter whether it was a little thing or a big thing. It’s just that motive itself is disqualifying.”Charlie: I don’t buy the consequentialist case at all. Imagine if we had learned that President Obama had instructed Lois Lerner to go after Tea Party groups. Would we have said, “Well, she didn’t do it,” or, “Well, it was caught before tax season was over,” or, “In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t affect much.” No, of course not.Trump did this. The fact that it didn’t come to much is neither here nor there for me.That doesn’t mean, though, that I’m thrilled about what happened yesterday. In fact, when it happened, I felt irritated. I instantly thought just how close to the Clinton impeachment this has been. In both cases, the president did what he’d been accused of, and in both cases he was let off -- Trump’s case will be let off -- by his party.In both cases, critics of impeachment pretended that the president was being impeached for something innocuous. In neither case was that true.The language is similar. Representative Loudermilk -- there’s a name! -- compared the House of Representatives to Pontius Pilate yesterday, and the president, implicitly, to Jesus. Well, so did Steny Hoyer in 1998.Both impeachments settled on behavior that was, arguably, impeachable, but in both cases that was not really why the impeachment drive had begun. You go back to Clinton’s: Clinton’s impeachment came after years of Republicans saying that the guy was a philanderer, maybe a rapist, that he was dishonest, he was corrupt. It came after Whitewater and the cattle futures scandal and the travel agency scandal. By the point that the Republican House impeached Bill Clinton, it just knew that he was worse than the articles of impeachment themselves suggested.I think the same is true of Trump. Democrats have said for a long time now that he’s a philanderer, maybe a rapist, that he’s dishonest, that he’s corrupt. The impeachment has come after Mueller and the emoluments cases and watching Trump berate the media and tweet like an idiot. So by the point that they impeached him yesterday, they just knew that he was worse than the articles of impeachment suggested.I think I would’ve voted for neither. In fact, I think I would’ve opposed all three of the impeachments that we’ve seen in American history. I’ve said this before, but it is odd, given some of the terrible things presidents have done, including in my lifetime, that all three of the impeachments that we’ve seen seem so small, so partisan, so contingent upon the surrounding politics, rather than a break from it. And all three seemed so unlikely to prevail. It seems to me that, throughout their history, Americans have not breathed a great deal of seriousness into the Impeachment Clause of the Constitution, and this latest impeachment is no exception.I am -- what was the word you used? -- excoriating when it comes to Trump, including on this, and when it comes to the Republicans and the way that they have fallen in line with him and pretended his call was “perfect” and there’s nothing to see here. But I feel sad in general because I don’t think that anyone has taken this seriously from the beginning, including yesterday. Donald Trump certainly didn’t. The Republicans haven’t -- and aren’t -- and nor are the Democrats. Nancy Pelosi is not sad. She’s not somber. She doesn’t think this is grave. She’s not praying for the president. She’s not protecting or saving the Constitution. And the people who ultimately pushed Nancy Pelosi into this, because she didn’t want to do it, do not give two hoots about the Constitution. In fact, they generally loathe the Constitution, and they’re happy to say so.I find it odd that impeachment has come in America’s history when it has, on the topics that it has. It was said earlier that maybe a censure would have been a better option. Perhaps. But that’s what this is. That’s what this was for Clinton, and it’s what this is for Trump. When you know full well that the Senate is not going to convict and you push an impeachment through the House anyhow, you are effectively censuring the president. You’re using a different mechanism to do it, but you are effectively censuring the president. I think that that is a tactical mistake, even if you believe that the underlying high crimes and misdemeanors would warrant such a measure in a vacuum.Rich: On Pelosi, I actually may be naïve. I don’t doubt that she prays for Trump. I think the appropriate reaction when anyone says they’re praying for you, the appropriate reaction is “Thank you.” It’s not like, “No, there’s no way you’re doing that. Stop lying.” MBD, pick up on anything you heard from Charlie. I just think the norm . . . There’s a tendency to think, to Charlie’s point, the Nixon impeachment, that’s the model; that’s the norm. But now we have a different norm, where it’s inflamed partisan majorities in the House that do this with, at least, the recent example is no chance of convicting. They came within one vote of convicting Johnson.Michael: I really relate to Charlie’s feeling of almost being alienated from the process, because on the one hand what the president did was worth condemning, and on one level if you’re saying, “What are your standards, MBD, for impeachment?” this qualifies. But thank God we don’t go by my standards for public office. Duncan Hunter Jr. would’ve been horsewhipped in public. Several Congress members that were parading around yesterday would be tarred and feathered. It’s a great mercy to me and to all of my colleagues that my standards do not prevail in our country—Rich: What would you do to your colleagues?Michael: . . . in many ways.Rich: What punishments would they have? What chastisement would they suffer?Michael: But I agree with Charlie that—Rich: Maybe we could get some serious enforcement of deadlines here for once, Michael, if we put you in charge.Michael: I know. But I agree with . . . Except my own. But I agree with Charlie. Iran-Contra was a more serious offense than this. The Lincoln bedroom scandal was a more serious offense than this. The—Charlie: Invasion of Libya.Michael: The bombing of Sudan ahead of impeachment was a more serious offense than this. The invasion of Libya. Undeclared drone warfare in several countries. Attempts at regime change in Syria without congressional approval, actually even against congressional approval. Johnson siccing the intel community on Goldwater. There was so many offenses presidents of both parties have conducted in my lifetime that seem so much more serious than this idiotic phone call, which was wrong, that I find it hard. My sense is that the motive for impeachment isn’t actually the offense. The offense was just the usable excuse for impeachment.Rich: I think Charlie is right, though. In both cases, it had built up and went to a deeper issue than what the impeachment itself was about.Michael: Right, but fundamentally I think this is . . . In both the Clinton and the Trump impeachment, you have an opposition party in Congress that is shell-shocked by the political defeats the president has been inflicting on their party, and a party that is angry that the country doesn’t see the president as the fraud they see the president as. I think the Charlie’s comparison is very apt.Charlie: But also that believed that it was destined to rule now. If you look at the Republican party, it was shocked in 1992 that Bill Clinton, this draft-dodging, weed-smoking womanizer, had beaten George H. W. Bush after the corner—Michael: A war hero.Charlie: . . . that the Reagan Revolution had supposedly turned, and it was especially shocked when he won reelection fairly easily, and began to wonder, “Well, are we now going in a different direction?” I think the same thing happened with Trump. Although, it was far more appalling to progressives that Trump won, not only because he represents everything they hate -- and he is hateable in some ways -- but also because they are more prone than others to believe in the coming of the Age of Aquarius and the bending of the arc of history and so on. To replace Barack Obama with Donald Trump was a shock to the system.Rich: Jim, let’s dive a little bit. You touched on this earlier. The current Pelosi gambit, I cannot believe that this gambit will last much past the weekend, because it seems so pointlessly self-destructive. But the idea, and this is not a great credit to this idea, that apparently it originated with Laurence Tribe, of holding the articles, I think Tribe just wanted to hold them indefinitely so he wouldn’t get acquitted, but the idea is to hold them, and this is going to make Mitch McConnell so upset, he’s going to be so desperate to have the articles thrown over in his lap, that he’s going to say, “Okay, let’s have a trial the way Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer want it.”The problem here is Mitch McConnell isn’t going to feel that way, obviously. It contradicts the claim over the last month that Democrats can’t go get witnesses, more witnesses, firsthand witnesses, because it would take time, and this is an urgent priority. The nation is at risk every day that the president isn’t impeached and removed. Then, finally, it’s just obviously like a game. It makes it seem even more partisan and political than it has to this point.Jim: Yeah. The general gist is Trump is an authoritarian—Rich: Sorry, Jim. Go ahead. I’ll silence my phone.Jim: Okay.Michael: You should break out the blues version of this.Jim: Things are so bad for impeachment. In short, the message from the Democrats is Trump is an authoritarian, he has no regard for the Constitution, he is a threat, we cannot wait until the next election, he must be removed as quickly as possible, and it could wait until after the holidays. No contradiction there. By the way, the only way this could go any better . . . I know McConnell has already given his initial statement in scoffing about this, but if he had just gone out there and said, “Please don’t throw me in that briar patch. Oh, no, it would be terrible if my caucus couldn’t vote on Trump’s impeachment. We’d be broken up.”You could see Wednesday the thinking of Democrats, both in office and the activist left on Twitter, having this recognition. For a long time, they’d been trying to answer the question, “How can we impeach Trump?” and all of a sudden, around the middle of the week, it became the question of “Wait, how can we stop the Senate from acquitting Trump?” which is a very different question. This idea of “Well, the Constitution says the Senate holds the trial, but it doesn’t say when it has to hold the trial,” it’s an entire miscalculation of the orders and priorities and interests of Senate Republicans.Is it conceivable that four Senate Republicans would say, Mitt Romney at some point is going to say, “By golly, Nancy Pelosi is right. These rules are unfair. We do need to call a lot more witnesses and we do need to take a lot more time on this, so I will take a stance with the 47 Democrats to insist that Mitch McConnell take a fairer set of rules”?We’re all certain, by the way, that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar and Michael Bennet all want as long a trial as possible, right? Everybody is on board for this whole thing where they’d hear from every witness, and this would drag on through January into February, and they wouldn’t be able to campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire. Everybody is on board? Okay, just wanted to make sure on that.It’s really bizarre. I now find myself thinking that this is the ridiculous cherry on top on what has been a largely bad-faith process since the beginning, that, in a way, for the House to impeach Trump and then to never send it to the Senate in order to have a trial . . . By the way, Democrats may well look at this and say, “Hey, you know what, that may violate the Constitution,” but as Charlie pointed out, they never really worried about that very much before.Trump getting acquitted would be worse for the country than us never sending it over to the Senate. We can all do math, right? You’re going to get most of the 47 Democrats voting for this, maybe not Joe Manchin. I think Doug Jones probably says in for a penny, in for a pound. Maybe you lose one or two other Democrats. Then you’d end up with maybe Romney would vote for it, maybe Murkowski, maybe one or two others. You’re not going to get the twelve that publications like The Bulwark were throwing around there. So you end up with a situation where it’s a vote that’s 49-51 or something, and you know Trump is going to go out onto the White House lawn and twerk in victory and see it as a complete exoneration because they couldn’t get the two-thirds of votes. If you really see Trump as this-Rich: Now I oppose his impeachment even more than I did at the start of the podcast.Jim: That’s why at the beginning I was saying, “Okay, would a bipartisan resolution of censure have done more, have actually sent the clearer signal to the president you shouldn’t do this?” I don’t know. But we all know where this is going, and we could see where this was going from the beginning. And it’s midday on Wednesday, Democrats suddenly realize, “Hey, wait a minute, we’re not going to get close to 67 votes. What are we going to do here?”Keeping the impeachment in limbo, taking the two articles of impeachment and freezing them in carbonite until they can work out the rules for weeks or months, it sounds like a great idea to me. I love this idea, just for the sheer ridiculousness of it.Michael: This is why partisan impeachment is such a disaster, because in a sense the way impeachment is set up is supposed to be the House, the elected representatives of the people, accuse the president, an impartial Senate tries the president. Without Republicans taking this seriously, the guilt that Democrats want to heap upon Trump for being okay with election interference, etc., inevitably spreads to all the Republican Party in their minds. The Senate become collaborators, and Mitch McConnell becomes Moscow Mitch again, and Vice President Pence because he’s not resigning in protest. Well, even if you impeach Trump, he is also in some way connected to this guilt. In a sense, it reveals itself as just a tool of partisanship and not some kind of solemn, sad duty that the Constitution imposes on Nancy Pelosi and her peers. It doesn’t work this way.Rich: Charlie, last question on impeachment. Do you care one way or the other whether the Senate trial has witnesses?Charlie: Well, I think it’s up to the Senate.I’m not sure that Jim presented the best argument from the Democratic side. The argument, as I see it, is that the Democrats believe, or at least their position is, that what Donald Trump demonstrated with his Ukraine phone call is that he’s prepared to cheat in the next election, and that, as a result, he needs to be removed before the next election. So it doesn’t matter if you wait until after Christmas because the key is getting him out before he can run again and, in their eyes, cheat again. From their perspective, it’s worth waiting because the Senate is not going to be fair, is not going to consider this seriously, and is therefore going to exonerate Trump, which will mean he will run in the next election.Now, I think this is a bad argument, not least because the House could have done everything that it wants the Senate to do. It could’ve brought in any other witness that it wanted to bring in. That it did not is not the leadership of the Senate’s problem, and the leadership in the Senate is in no way obliged to make up for the House’s mistakes or oversights.It’s also an extraordinarily silly idea because there is no leverage here. The Senate does not want to be sent these articles. The Republican Party doesn’t want to deal with it. It doesn’t want to vote on it. Susan Collins doesn’t want to vote on it. Cory Gardner doesn’t want to vote on it. McConnell doesn’t want to have those meetings, and he doesn’t want to be accused of being Moscow Mitch or a collaborator or any of the other things that Michael says.It’s a very silly plan that is built upon a misreading of what this would do. I don’t think that McConnell and Trump would sit there and say, “I can’t believe I’ve been left in limbo.” I think that McConnell would breathe a sigh of relief that he doesn’t have to deal with it, and Trump would run around the country saying, “They’re so weak, their case was so flimsy, it was such a stunt that they didn’t even transmit the articles to the Senate. These people wasted time, they wasted money, they sullied my good name, and they weren’t prepared to follow through.” We have all seen a Donald Trump rally. We’ve all seen how Donald Trump tweets.Taking advice from Laurence Tribe at this stage is perhaps not a good idea. In fact, this is such a bad idea that I wonder at one level whether it’s a pretext for essentially rendering the impeachment a censure vote and drawing a line under it.Rich: I think she’s transmitting them—Charlie: No, she will do it. I’m just saying that this argument, which has caught on in some quarters, makes no sense whatsoever, and so you have to assume Nancy Pelosi, who is not stupid and is not politically ignorant, will know that.But the specific question you asked: I don’t think the House should have any say over what the Senate does. The House had its turn. It could’ve lasted a year, this investigation, if it had wanted it to. It didn’t. Now it’s on to the next chamber.Rich: MBD, exit question to you, a special, historic, double-barreled exit question. The number of Republican senators voting to convict in the Senate will be what; and yes or no, will there be witnesses during a Senate trial?Michael: There will be witnesses, and zero Republicans will vote to convict.Rich: Jim Geraghty?Jim: Two. Minimal witnesses, if any. Basically, it’s going to be the McConnell plan of rules. Maybe he’ll throw them a bone here and there just to get this thing going, and it will be done by the end of January.Rich: But you say there are going to be two Republican votes to convict?Jim: Yeah, Romney and Murkowski probably.Rich: Wow. Charlie Cooke?Charlie: I don’t think there will be any votes to convict on the Republican side, and I think there will be a few Democratic defections, and no witnesses.Rich: That’s the correct answer. It’ll be zero and zero, no Republican votes to convict. Dan McLaughlin pointed out the other day there actually . . . Obviously, a really small sample size, but in the two prior Senate trials, no member of the president’s party has ever voted to convict. That was only nine, I believe, Democratic senators during the Johnson impeachment, but no Democratic senators during the Clinton impeachment. I think that will hold up here. I think if you’re just doing pure politics, it is a debacle for you if you’re Susan Collins or . . . Mitt Romney is different. He has a degree of independence. But you’re just going to lose your own party. Susan Collins, her career would be over if she votes to convict, in my estimation.Then on witnesses, I think that’s a closer call. If they’re going to flake on something, Romney, Murkowski, Collins, it would clearly be witnesses, in my view, not the ultimate question. But I think McConnell, he knows what he’s doing. He is going to . . . We’ll know more soon, but he’s trying to get a similar process to the Clinton impeachment, where you do the real basic ground rules first and you hear the basic case first and then you vote on witnesses. His calculation is just, after two weeks of this, and it would take about two weeks, there’s just going to be zero appetite for continuing.I think the default rule, as I understand it, someone was mentioning it to me, they go Monday through Saturday, which is unheard of for the Senate to not be able to run home on Thursday. You’ve got to sit there and you can’t say anything, and you’re going to hear these things over and over again we’ve already gotten sick of because we’ve heard it repeatedly over the last two months, and then you ask questions on a note card. By the time you’re in the second week of this, going up against a holiday weekend coming up early the next week after that, and I know that shouldn’t matter in the fifth great historic Senate trial, but it will, that probably Republicans will just be ready to vote and to end it. But as I said, we’ll know more soon.

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[nicholemhearn]

The End of the Working Class

Increased income inequality; wage stagnation; skill-biased technological change; productivity growth slowdown; rising college wage premium; labor-market polarization; declining prime-age labor force participation; low intergenerational relative mobility; declining absolute mobility—all of these are concepts developed by economists to describe the dimming prospects for ordinary American workers. Taken together, they inform the consensus view that something is wrong with the American economy that isn’t going away anytime soon.

But if we follow the experts in looking at our problems solely from an economic perspective, we will fail to appreciate the true gravity of our situation. Yes, the relevant data on “real” or inflation-adjusted incomes have been disappointing and worrisome for decades. In particular, the sharp rise in income inequality, created mostly by a rollicking rise in the top 1 percent of incomes, has meant that incomes for typical American households have not kept pace with the overall growth of the economy. Nevertheless, a careful and dispassionate review of the data shows that incomes continued to inch upwards since the 1970s. Indeed, of those who “fell” out of middle-class status over the past 25 years, depending on how one defines it, a good many fell “up” to higher income brackets. Although the Great Recession knocked incomes downward, they have now recovered almost all the ground they lost. When we factor in the fact that comparisons of real incomes can never capture access to new products that previously were unavailable at any price, the reasonable conclusion is that overall material living standards in the United States today are at their highest levels ever. Relative stagnation may frustrate our expectations, but isn’t the same thing as collapse.

If we pull back from a narrow focus on incomes and purchasing power, however, we see something much more troubling than economic stagnation. Outside a well-educated and comfortable elite comprising 20-25 percent of Americans, we see unmistakable signs of social collapse. We see, more precisely, social disintegration—the progressive unraveling of the human connections that give life structure and meaning: declining attachment to work; declining participation in community life; declining rates of marriage and two-parent childrearing.1

This is a genuine crisis, but its roots are spiritual, not material, deprivation. Among whites, whose fall has been from greater heights, the spreading anomie has boiled over into headline-grabbing acts of self-destructive desperation. First, the celebrated findings of Anne Case and Angus Deaton have alerted us to a shocking rise in mortality among middle-aged whites, fueled by suicide, substance abuse—opioids make headlines these days but they hardly exhaust the list—and other “deaths of despair.”2 And this past November, whites in Rust Belt states made the difference in putting the incompetent demagogue Donald Trump into the White House.

What we are witnessing is the human wreckage of a great historical turning point, a profound change in the social requirements of economic life. We have come to the end of the working class.

We still use “working class” to refer to a big chunk of the population—to a first approximation, people without a four-year college degree, since those are the people now most likely to be stuck with society’s lowest-paying, lowest-status jobs. But as an industrial concept in a post-industrial world, the term doesn’t really fit anymore. Historian Jefferson Cowie had it right when he gave his history Stayin’ Alive the subtitle The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, implying that the coming of the post-industrial economy ushered in a transition to a post-working class. Or, to use sociologist Andrew Cherlin’s formulation, a “would-be working class—the individuals who would have taken the industrial jobs we used to have.”

The working class was a distinctive historical phenomenon with real internal coherence. Its members shared a whole set of binding institutions (most prominently, labor unions), an ethos of solidarity and resistance to corporate exploitation, and a genuine pride about their place and role in society. Their successors, by contrast, are just an aggregation of loose, unconnected individuals, defined in the mirror of everyday life by failure and exclusion. They failed to get the educational credentials needed to enter the meritocracy, from which they are therefore excluded. That failure puts them on the outside looking in, with no place of their own to give them a sense of belonging, status, and, above all, dignity.

Here then is the social reality that the narrowly economic perspective cannot apprehend. A way of life has died, and with it a vital source of identity. In the aftermath, many things are falling apart—local economies, communities, families, lives.

This slow-motion catastrophe has been triggered by a fundamental change in how the capitalist division of labor is organized. From the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century until relatively recently, the miraculous technological progress and wealth creation of modern economic growth depended on large inputs of unskilled, physically demanding labor. That is no longer the case in the United States or other advanced economies. Between automation and offshoring, our country’s most technologically dynamic industries—the ones that account for the lion’s share of innovation and productivity growth—now make little use of American manual labor.

The U.S. economy still employs large numbers of less-skilled workers, of course. They exist in plentiful supply, and U.S. labor markets are functional enough to roughly match that supply with demand for it. But all of this is occurring in what are now the backwaters of economic life. The dynamic sectors that propel the whole system forward, and on which hinge hopes for continued improvement in material living conditions, don’t have much need today for callused hands and strong backs—and will have less need every year going forward.

Economists describe this situation drily as “skill-biased technological change”—in other words, innovation that increases the demand for highly skilled specialists relative to ordinary workers. They contrast the current dynamics to the skill-neutral transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy. Then, workers displaced from farm jobs by mechanization could find factory work without first having to acquire any new specialized expertise. By contrast, former steel and autoworkers in the Rust Belt did not have the skills needed to take advantage of the new job opportunities created by the information technology revolution.

Here again, exclusive reliance on the tools of economics fails to convey the full measure of what has happened. In the heyday of the American working class during the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the position of workers in society was buttressed by more than simply robust demand for their skills and effort. First, they had law and policy on their side. The Wagner Act of 1935 created a path toward mass unionization of unskilled industrial workers and a regime for collective bargaining on wages and working conditions. And during World War II, the Federal government actively promoted unionization in war production plants. As a result, some three-quarters of blue-collar workers, comprising over a third of the total American workforce, were union members by the early 1950s. The Wagner Act’s legal structure allowed workers to amass bargaining power and direct it in unison against management, suppressing wage competition among workers across whole industries. Unionized workers were thus empowered to negotiate wages roughly 10 to 15 percent above market rates, as well as a whole raft of workplace protections.

It is important to note that the strictly legal advantages enjoyed by labor at the height of its powers have diminished very little since then. There has been only one significant retrenchment of union powers since the Wagner Act, and that occurred with the passage (over President Truman’s veto) of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947—a few years before organized labor reached its high-water mark. What really transformed labor law from words on a page into real power was the second great prop of the working class’s position in society: collective action. Congress did not unionize U.S. industry; mass action did, never more dramatically than in the great General Motors sit-down strike of 1936–37, which led to the unionization of the U.S. auto industry. And once unions were in place, labor’s negotiating strength hinged on the credibility of the threat of strikes. Coming out of World War II, when strikes had been strongly discouraged, American workers hammered home the seriousness of that threat with a wave of labor actions, as more than five million workers went on strike during the year after V-J Day—the most strike-ridden year in American history.

This militancy and group cohesion paved the way for the 1950 “Treaty of Detroit” between Charlie Wilson’s General Motors and Walter Reuther’s United Automobile Workers. The deal provided the basic template for labor’s postwar ascendancy, in which workers got automatic cost-of-living adjustments and productivity-based wage increases while production schedules, pricing, investment, and technological change were all conceded to fall within the “managerial prerogative.” “GM may have paid a billion for peace,” wrote Daniel Bell, then a young reporter for Fortune, but “it got a bargain.”

The declining fortunes of organized labor are a direct result of workers’ ebbing capacity for collective action. After the great wave of unionization beginning in the 1930s, organizing rates peaked in the early 1950s and then went into long-term decline. As employment in smokestack industries started falling in the 1970s, the number of newly organized workers lagged badly behind and the overall strength of unions progressively waned.

This flagging commitment to union solidarity cannot be explained satisfactorily without reference to the changing nature of the workplace. The unique—and uniquely awful—character of factory work was the essential ingredient that created a self-conscious working class in the first place. Dirty and dangerous work, combined with the regimentation and harsh discipline of the shop floor, led workers to see themselves as engaged in something like war—with their employer as the enemy. Class warfare, then, was no mere metaphor or abstract possibility: it was a daily, lived reality.

“It is a reproach to our civilization,” admitted President Benjamin Harrison in 1889, “that any class of American workmen should in the pursuit of a necessary and useful vocation be subjected to a peril of life and limb as great as that of a soldier in time of war.” At that time, the body count of workplace deaths and injuries hovered around one million a year. Such conditions begat efforts to organize and fight back—often literally. The “Molly Maguires” episode in the Pennsylvania coal fields, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 that claimed more than a hundred lives, Haymarket, Homestead, Cripple Creek, the Ludlow Massacre—these are just some of the more memorable episodes among countless violent clashes as the agents of capital struggled to keep a lid on the pressures created by the demands they made of their workers.

The best part of working-class life, solidarity, was thus inextricably tied up with all the worst parts. As work softened, moving out of hot, clanging factories and into air-conditioned offices, the fellow-feeling born of shared pain and struggle inevitably dissipated.

But at the zenith of working-class fortunes, the combination of law and collective action gave labor leaders powers that extended far beyond the factory floor to matters of macroeconomic and geopolitical significance. This capacity to affect domestic politics and international relations further bolstered the position and influence of the working class. When steel or autoworkers went on strike, the resulting disruptions extended far beyond the specific companies the unions were targeting. Labor unrest in critical industries affected the health of the overall U.S. economy, and any threat to the stability of America’s industrial might was also a threat to national security and international order. Consider Harry Truman’s decision in April 1952, during the Korean War, to nationalize the U.S. steel industry just hours before workers were planning to walk out on strike. We generally remember the incident as an extreme overreach of Executive Branch power that was slapped down by the Supreme Court, but the point here is to illustrate the immense power wielded by unions and the high stakes of any breakdowns in industrial relations.

The postwar ascendancy of the working class was thus due to an interlocking and mutually reinforcing complex of factors. It was not just favorable labor laws, not just inspired collective action, but the combination of the two in conjunction with the heavy dependence on manual labor by technologically progressive industries of critical importance to national and global welfare—all of these elements, working in concert—that gave ordinary workers the rapid economic gains and social esteem that now cause us to look back on this period with such longing. And the truly essential element was the dependence of industry on manual labor. For it was that dependence, and the conflicts between companies and workers that it produced, which led to the labor movement that was responsible both for passage of the Wagner Act and the solidarity that translated law into mass unionization.

No sooner was this working-class triumph achieved than it began to unravel. The continued progress of economic development—paced by ongoing advances in automation, globalization, and the shift of output and employment away from manufacturing and into services—chipped relentlessly away at both heavy industry’s reliance on manual labor and the relative importance of heavy industry to overall economic performance.

These processes began in earnest longer ago than many observers today remember. U.S. multinational corporations quadrupled their investments overseas between 1957 and 1973—from $25 billion to $104 billion in constant dollars. And back in 1964, the “Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution” made headlines with a memorandum to President Johnson on the threat of mass technological unemployment as a result of automation. But this was just the beginning. As information technology supplanted smokestack industry at the vanguard of technological progress, and as demand for labor generally shifted in favor of more highly skilled workers, the working class didn’t just go into decline. It eventually disintegrated.

There is a great deal of nostalgia these days for the factory jobs and stable communities of the egalitarian 1950s and 1960s—when working-class life was as good as it ever got. The sense of loss is understandable, as nothing as promising or stable has replaced that way of life now gone. But this lament for what has been lost is the cry of the Children of Israel in the wilderness, longing for the relative comforts of Egypt. We must remember that, even in the halcyon postwar decades, blue-collar existence was a kind of bondage. And so the end of the working class, though experienced now as an overwhelmingly negative event, opens up at least the possibility of a better, freer future for ordinary workers.

The creation of the working class was capitalism’s original sin. The economic revolution that would ultimately liberate humanity from mass poverty was made possible by a new and brutal form of domination. Yes, employment relations were voluntary: a worker was always free to quit his job and seek a better position elsewhere. And yes, over time the institution of wage labor became the primary mechanism for translating capitalism’s miraculous productivity into higher living standards for ordinary people. Because of these facts, conservatives and libertarians have difficulty seeing what was problematic about the factory system.

We can dismiss the Marxist charge of economic exploitation through extraction of surplus value. Meager pay and appalling working conditions during the earlier stages of industrialization reflected not capitalist perfidy but objective reality. The abysmal poverty of the agrarian societies out of which industrialization emerged meant that nothing much better was affordable, or on offer to the great majority of families.

But that is not the end of the inquiry. We need to face the fact that workers routinely rebelled against the factory system that provided their livelihoods—not a normal response to mutually beneficial exchanges. First were the individual mutinies: no-shows and quitting were commonplace. During the early 20thcentury, absenteeism rates stood at 10 percent or higher in many U.S. industries, and the usual turnover rate for factory employees exceeded 100 percent a year. For those who made it to work, drinking, drug use, monkeywrenching to slow the line, and other acts of small-scale sabotage were regularly availed outlets for sticking it to the man.

More consequential than these acts of private desperation were the incessant attempts to organize collective action in the teeth of ferocious opposition from both employers and, usually, the state. Mass labor movements were the universal reaction around the world to the introduction of the factory system. These movements aimed to effect change not only in the terms of employment at specific workplaces, but in the broader political system as well. Although socialist radicalism did not dominate the U.S. labor movement, it was the rule elsewhere as the Industrial Revolution wrought its “creative destruction” of earlier agrarian ways. Whether through revolutionary or democratic means, elimination of private ownership of industry and the wage system was the ultimate goal.

Since grinding poverty had long been the accepted norm in agrarian economies, what was it about industrial work that provoked such a powerfully negative response? One big difference was that the recurrent want and physical hardships of rural life had existed since time immemorial, and thus seemed part of the natural order. Likewise, the oppressive powers of the landed aristocracy were inherited, and sanctified by ancient custom. By contrast, the new energy-intensive, mechanized methods of production were jarringly novel and profoundly unnatural. And the new hierarchy of bourgeois master and proletarian servant had been erected intentionally by capitalists for their own private gain. There had been solace in the fatalism of the old Great Chain of Being: all the orders of society, from high to low, were equally subject to the transcendent dictates of God and nature. Inside the factory, though, industrialists subjected both nature and humanity to their own arbitrary wills, untethered from any inhibition of noblesse oblige. The traditional basis for the deference of low to high had been wrecked; the bourgeoisie’s new position at the top of the social pyramid was consequently precarious.

Another reason for the restiveness of industrial workers was the factory system’s creation of enabling circumstances. In other words, workers engaged in united resistance because they could. In the agrarian era, highly dispersed and immobile peasants faced nearly insuperable obstacles to organizing on a large scale—which is why peasant revolts were as uncommon as they were futile. The factory system dramatically reduced the costs of organizing for collective action by concentrating workers in large, crowded workplaces located in large, crowded cities. Toiling and living together at close quarters allowed individualized discontent to translate into concerted resistance. Solidarity was a consequence of falling transaction costs.

At the heart of the matter, though, was the nature of the work. According to the cold logic of mechanized production, the technical efficiency of the human element in that process is maximized when it is rendered as machine-like as possible. Machines achieve their phenomenal productivity by performing a sequence of discrete, simple tasks over and over again, always the same, always precisely and accurately, as rapidly as possible. Humans are most productive in filling in the gaps of mechaniz from nicholemhearn digest https://niskanencenter.org/blog/end-working-class/