Definitely the latter. They don’t want to risk anyone else defecting in the meantime after repeated failures that make them look bad, so they’re looking for some other way to coerce the votes.

It punishes people poorer than me, who are only poor because they deserve it. Right? I mean, if I’m an evil oligarchic asshole, but God loves me enough to let me have all this money, they must be even more evil than I am.

Yep. Protests are just being used at this point to root out dissidents. Mutual aid and sabotaging oppressive institutions where possible can be more effective ways for folks to participate in organized resistance without risking life and livelihood.

South Korea’s government managed to successfully impeach and convict him first, though.

Trump has been impeached twice (which is already unprecedented for an American president), but it failed both times because the bar to pass is 2/3 of the senate voting to convict, which simply cannot happen while Republicans control half or more of the senate.

I’m just a bit worried about any potential schism among the Democrats because the electoral system in the US is still incredibly broken and will always gravitate towards a 2-party state.

To me, it seems easier for the Democrats to rebrand as more left-leaning than they currently are and try to remain a united front, rather than splinter into several competing parties.

If anything is to supplant the Democratic party, it would need to be one party supplanting the whole of the Democrats, or else Republicans will remain a plurality and retain control of the US government until the electoral process changes or their numbers diminish.