Dewey, Cheatham & Howe to the Rescue!

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

As with, I imagine, tens of millions of other Americans, last night I watched the first full day (and night) of the Senate impeachment trial of "President" Donald Trump with growing horror. Finally, even a political wonk like me had to call it a night and I retired to bed after 11 PM while Sylvia Garcia was just winding up a doomed case for yet another Democratic amendment.

     By this time, Trump's 53 consiglieres had shot down every one of the first five amendments brought forth by Democrats by a 53-47 count, every one split down the middle by an ideological razor. The closest the Democrats came to victory was when Midnight Mitch McConnell tried to introduce amendments of his own (violating the promises he'd made to Pelosi) that would've further streamlined an already rushed, meatball process in the Senate. The amendments would've just made the Senate trial even more of a kangaroo court than it already is as it would've reduced arguments to 48 hours and given Senate Republicans the right to ignore any evidence brought by the House. And who and what objected to these ridiculous proposals? Well, Senate Democrats, obviously but mostly McConnell's own right wing caucus. 

   In their amendments, the Democratic impeachment managers tried to compel testimony from Bolton and Mulvaney, Sandy and Duffey and various documents that had been withheld by Trump. As one who's as familiar with the House Intelligence Chairman as I am, the best cases for the amendments last night tended to come from Adam Schiff, whose dry, deprecating wit has been virtually the sole source of amusement during this sad, sorry spectacle to which we've played witness since last September. In fact, Schiff was so forceful in his arguments that Republicans were reportedly looking very uncomfortable while he was at the podium.

    In the hours I'd watched the impeachment trial, I'd listened to arguments from Schiff, Garcia, Crow and Hakeem Jeffries. A lot had changed in television technology since Bill Clinton's own impeachment proceedings. Democrats were able to make use of not only poster boards but also impeccably-cued clips of House testimony from last fall with the slickness of any major TV network. It was all very damning to Trump and that accounted for the right wing "histrionics" that Chuck Schumer would later say exactly 12 hours later was like something out of Fox "News."

    However, Schumer's too kind description of White House Counsel's outright lies and conspiracy theories being mere "factual errors", what they actually said was far more damaging to the interests of a fair trial. Among them: Trump had no means to defend himself (he chose not to participate and did so on, as usual, Twitter), that the Democrats intimidated witnesses through subpoena (they had subpoena power and were forced to use it when Trump refused to allow a dozen witnesses to testify) and that Democrats wouldn't allow Republicans' witnesses to testify (In fact, 33% of the witnesses were ones summoned by the GOP but many of them weren't fact witnesses who wouldn't have added anything substantive to the discovery phase). And, as usual, the Democrats are Blue Meanies who are so unfair! (Point in fact, the rules by which Democrats had to abide were put in place by Republicans when they had control of the lower chamber in 2015).

     In fact, in their opening statements, lead WH shysters Jay Sekulow and Pat Cippolone basically looked like a law firm of personal injury lawyers on late night UHF TV begging for customers. ("If you were hit by a Democrat motorist, we can get you money! Call Dewey, Cheatham & Howe for a free consultation!") From the gitgo, the Sekulow and Cippolone assclown tag team shtick was in attacking Democrats for their processes and priorities in bringing this to the Senate in the first place, not in offering any substantive defense of Trump. Of course, you don't need to defend your client when the dominant political party refuses to enter evidence.

The Old Man on the Mountain

Meanwhile, 4203 miles away in Davos, Switzerland, a nation famed, ironically, for the neutrality that congressional Republicans refuse to adopt, sat the grand old man of the mountain, Donald Trump. In between rubbing elbows with real billionaires while contemplating cuts to Social Security, a wet dream of Republicans since it was first enacted in the 1930's, Trump weighed in with an "eruption of lies" on his own impeachment trial. And he must have been very pleased with what he was seeing on TV.

    He must have been especially pleased with the at times hysterical histrionics of his legal counsel (which count among their number Pam Bondi, who took a $25,000 bribe from Trump in 2016 to make her lawsuit against Trump University mysteriously vanish and is now on the legal team, obviously, because Trump called in a note he thought he had over her). Indeed, it was as if we were watching two parallel dimensions constantly colliding with each other, with one dimension's idea of justice consisting of documents, evidence and witness testimony and another vaguely-familiar dimension insisting none of those were necessary.

     I'll leave it to you, Constant Reader, to decide which of those dimensions has the right idea about an impeachment trial. We're essentially seeing the destruction of our democracy in real time, proving this revolution (or Mitch McConnell's and the GOP's at any rate) will be televised. Manager Crow made a compelling argument about midway through the debates that if the Republicans have their way, there would be nothing to stop a Democratic president to refuse to cooperate with his or her own impeachment while relying on their party to merely adopt the new rules that McConnell's put in place. As with Neil Gorsuch's nomination, McConnell essentially is rewriting and sledgehammering rules that were put in place over two centuries ago to ensure a smooth, lawful process.

     And in between Trump's shysters' hair-tearing and chest-beating, it was becoming more and more clear the Democrats were not playing to the GOP's better instincts and angels. Republican scum, after all, have none. Rather, knowing their every amendment was doomed to fail because of the GOP's insistence on going over the cliff with Trump to the bitter end, Democrats were playing to an audience of not 53 but to 330,000,000. It's vitally important that the Democrats continue to hammer home these points infinitum ad nauseam the true story of what happened with Trump's illegal hold on Ukraine's security assistance (illegal according to the GAO's ruling).

     And Republican intransigence and heel-digging means the Democratic impeachment managers are forced to recycle evidence from the House's investigation that was hobbled by the White House. Among these facts are Mark Sandy, a career OMB official whose job it was to oversee US disbursements to foreign nations, abruptly getting replaced by Michael Duffey, a Trump flunky who had no experience in aid disbursement when Sandy began raising questions about the legality of the hold.

     That on July 25, an hour and a half after the infamous phone call to Zelensky, Trump ordered the security aid to be frozen. That the same day, Ukrainian officials had contacted the State Department via email asking what the hold up was regarding that aid. That OMB and DoD officials alike were freaking out about the hold on the aid which even they knew was plainly illegal. That the so-called transcript of the call was a heavily-censored one at best, more like a call summary that even stated it was not a transcript.

     And if and when these wet-legged Republicans spring Donald Trump, making him in the process the first impeached "president" ever to run for re-election, it will never have the seal, the very necessary imprimatur of legitimacy that we'd seen with the ridiculous Clinton impeachment. And the stench will hound them like the opposition researchers from the deepest pits of Hell on their 34 campaign trails.