The Republicans' Visual Aids Don't Stack Up Well Against the Intelligence Committee Report
WASHINGTON—Since it was Civics Lesson Day in front of the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, the Republican minority once again demonstrated its vast seventh-grade-class-report skillz with three large pieces of posterboard looming over them featuring quotes that the Republicans apparently believe are devastating to the proposition that the president* and a remarkable percentage of the Executive Branch are as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. On Tuesday, we got the majority report from the Intelligence Committee, which did everything but assign a lot of these jamokes a cell at Danbury. On Wednesday, we got...visual aids.
Meanwhile, El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago is losing his sh*t in London. This is a helluva day in the world’s oldest democracy.
Video: Republicans Keep Doing ‘Dancing With the Stars’
The four constitutional scholars who testified on Wednesday did present their opening statements in advance. The three witnesses called by the Democratic members of Judiciary—Noah Feldman, Pamela Karlan, and Michael Gerhardt—all kept their statements under ten pages. Jonathan Turley, called by the Republican minority, clocked his in at 53, which is a word salad bar of considerable length.
Turley is an interesting duck. If I recall correctly, he was one of the first prominent television experts to call for Bill Clinton’s impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky affair. He now is one of the most prominent voices against the impeachment inquiry into the Ukraine shakedown. His statement, remarkably, cites the impeachment of Andrew Johnson as an outlier because it was based on what Turley calls a “trapdoor” crime. In my non-expert opinion, the same could be said of the Clinton impeachment—Hi, Linda Tripp!—of which Turley was an early and enthusiastic supporter. Whatever this is, the president* cannot reasonably said to be entrapped.
And calling the majority report into the Ukraine shakedown a “wafer-thin” record, as Turley does, when it has roped in the president’s lawyer, his White House chief-of-staff, his Secretary of State, and the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee itself, is absurd. It’s a far bigger pancake than it is a wafer. You can’t fit all of it on a poster, either.
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