1. Say what you
will, we can all agree that Adam Schiff is doing a brilliant job. He won’t change any minds, as he well knows,
but he is a class act, and I for one enjoy watching a virtuoso performance of
any sort.
2. There has
been some stupid commentary about a grand witness swap, Hunter Biden for John
Bolton. The Republicans have 53 votes
and they need 51 to call Hunter Biden as a witness. The same 51 votes suffice to refuse to call
John Bolton as a witness. They don’t
need the Democrats to agree to anything.
So why don’t they call Biden?
Two
reasons: First, calling any witness would prolong the trial sufficiently to
delay the acquittal vote until after the State of the Union address. At the present pace, the prosecution will
finish tomorrow, the defense will finish Tuesday, Senator’s questions will
conclude next Thursday, and then will come the vote on whether even to consider
documents and witnesses. A witness must
be issued a subpoena. He or she must
then respond. Then the witness must be
deposed. Then the witness must testify,
and Senators must be able to ask questions.
The State of the Union address is scheduled for a week from
Tuesday. No way they will be done by
then if they have even one witness.
Second
reason: It would play badly in the states where vulnerable Republican Senators
are up for re-election.
That is why
Schiff keeps maliciously taunting the Republicans, inviting them to subpoena
the documents and call the witnesses Trump is refusing to turn over.
1 comment:
Schiff is v. good (not that I've listened to every minute) and I think a couple of his colleagues from the House also are pretty good.
It seems to me they have made one or two missteps, however. The rhetoric about the U.S. as leader of "the free world" (this was in Hakeem Jeffries' presentation and elsewhere) is being laid on a little too thick for my taste and sounds like it comes out of the '50s or '60s; one can make the points about Ukraine and Russia without this self-congratulatory and simplistic (to put it charitably) overlay. For another thing, and this is a minor but annoying point, they continually refer to the Crowdstrike theory (i.e. Ukraine-interfered-in-2016-to-help-HRC) as a "debunked conspiracy theory," but the word "conspiracy" is not doing any proper work since, as Charles Pigden as I recall has pointed out here, all theories involving actions by more than one person involve "conspiracies". The Dems shd refer to Crowdstrike as a debunked theory, not a debunked conspiracy theory. (They've also correctly pointed out that it's been spread by the Russians and that Putin seeded, so to speak, Trump with it.)
Post a Comment