"This Chair is Terrible."

"Foreign governments don't intervene in our elections to benefit us - they intervene to benefit themselves." - Professor Pamela Karlan, 12/4/19
"Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder." -President George Washington to Major General Robert Howe, 17 August 1779

 (By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

As the old theater review chestnut goes, "I laughed. I cried." 

     The first day of the House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearings came advertised and more. In what was to be a simple fact-finding parlor play to determine whether or not the committee should go ahead with an impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump, they brought in four law professors who were to give their learned opinions as to whether or not Trump had committed impeachable offenses. Even to political nerds such as yours truly, this initial phase of the impeachment is the political equivalent of what used to be ice skating's compulsories.

     Luckily, thank GOD, we had the Republican Party to make these dull proceedings lively, replete with laughter and tears .

    Let's start with the Ranking Member, the incredibly rank Doug Collins, the man Trump wants to shoehorn in the Senate, which would make him the only lawmaker in US history to participate in an impeachment in both Houses of Congress. Doug Collins began pissing and moaning their chairs weren't comfortable enough and that the temperature was too cold and maybe we should postpone these proceedings.

     Then, once he got that out of the way, Collins went on a bizarre rant about the impeachment process and it ain't Constitutional-like, y'all, and what the fuck are we all doing here, y'all? Then, after Collins stopped ineffectually throttling democracy itself, he motioned that Adam Schiff testify before the committee. Wearily playing along, Jerrold Nadler put tabling the motion up to a roll call vote among the 41 members. Not surprisingly, the Democrats outvoted the motion by a 24-17 vote split neatly along party lines.

      So, now maybe we can begin to have an orderly impeachment inquiry, Chairman Nadler perhaps thought naïvely but the rodeo clowns hadn't even gotten their chaps on over their bare butts. When Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan delivered her opening statements, she went off script to tear Doug Collins a new one for questioning the integrity of the witnesses by presuming they hadn't had time to read the 300 page report released yesterday by Democrats on the committee.

“Here Mr. Collins, I would like to say to you, sir, that I read transcripts of every one of the witnesses who appeared in the live hearing because I would not speak about these things without reviewing the facts. So I’m insulted by the suggestion that, as a law professor, I don’t care about those facts.”

      And that was just the beginning of the hell she rained down on Collins who suddenly looked even more uncomfortable in his "terrible chair" especially as Professor Karlan wouldn't allow him to interrupt her. And that was all before a question had even been asked of the legal witnesses because the rodeo clowns of the GOP hadn't even begun stepping in their own bullshit with their big clown shoes.

"A Harmless Drudge"

You'd think that even in the hands of the one law professor the Republicans asked for, and got, in Professor Jonathan Turley, the hearing would be somewhat elevated from the Assclown Vaudeville show of the party who'd called for him. But there you'd be wrong. Turley essentially said in his flannel-tongued way that the definition for bribery doesn't exist according to "express statements from the federal court." That was when Prof. Karlan took him back to school by producing her digital copy of Dr. Samuel Johnson's landmark 1755 Dictionary of the English Language.

     She specifically pointed to the part of the lexicon which stated that defined bribery as "the giving or taking of rewards for bad practices." In other words, Trump withholding a White House visit and nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine in exchange for politically-motivated investigations that would be advantageous to Trump. At this point, and I'm not making this up, many on Twitter were calling for Karlan to be put on the Supreme Court, not an unreasonable fantasy, given her spectacular performance today.

      But the rodeo clowns, all 17 of them, were just streaming into the paddock and were determined to save the day. Matt Gaetz (R-I Swear, Occifer, that light pole jumped out in front of me!) apparently had his stooges do opposition research (!) on Karlan and essentially did a good drunken imitation of Joe McCarthy by pointing out she'd been on a liberal podcast once and that she once gave $1000 to Elizabeth Warren and twice as much to Hillary and even asked why she gave twice as much to Hillary.

      The very fact that right wing nut bags like Matt Gaetz are doing opposition research on the law witnesses shows that not only are they bereft of facts and moral currency, they're also engaging in the same behavior for which Trump's being impeached. To put a crooked exclamation point on his wingnuttery, Gaetz then asked the witnesses how many of them had direct knowledge of the facts brought out by the fact witness during the Intel hearings. Naturally, none of them raised their hands because it was understood by anyone and everyone else with two neurons to rub together that the four law professors were not fact witnesses but were there to give their legal opinions as to whether or not they thought impeachable offenses had been committed by Trump.

       Which Turley, who 21 years ago advocated for the impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about a blow job and said we needed to do to prevent the destruction of the entire government and anarchy itself, didn't believe Trump had done when anyone who doesn't watch WWE matches and NASCAR knows Trump did in jeopardizing our national security. Eventually, Doug Collins ran bandy-legged back into the ring and valiantly put his body before the metaphorical bulls of the other three law professors and essentially said we shouldn't throw the skeletons of the Founding Fathers into the witness box. Turley mentioned the word "necromancy" before mentioning Louis XIV and Charles II.

      Yeah, there was that, also. Turley apparently thinks the narrow 1670 definition of "bribery" is what we should go by here. I quote:

“What (Gouverneur) Morris said is we need to protect against bribery because we don’t want anything like what happened with Louis XIV and Charles II. Louis XIV who was a bit of a recidivist when it came to bribes gave Charles the II a huge amount of money and a French mistress in exchange for the secret Treaty of Dover of 1670.”

      So there you have it. Trump didn't commit bribery (which doesn't even address the other issue of obstruction) because Zelensky didn't give Trump a French mistress.
       And if Zelensky had offered the infamously lecherous Donald Trump a French mistress, do you think he would've turned him down?

"Yes, presidents break some laws all the time."

Yes, even right wing law professors have to admit defeat and call it a day. Because by this time, Turley was so thoroughly defeated, he essentially undercut Trump's brilliant defense of, "I didn't do it! It was a poifect call!" by saying, "Yes, presidents break some laws all the time." Which is true. Lincoln, an attorney who should've known better, suspended habeus corpus for Confederate prisoners and even the Emancipation Proclamation was blatantly illegal and he knew the Supreme Court would make a meal out of it if it ever got to them, thereby necessitating the 13th Amendment.
     But no president in American history had ever gone to such lengths to violate the very Constitution and endanger national security to strongarm a foreign nation to do him a political favor. By this time, the rodeo clowns of the Republican Party were fatigued, they knew they had no game and their tears were washing the greasepaint off their well-fed faces. They were desperate and had to come up with something.
     And then, out of the blue, Tom McClintock thought of the shockingly brilliant strategy of demanding to know which people on the panel voted for Trump. Tellingly, none of them raised their hands, which, from an optical standpoint, looked horrible. But in reality, none of them, not even Turley, raised their hands because it was such an incredibly inappropriate question that screamed straight out of the Joe McCarthy and HUAC era.
      Doug Collins then yelled at Professor Feldman who said that the Founding Fathers would certainly hold Trump accountable for high crimes and misdemeanors and would impeach him. Collins started screaming incoherently as if believing (and he likely does) that yelling at someone who gives you an answer with which you don't agree somehow makes the answer less factual.
       Yet, what was conspicuously missing from the dialogue about the #ImpeachmentHearing is no one calling out the GOP on one simple, ineluctable fact- Their job was not to defend Trump but to determine whether or not he committed impeachable crimes. Their attempts to prove his innocence prove they have absolutely no interest in that.