It's also a prelude to what impeachment hearings would look like in the Senate.
— RiPPa (@RippDemUp) May 1, 2019
Or as Scott Lemieux puts it:
There are very reasonable arguments for impeaching Trump although he can't be removed from office. As this hearing should make clear, "it will make Republican senators own Trump" is not one of them
— Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) May 1, 2019
Josh Hawley: "The Honorable Bill Barr should appoint Donald Trump America's permanent Emperor God." Missouri voters: "Six more years!"
— Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) May 1, 2019
It may simply be impossible in 2019 to produce a spectacle that will shame Republicans, because literally everything done by Donald Trump, or done in his defense, is praiseworthy in their eyes, and in the eyes of enough to voters for the GOP to hold the Senate indefinitely and regularly seize control of the White House and the House of Representatives. So every attempt to hold Trump and his helpers accountable inevitably turns into a pep rally for right-wingers, however unfavorable to their cause the facts are.
If Donald Trump ever shoots someone on Fifth Avenue, not only will he not lose any votes, his White House and congressional Republicans will proudly fight the effort to bring him to justice, denouncing the victim, the cops, the prosecutors, and horrified members of the public, who'll come to be known on the right as a conspiratorial cabal of anti-murder cultists. For Republicans in 2019, there is no right or wrong -- there's only defense of the tribe and destruction of the enemy.
So maybe it doesn't make sense to give these people another spectacle they can hijack. Trump certainly deserves to be impeached and removed from office, and to be shamed if there aren't the votes for removal -- but if Trumpers treat every clash with opponents as a point of pride, then maybe it makes sense to work harder on 2020, and to deny them a Senate trial that they'll turn into a days-long Nuremberg rally.
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